garden with the creator of the universe. But instead of finding his ‘kids’ happily playing in the garden, they were terrified because of their fear and shame when they heard him coming, and they hid (3:8).
So God called Adam, ‘Where are you?’ Adam was at least honest in responding, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’10 This revealed that they had sinned against God and the relationship between God and humanity was forever ruptured.
Why did such a seemingly small event lead to a rupture in the relationship? The answer is found in one particular attribute of God mentioned in chapter one – his perfect purity or holiness. God is pure and will not dwell with evil, unless it is dealt with, since it is repugnant to him. Hence, at the moment when humans disobeyed, rejected and rebelled against God, corruption was etched into human existence. Adam and Eve were the parents of all humanity and they passed this status down to their descendants through the ages.
Because of this, God was no longer able to dwell with humanity in this intimate, free relationship due to the impurity that violated his sense and being. He thus expelled Adam and Eve from the garden and barred them from having a direct relationship with him.11 Access to the tree of life was also barred and so humanity became subject to death and decay.12 If God had allowed them to remain in the garden and eat of the tree of life, they in their fallenness would have gained eternal existence and the universe would be forever blighted with the presence of evil.
The third consequence was that their relationship with one another was ruptured. When we read on we see that Adam and Eve instantly began to fight, seeking to blame someone else for their indiscretion.
First, Adam tried to blame Eve. When God asked them, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?’13 Adam’s response was to implicate Eve and, indirectly, God himself: ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’14 Yet, as noted above, he was with her at the time of eating and was equally culpable. Here we have the first marital breakdown and family conflict. The basic unit of society was fractured. As many of us have experienced, human history has been dogged with broken families and human conflict at every level since that day. God’s great dream of a world of harmony, love and unity was thus in great peril.
When God turned to the woman and asked her, ‘What is this you have done?’ She responded by blaming the snake: ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.’15 Again this is a typical human reaction and sounds like the murderer in the courtroom who says, ‘The devil made me do it.’
A fourth consequence then was the demise of God’s great dream for his world. God’s dream is not just about individuals living in relationship with God and one another, but of humanity building God’s world with all his creativity in love and harmony. It is a ‘utopian’ picture of all facets of existence including the arts, sciences, literature, music, sport and more, with each individual contributing in a unique way to building up God’s world; all of this in a place of unity, love, joy and peace. The Fall or Rupture shattered this. Each person became marred and flawed, unable to fully express their innate God-inspired brilliance because of their brokenness. Selfishness and personal ambition corrupted all humanity. Contention and domination became par for the course. God’s world would now never be what God intended, unless it is restored.
The result of Adam and Eve’s actions was the judgement of God on all. The snake was cursed to slide along the ground, probably meaning that he would contend on earth with humanity until ultimately defeated.16 The woman was told that she would forever experience great pain in childbearing and live in constant conflict with man throughout human history and be subject to him. This represents the truth that patriarchy and family fragmentation will be a problem for all of time. This subjection is not God’s ideal but a consequence of sin.17
The man was told he would spend his days slaving to produce food, contending with thorns and weeds. Finally he was told he would die, ‘for dust you are and to dust you will return’.18 Adam and Eve were banished from God’s presence. Here we have humanity afflicted with pain and suffering, hunger and famine, conflict, contention with creation itself, separation from God and the introduction of our greatest enemy, death.
The Fall was a cosmic cataclysmic event affecting all of the created order. I sometimes imagine that as Eve and Adam ate that fruit in the garden, there was a sudden change in the weather, there was thunder and lightning, there were earthquakes and eruptions – the whole of the earth reacted to this terrible moment of disobedience. The world would never be as God intended it unless it could somehow be restored. Creation groaned as it was fragmented and subjected to decay.19 Heaven itself was shaken in that moment.
All Corrupted by Sin
At the point of the Fall then, evil was let loose to affect God’s creation. Corruption entered world history. Death, sickness, pain, war, and natural disasters were released. It was as if a virus was introduced into the cosmos, corrupting the whole earth – like a virulent strain of HIV, bird flu or Ebola infecting God’s perfect creation; like a rot infecting a beautiful piece of fruit; like rust destroying iron… eating it away. No longer was creation ‘very good’ as God had first described it,20 now – while it was still good in many ways – it was fatally flawed.
This corruption became part of the DNA of the whole living kingdom, death was released,21 life was driven back, and the whole of the world became a war zone between life and death. The greatest manifestation of this ‘disease’ is that people say, ‘I don’t need God.’ In so doing they deny their ‘createdness’ and the glory that stands behind the wonders of this world. Put another way, God has been usurped with the mantra, ‘I am lord of my own destiny.’ Every future descendent of Adam and Eve was corrupted from birth. Later in the Bible, King David said as much in the Psalms as he repented for taking Uriah’s wife Bathsheba, committing adultery with her, and then sending Uriah to his death.22 As an adulterer and a murderer he admits to God: ‘surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.’23 Even in his mother’s womb he was corrupted. Solomon said the same when he consecrated the temple to God and prayed for the people: ‘there is no one who does not sin.’24 Jesus’ words to the rich ruler, ‘no one is good except God alone’, imply the same.25 The Apostle Paul speaks of universal human sinfulness when he says, ‘Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin … there is no one righteous, not even one… all have turned away… there is no one who does good, not even one: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’26
This all goes back to the Fall. Paul goes on to say, ‘therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, in this way death came to all people… because all sinned.’27 The last clause is important because here Paul explains that death remains not just because of Adam and Eve; that would be unjust. Death remains because ‘all sinned’ – that is, we are all separated from God because of our own individual sin, not because of Adam and Eve. We are all prone to sin but we are also all responsible for it before God.
It is not that there is no good left in the world; after all, there obviously is! What is meant is that everything that exists is marred and no longer fully what God intended it to be. This applies to us individually. It also applies to human society, which is broken in every part. Human creativity, while remaining extraordinary, has become misguided – not concerned for human good and the careful management of the ecosystem but focussed on self-glorification and greed. Human society became stratified between the ‘have’s’ and ‘have not’s’; between the powerful and the powerless. Racism, ageism, sexism, socio-economic inequality, war and other terrible inequalities are all a consequence of this essential corruption.
Creation itself has been marred by the influence of evil and corruption. Paul tells us that creation
