Arthur King
Active Member
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 desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.
When Adam and Eve sinned, they infected creation with perversion, corruption, and destruction, all prior to any judgments given by God. From this text we see that sin is self-destructive independent from, and prior to, God’s destructive response to sin. The origin of sin’s destruction is in the act of sin itself, not in God’s destructive response to sin. As John Calvin says:
“And truly this opening of the eyes in our first parents to discern their baseness, clearly proves them to have been condemned by their own judgment. They are not yet summoned to the tribunal of God; there is none who accuses them; is not then the sense of shame, which rises spontaneously, a sure token of guilt?”
Calvin says that Adam and Eve were “condemned by their own judgment” with “shame” prior to being summoned to the tribunal of God. Notice that Adam and Eve completely failed in what they were attempting to achieve. By eating the fruit, they wanted to “be like God” but in actuality they submitted to the beast, a being over which they were supposed to rule. They were to exercise mastery over nature by cultivating and protecting it, but instead they trusted in an object of nature, the Tree, to make them like God. Their attempt at ascent was actually an act of descent. Their attempt to gain power was actually an act of giving up their power, over the beasts and over nature. Their attempt at self-glorification was in fact an act of self-destruction. It was a cosmic backfire. Below is just a beginning of a list of destructive effects of sin prior to God’s entrance into the garden in Genesis 3:8. These are not things that God did to humans, they are things humans did to themselves in the very act of sin. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they:
-Dethroned themselves from their lordship over creation by submitting to a subordinate creature over whom they were supposed to rule, for humans are supposed to, “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth (Gen 1:26).”
-Dehumanized themselves by submitting to the dominion of the serpent, making the beast their master, see again Gen 1:26. As the 6th century Christian philosopher Boethius says, “wickedness thrusts down to a level below mankind those whom it has dethroned from the condition of being human…So what happens is that when a man abandons goodness and ceases to be human, being unable to rise to a divine condition, he sinks to the level of being an animal.”
-Dishonored themselves in their own eyes, and one another’s eyes, for they became ashamed of their nakedness (Gen 3:7), clouding the very image of God they are meant to display (Gen 1:16, 3:7)
-Disrupted their sexual oneness with fig leaves, for Gen 2:24-25 says, “A man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Adam and Eve became ashamed of themselves and covered their nakedness.
-Failed in their duty to one another as spouses, for Adam and Eve were supposed to be “suitable helpers (2:18)” for one another, not contribute to one another’s sin.
-Dissatisfied their desires, as they failed to attain anything they were hoping to achieve by their sin. Nowhere in the text is any mention that Adam and Eve took pleasure in eating the fruit. See verse 3:6, “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 desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate.” The author of Genesis lists the benefits of the fruit only as what the woman perceives before actually eating the fruit. The fruit is only delightful in her perception, but not in reality. Once eaten, the fruit just opens Adam and Eve’s eyes to their nakedness and shame (Gen 3:7). Eating the fruit immediately produces suffering. Nowhere in the Biblical text is the kind of revelry in sin that we see in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Adam and Eve eat the fruit and then engage in wild sex on a bed of flowers. CS Lewis was right to call this a mistake, for Milton’s addition to the story runs completely contrary to the themes of the Genesis account.
-Disordered their souls, for the human soul in all of its actions should be oriented towards loving and obeying God. Sin requires us to disorder our souls so that God is not the central love, highest love, or greatest love. The act of sin is a disordering of the soul.
-Entered a state of death, physically and spiritually. In the Bible, death is much more than just the physical process of the soul departing from the body. Death is a spiritual condition. Ephesians 2 says that prior to becoming believers, we were “dead” in trespasses and sins, even though we were walking around and breathing. Jesus refers to the rebellious prodigal son, prior to his return to his father, as “dead” even though he is still physically alive (Luke 15). Death is the state of disorder both of soul and body that comes from a condition of disobedience to God.
Now, it is important to keep in mind that God is the primary offended party by Adam and Eve’s sin. God is always the primary offended party by our sin. An often cited proof of this principle is that King David, after committing adultery with Bathsheba and having her husband Uriah killed to cover it up, prays to God “Against you alone have I sinned (Psalm 51).” Obviously, David sinned against others as well, but his prayer of confession highlights that first and foremost his sin was against God. However, we must recognize that offense is different from damage. God is always the primary offended party, but sinners are primarily the damaged party. Humans cannot damage God by their sin. He’s God. It is not a high view of God that claims He is damaged by our sin. God is not harmed by our sin until He becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, at which point he is most certainly harmed by our sin. In sum: there is Creator and Creation. Sin damages Creation; it does not damage Creator.
Consider this whimsical illustration: Let’s say Skinny Pete, out of envy for Body Builder Bill’s glorious physique, throws a punch into Bill’s rock-hard abs. Upon contact, the bones of Pete’s hand and forearm instantly shatter into hundreds of pieces. Who is the offended party? Bill. But who is the damaged party? Pete. The offense was only to the damage of the offender. This is what it is like when humans sin against God.
One of the best descriptions of sin in the Bible is the one that God gives in Jeremiah 2:13, “My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that hold no water.” Who is offended in this illustration? God, the fountain of living waters. But who is damaged? Humans, by dying of thirst. What did God do to make the humans die of thirst? Nothing. It was the act of offense against God itself that killed the humans who forsook the fountain of living waters. Who is the offended party? God. Who is the damaged party? Humanity.
To not acknowledge the self-destructive nature of sin is to fail to take both God and sin seriously enough. Sin works against the sinner. Like pedaling forward on a bicycle that is engineered to go backwards, the harder you try to attain your goal, the further you get from it. As God says of Israel, they “walked in their own counsels and in the stubbornness of their evil heart, and went backward and not forward (Jeremiah 7:24).”
Prominent biblical scholar DA Carson prefers to describe sin as the “de-God-ing of God.” While I think this description is fine, I find it misleading in that it sounds like something that happens to God, rather than to sinners. We can’t de-God God, objectively. He’s God. As we see in the case of Adam and Eve, the attempt to de-God God only succeeds in the dehumanization of humanity. We can only de-God God from the throne of worship within our hearts.
When Adam and Eve sinned, they infected creation with perversion, corruption, and destruction, all prior to any judgments given by God. From this text we see that sin is self-destructive independent from, and prior to, God’s destructive response to sin. The origin of sin’s destruction is in the act of sin itself, not in God’s destructive response to sin. As John Calvin says:
“And truly this opening of the eyes in our first parents to discern their baseness, clearly proves them to have been condemned by their own judgment. They are not yet summoned to the tribunal of God; there is none who accuses them; is not then the sense of shame, which rises spontaneously, a sure token of guilt?”
Calvin says that Adam and Eve were “condemned by their own judgment” with “shame” prior to being summoned to the tribunal of God. Notice that Adam and Eve completely failed in what they were attempting to achieve. By eating the fruit, they wanted to “be like God” but in actuality they submitted to the beast, a being over which they were supposed to rule. They were to exercise mastery over nature by cultivating and protecting it, but instead they trusted in an object of nature, the Tree, to make them like God. Their attempt at ascent was actually an act of descent. Their attempt to gain power was actually an act of giving up their power, over the beasts and over nature. Their attempt at self-glorification was in fact an act of self-destruction. It was a cosmic backfire. Below is just a beginning of a list of destructive effects of sin prior to God’s entrance into the garden in Genesis 3:8. These are not things that God did to humans, they are things humans did to themselves in the very act of sin. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they:
-Dethroned themselves from their lordship over creation by submitting to a subordinate creature over whom they were supposed to rule, for humans are supposed to, “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth (Gen 1:26).”
-Dehumanized themselves by submitting to the dominion of the serpent, making the beast their master, see again Gen 1:26. As the 6th century Christian philosopher Boethius says, “wickedness thrusts down to a level below mankind those whom it has dethroned from the condition of being human…So what happens is that when a man abandons goodness and ceases to be human, being unable to rise to a divine condition, he sinks to the level of being an animal.”
-Dishonored themselves in their own eyes, and one another’s eyes, for they became ashamed of their nakedness (Gen 3:7), clouding the very image of God they are meant to display (Gen 1:16, 3:7)
-Disrupted their sexual oneness with fig leaves, for Gen 2:24-25 says, “A man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Adam and Eve became ashamed of themselves and covered their nakedness.
-Failed in their duty to one another as spouses, for Adam and Eve were supposed to be “suitable helpers (2:18)” for one another, not contribute to one another’s sin.
-Dissatisfied their desires, as they failed to attain anything they were hoping to achieve by their sin. Nowhere in the text is any mention that Adam and Eve took pleasure in eating the fruit. See verse 3:6, “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 desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate.” The author of Genesis lists the benefits of the fruit only as what the woman perceives before actually eating the fruit. The fruit is only delightful in her perception, but not in reality. Once eaten, the fruit just opens Adam and Eve’s eyes to their nakedness and shame (Gen 3:7). Eating the fruit immediately produces suffering. Nowhere in the Biblical text is the kind of revelry in sin that we see in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Adam and Eve eat the fruit and then engage in wild sex on a bed of flowers. CS Lewis was right to call this a mistake, for Milton’s addition to the story runs completely contrary to the themes of the Genesis account.
-Disordered their souls, for the human soul in all of its actions should be oriented towards loving and obeying God. Sin requires us to disorder our souls so that God is not the central love, highest love, or greatest love. The act of sin is a disordering of the soul.
-Entered a state of death, physically and spiritually. In the Bible, death is much more than just the physical process of the soul departing from the body. Death is a spiritual condition. Ephesians 2 says that prior to becoming believers, we were “dead” in trespasses and sins, even though we were walking around and breathing. Jesus refers to the rebellious prodigal son, prior to his return to his father, as “dead” even though he is still physically alive (Luke 15). Death is the state of disorder both of soul and body that comes from a condition of disobedience to God.
Now, it is important to keep in mind that God is the primary offended party by Adam and Eve’s sin. God is always the primary offended party by our sin. An often cited proof of this principle is that King David, after committing adultery with Bathsheba and having her husband Uriah killed to cover it up, prays to God “Against you alone have I sinned (Psalm 51).” Obviously, David sinned against others as well, but his prayer of confession highlights that first and foremost his sin was against God. However, we must recognize that offense is different from damage. God is always the primary offended party, but sinners are primarily the damaged party. Humans cannot damage God by their sin. He’s God. It is not a high view of God that claims He is damaged by our sin. God is not harmed by our sin until He becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, at which point he is most certainly harmed by our sin. In sum: there is Creator and Creation. Sin damages Creation; it does not damage Creator.
Consider this whimsical illustration: Let’s say Skinny Pete, out of envy for Body Builder Bill’s glorious physique, throws a punch into Bill’s rock-hard abs. Upon contact, the bones of Pete’s hand and forearm instantly shatter into hundreds of pieces. Who is the offended party? Bill. But who is the damaged party? Pete. The offense was only to the damage of the offender. This is what it is like when humans sin against God.
One of the best descriptions of sin in the Bible is the one that God gives in Jeremiah 2:13, “My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that hold no water.” Who is offended in this illustration? God, the fountain of living waters. But who is damaged? Humans, by dying of thirst. What did God do to make the humans die of thirst? Nothing. It was the act of offense against God itself that killed the humans who forsook the fountain of living waters. Who is the offended party? God. Who is the damaged party? Humanity.
To not acknowledge the self-destructive nature of sin is to fail to take both God and sin seriously enough. Sin works against the sinner. Like pedaling forward on a bicycle that is engineered to go backwards, the harder you try to attain your goal, the further you get from it. As God says of Israel, they “walked in their own counsels and in the stubbornness of their evil heart, and went backward and not forward (Jeremiah 7:24).”
Prominent biblical scholar DA Carson prefers to describe sin as the “de-God-ing of God.” While I think this description is fine, I find it misleading in that it sounds like something that happens to God, rather than to sinners. We can’t de-God God, objectively. He’s God. As we see in the case of Adam and Eve, the attempt to de-God God only succeeds in the dehumanization of humanity. We can only de-God God from the throne of worship within our hearts.
