Genesis 3 captures the fall of man. Adam and Eve are created holy and pure and are living in the garden in perfect harmony with God and His creation. Along comes the serpent who was “more crafty” than any other beast. That is the perfect description of Satan and his band of demons who are always lurking around with ideas for us to fall into sin. He is crafty – he will lead us into the weeds and cause us to fall into disobedience. He begins with a simple question to Eve: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden”? He gets her to question what God actually said about eating the fruit of the tree. That is his first move – to get us to question whether what we think God said was even said. Fortunately for us, we have God’s written Word that we can utilize to know what God said. That only helps if we read it – but we do have a resource to know what God said!
His next move to knock the woman off God’s plan was to question whether what God said would really happen. “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”. It wasn’t really so much a question as an outright lie. Satan tells her that eating the fruit won’t be a bad thing, but in fact will be actually a very good thing. Our enemy will twist the truth and attempt the same on us – to turn things around so bad seems good. Let me make one thing very clear – disobedience of God’s commands will never be a good thing. Never. The enemy will lie and try to make it seem like it could be so – but it won’t be. In this case – that piece of twisting began to work on Eve and she began to look at the forbidden tree differently. She saw:
- “good for food
- Delight to the eyes
- Desired to make one wise”
She totally forgot that God said “do not eat” from it. She lost tract of the truth as the serpent lied and twisted God’s words.
So they CHOSE to disobey God’s command. Sin is a choice – always. We don’t just accidentally sin. The devil doesn’t make us do it. We can only blame one person for sin in our life – and that is ourself. We chose to disobey God and violate His commandments. Eve falls first, and as is often the case, she drags another with her as she gives Adam the forbidden fruit. Adam chose to sin – we can’t blame another either for our sin. We make that choice. Association with the wrong people can influence us – but sin happens when we make a choice to disobey. SO they both made that very bad choice. At first it seemed pretty good though as “the eyes of both were opened”. That is how sin often starts. It feels like a great choice. But quickly things go bad and in this case Adam and Eve “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord”. It didn’t take long for them to realize that they had made a very poor choice.
That is how sin works. Sin will take you further than you want to go. It will keep you longer than you want to stay, and it will cost you more than you want to pay. It is never a good thing. It seems so at the time, but quickly becomes something that can cause problems that last a lifetime. That is the reality of sin. Certainly Jesus went to the cross to allow us to experience forgiveness of our sin. But that does not change the results and outcome of our choices. There are always things that result when we chose to violate God’s commandments. Sin is exactly that – falling short of God’s plan and mark for our life. When we do – the results of those choices will often last a lifetime. So sin not only separates us from God for eternity if we don’t deal with it and see the grace and forgiveness through Jesus – the impact of that sin can carry on for our entire life as well. We’ll see that in full swing in the second half of this chapter as God punishes Adam and Eve for their disobedience!
