Paradise Lost

The Fall tells us much about God and about Satan, but it also tells us much about ourselves. Like Adam and Eve, we too are susceptible to temptation. Now temptation itself is not sinful. Like the saying goes, “The sin’s not in the bait; it’s in the bite.” But sometimes we set ourselves up unnecessarily. If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned. Like Eve, we stare at the forbidden fruit, we think about how good it will taste, we look at it with lust, we justify how it will make us wiser, we reach out and touch it, and finally we give in to it. 1 John 2:16 describes temptation as “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” Eve moved through all three.

The story goes that Abel one day asked his father, “Dad, why don’t we live in the Garden of Eden anymore?” And Adam replied, “Son, your mom ate us out of house and home!”

To be fair, Eve sometimes gets a bad rap. Adam is equally to blame, and I’ll show you why. 1 Corinthians 10:13 assures us, for every temptation God will provide a way out, an exit, if we but watch for it. Eve had a way out standing right next to her. Satan had been talking to Eve in the plural, as in “you all,” so it appears Adam was standing there the whole time, but he was silent. Even though God had given him the boundaries, even though he had walked with God in the cool of the day, even though God had given him a helpmate to complete him, Adam stood by, seemingly blinded to what was unfolding before his very eyes. And then he took the fruit from Eve without a word of objection and thus abdicated his leadership role as the first human being.

Which led to a massive problem for the human race: Sin introduced death. Satan questioned whether Adam and Eve would truly die, and you might think he was right, since they weren’t struck by lightning on the spot. But that very moment they began the dying process, sure enough, for sin always leads to death: death of innocence, as they realized they were naked; decaying of relationships, as they covered themselves in shame, blamed each other, and hid from God; death of eternal life, as he banned them from the garden and the Tree of Life; and yes, physical death, as their bodies began to age.

Romans 3:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.” The human condition is 100% fatal. And yet, early on, God promised a solution. In Genesis chapter 3, just beyond our passage today, in verse 15 God promises one to come—an offspring of Adam and Eve. The serpent will strike his foot; oh yes, Satan will do all he can to hurt this one to come. Yet this promised Savior will strike the serpent’s head. A foot strike you can survive, but a head strike is fatal. Satan is going down for good, and it’s all predicted right here in the third chapter of the Bible.

The name Adam means “man.” The first man failed. He stood idly by, passively participating in the destruction of the human race. As we read earlier, from Romans 5, verses 12 and 15: “Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned ... How much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many?”