What was Lost, Is Now Found: THE FALL

In the beginning, it starts with God making something out of nothing and it was good. Nothing tainted, nothing bad including man ( Gen 1-2). God made man in His image and gave man a job that consisted of working the land and having dominion over creation. Not only did Adam and Eve have a perfect relationship with God, but the relationship between them two was also perfect, without shame, guilt, and fear. God fully knew and loved man and man felt no shame or guilt before God and before each other. You can see this throughout the interactions before the fall. Life was actually good and holy as God intended it to be.

But by chapter 3 is when it gets a little lot messy. A lot of the stuff we experience now even comes from and even starts here. If you read it carefully and some of the details I got from this sermon by Jackie Hill Perry [1] in how we view God, trust Him ( or lack thereof), and the consequences of this interaction between Adam, Eve and the serpent. It starts with first, the serpent addressing God as God, not the Lord God or Lord your God which is pretty much before every “God” you see in Genesis up to Deuteronomy and that just shows plainly a lack of fear or reverence for who God is. Then you see the serpent begin to re-ask what God commands in a way that questions His goodness and His authority as if God is withholding good something from Adam and Eve. Then that moment when Eve chooses to rely on her own wisdom over God’s, that’s when the first act of sin entered into the world and brought everything down with it. Immediately we see how sin taints everything that was once good.

The first thing we see is the relationship between Adam and Eve and I think something I didn’t notice before is themselves. “They knew that they were naked” ( Gen 3:7). Well before and after this incident, they were naked, but it’s this “opening of eyes” that caused them to distort this nakedness. Nakedness is a neutral thing, but once sin became the lens in which everything was filtered through, they felt shame, guilt, fear, and distorted how they viewed themselves and each other. And the crazy part, you know where our fear of man comes from and this desire to be approved. I think I would argue it is in this moment of the fall that motivates those fears. So why not find it in God as we are constantly always told? Find your identity in God? Well before that fall, it was already in God. But because of the fall, that ability again to see and understand who we are and what we were created for crumbled. But God in His great grace and mercy, not surprised by what happened, shows that His love and care for them did not change. What does He do? He searches for them and asks where they are. It’s not like God is unaware but in some ways, God is creating space for Adam and Eve to confess and repent.

God never changed, but we did and everything that God created for good had a consequence. For example,work which was what humans were to do as a good thing became tainted with toil and a sense of emptiness, childbirth became painful ( freakin EVE!) and ultimately they and every human after that became dead. And no they did not physically die ( actually the physical death is the ultimate representation of the spiritual death sin has but that’s another topic for another day), but the relationship between humans and God, their creator was broken. Their ability, just like ours until we are saved, to see and believe in Him, in His word, His character, His promises, all of it tainted by and because of unbelief-the root of all sin.

What was lost at the fall was our very means of life: being able to be in the Presence of God.

It’s insane how God in His manifold wisdom restores all things that were lost at the fall: how we see ourselves, our relationship with one another and most importantly, our relationship with Himself.

[1]https://youtu.be/QWqAdElTf9k