The moment Eve saw that the tree was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise, she purposed in her heart to eat. Using the very freedom God had given her—the freedom that makes love possible—she chose the fruit instead of the word of her Maker. And so, just as it had been with Lucifer, iniquity was found in her. Adam followed; and together they broke the one command laid upon them. In that act they set in motion a second great chaos—one that, like the first, will run its course until at last God makes a new heaven and a new earth.
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. 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. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? (Genesis 3:7–11).
The Covering Removed
The moment they ate, “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” Before this, they had been naked and unashamed (Genesis 2:25); now, suddenly, nakedness is shame. What had changed? A long line of Christian interpreters has understood that, before the Fall, our first parents were clothed in the glory of God—a covering of light and innocence—so that they felt no shame. When they sinned, that glory departed, and they saw themselves exposed. The shame they felt was the awareness of a glory now lost.128
With the covering gone, a whole train of strangers entered the human story that had never been there before: guilt, shame, fear, sickness, and at the last, death. “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Adam and Eve did not drop dead that day in body, but in that very hour they died spiritually—cut off from the life of God—and the seed of bodily death was sown in them and in all their children. Their pitiful fig leaves were the first of all human attempts to cover our own shame by our own effort; and like every such attempt since, they were not enough. It would be God Himself who clothed them, with the skins of a slain animal (Genesis 3:21)—the first death in Eden, and the first faint shadow of the truth that without the shedding of blood there is no covering for sin.
A Strange Voice in the Garden
Notice something easy to miss. When God came walking in the garden, as He had so often come before, Adam and Eve hid—and when God asked why, Adam answered, “I was afraid, because I was naked.” To which God put a piercing question: “Who told thee that thou wast naked?”
Who, indeed? Not God. By choosing the word of the serpent over the word of God, Adam and Eve had opened a door to a stranger—and now, for the first time, they could hear and heed a voice that was not their Maker’s. Where once they knew only the sound of the LORD coming in the cool of the day to share fellowship, now a new and alien voice was speaking in the garden, and they were listening to it and believing it. The first thing this strange voice told them was a verdict of shame: “You are naked.” They received it as truth, and hid from the God who loved them. This is what sin does: it tunes the ear to the wrong voice. Where they had once heard God and run to Him, now they heard another and ran from Him.130
Dominion Lost, and Nature in Trouble
There was more at stake here than one couple’s guilt. Man had been crowned as God’s steward over the earth, given dominion over every living thing (Genesis 1:26–28). But in surrendering to the tempter—in choosing the creature’s voice over the Creator’s—man handed over the very dominion he had been entrusted with. The usurper seized it; and so Scripture can speak of Satan, astonishingly, as “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4) and “the prince of this world” (John 12:31). The steward had abdicated, and a thief had taken the keys.132
And with man’s fall, the whole creation he had been set over fell with him. God pronounced the curse—upon the serpent, upon the woman, and upon the man—and “cursed” the ground for man’s sake, so that it would bring forth thorns and thistles, and man would eat bread in the sweat of his face until he returned to the dust (Genesis 3:14–19). The perfect world tilted into disorder. The ground that had yielded freely now resisted. Creation, which had been “very good,” was wrenched out of joint: living things now died, predator turned on prey, the fruitful land could harden into desert. From a perfect earth to a groaning one—this was the wreckage of that single act of disobedience.133
The apostle Paul saw it clearly, and gave it words that anchor this whole part of our book: “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed… We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Romans 8:19, 22). Creation was “subjected to futility,” not by its own will, but through the sin of the one appointed to rule it—and ever since it has groaned, like a woman in labor, longing for the day of its release. The chaos that Lucifer began in heaven, man now extended to the earth; and the earth has been in travail ever since.134
A Light in the Curse
Yet here, in the very heart of the curse, God spoke a word of hope so bright that the church has called it the first gospel. Turning to the serpent, God said: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). Even as judgment fell, God promised a Deliverer—the seed of the woman—who would one day crush the serpent’s head. Satan would bruise His heel (cause Him to suffer), but the Deliverer would deal the serpent a fatal blow. This is the first faint dawn of the long story of redemption that fills the rest of Scripture, and finds its noon at the cross and empty tomb of Jesus Christ. The dominion man lost, the last Adam would win back; the head of the old serpent would be crushed beneath His heel.136
So the chaos is real, and the groaning is real—but it is not the end of the story. The whole creation waits, on tiptoe, for the revealing of the children of God, and for the restoration of all things. That is the hope toward which this entire book is moving.
What Are You Feeding Your Soul?
There is a sober lesson here for our own lives. When we keep company with those who are set against God—sitting comfortably among them, listening to and enjoying words and ways that despise Him—it will not be long before we begin to partake of those words, and they become the food of our souls. (This is altogether different from going among such people to love them and share the good news with them, as our Lord did; the danger is in sitting down to feast on what they serve.) Little by little, the voice we attend to is no longer God’s but theirs, until we find ourselves drawn into their activities and made deaf to the One who loves us. As the garden showed us, the soul becomes like the voice it chooses to hear.
So be watchful over what you see and hear, for it is the food of your soul. What are you feeding your heart with? Blessed are you when you feed it with the Word of God, for the more the Word fills the heart, the more clearly you will hear His voice, and the farther you will walk from sin. This is what David found: “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Psalm 119:11). And it is the Word that sets us apart for God: “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth” (John 17:17).138
Adam and Eve listened to a stranger and lost a garden. Let us listen to our God and, hearing His voice above every other, walk in fellowship with Him—until the day the whole creation is set free, and the children of God are revealed.
Notes
- 128. On the loss of innocence and the entrance of shame at the Fall (Gen. 2:25; 3:7), and the Hebrew wordplay between the naked (“arom) pair and the crafty (arum) serpent of 3:1, see Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–17, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 181, 190–191. A long line of interpreters (e.g., Ephrem, Chrysostom) understood Adam and Eve to have been clothed in glory before the Fall, so that their shame was the awareness of glory now lost. ↩
- 130. Whereas Adam once welcomed the sound of the LORD’s coming (see Chapter 8), now he hides in fear (Gen. 3:8–10). The greatest immediate consequence of sin was the rupture of the open fellowship man had enjoyed with God. See the discussion in Hamilton, Genesis 1–17, 192–193. ↩
- 132. Scripture speaks of Satan as “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4) and “the prince of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; cf. 1 John 5:19), and of the dominion man received at creation (Gen. 1:26–28). Many interpreters understand that in yielding to the tempter, man surrendered the stewardship he had been given, so that the usurper gained a hold he did not rightfully own—a hold decisively broken at the cross (Col. 2:15; Heb. 2:14–15). ↩
- 133. On the curse upon the ground (Gen. 3:17–19)—thorns, thistles, toil, and ultimately death—as the disordering of the created world that follows human sin, and on Paul’s reading of this in Romans 8:19–22, see Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 511–521. Creation was “subjected to futility” not of its own will but through the sin of the man appointed to rule it. ↩
- 134. Romans 8:19–22. Paul personifies creation as straining forward on tiptoe (apokaradokia, “eager expectation”) and groaning in labor, awaiting “the revealing of the sons of God,” when it too will be set free from its bondage to decay. See Moo, Romans, 513–517. ↩
- 136. Genesis 3:15 has been called the protevangelium—the “first gospel”—since the earliest Christian interpreters (Irenaeus, Justin Martyr). In the midst of the curse, God promises that the seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head, though His own heel be bruised. Derek Kidner calls it “the first glimmer of the gospel.” See Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1967), 70–71; and on its unfolding across the canon, Hamilton, Genesis 1–17, 197–200. Some interpreters read “seed” collectively; the line of evangelical interpretation followed here hears in it, ultimately, the single Seed—Christ (cf. Gal. 3:16; Rom. 16:20). ↩
- 138. Psalm 119:11 (“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee”) and John 17:17 (“Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth”) together teach that the Word both guards from sin and sets apart for God. Note: the citation in this chapter follows the verse as commonly numbered, Psalm 119:11. ↩