Life A.f. (After The Fall)

A number of years ago, General Electric had a wonderful commercial which showed the lights coming on in the nation of Hungary. After the fall of communism, a new day had begun for the people of that land. Our text today is Genesis Chapter 3. In these verses, we see that after the fall of humanity, after Adam and Eve have sinned, a new era begins as well. This time, however, the lights are going out. Their decision to eat the forbidden fruit had a devastating effect on Adam and Eve and on the rest of the world. In Verse 23, we are told God banished them from the Garden of Eden, the Paradise He had made for them. The next morning when Adam and Eve woke up, somewhere east of Eden, they saw a very different world. Life after the fall would not be the same as it had been before. And though many thousands of years have gone by since the events recorded in Genesis occurred, our lives today, our lives here on the Range in 1998, are still impacted greatly by what happened then. We too live A.F., after the fall. Today we are going to explore the consequences and lasting effect of Adam and Eve's disobedience to God. As we do, let's pray that God would use His Word to help us experience His grace and blessing in the midst of a fallen world.

I want you to pretend you are Adam or Eve in their new home the day after the fall. What is different now that you are out of Eden? #1) Right away you notice the physical environment has changed. Your new home looks different from the Garden. There are different types of plants. When you touch some of them, they prick your fingers and it hurts. The following verses indicate what God had told Adam and Eve would happen because of their disobedience. Genesis 3:17b,18,19a "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken;..." Because of sin, a corruption of nature has occurred. In the Garden of Eden, a perfect harmony had existed be-tween man and his environment. I'm sure there were oranges, peaches, and papayas hanging on trees just waiting to be eaten. But outside of the Garden, that harmony has been broken. Thorns and thistles seem to be everywhere. Getting food to eat is now hard work. Even today, we experience this lack of harmony between man and nature. Many of you go out to your garden and see that the weeds are growing much faster than the veg-etables. It is because we live after the fall.

There were other differences in the environment east of Eden. There may have been mosquitoes in the Garden, but they didn't bite like they do now. Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods never disrupted life in Eden, but now they are a very real threat. A few years ago a couple went to live in a cabin in a remote part of the Canadian Rockies. They were real nature lovers, who considered themselves friends of the earth. After living there two years, they realized the earth was not all that friendly. Temperatures of 60 degrees below zero, 80 mile-an-hour winds, blizzards which pro-duced four feet of snow, torrential rains, and a drought were all part of their experience. Nature doesn't seem to look out for our best interests. That has been very obvious the past year. Though El Nino has brought some rather pleasant weather to us, it has been devastating in many parts of the world. Central America, especially, has suffered from heat and drought which have almost destroyed their economy. Weather and human beings don't enjoy any harmony A.F., after the fall. This is because the planet we inhabit today, after the fall, is not the same one that God created in Genesis 1 and called good.

#2) As you wake up the day after the fall, you probably noticed there is a tension between you and your spouse, between husband and wife. You do not get along with each other as you had in Eden. Part of it may have been because you are mad, blaming Eve or Adam for your decision to eat the forbidden fruit. But part of the tension is a result of what God had said to Eve in 3:16 "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." Right from the start, God made men and women so they could have a sexual re-lationship which would lead to the birth of children. But now, after the fall, having a baby is going to be a very painful experi-ence. I don't know that from experience, but from what I have read and what women have told me, it hurts a lot to give birth to a child, even with our modern medications. After the fall, having a baby involves pain.