The Gospel: Chapter 2 -- The Fall

Living in a Broken World

We saw in the previous session that our innate sense that the world shouldn’t be the way it is — plagued by suffering, evil, brokenness, and death — exists precisely because the world was never intended to be this way. The world God created was full of harmony, goodness, beauty, life, and truth.

This is not the world we know today.

We each have been touched by the brokenness of the world in different ways, whether through our own personal experience with relational strife, abuse, trauma, or sickness, the hardship or death of people we love, or simply through the knowledge of the pain and suffering all around us, locally and globally.

Every human civilization and world religion has wrestled with the problem of evil, pain and suffering. It is a universal aspect of the human experience, and therefore is relevant to each and every one of us.

The collective sigh of the human race is: “It shouldn’t be this way.”

So what happened? How did God’s good world become so corrupted, so broken?

This is an important question to answer, first because of the universal interest all humans have in understanding our suffering, and second, because the way you define a problem determines the types of solutions you seek to solve it.

In this session, we focus on identifying the source of the world’s brokenness. We don’t have to look much further from where we started last time in the opening two chapters of Genesis -- the beginning or “exposition” of the biblical story -- to see things radically changed.

In chapter 3 of Genesis, conflict enters the story, and as in every well-told story, the protagonist and his goals are challenged by the introduction of an antagonist.

The Fall of Man

Immediately after the author introduces the main characters and setting of the biblical story, another character enters the plot:

Genesis 3:1 (ESV)

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.

The story unfolds to show the craftiness of the serpent — an ancient symbol which original audiences of the biblical story would have recognized as representing chaos and mankind’s mortal enemy.

Genesis 3:1–5 (ESV)

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”

2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”

4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Notice the serpent’s craftiness in creating doubt in the mind of the woman. A simple question plants the seed: “Did God really say…?” Then, with the seed firmly planted, he nurtures it with a full on lie:

Genesis 3:4 (ESV)

4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.”

This is a direct contradiction of God’s words in Genesis 2:17.

But he’s not done.

Genesis 3:4–5 (ESV)

4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Do you sense the essence of his lie, here?

First, he cast doubt on God’s Word. Now, he makes a direct assault on God’s character. Consider what he is essentially saying to the woman:

God is holding out on you. God knows that you will become equal to Him if you eat from that tree, and He doesn’t want to share His power. He doesn’t want you to know what He knows.

The seed of doubt comes to fruition as the serpent’s lies play to the woman’s now disordered loves:

Genesis 3:6–7 (ESV)

6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

The good Creator, who had given the man and the woman everything in the garden for their pleasure and enjoyment — including the Tree of Life! — was rebelled against by his image-bearers — his co-regents on Earth.

This is the essence of that Original Sin: rebellion against the creator God. Instead of serving and worshiping God joyfully as his co-regents, the first humans disobeyed, instead choosing to establish their own kingdom. It was about doubting God’s goodness and care, and instead believing that something outside of relationship with God and obedience to His commands would bring satisfaction and joy.

But the serpent’s lies over-promised and under-delivered, as they have continued to do so ever since. Immediately upon tasting the fruit, their eyes are open not to full knowledge and wisdom of God, but of their own frailty and mortality. They see themselves for the first time with their own limited perspective, instead of through the identity God had given them. No longer were they free to enjoy the garden as co-heirs with God; instead, they were ashamed of their frail, creaturely nakedness.

God finds them hiding in the garden, afraid to come near Him. Isn’t that often the case when we know we’ve sinned? We run away from God, instead of to God. Then, once found out, they play the blame game.

“The woman made me do it!” Adam says.

“The serpent made me do it!” Eve says.

God’s Judgment on Sin

So God, being not just good and loving, but essentially just, casts judgment on the serpent, the woman, and the man.

The serpent is forever cursed, symbolizing God’s judgment not on snakes per se, but on the cosmic sources of chaos and evil in the world which the serpent represents.

The woman, originally commanded to multiply and fill the earth with worshipers, is now faced with pain in childbirth. Further, rather than working harmoniously with her husband to work and keep the garden and subdue the earth, they will now experience interpersonal conflict.

The man, originally commanded to be the primary cultivator of the earth, working and subduing it joyfully while feasting on the Tree of Life, is now faced with work that is hard and punishing. The Tree of Life is taken away, the man and the woman are driven from Eden’s paradise, and death enters the horizon.

To summarize:

Conflict enters between God and the serpent, who we learn later is no other than Satan himself;

conflict enters between God and man, as their paradisal relationship is severed by their rebellion;

conflict enters between mankind, as strife between man and woman and competition for resources becomes a realtiy;

conflict enters between man and creation, as sin infects the created order and returns the man’s work with thorns and thistles;

and, finally, conflict enters between mankind and the serpent — an ongoing enmity of which the story of the serpent’s temptation in the Garden of Eden is but an archetype.

The result?

Cain kills Able in Genesis 4. The first human death.

By Genesis 6, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). Among all the people on earth, Noah alone finds favor with God, and the world is flooded.

By Genesis 11, the earth had repopulated, but the problem of human sin remained, and the Tower of Babel was erected as a monument of human pride. The tower falls by the hand of God, and the peoples of the earth are divided by language for the first time.

So the earth is filled with God’s image bearers, but not in the way God intended. They take with them not a worshipful care for the earth and others, but instead the rotten disease of sin and brokenness.

Here we are, thousands of years later, living in the midst of a people shining with hints of the glory of God, yet terribly plagued by corruption, sickness, war, and death.

All of it the result of that infamous first sin in the Garden.

Foreshadowing of the Gospel

Yet, even in the midst of the world’s darkest day, God acts in grace towards the creation he loves.

First, he makes clothes from animal skins to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness and shame. The first deaths in God’s good creation came from his very own hands, a sacrifice made to cover the sins of his people — a foreshadowing of the ensuing reality that sins will be atoned for by sacrifice.

Then, he makes a promise to the serpent, foreshadowing a future battle in which the sons of man will overcome the evil one:

Genesis 3:15 (ESV)

15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,

and between your offspring and her offspring;

he shall bruise your head,

and you shall bruise his heel.”

Here, three chapters into the biblical story, we see a plot-line taking shape:

God creates the world to fill it with worshipers.

Mankind rebels at the temptation of the evil one, frustrating God’s plan to fill the earth with worshipers.

God promises to defeat the evil one through the offspring of the woman.

The story of the Gospel begins to take shape. Though all is now broken, all is not lost. In His grace, God had not abandoned His mission to fill the earth with worshipers.

But a tension enters the story.

How will God accomplish his original purposes?

How will he overcome the sin of man and the power of the evil one?

How will he fill the earth with worshipers when his image-bearers rebel against his reign?

We’ll find the answer to these questions in the next chapter.