The Fallout of the Fall

The Shift from Temptation to the Fallout of the Fall

Well, there are some slight changes we have this morning as we consider Genesis 3 together. I think what had originally been announced as three parts is now stretching into four. Sort of the nature of the beast when we're looking at these massive foundational chapters at the beginning of the beginning of the Bible.

And so as we said last week, it's sort of like the Himalayan range. And almost any passage from Genesis 1 through 3 is this great mountaintop, this great peak. And perhaps Genesis 3 .15 is Everest itself as far as Genesis is concerned.

So last week we considered part 1 verses 1 through 6 and we talked about temptation and the fall. And this morning with part 2, originally we're going to be looking at verses 7 through 13.

I'll read 7 through 13.

But as I continue to work on things, it seems more and more disjointed. And I realized toward the end the marital dysfunction of the fall would be a shoo-in. And I'm assuming that not every marriage in this room is running on all cylinders.

And has completely alleviated the curse of the fall. So if that's not you, it's at least me. Which means we're going to be looking at that in more detail next week. And then we'll close.

So the nice thing is this is all of a rhythm. There is a pattern here.

We're looking at the consequences of the fall. And that begins here with verses 7 through 9. But it continues. It continues not only in Adam and Eve's relationship to God, which will be the focus today.

But also in their relationship to each other, which we'll look at next week. And then the ramifications begin to work through creation itself. Into human society. Into their offspring. Into the woodwork of creation itself.

The fabric of creation which, as Paul says in Romans 8, is groaning. Groaning for this deliverance.

So the fallout of the fall.

That's our focus here this morning.

The fallout of the fall.

And I'll read beginning at verse 6.

Original Sin and the Universal Plight of Humanity

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food.

That it was pleasant to the eyes. And a tree desirable to make one wise.

She took of its fruit and she ate.

She also gave to her husband with her and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened. And they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And Adam and his wife hid themselves in the presence of the Lord God. Along the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him,.

Where are you?

So he said, I heard your voice in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?

Then the man said, the woman who you gave to be with me. She gave me of the tree and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you've done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me. And I ate.

We need to keep the significance of last week in view.

Verse 6 is a very important shift in the passage.

Theologically, verse 6 marks the shift from the original righteousness that Adam and Eve had to original sin. They go from an original righteousness which perfectly reflected the perfections of God to now original sin which stains and corrupts all of their offspring, all that are born into Adam.

As we said last week, prompted by our brother during interaction and summoning the spirit of R .C. Sproul, we're not sinners because we sin. We sin because we're sinners. In one little phrase, we saw original sin come about.

She gave to him and he ate. In that phrase is contained the fall of the entire human race, the misery of the entire cosmos, the plunging into the darkness of spirituality and physical death. Drawing back to Romans 5 in verse 12, Paul says, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin and death spread to all men because all sin.

So we see it's in Adam that this responsibility and curse of the fall ultimately lies. So as we're looking at this together this morning, we have to be reminded that the fall cannot be minimized. It's non-negotiable.

You cannot make sense of Christianity, much less the gospel, if you minimize the fall. The fall is the starting point for the gospel. The fall is the starting point for the plot of the scriptures, the plot of human history, the plot of creation itself.

The fall presents to us the universal plight of mankind, the universal curse, the condition of which we find ourselves even this morning, and we cannot minimize this. C .H. Spurgeon in his day, and you remember toward the end of his life, he faced what was called the downgrade controversy within his own denomination as sort of Victorian morality was making its way into the politeness of the pulpit, but then also the enlightenment confidence in reason.

It was beginning to downgrade doctrine, rationalize doctrine, atomize doctrine. And Spurgeon said, few preachers of religion thoroughly believe the doctrine of the fall or else they think that when Adam fell down, he broke his little finger instead of his neck and ruined his whole race.

That's the difference.

We need to thoroughly believe the doctrine of the fall. We need to understand its implications. Over the past few centuries, there's been a steady decline in this doctrine. And when you minimize the doctrine of the fall, you minimize what comes with it, what it grounds theologically, sin, God's judgment, the finality of God's judgment in an everlasting punishment in hell.

All of this becomes watered down, compromised, minimized when you start to shift away or downplay the fall. Without these vital realities, Christianity becomes moralism. The Old Testament would be read as a moralistic book.

Be like so-and-so, don't be like so-and-so. That's how the Old Testament's often preached because the beginning of the Old Testament is downplayed, it's forgotten. The fall, the story of redemption that's now going to work through the history of Israel until the culmination of the true Israel, Christ himself.

Christianity simply becomes a moralism without the fall, an ethical way to live. Preaching or evangelizing becomes life coaching. If we minimize the fall, if this is not our problem, our plight, our condition, our curse, then the most I can do in a sermon is life coach.

Give you good advice to make you more successful and have your best life now. Or if I can risk stepping on some toes, new day, new you.

And of course, the church becomes just a social club.

We become the rotary, the elves.

We get together because it's good to get together.

We're made for community. We like good soup. We like to be around each other. We become that instead of a spiritual body of a risen savior.

Who's overcome the very curse of the fall.

When you get the starting point wrong, you'll never get the end right. The problem wrong, you'll never get the solution. When you take away the fall and its universal implications upon humanity, you take with it the cross, the resurrection, and the gospel.

So what we're dealing with here is foundational.

Genesis 3 is the basis for all that follows.

It is the single, indispensable explanation for the what, why, and how of the gospel. Now as we consider these verses, we also have to be reminded that Adam and Eve had an experience and a relationship with God that we just simply cannot imagine.

I cannot recover it for you, nor can I recover it myself. It is perhaps impossible for us to imagine. It would have been impossible for Cain and Abel and Seth to imagine just what Adam and Eve had, just what they lost.

I can imagine Adam and Eve spent many centuries in their lives with tears streaming down their cheeks, trying to explain what it was like to dwell with God in the perfection of Eden as pure image bearers.

Words could not convey. They could not explain what true white was, now that there was no longer true white. There was only stains, only corruption, only defilement. We, ever since Genesis 3 verse 6, have always related to God in one way or another.

Through the results of the fall.

There is no going back. The fall was an event in human history, a concrete event in human history, and human beings from thence to eternity will never relate to God apart from it. Whether it's through redemption or judgment, we all relate to God through the effects of the fall.

When He brings redemption into our lives, what does that redemption come with? It comes with this yearning of the not yet. It comes with this Roman 7 combat.

That we feel this spirit at war with the flesh,.

And this is all coming out of the effects of the fall.

It leads us to the cry that Paul cries,.

Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Adam and Eve, up through Genesis 3 verse 5, knew nothing of that. They did not have a body of death. They had a body of perfection, a body of life, bodies of harmony, bodies of glory.

Adam and Eve once dwelt perfectly with God.

As their Creator.

And when they fell and plunged humanity into this fallen state as individuals, they retained that memory. Surely sin distorted it, but there was some nostalgia.

Of the experience of the holy.

That, I think, is the greatest tragedy of all. Some of us are haunted by certain memories. Can you imagine a life lived with that fateful day in Genesis 3 verse 6?

The haunting that they had thrown away.

The perfections of dwelling with God, and now had been barred from His presence in Edom. The horror of what they had lost. The horror of seeing their decision now played out ad nauseum in their offspring.

It is impossible for us, post-fall,.

To fully appreciate the glory that was lost,.

Or to fully comprehend the horrible rush of filth.

That took its place.

Mind became darkened. Affections became rogue. And this builds, and it builds, and it builds, and we come to Genesis 6 verse 5,.

And we read,.

"...the imaginations and thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually.".

The effect of the fall.

Prior to this point, the imaginations and thoughts of man's heart was only purity, and godliness, and righteousness, and holiness. And within three chapters, the continuous train of thoughts of humanity.

Is only evil.

And God despairs that He makes man.

This is all the fallout of the fall. And we're only going to look at two aspects of it this morning.

As we really look at the way the fall impacted God's relationship to man. This happened a long time ago, and yet it's the reality that's lived out before us and in us day by day.

This very reality.

This fallen condition. Time has not abated it. Cultures. Unfolding events in history. All the very differences of humanity in the world have not ebbed away at all from this cursed condition. These dynamics are as true today as they were the very moment Adam and Eve fell,.

As we'll see. So what's the fallout of the fall? What's the first fallout?

The first thing we'll consider. The first thing we begin with in verse 7 is shame. Shame.

And an attempt to cover.

Shame, Nakedness, and Self-Covering

Shame and an attempt at self-covering. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. Genesis 2 .25 is important here because it tells us that before the fall they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.

So in the perfection of Eden, in this very, I think, figurative language, though it was physically real, they were truly naked. But there's a theological, spiritual significance to that. And it becomes a very important metaphor as we continue on in Scripture.

So it's deeply theological in what it's saying here. They were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed. At first glance, this seems to be a picture of marital intimacy.

Right?

And you could make a good case for that. It's in the context of marriage. The famous quote about marriage in 2 .24 happens right before it.

But this is a more profound statement.

About Adam and Eve's integrity.

Before God and before one another. There was no need to hide anything. There was no self-consciousness in a distorted kind of way. They had complete integrity before God and before one another. And that utter transparency, that utter invulnerability.

Is described for us by this word,.

Naked.

They lived in the boldness of their integrity.

Utterly open. With no trace of embarrassment.

Nothing uncertain about their stature or their standing or their relationship.

A perfectly self-aware.

And yet other-oriented esteem.

With nothing to hide.

Nothing to become self-conscious of.

Nothing but the bliss of God's perfections reflected perfectly in them, in their flesh, in the midst of paradise. That's what it meant for them to be naked without shame. Now if we can draw some lines toward the Gospel, there's a sense in which their original righteousness.

Was their clothing.

They were naked and that was a free and transparent and a state of integrity that came out of having a perfect righteousness.

Because they were perfectly righteous,.

They were covered, if you could think of it that way. They were covered in holiness. Their very own holiness.

It was innate to them.

Natural to them. And therefore they could dwell with God.

As they were.

They didn't need any barrier.

Between them and God.

Any form of covering.

They were their own covering.

They were holy.

They were righteous.

In their perfect flesh.

They were unashamed and free. But notice what takes place to Adam and Eve immediately after the fall. The eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked.

They became self-aware,.

Self-conscious, embarrassed.

They became ashamed.

Satan had promised knowledge and their eyes were opened.

The knowledge that they received,.

They were meant to receive,.

But not in this way.

They did not come to know good and evil the way that God intended for them to know, as we said in weeks past, by trusting God's Word, by resisting evil and therefore learning about the goodness of God and the evil that He calls us away from.

That's how God meant them over time to know good and evil. Instead, they took this seeming shortcut through listening to the serpent. And they actually came to know good and evil by losing the good and becoming evil.

They became defiled. They robbed their own innocence.

They corrupted, therefore,.

Their ability to know God and to comprehend God's Word or God's purposes or God's ways. And this is what sin always does.

It spoils our ability.

Not only to appreciate life, but to view life rightly in God's world. It spoils our sensitivity not only to beauty and to joy,.

But to what is upright,.

What is demanded of us as creatures made by a holy God. It brings hardness, bitterness,.

Aversion into our souls.

Before God and fellow man. And all of this is the fruit of this action, the guilt of which makes them ashamed.

They had never felt this way before. They had never felt this way before.

This was not an emotion that humanity had felt up to this point.

Shame.

Guilt.

I think one of the best scenes in Shakespeare's Macbeth is when, of course, Macbeth is going back and forth. He's not quite sure if he's killed the king. And he comes back and he's vexed.

And Lady Macbeth,.

He seems to be this iron woman. She sort of castigates Macbeth.

And she takes the knives.

And she goes off stage and then comes back. And she begins to have a mental collapse. And she's constantly washing her hands because her hands are just as they are,.

Perfectly fine,.

But she has this sense.

That they're covered in blood constantly.

So she's constantly scrubbing at them, constantly scrubbing at them. Why can't I get this blood out? And it's this depiction of the guilt,.

The guilt that's there.

And it doesn't matter how much you scrub,.

It's there.

This is the guilt that Adam and Eve felt.

There's this stain,.

There's this offense, there's this defilement and there's nothing we can do about it.

It's there.

There's no way I can cover it. There's this shame,.

There's this misery and this fear.

That comes out of this guilt. And look at what it leads them to do. They have to cover it somehow.

They attempt to sew together these fig leaves.

It's very pitiful.

There's this moral breach.

In the order of God's creation. And there they are intricately sewing leaves together as though this somehow is going to remedy that.

But you get this idea.

They need a barrier now. They need a covering. They need a hiding place. There's no integrity now. There's no openness now. They're utterly vulnerable now. They're liable now. They're guilty. Horatius Bonner, the great Scotsman, we sing 403 all the time, don't we?

He wrote that. Unfallen man needed no covering and he asked for none. But fallen man, under that bitter consciousness of the condition to which sin had reduced him, unfit for God or angels or even man to look upon, cries out for a covering.

A covering that will hide his shame even from the eye of God. That's what they're trying to do. There must be some way I can alleviate.

This shame and this guilt.

And the things that I've done.

There must be some form of scrubbing that I can do to make myself presentable once again to God. I need a barrier. I need a refuge. I need something to hide behind.

I need to cover myself. And that's what they try to do. How pitiful their little garment. Little garment of leaves. You know what happens when you pluck a leaf. If you're on vacation in the summertime, just invite me to water your plants and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

They dry, they wither, they crumble. Doesn't take long, does it? Elsie likes to pluck flowers, dandelions. And I have a little box in my office and she puts these dandelions in my box,.

Which is very sweet.

But of course, within days, they just wither. They wither and fall apart and they curl up. And that little garment, how long is that going to last? How long is that going to be a suitable covering before it dries up and curls in and begins to fall apart?

That's how every attempt at self-covering goes. Maybe this will give me a place to hide for a week or a month or a season. Maybe this is sufficient for my sins. Maybe this is how I can have peace in my conscience.

Maybe this is what I'm convinced will be an effective barrier between the knowledge of God that haunts me and that I can hide from that.

I can put that away with this covering.

And it always crumbles, doesn't it?

It always crumbles.

You're on to the next covering. When you're in this state, as it were, you're constantly sewing together.

You have a little sweatshop.

Spiritually speaking, you're constantly working out.

These little leaf garments.

Because you must have a barrier.

Between the all-seeing, all-knowing,.

Ever-present God and your sin. Men and women get very creative about the ways that they hide from God, the coverings that they devise. There can be very religious coverings, make no mistake. The leaves that you sew together might be heaps of good old Christian books and loyalty to the church and many zealous efforts in the name of Christ.

And that can become, as Jesus taught us from the parable of the fig tree, not even the parable,.

The prophetic act of the fig tree.

A fig tree that looked like it ought to have fruit and He found none on it and He cursed it and said, may you never bear fruit again. That foliage of hypocrisy is something that many people hide behind.

But for the Christian, the safest refuge is under the cross, in the blood, in the refuge of the assembly of the saved ones. But you know, frankly, for some people who have never closed with Christ,.

The safest place that they can be.

Is in a church too. It's a pretty effective hiding place for them. They put their conscience at rest. I'm doing more than most. My life is given over to sin and there's things I won't repent of and there's things I won't confess.

But hey, I'm going to church. I'm in the right place. It's just a matter of time before I do finally surrender over to Christ and come clean and close with Him. What is that but just the constant sowing of fig leaves?

Sometimes the best hiding place.

Is the church.

Whatever it is that you're hiding behind, whatever leafy garment you're hoping will cover you now, whether it's being good compared to other people that you know and can name, how that will curl up and wither in a moment.

Whether it's great heaps of religious deeds.

And religious fervor, whether it's some vain resolution that I'm going to cover my sins, I'm going to make my own barrier because I'm going to do this. I'm going to turn things around. I'm going to do this.

By next year, I'm going to get this in order. I'm going to be able to do it. And you'll see that those leaves will wither. You'll see they cannot cleanse.

They cannot hide.

They cannot purge.

They cannot deal with man's fundamental problem.

Some people think that it's just time. If you can give enough time to your sin, that somehow is a remedy. I was reading this the other day from Joel Beacon and I thought it was very insightful. Sometimes we assume that time cancels sin.

Some people joke about the sins of their youth and yet those sins have never been washed in the blood of Christ. And God is not a creature of time. He remembers all of our sins as though they were committed today.

Time is no remedy. You might have forgotten about sin,.

But that doesn't cancel it out.

There's only one way to cancel out sin.

And it's not time.

There's only one way to cover the guilt and the shame of our sins. There's only one mediator that God has provided between God and man. I remember when we were at the Cape a few weeks ago, we ended up watching a sermon by Jeff Thomas.

And he was talking about this desire to be purged of sin. And he said that he was at his home and there was a knock on the door and he went and there was this young man. And he was clearly very disturbed and very broken.

And he said,.

I'm wondering if you could baptize me.

I need to be baptized.

He had a very wrong understanding of baptism, but he came to him. And so Jeff invited him in and had him sit down and said, Why do you need to be baptized? What's your understanding of baptism?

He says,.

Well, you see, for weekends I've been going up and I've had this illicit relationship that no one knows about and I've gotten this girl pregnant.

And she just told me she had an abortion.

I need you to baptize me. I need to be washed.

So Jeff was able to talk about the gospel that it's not the physical act of going into the water that makes you clean. It's being washed in the blood and how that's represented in baptism. You see, this innate desire.

I need a barrier. I need a covering. I need something to purge my guilt and my shame.

And men and women,.

They can do well to distract themselves with the sowing, but it always crumbles down.

If not in this life,.

Then in the life to come on that day, it comes crumbling down. And so David in Romans 4, 6,.

As Paul says,.

David describes the blessedness of the one to whom God imputes righteousness.

Apart from works,.

Apart from sowing fig leaves,.

Apart from self-covering. Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven,.

Whose sins are covered. So that's the first fallout from the fall.

It's shame.

It's nakedness before God and the terror of trying to create a barrier, a hiding place.

Hiding from the God Who Seeks

And then secondly,.

The next fallout we see between God and man is this hiding. Hiding from the God who seeks.

Verse 8,.

They heard the sound 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 among the trees of the garden. Again, the relationship Adam and Eve had to their Maker was perfect.

They delighted in Him.

And He delighted in them.

But where they had once walked in freedom, now they were cowering in fear. Now the stains cannot be hidden. Now their mind, instead of dwelling upon the wonders of God, only can think of the threat of God's judgment.

Now their consciences bark at them, accuse them, and they feel the pain of their guilt bowing them down like some impossibly heavy anchor. And there's the coming One,.

The One whom once was the light of their soul,.

Now is the dread. Now He's the coming terror, the One who had once made them in splendor.

That's just to say,.

Fellowship between God and man was broken. Communion, intimacy between God and man shattered. I must have been David's age, and I'll never forget. I can almost picture it in my mind's eye, looking up and seeing Pastor Dorr preaching.

He didn't preach with props very often. And this might have been like a Friday night service for the youth. But he took out a big piece of rope, and he said, this was our relationship to God, and this is what sin did.

And he cut it in half,.

And he said,.

This is not coming back together. And then he tied it together and talked about the Gospel. It just stuck in my mind. Once that relationship is severed, it can't be repaired by just pushing it, pushing it, pushing it.

Something has to happen. Some act has to rebind what was broken. Fellowship between God and man. Alienation between God and man. Aversion between God and man. This is all flowing out of the fall. Now, human beings are no longer comfortable in the presence of God.

No longer comfortable. They no longer delight to be in the presence of God. Even though they think they would. Remember, in holiness of God, you might take a fisherman,.

Who seems to be a pious fisherman,.

One who's really laying his life down in sacrifice to the Messiah, and yet when Jesus reveals who he is.

With that great catch, what does he do?

He leaps back to the other end of the boat and says, get away from me,.

I'm a sinful man.

Man is no longer comfortable in the presence of holy. Guilt has made us afraid of God. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden. That sound clearly, it's not just the sound of Him coming, but it's also the sound of Him seeking.

Because that's what Adam reports.

I heard your voice.

It's the rustling as God is, as it were, seeking men. And I don't think we have the best translation here when it says that God was walking in the cool of the day. The Hebrew there is in the wind of the day, and it's an idiom.

In the wind of the day, you can translate it as the cool of the day. But I'm convinced by those that point out this is really a theophany. This is a manifestation of God's presence. God is moving in the wind calling out, and it's just like Job 38,.

Where God speaks out of the whirlwind.

And that's a theophany. That's a manifestation of God's presence in this wind, and He's calling out of it. And so here's this presence of God now moving through Eden like this, rushing wind. Emblematic of Pentecost, by the way,.

In Acts 2.

We won't touch on that.

And He's calling out. He's calling out. There had been unity and harmony only moments before, but now they're hiding, holding their breath, careful not to tread on a strip, crouching behind trees. I don't have this in my notes, and it's dangerous to preach sometimes.

You incriminate yourself. When I was less mature and less sanctified,.