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"The Fall" Text Comment
This is not the matter of interest here, but obviously sin has already entered the universe before Adam and Eve fall into it. There is a tempter; where did he come from? Some of the angels fell first but how and why we are told little of in the rest of the Bible. There is a great deal that our curiosity seeks that the Bible does not provide. It is interested in what we must know not what we are curious about. [What Devil once was (Isaiah 6) and is now! Such a difference for man too!] "Did God really say?" In the word "really" there is a touch of skepticism, even surprise, and then, "you must not eat from any tree" is a wild exaggeration that is designed to place the Lord's command in a completely unfavorable light. How unreasonable God was to restrict you in this way. It is hard to believe God should ask something so unjust. Very standard technique in argument: force the opponent to debate on your terms and place his position in the worse possible light, even if it means misrepresenting that position. Once the falsehood is out there it is hard to counter. [American politics.] v. 3 The woman corrects the falsehood but not exactly. When she adds "must not touch it" it appears she has already accepted into her heart something of the serpent's attitude; she has begun to separate in principle God's rights from her own; magnifying God's strictness, she seems open to the suggestion that his demands are unreasonable -- she will have many successors! v. 5 After the subtle undermining of confidence in God's Word comes now the flat contradiction and a lie so big that it creates a completely different view of the world and of human life and its purpose. This is the view, of course, that men have had by nature and instinct ever since the fall! Man as God! His own ruler; his own interpreter of reality; and his own savior. The particular denial is that of God's judgment: "you surely shall not die." It is exactly the denial that men have willingly entertained ever since, that God will not judge me or condemn me for my conduct as he has said so plainly in his word he will. Now, the snake is really crafty here, because, of course, as we discover, the man and woman do not die, at least bodily and immediately. It is possible to claim that they didn't die because they continued to exist even after their sin. But, as we shall see, they really did die and mankind with them, they died in the really significant way and, in addition, made inevitable their physical death as well. It was living death, death as a condition of existence that God had promised should man sin, and this is the death that Adam and Eve suffered when they sinned. And this is the death that really matters, not the death of the body, which, in the final analysis, determines nothing. The death that God threatened was nothing other than separation from Him, exposure to his wrath and judgment, and the loss of all that made human life as God made it so rich and fine and wonderful. v. 6 So prepared by the tempter's question and his assertion, the woman needs nothing more than the delicious appearance of the fruit. She saw ... she took ... she ate. Note that Adam was with her all the while, apparently. He cannot be absolved of the blame for this and the Bible never does. Indeed, Adam is the one of these two who is primarily held responsible, for God had given the command to him, before the woman was created, and it was his responsibility to lead her in righteousness not to be led by her into rebellion. v. 7 In a bitter irony, the serpent's prediction in v. 5 is fulfilled; their eyes were opened, but it was a grotesque mockery of the illumination that he had promised them: as is always the case with sin, it promises it own forms of human happiness and fulfillment and delivers them; only they turn out to be distorted, short-lived, and toxic imitations of that true fulfillment humans were made for and long for. Adam and Eve's eyes were opened and what did they see? Their own nakedness -- which had been a happy thing before -- now a matter of their shame and fear. They have something to hide, to cover up, before God and before one another. v. 8 The image of the garden in the cool of the day and God's presence there -- God's "walking" is just a vivid way of speaking of his presence -- (the same word "walking" will be used later of God's presence with his people and, of course, the Christian life is often referred to as a matter of "walking" with God) suggests the happy kind of fellowship man had had with God there in the garden. But now that is gone. The trusting innocence and happiness of their former communion with God has now been replaced by the fear of guilt and of God's displeasure. v.13 God asks each in turn what has happened, beginning with the man, then the woman, indicating in that order the degrees of responsibility. Each in turn blames the other and ultimately God for the disaster that has befallen them. Now they are covering up in another way! ___________________________________ These few verses give the Bible's account of the fall of man into sin, guilt, and death. We might have expected more given the extraordinary importance of this event that defines the nature and destiny of man in the world. There is nothing like a theological explanation of sin and its consequences, such as Paul gives us in Romans chapter 1. But, taken as a whole, there can be no doubt about the power of this account or its meaning and message. Indeed, it is the more powerful for its understatement. As the remainder of chapter three and then the following chapters of Genesis unfold, the results, the devastating consequences of these acts of Adam and Eve, will fall upon us like hammer blows. And the two great consequences, already revealed so starkly in these few verses we have read, but soon to be written in letters of blood as the narrative continues are exactly those that the rest of the Bible constantly forces upon our minds and our consciences. First, there is death. We have already considered this question in connection with the statement in 2:17. God promised that death would overtake man if he disobeyed God, and death did. But not the simple extinction, the slipping away into nothingness that rebels against God dream of. No, this death is a condition of existence: alienation from God and from other men; the prospect of divine judgment and of punishment for our sins; and the loss of all that makes life what it might be and what we long for it to be with an inconsolable longing. This death, in other words, is a living death. Here the sign of this living death is shame; alienation from God and one another. That is what the Bible always means by death, that is the death we see Adam and Eve suffer immediately here. And they but suffer its beginnings, its birth pangs. That death in its completeness still lies ahead. The next chapters of Genesis are going to present us with an anatomy of that death, an unfolding of its bitterness and hopelessness and ugliness. The wages of sin is death! Second, the fall corrupted man. This too is part of that all encompassing death that was visited upon man for his sin. But it deserves special attention. This is what Christian theology calls "original sin," the bending and twisting of human nature, of the mind, the heart, and the will so that, as we will read shortly, in Genesis 6:5 "every inclination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil all the time." Here we see it first in hypocrisy -- blaming others for our own sins! By that is not meant that men and women are as evil as they might be; they are clearly not and the Bible says so. Unless they are rescued from sin they will find, in another world, that they can be much more evil than now they are, when all the restraints and all the pure and good influences are removed. What is meant is that man's fundamental orientation is now away from God and against God. Even when he does that which is formally correct and right and good, he does it in an attitude that is dismissive of God and adoring of himself. Man never does anything completely good, entirely good, not as judged by a God who looks upon the heart and the motives of the heart; and, because of this sinful orientation, this rebellion against God that lies at the bottom of his heart, most of what he does is not good at all. He neither loves God nor his neighbor as he should; he primarily loves himself. And he makes a life's work of breaking one of God's commandments after another. In other words, as Paul will say in his theological analysis of the fall in Romans 1, God punished the sin of Adam and Eve by giving them the sin they asked for. They chose to be sinners and, for their punishment, God made them sinners through and through. He punished sin with sin. And because Adam was the head of the race and acting on behalf of us all, that sinfulness was not only their curse, but ours, for they passed it on to us. [We will consider the fact of our solidarity with Adam in another sermon.] Now, let it be admitted at the outset that this account of the early history of mankind, his creation as a being sinless, pure, and perfectly happy and his fall, by rebellion and disobedience, into a life of sin and death, is no longer for Western Civilization the authoritative account of the origin of mankind and the explanation of human life as we know that it once was. It has been replaced in many minds and in the collective mind of the authoritative cultural elite with the alternative account of the origin of man and the life of mankind in the world furnished by the theory of evolution. Man is what he is as a result of a long, mindless process of development. He has not descended from a pure and pristine original state, but he has ascended from a lower order of development. But quite apart from the fact that we do not accept evolution at all as a believable account of the origin of mankind, we do not hesitate to say that we find more credible not only the Bible's account of the creation of the world and of mankind, but as well its account of the fall. The fall of man into sin as reported in the Bible, in fact, in a way that evolution does not and cannot, explains the life that we actually see in the world and accounts for human beings as we know them to be. And I am not only speaking of the fact that mankind is sinful through and through. It is true that, with a kind of touching naivete, modern psychology and sociology has attempted to argue that man is basically good, and in this the social sciences have been joined by a large number of politicians, preachers, and educators. But this sentimental thinking about man is accepted by almost no significant thinker and is more an illustration of the fall than an argument against it. The actual existence of mankind in the world and the actual behavior of human beings from their birth to their death, is one magnificent demonstration that man is fallen into sin and that the tendency of his heart is corrupt. Here is Joseph Conrad the American novelist writing to Bertrand Russell the English philosopher in 1922:
I could spend the rest of my time simply describing in how many ways the life of individuals and of societies is marked, dominated, corrupted by sin. It is inescapable. It is the fundamental principle of human affairs. There is nothing like this in the animal kingdom, for we are not speaking of mere instincts such as might have been inherited from lower orders of evolution: e.g. attachment to an individual or social territory, mechanisms of defense and aggression, the individual and collective urge to maintain oneself, such as you find in the animal kingdom [Berkhof, Study of the Faith, 206]. No, human sin is something far deeper and far deadlier and far more evil than any of that, it is a sinister, wilful, evil that you never find among the animals. Indeed, the great modern 20th century demonstration of the fall is precisely the enormity of the crimes committed against goodness, against other human beings, by societies and civilizations that were among the most enlightened and developed in the history of the world. But more than this fact of human sinfulness, what the fall explains is what must be explained to make any sense whatever out of our world, out of the real world which we live in every day. And what must be explained is precisely this: how can something that is so wonderful, so glorious, so full of the purest charm -- human life -- be at one and the same time, so ugly, so bitterly cruel, and in so many ways one vast disappointment. The wonderful potential, but always unmet, unrealized. The longing for what is finally always ruined on purpose, by the willing acts of men and women. Man can write the Psalms or the Gettysburg address, but his speech is usually so much less and so often so cruel and mean-spirited, or, at least, so little used to love and cherish and so often used at best for nothing at all. And so it goes whether we are speaking of man's inventiveness, his genius, his artistic capacities, his power of thought, his social tendencies, his sense of humor, his life in families or anything else. That which is so good and so full of the most wonderful potential, becomes in his hands something so often so base, so toxic, so mean, so disappointing, and, altogether, so much less than it promised. You can think of this fundamental reality of human life, its terrible duality -- beauty and ugliness, wonder and petty failure -- negatively, as Albert Einstein did. The brilliant, breathtaking advances in physics for which he was responsible -- how great is the mind of man -- led, it seemed inexorably, not to some golden age of invention but to the creation of a weapon of mass destruction and the age of a universal fear of world-wide catastrophe. What is more, he lived to see his "relativity" translate into moral relativism, which he himself regarded as a "disease." Everything he touched, it seemed to him, had turned not to gold but to dust. Or, we can think of the reality from a more positive viewpoint. Human beings have within them a sense of perfection, of goodness, of eternity, a longing for what they know they have been made for but what they have not yet experienced. C.S. Lewis described it this way [In Psychological Seduction, pp. 129-130]:
This is not something left over from some lower animal world--it is higher than anything man is now! This is the echo of our creation as pure and perfect men, made to live in fellowship with a holy God and to inhabit a world of joy. The fall has spoiled all of that, but the distant memory of it still resides in our hearts. We were made for the world that stands up straight, but we live now in a fallen world. (Boys in gangs who kill without remorse, but who speak of their [revenge] with fellow gang members in terms of love!) Listen to this description of our situation by the 17th century English Puritan John Howe:
I just finished reading Norman Mailer's study of Lee Harvey Oswald. A life that held surprising promise, that might have been so much, but which all in all became so petty and of so little worth. Indeed, the amazing thing about the story is that such a great evil, such a world-shattering deed, could come from such a small and inconsequential life. So those who killed Christ! Here is the fall! So great an evil done by perfectly ordinary folk like you and me except for opportunity! A man who knew how to love his wife, Marina, who sometimes cared for her with tenderness and respect; but who usually treated her very shabbily and was often cruel and hard-hearted. So with his own child, so with those who had befriended him. But we needn't consider an assassin's life. We have our own. We know ourselves, every human being knows, that we were made to be good, that we were made to know God, that we were made to love and to be loved at the deepest and highest level of human experience. We know that we have a capacity for all that is beautiful and pure and just and kind and that our lives might have been far nobler than they have come to be. What is this but the vast disappointment of human life that we see everywhere, the failure of human beings to become what they have been made to be. Why is even our best so often marred by the corruptions and the pettiness of the human soul and the tendency to disintegration everywhere seen in human experience. And why, if this is all so universal, do we care about it so much? If it is so natural, why does it always seem so unnatural, so much an unwelcome intruder to us? As Lewis put it: do the fish in the sea complain of the ocean for being too wet? Why does every human being feel that life has disappointed him and, that he himself or she herself has failed at life in many ways? Why is it, as Chesterton pointed out, that the uneasy conscience is the most universal experience of mankind? Except that man was made to live at a great height and has fallen from that height by sin, and so while he lives down low he cannot get out of his mind and heart the memory of that former height, the sense that his life belongs up there, even if -- because of his inveterate sinfulness -- he will not climb back up there and cannot. This is the fall and I want you to see this morning simply this: that it is the only explanation of life as you know it -- your own life and the life of the world. So wonderful and so terrible at one and the same time. A perfect creation, a perfect manhood, lost through sin. |
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