Episode Intro
What is sin? Where did it come from? How has it affected us as human beings? How has it effected the world in which we live?
In the last episodes of Thinking Theology we saw that God created human beings. He created human beings to reflect him, to rule over the world under him. He made us to relate to him. But things are no longer as they were created to be. Our world is broken and we are broken.
But what happened to get us from there to here?
That’s what we’re thinking about in this episode of Thinking Theology.
Podcast Intro
Hi. My name is Karl Deenick. I write about theology and I teach it at Sydney Missionary and Bible College. Welcome to Thinking Theology, a podcast where we think about theology, the Bible and the Christian life, not just for the sake of it, but so we can love God more, with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
The Fall into Sin
In a moment we’ll look at the consequences of the fall into sin. But we begin by looking at the event itself.
The fall of humanity into sin takes place in Genesis 3. God made the world good, and he gave the first two human beings, Adam and Eve, free reign of the garden. There was one thing, however, which they were not permitted to do. That is, to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden.
God tells them in Genesis 2:16,
You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:16–17 NIV)
However, in Genesis 3 that simple command is broken, and with it, all of humanity and creation is plunged into sin.
It’s helpful to look at the details of the fall since it tells us some important things about the nature of sin.
At the beginning of chapter 3, we see Satan, in the form of a snake, coming to Eve and raising doubts about what God has said. He says,
Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’? (Genesis 3:1 NIV)
That is an out and out lie. God never said they couldn’t eat from any tree. He said they could eat from every tree except one. Satan is casting God as ungenerous and stingy.
Next, the woman responds with a half-truth. She says in verse 2,
We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.” (Genesis 3:2–3 NIV)
The woman has corrected the serpent’s error about what God said, but then adds an error of her own. She says that they can’t even touch the tree in the middle of the garden. But God had not said that. He had only said that they couldn’t eat from it.
The serpent’s lies are beginning to undermine God’s truth.
Next, the serpent out and out lies by stating that if the woman eats from the tree show won’t die. Which is a lie. Instead, he says, God doesn’t want them to eat from it because if they do they’ll become like God. Verse 4,
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4–5 NIV)
Again, the serpent paints God as stingy and as wanting to keep good things from the man and the woman. But here also, in many ways, is the heart of sin: the desire to be “like God”. At the heart of sin is the desire to replace God with ourselves. Instead of God being in charge, we get to be in charge. And often bound up with that, is the lie that taking God’s place would be better because God is keeping things from us that it would be better for us to have.
The particular way in which the serpent suggests Eve will become like God is in “knowing good and evil.”
Knowing exactly what that means is a little bit tricky. But the phrase “good and evil” is used in other places in the Bible. So Solomon asks in 1 Kings 3 for wisdom to judge between good and evil. He says,
9 So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?” (1 Kings 3:9 NIV)
In that case, the idea is the ability to decide or determine what is right or wrong.
Similarly a woman who comes to David for judgement in a matter, says of him,
17 “And now your servant says, ‘May the word of my lord the king secure my inheritance, for my lord the king is like an angel of God in discerning good and evil. May the LORD your God be with you.’” (2 Samuel 14:17 NIV)
David has been appointed by God to judge what is good and evil in matters brought to him. The basic idea, then, is that knowing good and evil is about having the authority to say what is good and evil.
In eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Eve and Adam, then, grasp for themselves the authority to determine what is right and wrong.
Which matches what actually takes place. That is, in deciding to eat from the tree, Eve decides that that her judgment is better than God’s. God said don’t eat from it, but Eve decides she knows better.
In that sense, the tree is not special in any particular way. The fruit is not magical. Rather, it is simply a tree that God set apart as exemplifying his rule. In eating from the tree, Adam and Eve rejected God’s rule and took upon themselves the authority to determine what is right and wrong.
Consequences
So we’ve seen the nature of the sin and rebellion of humanity against God. But what are the consequences of that?
Many of the consequences become apparent in Genesis 3, in the aftermath of Adam and Eve’s sin.
Judgement and Death
The first of which is judgement and death. God says to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:19,
19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:19 NIV)
Not only will life now be hard. Death has entered the world.
Similarly, God prevents the man and the woman from accessing the tree of life. The tree being the means that God had ordained to sustain their ongoing life.
Paul talks, too, about the entry of death into the world through Adam and Eve’s rebellion. He says in Romans 5:12,
…sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned…. (Romans 5:12 NIV)
So death came through sin.
He says in 5:16,
The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation….
And,
by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man…. (Romans 5:16–17 NIV)
In other words, the result of Adam and Eve’s sin was judgement and condemnation. They had broken God’s command. And the result of that judgement and condemnation was death.
Not only physical death for this life, but also something much worse.
Revelation 20 speaks about that so-called “second death”. That is, God’s eternal judgement. What Revelation also calls the lake of fire. Physical death is only a portent of that much greater and much more terrifying reality.
Corruption
The second consequence is corruption. That is, not only are human beings condemned and subject to death. We are corrupted by sin. Sin lives in us and distorts us.
Paul writes in Ephesians 2,
1 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. (Ephesians 2:1–3 NIV)
Paul talks about being dead in sin. That deadness manifested itself in following Satan rather than God—gratifying our desires that are at odds with God.
We see that corruption in us when without our consciously deciding, anger wells up in us. Or greed. Or selfishness. Those things are often not things we decide to do, but they are instinctive. Those instincts are what the Bible calls our sinful nature. It is the corruption of sin that lives within us.
And because of that corruption, Paul says, we are objects of God’s wrath.
It is important to realise that we are not only objects of God’s wrath because of the sins we have committed, but we are also objects of God’s wrath because of the disease of sin that lives within us. It is not enough simply to be forgiven for our sins, God’s solution to the problem of sin must also address the ongoing corruption within our hearts.
Decay
The third consequence of sin is misery and decay.
We see that already in Genesis 3.
Childbearing becomes painful for the woman. God says to Eve,
I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. (Genesis 3:16 NIV)
So, too, there’s a breakdown in the relationship between the man and the woman. God says again to the woman,
Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. (Genesis 3:16 NIV)
There is now a power struggle between the man and the woman. Destroying God’s good pattern for their relationship with one another.
So, too, work is now plagued with hardship. In Genesis 3:17, God says,
Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food…. (Genesis 3:17–19 NIV)
It’s not that work is a curse. Work is a good gift from God. We were created to work in his world under him. But because of our desire to live in God’s world without him, work has now become bitter and frustrating.
Paul talks about the decay of the world, too, in Romans 8 when he says,
20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:20–23 NIV)
The world is groaning. It’s groaning because it is not what it ought to be. Human rebellion against God has plunged the whole world into chaos.
We can see that. We see it in death, disease, destruction, earthquakes, floods, famine and wars.
That is not say there are no echoes of the way God intended the world to be. The world is broken, but we still can see clearly the glory of the God who made it. But we see it in the same way that we see the beauty of a watch whose face has been damaged. Glimpses of glory, but also destruction.
That’s important because it means we cannot simply look at how the world is now and assume that’s what God intended it to be.
We cannot simply look at ourselves and says, “God made me like this, therefore it must be okay.”
In the words of the theologian Wesley Hill, that’s having a theology of creation without a theology of the Fall.”
We see a similar thing when people say, “It’s natural, therefore it must be good.”
Natural things are fallen and broken, corrupted and decaying. Some natural things might be better than things that are not natural. But that won’t always be true. Some natural things will kill us. And good theology will lead us to be suspicious of the idea that things in the world, untouched by human beings, are somehow intrinsically better. Human sin has had ramifications on the entire created world. The whole world is broken and so are we.
Outro
God made a beautiful world. He made us as human beings within that world to be special—to reflect him and related to him, to rule his world under him. But as human beings we have rebelled. As a result, condemnation, death, sin and decay have entered the world. And each one of us continue to live in the way that Adam and Eve did. We share in the consequences of what they did, but we also share in the consequences of our own daily rebellion.
So what’s the solution?
That’s what we’re thinking about in the next episode of Thinking Theology, when we begin to think about who Jesus is, and how his very person solves the problem of our rebellion and sin.
Please join me then.