Word of Salvation – Vol. 44 No.32 – August 1999
The Fall of Man (1)
Sermon by Rev MP Geluk
on Lord’s Day 3b (Heid.Cat. Q&A 7-8)
Scripture Reading: Genesis 3; Romans 5:12-19
Suggested Hymns: BoW 462; 427; 376; 372; 241
Beloved Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We learn why people have sinful natures from the Word of God about the doctrine of sin, and Question 6 of the Catechism asks if God perhaps created man so wicked and perverse. This kind of question arises because quite often people will not accept responsibility for their sinful actions. They excuse themselves by saying that they acted according to their nature which they can’t help having.
But if they are really not to blame, then who is? Well, you know how people blame the circumstances they were placed in, or the environment in which they grew up. Anything but themselves. But some go back further and dare to suggest that the sinfulness of man might be the doing of God. After all, if God is the Creator and the One who still rules over all that is, then it may not be so unfair to suggest that God did not do such a good job in the way He made people and the world.
It seems an outrageous thing to say, but don’t forget that Adam already did this very thing. He and Eve had disobeyed God, and God wanted Adam to face up to what he had done. Adam blamed Eve for giving him the fruit to eat. But Adam was not just passing the blame to his wife. He said more. He said, “The woman you put here with me.” Adam blamed God for giving him a kind of woman who got him into trouble.
It was very unfair, of course, for Adam to say this for it was totally untrue. The reason why it is untrue is that God made everything very good. The Bible repeatedly claims that God is altogether pure and holy. If God tempted anyone to sin, then God would just not be the God of perfect truth and righteousness any more. If God, then, is not to be held responsible for man’s sinfulness, where does that nature come from? The answer is – from the fall and disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in Paradise! The account of this is given in Genesis 3, and we want to look at this now.
1. The Reliability of Genesis 3
If the first three chapters of Genesis are not historical, then we cannot speak of a fall into sin occurring at a specific point of time in history. If the Genesis account of the creation of the world and of man in chapters one and two is not reliable, then the record of the fall in chapter three is not reliable either. And if the fall into sin did not really take place then we will have to accept some other explanation for man’s sinfulness.
Some people provide such explanations and they can do it in a very scholarly way. They reject the biblical teaching that children are born with a sinful heart and say they are born pure and innocent. As they grow older they learn sin from others. The evil in the world is there because people copy bad examples. But the Word of God explains that human nature after the fall has a natural tendency to sin.
Those not believing the Bible would avoid the word sin and speak more of right and wrong behaviour, and what that is depends on what society happens to think is right and wrong at a particular time. The Bible, of course, also says that the bad example of others can have great influence but goes much further and explains that the willingness to copy wrong behaviour is because a person has a sinful heart and is attracted to sin like iron is to a magnet.
The ones who reject the Bible’s teaching of a good creation and a subsequent fall into sin are mostly those who have accepted the theory of evolution. Evolution philosophy is taught in public schools, colleges and universities. Most non-Christians hold to evolutionary beliefs. It says that man evolved from lower forms of life that began millions of years ago and our nearest non-human ancestors are the apes.
But the church’s biggest threat as regards the historicity of the fall is not so much from the non-Christian. You would expect a non-Christian to reject the creation and the fall of man, as described in the first three chapters of Genesis, as being nonsense. The biggest threat is from those who see themselves as being part of the wider Christian church and who say that they believe in God but also in some form of evolution. They have accepted the belief that life evolved over a long period of time but instead of this happening by chance, as non-Christians believe, they hold that God made evolution happen. But how then do they look upon Genesis 1-3? Well, it’s what the ancient Hebrews believed. What you read in Genesis 1-3 is their explanation of the origin of things and why people are sinful.
And, of course, there are those who would say that Genesis 1-3 is just a fable. After all, in fables animals talk and here in Genesis 3 you have the serpent talking. They go on to say that fables are useful because they have moral lessons. After all, the prophet Nathan used a fable to confront David of his sin of adultery and murder. So they are quite happy to leave Genesis 3 in the Bible. It just teaches us a lesson about the wrongs of being disobedient. It’s a made-up story to teach certain important truths about God. It doesn’t necessarily have to be historical. It is easy to see why these explanations of Genesis 1-3 are acceptable to many people. They don’t have to accept the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve in the way they were created and the talking serpent as actual events that took place in history.
Some of you might feel that it is not necessary for me to speak about the reliability of Genesis 3 because you assume that everyone here accepts it as historical. But could you defend your faith and explain the origin of human sinfulness from the fall into sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, to someone who does not hold Genesis 3 to be an historical fact? And even more urgently, could you defend the truth of Genesis 3 to your own children in high school and university who most certainly are being confronted quite frequently by evolutionary thinking and unbelief? If you as a Christian parent are unable to equip your children with good arguments and teach them to think out of the Bible rather than come to the Bible with all sorts of wrong perceptions, then who will? Don’t just leave this to the minister and the Christian school. You have a far greater access into your children’s lives than the church and the school.
Of the many things that can be said in defence of Genesis 3 being reliable we ought to at least mention these facts. God Himself says that all Scripture is inspired. Genesis 1-3 is part of that Scripture. It is God’s own Word and God is true. Jesus said that the Word of God cannot be broken. He frequently appealed to God’s Word as a basis for truth. No one can arbitrarily decide what part of the Bible to accept and what part not to accept
This becomes very clear when we note how in Romans 5:12-19 Adam and Jesus are put next to each other. This passage is very relevant to the reliability of Genesis 3. Let me quote from Dr Edward Young, an Old Testament scholar who had this to say about Adam and Jesus in Romans 5:
In these verses Paul constantly reasons as though there had been a real man named Adam and attributes to the disobedience of this man the fallen condition of the remainder of mankind. His phrases are very convincing: ‘As sin entered the world through one man – many died by the trespass of the one man – death reigned through that one man – the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men – through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners.’ In these words of the apostle the uniqueness of Adam stands out. No other man is thus contrasted with Christ. It is the work of Adam as over against that of Christ. Indeed, elsewhere Paul speaks of Christ as the second Adam. Suppose, however, that Paul is mistaken! Suppose that Adam was not a real individual and had never lived! What becomes of the point of Paul’s tremendous argument? It then loses all its force. All that Paul says about the saving work of Christ is lost if there was no first Adam to bring the world into sin. Indeed, it follows that if Adam is not an historical character, what Paul writes concerning Christ must be rejected. If Adam is unreal, the contrast Paul makes is false, and Paul’s statement concerning the work of Christ must be rejected. None of them are then true. If there was no first Adam, then Christ is not the second Adam. And this leads us to the heart of the matter. If Paul was so profoundly mistaken about Adam, how do we know that he was not equally mistaken about Christ? If Adam is not an historical character, how do we know Christ was an historical character? And further, if we do not need to believe that Adam was a real individual, why do we have to believe that Christ was a real individual? Remove Adam and his historicity from these verses and all the profound truths that Paul is teaching go by the board. They are then not truths at all and Paul’s words must be abandoned. Adam is gone, but so is Christ.”
End of quote!
There is everything to be said, therefore, that Genesis 3 is reliable and you need to know the arguments to support that claim so that the Lord can use you to help your children and others to accept the Bible as it stands.
2. How Could Satan Enter God’s Perfect Creation?
Chapter 3 begins, “Now the serpent…” There is nothing unusual about there being a serpent, or snake, in Paradise. Along with the other animals that God had made, the serpent was part of God’s creation. What is unusual is that the serpent became the tool of Satan to tempt Eve into disobeying God. Genesis 3 does not mention Satan by name but the nature of the attack by the serpent on God makes it clear that it was really Satan. In his letter to the Corinthians Paul says that Eve was deceived into sin by the serpent’s cunning and only Satan was capable of doing that. And the book Revelation speaks in two places about Satan as that ancient serpent called the devil who leads the whole world astray [12:9; 20:2).
By itself the serpent in Paradise was very good, as everything else was. Yet the opening verse of Genesis 3 says the serpent was more crafty, or more subtle, than the other animals. This craftiness, or subtlety, comes out in the way the serpent succeeds in persuading Eve to disobey God and eat from the tree. Its craftiness is, therefore, something sinister and evil. Such craftiness did not belong to the snake because God created it good. But perhaps there was something about the way a snake glides and looks that made Satan use this animal as the instrument of his attack. Satan is a spiritual being and therefore invisible. Eve was not a spirit but a human being and to approach her, Satan decided to use a visible serpent, and for his purposes he turned its natural behaviour into something crafty and also made it speak his words. We cannot completely explain it because the Bible does not provide us with more information.
Snakes, of course, do not speak with a human voice. God did not make them that way. But not only did the serpent speak, what he said was a terrible insinuation about God’s holy character. It was, of course, Satan speaking through the serpent. And here the difficult question arises – how was it possible for Satan to enter into God’s perfect creation? Satan is not stronger than God. If God had not allowed this then it could not have happened.
Where did Satan come from? Well, he was created along with all the other angels, probably on the first day when God made the heavens and the earth. Then sometime between the first and the sixth day, Satan rebelled. How was it possible for a good angel to go against God? There are passages in Isaiah (14:12-15) and Ezekiel [28:11-19) which point to Satan wanting to be like God. Jude 6 says that Satan and other angels were not satisfied with their place as God’s servants that He had assigned to them. Their rebellion cost them their servanthood. Jesus refers to Satan’s punishment when He says He saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven (Lk.10:18]. We can assume from this that Satan then resented God so much that he tempted Eve to go against God also. It is not an unreasonable assumption because Satan certainly tempted Jesus to also go against God and worship him instead.
We do not know how much time elapsed between the creation of Adam and Eve and the fall into sin. The Bible does not say and it is not important for us to know. What is important is that Adam, with Eve his helper, lived in Paradise to the glory of God and without sin. Then the serpent spoke to the woman and she and Adam obeyed him and the fall took place.
But we haven’t as yet answered the question as to how it was possible for Satan to enter into God’s perfect creation? And we face a similar question when we ask how it was possible for a perfect Eve to obey Satan’s evil course of action and so disobey God? And how was it possible for a perfect Adam to also be persuaded to sin? These questions are not easy to answer and there is nothing specifically said about this in Genesis 3. From Genesis 1 and 2 we know that God created man in His own image. God is holy and righteous and with His perfect knowledge God would know the opposite of holiness and righteousness.
God cannot, and does not sin. He cannot be the opposite of what He is. For some reason we cannot fully understand, God did not create the angels and man with an impossibility to sin. God asked man to willingly obey Him, which he could do with the likeness of God in his nature. But how do you show this willingness without there being the possibility to do otherwise? So God put the tree of knowledge of good and evil in paradise and that became man’s test of obedience.
God made Adam and Eve very different to the animals. Animals were not made with God’s likeness in them. Each animal simply acted according to the nature that it had received from God. Adam, in fact, gave all the animals a name that corresponded to their nature. He, therefore, knew very well that the animals were very different from him. They could not talk like him. They could not communicate with God the Creator like he could. And God did not talk to the animals as He did with Adam. It was, therefore, so completely out of character when the serpent began talking. The serpent actually talked to Eve as though it was another person who, like Eve, could think and suggest other possibilities.
Adam and Eve knew from what God said about the tree that they were not to eat from it. It was possible for them to eat from it. But they would die if they did, God had said. So by obeying God’s instruction they would let God rule over them and they would remain in that perfect fellowship with God. God would be recognised as the Almighty One who made and ruled over the creation in just the right way, and Adam and Eve would perfectly fit into that whole scheme of things just as God wanted. They would experience happiness as they enjoyed God and His works and God was glorified by their obedience.
But now Satan made the serpent speak and challenged Eve in that crafty, subtle way. Eve should have realised straightaway that something was wrong when the serpent spoke. God had not created snakes with the ability to speak the language of Adam and Eve. But it was not only the speaking, the snake actually also began to question and twist God’s command to Adam and Eve. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?'” Maybe Eve was deceived there and then. To actually listen to Satan and not recognise straightaway that with the serpent behaving in that abnormal way, there was something seriously out of order. But she did not turn away and began a conversation with the serpent whom she did not realise immediately was an enemy.
Time prevents us from examining the conversation between Satan and Eve verse by verse, but by way of summary we can say that Satan cleverly got Eve to waver about God’s command not to eat from the tree. God had said that Adam and Eve would die if they did, but Satan said that this would not happen. In fact, Satan passed judgment on God by suggesting that God is jealous and therefore He gave them the command not to eat lest they become like Him and be His rivals. Satan further suggested that by eating from the tree Adam and Eve would have the wisdom of knowing good and evil like God. It would make them equal to God.
Having already become interested in what the serpent was saying, and in that act no longer depending wholly on God, Eve began to look at the tree and its food in a deeper way than she had done before. God had made all the trees and they were pleasing to the eye and good for food. All this was sufficient for Adam and Eve. But now with the prize of having knowledge like God before her, Eve looked again at the tree she knew she wasn’t to eat from. Her heart had already changed. Before all this, she and Adam were not at all tempted to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden. They were happy and content in God’s good creation. But Eve failed to turn away from the tempter as he, with increasing boldness, made God look as if He was their enemy, the jealous One. She had taken Satan’s side, the side of evil and disobedience, and she had now fallen from God and was in bondage to sin. She was now weighing up God’s commands in the light of Satan’s reflections. The serpent might be right after all. He had shown, had he not, that he was on her side. He was only trying to help her. So why not try, why not investigate, and yes, why not eat and find out? And that’s what she did!
How different was God’s desire for Adam and Eve! God wanted to have them obey His law merely out of love for Him. An obedience that was simple and straightforward and which acknowledged God His rightful place as their God and Creator. When He came to earth the Lord Jesus gave that love to God because He was delighted to do the will of His Father (cf Ps.40:8; Heb.10:7]. And He showed this love when He did not listen to Satan who tempted Him in the wilderness. He showed it again later on in the garden of Gethsemane when He, incredibly burdened by the approaching death on the cross, nevertheless said to His heavenly Father, “Not my will but your will be done.”
But the first Adam broke away from this kind of love to God when he listened to his wife and accepted from her the forbidden fruit. We read in Genesis 3: “She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” It would appear that Adam was there all the time. And he did not protest, nor did he lovingly rebuke Eve. He too had failed.
Adam received Eve from God as his helper. The man and the woman were not and are not even now equals to each other, although they were and still are equal before God. Eve was created in order to be a help to the man, to complement him. Her creation was necessary in order that Adam’s existence might be whole and complete. Perhaps in this fact she was the weaker partner, which are the words the apostle Peter uses (1Peter 3:7). And being in some way subordinate to the man, maybe the reason why Satan approached her and not Adam. In any case, Adam was formed first, then Eve, wrote Paul to Timothy, and “Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.” (1Tim.2:18].
But God made it very clear to Adam that he was held primarily responsible for eating from the tree. He should not have listened to his wife. His wife, instead of being his helper, became a hindrance to him. Nevertheless, Adam, as the head, failed and meekly submitted when his wife offered him to also follow Satan’s advice and go against God. Romans 5 makes it very clear that through the first Adam, sin and death entered the world.
So far, then, we have tried to make it clear that it is very important to accept the fall into sin by Adam and Eve as a true historical event. We have also looked at that difficult question why Satan and sin could enter God’s perfect creation and how it was possible for Adam and Eve to disobey God. There is more to be said about the fall into sin. We still have to look at the results of the fall and then we must also consider the way out. We’ll do that next time.
Amen.