Adam, Eve and Mankind Outside Eden

When Adam succumbed to temptation, I am sure he had no idea that the full responsibility for both the presence and consequences of sin in the world, would crash down upon mankind like the proverbial “ton of bricks.” And, man cannot transfer his guilt to Satan. Man sinned and man must die. God said it, and so it is. This is the reality of mankind outside Eden.

We would be hard pressed to find any passage in the Bible that has had such immense influence upon Christian thought as the third chapter of Genesis. In fact, we learn in Romans that Apostle Paul made it a foundation block upon which he developed his theology:

“sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin” (5:12);
“…one trespass was condemnation for all men” (5:18);
“through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners” (5:19).

What happened in Adam and to Adam was for Paul the awful fact by which all human destinies was originally determined.

God gave Adam a law, a direct command in the form of a covenant. We know this from Hosea 6:7 which reads, “Like Adam, they have broken the covenant--they were unfaithful to me there.” In this covenant, Adam, by Divine appointment, became representative of the entire human race.

Thus, when we talk about original sin , we are not talking about the first human sin, which was committed by Eve. Rather, original sin refers to the first sin of Adam and only the first; not to his subsequent sins. His first sin, that one moment of failure, was the source of all his later sins and the sins of mankind. And it was in the power of that one sin by which death became a reality for Adam and Eve and all human beings.

And, that first Adam-sin resulted in other terrible consequences. By this one initial act of disobedience, Adam broke relationship with his Creator, with his wife, with the natural environment and with himself. Man willed to go it alone and therefore alienated himself from all reality. In that instant, man’s cerebral, emotional, biological, and spiritual essence became tainted, defective and disjointed. Adam and Eve hid themselves from each other with pieces of leaves, they tried to hide from God, Adam blames God and Eve, Eve blames the serpent, and the self is aloof from itself. In this one historical event, and contrary to what psychology would have us believe, man lost self-realization and truly became his own worst enemy. The self is totally corrupt, for humans can do nothing worse or more destructive to God, his fellow man, his world or to himself, than sin.

Adam’s sin and all sin reflect the severance of relationship to all reality and we ourselves cannot fix it. This is clearly disclosed in the Cross of Christ where man kills Him in whom all reality, divine and created, is centered. As David said, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.” Every sin against our neighbor, against our natural environment, against ourselves, is also a sin against God. This is the truth of the Genesis story and this is man’s pitiful plight outside Eden.

Yet, the whole idea of Adam’s sin and the condemnation which is said to have fallen on the whole human race through him is not an acceptable doctrine to all Christian believers. Some Christian thinkers are of the mind that the Eden story is an exaggeration, an ancient myth being treated as actual history. These modern day think-tanks insist that the entire story of the fall is an illusion; and worse than that, they claim it is an illusion which has done great irreparable damage to human spirits. Thus, in their world view, generations have had to live among false shadows of fear and guilt and condemnation. Consequently, they vociferously demand we get rid of the sin phobia which has grown out of a fable that never was a fact, and let the spirit of man go free!

We are aware that this representation of the “fall” enjoyed widespread agreement and acceptance in the nineteenth century that continued well into the twentieth. The thought of man as fallen had become for many believers nothing more than a discredited superstition. The intelligent and informed was to take off the old garment of self-depreciation. Man was not fallen; he had only just begun to rise.

Later twentieth century saw Christianity shifting toward humanism. God is no longer a sovereign power before whose holiness men stand under judgment. God is the goodness living in man himself. Set men free from the belief of the old “fall” falsehood and their inherent virtues would be enough to bring in the millennium.

Humanism virtually classifies man’s “guilt” as his greatest enemy. Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, Canadian psychiatrist, presented in a paper at a United States conference on mental health entitled “The Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress”:

We have been very slow to rediscover this truth and to recognize the unnecessary and artificially imposed inferiority, guilt and fear, commonly known as sin.... which produces so much of the social maladjustment and unhappiness in the world. For many generations we have bowed our necks to the yoke of the conviction of sin. We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests....

Misguided by authoritarian dogma, bound by exclusive faith, stunted by inculcated loyalty, torn by frantic heresy...and loaded down by the weight of guilt and fear engendered by its own original promises, the unfortunate human race, deprived ... of its reasoning power and its natural capacity to enjoy the satisfaction of its natural urges, struggles along under its ghastly self-imposed burden. The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in.

So the vehement claim is that intelligent people must run from the narrow definitions of “good” and “evil” and above all, to stop obsessing with the idea of sin.

There are many others who, for different reasons, join them in repudiating the story of “the fall” of Adam, and the fall of the whole human race in him. They disclaim it not only because they consider it an unsubstantial myth, but also because they believe that traditional theology, upon which it was built is full of error and distortion. Many sincere men and women today will say that the whole story of the fall of Adam leads to such twisted conceptions that it should be eliminated altogether once for all.

But if, like me, you follow theological trends, you will have noticed that the “fall” pendulum is again swinging. There is an unmistakable emergence of another and more profound perception which turns us right back to the ancient story with the realization that there is a meaning in it which must never, ever be lost. The truth of the wonderful old drama of Paradise goes deeper that the fact that we are sinful because of Adam’s sin legacy. The truth dramatized in the Garden of Eden is that human nature, created to move towards God, has asserted its own will to go its own way, and this rebellious way must have an evil end.

This evil end is not only for the individual who has sinned but in the solidarity of human nature which Paul elucidates. Regardless of what anyone says, the truth of the matter is that there are laws as old as creation which we are meant to obey; and as sure as there is life and death, if we disobey them we shall be in serious trouble. No circumstances outside us can outweigh that eternal fact.

The disobedience of Eve and Adam is the symbol of a fatal truth. We human beings are continually disobeying and rejecting the law of Life; only when our wills are kept in accord with the higher will of God can life be blessed. The instant we yield to the rebellious self importance which establishes our own ungoverned desires; that very instant, life breaks up into tiny little egocentric fragments doomed to irrational discord and collision. This reality is put brilliantly by David R. Davies:

“Now in history we have to face the fact that the human race has willed itself out of the subordinate relation to God, with the fatal result that every individual becomes his own center…Since we are all alike in wanting to be our own center, we are irrevocably divided from one another. United in sin, we become disunited in everything else. This is the brilliant mess in which humanity finds itself, especially the progressive civilized humanity of today.”

How the worldly and self-sufficient mind can be redeemed outside Eden is not answered in the story of the fall. But the answer begins in the Old Testament record of the covenant which God made with the saving faith of Abraham and reaches forward through the long hope of patriarchs and prophets to the Second Adam.

For man outside Eden, there can be another and better spirit, a spirit which recognizes the inexorable deficiencies which because of its sins must suffer and yet has the will not to let it have the last word. The old Eden story does not attempt to tell what, if anything Adam made up his mind to do after his failure, but the whole Bible makes it plain neither sin nor death has the last word about the sinner, “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.” 1 Corinthians 15:21. Through God’s Man, the Second Adam, sin in dealt with and forgiven, death ends in resurrection power; sinners become saints and “him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil” is destroyed.

We rejoice in the knowledge that the Bible, which begins with Genesis goes on to Revelation, reveals God’s promise to all believers struggling outside Eden:

“The Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God… And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (Revelation 21:2, 4).

Come, Lord Jesus, Come! Amen.

Reference
D. R. Davies, Down Peacock's Feathers