Q. Do you understand the Scriptures to teach that sin is innate to us? Is sin or the sinful nature more than an old “pattern” that we slip back into under the influence of spiritual forces external to us? Thank you.
I think that according to Scriptural teaching, the concept of sin needs to be understood in two senses. We might refer to “sin” and to “sins.” Sins are specific actions that are contrary to what we know to be God’s wishes and intentions for our lives. In that sense they incur guilt and we need to forsake them (stop doing them) and ask and receive God’s forgiveness for them.
“Sin,” on the other hand, is a power that influences us to commit “sins.” Much of its hold over us comes from the fact that it works to blind us, i.e. we aren’t aware of its presence because it leads us to rationalize wrong actions, telling ourselves we’re doing them for some good reason that justifies them.
A person who has not yet been made a new creation through saving faith in Jesus is under the power of sin in this sense. But I would not say strictly that sin is a power within them. It’s something that they’ve admitted into their life and allowed to operate from the inside. It’s “innate” in the sense that they are born under the power of sin (and so they likely begin to allow it to operate from within before they’re even aware of doing this). But it’s not innate in the sense that it doesn’t reflect the image of God in them, which they still bear because they’ve been created in God’s image.
A person who has been made a new creation, on the other hand, is no longer under the power of sin. This is the triumphant proclamation that Paul works his way forward to in the first part of Romans: After declaring that “Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin,” he ultimately explains that “sin will not have dominion over” those who have become “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
So I would say that for followers of Jesus, sin is an external force, working in connection with the patterning of this present age, to try to make us continue conforming to its ways. This is the sense in which I understand the “sinful nature”; for more on that, please see this post. From the discussion there, you’ll see that I don’t believe sin remains an innate force in the believer.
Good Question 