I was reading Genesis 3 yesterday as part of my YouVersion reading plan, and it has kept knocking around in my head since then.
You can take a look at the passage here
This is the biblical account of the very first sin to enter the world. The original. Numero uno.
Eve has been created, and has been told the few rules of paradise. It would seem that she has been left to wander as she wills, and she found herself in conversation with the crafty serpent.
This crafty serpent decides to stretch the truth just a teeny tiny bit – most of what he says is true, but not all of it. Yes, eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will open her eyes and give her wisdom – it will make her like God in that way. She will know and understand the difference between good and evil. And no, she did not “die” that day in a physical sense, but in a spiritual sense, she did. And physically, her days just got a number put on them. Her body began to decay and every breath brought her closer to death.
What has been knocking around though comes after that part. She takes the fruit, shows it to Adam and they eat it together.
And their eyes were opened. Sin entered into Paradise.
What is the very first thing they do? They hid.
First they hid their nakedness with fig leaves. Then they hid themselves from God.
That’s the thing with sin. It creates division. It separates us from God. It causes us to look upon ourselves and feel that we need to hide ourselves away because we aren’t pure and spotless anymore. It makes us turn away from God because He is pure and spotless. He is Holy.
Then what happened?
The blame game starts. They were caught in their sin. Once God called them out of hiding & began to repair the rift in the relationship they start passing the blame. Avoiding responsibility.
Genesis 3:11-13
11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Adam passes the blame to Eve, and she passes it on to the crafty serpent. At least the serpent didn’t pass it along too. But no matter how far they passed it along, all they did was make the number of people who would be punished larger.
Because sin must be dealt with, and the consequences must be faced.
The serpent was cursed to slither on its belly & eat dust all of its days. It would no longer find a sympathetic ear in the woman, and it was cursed to have its head crushed.
The woman was cursed with pain in childbirth – one could assume she was cursed with monthly reminders of that pain as well. She was also told that she would live in submission for the rest of her days – but not like it.
Adam was cursed with toil and hard labor. No longer would everything he put his hand to be easy, he now had to work hard for everything he got. He had to fight against weeds and thorns to get the food to feed his family until the day he died.
Oh yes, death was now a reality for them, but not just their death.
Verse 21 says “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.”
A sacrifice had to be made to atone for the sin. Something had to die so that they could go on with their lives.
They found themselves kicked out of paradise, now with knowledge of evil, and faced with lives of pain and hard labor.
Thankfully they still had God in their lives. And thankfully God also provided the ultimate sacrifice for us – the Lamb has been slain to take away our sin and bring us back into relationship with God. We are clothed in His righteousness so that when God looks upon us He see’s Jesus – a pure and spotless life lived for Him.
When sin separates us from God, we need to walk into the light, not hide from Him. He longs to bring us back into relationship with Him. If He didn’t, Jesus would never have been born a Man, would never have lived a human life, and would have been spared the humiliating torture of the cross.
But He loves us. He created us to be in relationship with Him. And He gave us free will so that we could choose to show Him our love and give Him our worship.
