Adam's Original Sin; Introduction
Review: Genesis 3:20, “And Adam called his wife's name
Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” Eve’s designation as the mother
of all living indicates the unity of the human race. This indicates that there
are no homo sapiens that are not descendants from Adam and Eve, and it
indicates that there is one human race. This is important because in
distinction from the angels there is a corporate unity in the human race. We
will see the significance of this as we go on into some of the doctrines that
need to be developed, i.e. the doctrine of the federal headship of Jesus Christ
and the idea that there is one human race and we are all related to one another
therefore because of the fact that there is one man whose sin affects all of us
there is one man, the God-Man, who can die for all of us. Because of this unity
of the human race God can provide perfect salvation. That wasn’t possible for
the angels. Each angel was created individually, so there is no corporate unity
among the angels, no procreation among the angels. So Eve is the mother of all
living. This is further supported by Acts 17:26 where Paul said, “And hath made
of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and
hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their
habitation.”
Another thing that flows out of
Genesis 3:21 is the principle that there is a resolution to the shame problem.
The reality was that Adam and Isha were both naked
and not ashamed. Is the shame related to one another or is the shame related to
the two of them in relationship to God? The end of chapter two points out that
they were naked and not ashamed. The nakedness was not an exposure to one
another. The shame was not related to other human beings, the shame has to do
with God. Because when we come to Genesis 3:7, “And the eyes of them both were
opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together,
and made themselves aprons.” The context indicates that the covering is
designed to cover up their nakedness in relationship to God, not in
relationship to each other. Because in verse 8 we read, “And they heard the
voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife
hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the
garden.” So they are trying to solve their problem through their own solution.
Verse 10, “And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid,
because I was naked; and I hid myself.” Their nakedness there is directly
related to their fear of God and their exposure of their relative righteousness
before the perfect righteousness of God. So this puts a new slant on things,
that this has to do with exposure of man’s inability, exposure of man’s
unrighteousness, and exposure of his rebellion.
So God is going to provide a
temporary solution to this problem in verse 21 where He makes garments for them
of skins. Although this does not tell us specifically that He gave them
instructions related to the sacrifice, that He gave them doctrine related to
the shedding of blood as it is developed throughout the Scripture, the
implication is nevertheless there because in order to make garments of skin
there has to be the death of the animal. This verse points out that God
provides a perfect solution whereas man’s solution was no solution. This is a
constant theme throughout the Scripture; that man’s
solution is no solution and the divine solution is the only solution, and that
has implications for everything from salvation to solving problems in life. So
this begins at the fall. All man’s problems began at the fall and all solutions
must begin with the divine solution of salvation, otherwise they are nothing
more than temporary fixes, just a patch, and it doesn’t work. So operation fig
leaves was nothing more than an inadequate attempt to cover up a problem, and
even though it had some temporary benefit it had no lasting benefit. A point
that we have to understand is that human viewpoint often comes up with all
kinds of workable solutions, which seem to alleviate the pressure for a while,
but in the long run there is no adequate solution. In fact, all human viewpoint
solutions end up creating more problems down the road than a divine viewpoint
solution.
Then in verse 22, “And the LORD God said,
Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he
put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for
ever…” Here we have a divine conversation again between God the Father, God the
Son and God the Holy Spirit. Yahweh Elohim is the speaker and it is
believed that this refers to the second person of the Trinity; He is the one
who reveals Himself. “The man has become” is a qal
perfect tense the verb hayah in Hebrew, and the perfect tense
(there is no present tense in the Hebrew, there is just the perfect tense and
the imperfect tense) can be simple past, and it can also be perfective action,
which is completed action. We have to look at the context, and the context
tells us that when God says that the man has become like one of us He is not
simply saying the man became like one of us, simple past, but He is emphasizing
the present and ongoing results of a completed action. That is perfective
action. The action isn’t still going on, it is finished, and He is emphasizing
the present results of a past action. When there is a perfective idea here it
is emphasizing an action that is over and done with, it is not still going on.
The present results are such that man is now in some sense like God, and that
means in a sense radically different from being in the image and likeness of
God. This is a degenerative state. He has become this way,
it represents a change, so that excludes anything related to the meaning of
image and likeness.
The first thing we have to ask is:
What does this phrase “knowing good and evil” mean?
Option one: it refers to human good and evil; option two: it refers to positive
righteousness and evil, and that is saying that man was aware of positive
righteousness before the fall and now he knows what sin is because he has had
an experience with sin. So once again we are back to a conclusion that the
knowing here is an experiential knowledge. But that is a problem. If this is experiential
knowledge of sin then we have a problem because God is the one speaking here
and He says the man has become “like us.” God does not have an experiential
knowledge of evil. He has an awareness of evil; He knows what evil is by His
own intuitive omniscience, but He does not have a personal experiential
knowledge of evil. So we have to ask in what sense man knows good and evil as God knows
good and evil. In what sense does man after the fall know good and evil in the
same way that God knows good and evil throughout all eternity?
There are three basic ways that
question can be answered. First of all, we have to understand that all of these
come out of the general meaning of the Hebrew word yada. Yada
has a lot of different meanings. It can mean to know through observation and
experimentation; it can mean to know experientially; it can mean to know
intimately; it can mean to know sexually. So let’s look at the options here.
Basically what we are saying is that the first option is to know something experientially.
We can eliminate that because God does not know evil experientially. The second
option is that God knows something intellectually or through observation. For
God that would be an eternal observation, omniscience, more of an academic
intellectual simple cognitive awareness of what something is. Well that may be
true but man’s knowledge of good and evil at this point is not a mere cognitive
act, man is not simply aware intellectually of what sin is. He has sinned; he
has an experiential knowledge of sin. So it can’t be restricted to a mere
academic, intellectual or cognitive knowledge. The comparison indicates that
the knowledge man now has is the same as the knowledge God has. So what this
does is it eliminates completely the idea that good and evil stand for human
good and sin, or even righteousness and sin. It has a different connotation
here. What we have is resolved, we think, by the fact that we have in this
statement a reconstruction where there is the preposition Lamedh
attached to the infinitive construct of the verb yada,
and in some case that indicates purpose but here it has more of a gerundive
idea of knowing. But the context indicates the idea of determining what good
and evil is, and this fits the context best. Because if we go back to the first
part of the chapter the serpent comes along and says they won’t die, “your eyes
shall be opened, and ye shall be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
The temptation is to be like God.
And God is the ultimate determiner of what righteousness and evil are. It is
God’s character that is the absolute measuring rod of all ethics, of morality,
of fight and wrong in the universe. Man wants to be “like us.” Man wants to be
the final authority in his life. He has rejected God’s authority: God doesn’t have
the authority to say that this is right or wrong. Eve began to walk into that
trap when the serpent asked the question: Has God really said? As soon as he
asks that question she starts to look at that tree and think: How do we know He
is right? How do we know that if we eat that it is going to be a harmful thing?
She put herself in a position of judging the veracity of God’s prohibition. By
yielding to the question, by even entertaining the question, Eve has put
herself in the position where she is acting like God and is questioning God’s
authority and His right to command and determine moral and ethical absolutes in
the universe. So when we look at this phrase, what it means to become like God
to know good and evil, it means to act as if you are God, being the final or
ultimate reference point for values, morals and meaning in life. Once man put himself in that position he is acting like a little god and
he is spiritually dead. He is divorced from God and he has a new problem,
separation from God and spiritual death. He is spiritually dead but still
physically alive. God has announced that he will eventually return to dust,
that physically he is in a position of deterioration and his body is subject to
corruption.
He is going to die, but apparently
there was one option available to man and that was the tree of life. Because of
what God said, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life,
and eat, and live for ever,” it would be possible for man in his deterioration
and depravity to be corrupt and spiritually dead and yet to eat from the tree
of life and go on living in a corrupt body that would be under condemnation and
continue to deteriorate and to shrivel. So God guards them from this horrible
fate and erects a guard at the gates of Eden, a cherub with a flaming sword who
prevents man from being able to come to the tree of life.
Genesis 3:23, “Therefore the LORD God sent him
forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”
The word for tilling here is the same word we have in the initial mandate to
Adam, the Hebrew word abad, which means to work, or to
cultivate. It can mean to serve or to worship, but here it is tied to
cultivation so it has the connotation of manual labor. And then the conclusion
in verse 24, “So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden
of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned
every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” Cherubs were always associated
with the holiness of God, and so we see that the area of Eden is still the
throne of God, the area of God’s presence on the earth, and so the cherubim is
stationed there in order to protect the holiness and integrity of God. The
implication of sword in Scripture is the power of life and death and governmental
power. We think this implies that throughout the pre-flood period in the
antediluvian dispensation that God’s presence is still on the earth and He is
executing judgment. There is no provision for delegation of judicial power to
man in that dispensation. The contention is that God is still mediating justice
through the angels in the antediluvian world.
Is Adam viewed in the rest of
Scripture as a historically existing individual? Or is he viewed as some sort
of allegorical type or picture? The Scriptures consistently portray Adam and
Eve and the story of the fall as a historical event, not as some allegory.
1)
In Luke 3:38
Adam is listed along with all of the other historical figures in the genealogy
of Christ. If Jesus doesn’t go all the way back to Adam then we can’t argue
that He is truly human. Adam must be a historically existing individual if he
is listed in the genealogy of Christ. The principle in Scripture is that if it
just proven in one point it is proven completely.
2)
In Romans 5:14
we are told that Adam is the source of spiritual death for the human race. This
is represented in contrast to what Jesus Christ has provided for us in salvation.
“Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not
sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the type of him
that was to come.” When the Scripture uses type [tupoj] it doesn’t mean he did not literally exist because the types all did
literally exist but they were used to foreshadow or picture something. If Adam
wasn’t a historical figure then the entire analogy between Adam and Christ and
statement “from Adam to Moses” are rendered meaningless. Therefore to
understand the fallen state of the race Adam must be a historically existing
individual.
3)
In 1
Corinthians 15:22 Paul refers to Adam in establishing the reality of the
resurrection. So the conclusion is that if Adam wasn’t a genuine historically
existing individual then there is no resurrection. The argument is that because
of Adam’s decision physical death entered the human race (v. 21). This isn’t
spiritual death; it is physical death because the subject is physical, bodily
resurrection. Then in v. 45 of the same chapter we read, “And so it is written,
The first man Adam was made a living soul [quote from
Genesis 2:7]; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” Paul again draws a
parallel and an analogy between the first Adam and the second Adam, and since
the last Adam is a historically existing individual, the first Adam must be as
well; otherwise the parallel breaks down.
4)
The importance
of marriage as a divine institution in then understanding of both marriage and
divorce is built on a historically existing Adam and Eve, Matthew 19:1-6. Verse
4, in Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees, said: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female.”
That is from Genesis 1:26, 28.
5)
In the New
Testament there are a couple of passages that deal with the role of men and
women in marriage and the role of men and women in the local church and the
worship setting. 1 Corinthians 11:8, 9; 1 Timothy 2:8-14. In 1 Corinthians 11
Paul bases his whole argument for role distinctions in the public worship
service of the church on the order of creation. Paul, like Jesus, quotes from
Genesis chapters one and two and does not see a contradiction between the two
accounts.
6)
Conclusion: If
the account in Genesis 1-3 is not historically accurate then there is no basis in the New Testament teaching for sin,
salvation, bodily resurrection from the dead, marriage, family, or the distinct
roles within marriage and the worship service in the New Testament church. That
shows why creation is important. You can’t come along and just allegorize or
mythologize the first eleven chapters of Genesis as if they are just some sort of morality play because everything that the New
Testament teaches is predicated upon the historical accuracy and veracity of
that account. If you do away with Genesis 1-11 you may as well do away with the
cross, with Jesus, the deity of Jesus, the authority of Scripture. You
basically destroy Christianity. That is why Genesis 1-3 is such a battleground,
because the devil knows that if you destroy that you cut out the foundation for
the rest of the Bible.
1)
The first point
has to do with Adam’s loss of dominion. This is described in theology as
original sin because it was the first sin, it was the
sin that mattered. No one can commit any sin that has a billionth of the
consequences of Adam’s sin. And all Adam did was eat a piece of fruit. Man is
placed—Genesis 1:26-28—as God’s representative over creation. But
when he sinned he abdicated his position to Satan, so that Satan became the
ruler of the planet. For example, in Luke 4:6: “And the devil said unto him,
All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered
unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.” Jesus doesn’t dispute it. Furthermore,
a couple of the titles that are ascribed to Satan indicate his authority over
the planet: 2 Corinthians 4:4, he is called the god of this age; Ephesians 2:2,
he is called the prince of the power of the air. Furthermore, he is the king of
the kingdom of darkness into which we are all born. This again indicates his
position of authority. In Acts 26:18 there is a prayer, with reference to
Paul’s role as a Gentile missionary: “To open their eyes, and to turn them from
darkness to light, and from the dominion of Satan unto God.” The word for
“dominion” there is the same concept that we have in Genesis 1:26-28. We are
born in the dominion of Satan, and under his authority, his power. This is the
same ideas presented in Colossians 1:13, “Who hath delivered us from the domain
of darkness, and hath transferred us into the kingdom of his dear Son.” So
there is the contrast between the kingdom or domain of darkness, the dominion
of darkness, to the kingdom of His beloved Son. Even though we are still living
in Satan’s domain we now have a different authority over us and that is the
Lord Jesus Christ.
2)
Man is born in
a state of spiritual death. Adam was created in a state where he was
spiritually alive but all of his descendants are born in a state of spiritual death.
We see this is Ephesians 2:1-3, “And you hath he quickened, even though you
were dead in trespasses and sins: wherein in time past ye walked according to
the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the
spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience:
among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our
flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature
the children of wrath, even as others.”
3)
Man is born
spiritually blind. 2 Corinthians 4:3, 4, “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid
to them that are lost: in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of
them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is
the image of God, should shine unto them.” Man is blinded by
the message and the ruler of the cosmic system. 1 John 5:19, “And we
know that we are of God, and the whole world [cosmic system] lies in the power
of the evil one.”
4)
Man is
condemned because of his relationship to Adam, not because of personal sins.
That is one of the most difficult things for a lot of people to understand. You
sin because you have a sin nature; you sin because you are a sinner. You are
not a sinner because you sin; you were condemned because of your possession of
the sin nature and the imputation of Adam’s original sin, not because of
anything that you did. This goes back to an ancient heresy called Pelagianism, which plagued the early church. Pelagius
thought and taught that every person was born in the same state that Adam was
created in; therefore we are all neutral, and we are condemned because of the
decisions we make. And that has been clearly and correctly recognized as heresy
since the fifth century AD. The reference point is Romans 5:12: “Wherefore, as
by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed
upon all men, for that all have sinned.”