Adam and Eve had it made. They were living in a paradise, and they could do anything they wanted — except one thing. And just like us, instead of being thankful for all they had, they focused on the one thing they couldn’t have:
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)
A lot of people wonder why God even gave this command. If he hadn’t told them not to eat from that tree, they would never have sinned. But the point is that by disobeying this one rule they were declaring equality with God.
Sin doesn’t have to be a specific act. Sin is the desire to be in control instead of allowing God to be in control. Sin is our decision to be our own god, and once that decision is made, we do what we want to do instead of what God wants us to do.
That’s exactly what Adam and Eve did with the tree. They were saying, “We can decide what’s right and what’s wrong without God’s interference. We can be God.”
It’s important to see that the sin of Adam and Eve wasn’t a mistake on God’s part. This wasn’t an accident that took God by surprise and forced him to create a workaround. God knew that this couple would sin long before he ever created them. He chose to create them anyway, and even though their actions brought a curse on all mankind and all creation, eventually leading to the death of Jesus on the cross, God was good and wise in permitting them to sin. Because everything that God allows or causes is good and wise, whether or not we understand it.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:1-5)
So Eve, after wrestling with the temptation of the serpent, eats the fruit. And then she gives some to Adam and he eats it as well. And this changed the entire universe forever.
The perfect paradise was gone. This is what Paul was talking about when he wrote these words:
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it… (Romans 8:19-20)
When Adam sinned, all of creation, the entire universe, was cursed. All of creation is gradually decaying. That’s why we experience evil, sickness, death, and sadness. We live in a cursed creation in cursed bodies that are in the process of decay. We face disease, disabilities, failing health, old age, death, and male pattern baldness.
And the imago Dei? Well, that was changed as well. People are still created in the image of God, but now people are born with a sin disease. Paul wrote about this as well:
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. (Romans 5:12)
When Adam sinned, our whole world was contaminated with sin, and death came into our world as well. Through this one man, Adam, death came, and humanity stood guilty before God, deserving and experiencing death.
Death came into the world because Adam sinned. But Paul also says that death came into the world because “all sinned.” How can these both be true? How did death come into the world through Adam and the sin of all mankind?
We know that death came into the world through Adam’s sin. Adam sinned, sin entered his body like a disease, death entered the world, and this “sin disease” was then passed down to every single descendant of Adam, which includes every one of us. We are all born with the sin disease, meaning we have a corrupted nature that so inclines us to sin that eventually, we do sin.
Paul is also saying that as future descendants of Adam, we were “present” in the person of Adam when he sinned. When Adam sinned, we were “in” Adam as his future descendants. We were present within Adam so that when he sinned, we all sinned. It wasn’t just Adam and Eve who sinned that day in the Garden of Eden. All of mankind sinned. Because we were “in Adam,” God considers all people to have participated in Adam’s sin.
We are all born, then, already guilty of sin and worthy of death. We are born with the sin disease, the corrupt nature, so we will sin and have sinned, and we are born already guilty of sin and condemned to death by that sin. In Adam, the whole human race is judged by God to be guilty, andwe’re not just declared guilty, every individual has sinned and is personally guilty. That’s why Paul can say both “sin came into the world through one man,” and “death spread to all men because all sinned.”
From the moment we are born we are enemies of God, born with the sin disease and guilty of sinful acts as well. We are so lost that we can’t even turn to God for help without his first calling us to himself.
All because of one bite of forbidden fruit.
Genesis 3 is the greatest catastrophe the universe has ever seen. That’s how serious sin is. But even here, there are glimpses of God’s grace.
God tells the serpent, and us, what’s going to happen in the future (Genesis 3:14-15). One day the serpent will strike the offspring’s heel but the offspring will crush the serpent’s head. Right here, at the very first sin, God is already telling us about Jesus. The serpent will one day think he’s won a great victory at the cross, but instead, the cross will be the serpent’s greatest loss, as Jesus destroys the power of death and sin for good.
The second glimpse of God’s grace comes when he provides clothes for Adam and Eve. After the Fall, Adam and Eve are ashamed, but God gives them animal skins (Genesis 3:21). Notice, though, that these are animal skins, so a sacrifice was made, innocent blood was shed for the first time on the planet. God’s grace shines through even in these first pages of the Bible, and it also reminds us that God’s grace comes to us only through the shedding of the blood of the innocent Jesus.
The sin of Adam and Eve didn’t take God by surprise, but it still broke his heart. Our sin breaks God’s heart as well. Our culture has completely lost sight of the seriousness of sin. We’ve either trivialized it or just full-blown embraced it, but sin still matters to God today just as much as it did at the Fall.
I encourage you to take some time to look inside yourself. Ask God to examine you and point out to you any sin that’s hiding there, and then confess that sin to God.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)
That’s a promise, and God is a promise keeper. Your God loves you, and he will forgive you, restoring the incredible fellowship that he offers. Turn from your sins and turn to God. When you do that, you’ll experience something incredible — God’s amazing forgiveness and grace in your life.
And that’s much better than an animal skin.