The Tragedy of the Fall

Although God created all things good, we live in a world that is not as it should be. What happened? Today, Sinclair Ferguson takes several lessons from the Bible’s teaching about the fall of humanity into sin.

A few weeks ago on Things Unseen, we were trying to think about this great question: What is man? I mean in the sense of Genesis 1:26–28—man made as the image of God. I think it’s both interesting and important that while Genesis 1 emphasizes that God created us with different genders, the first thing it actually mentions is what we have in common. We’re persons made as God’s image and likeness. And that’s the most important truth about us, and most fundamental.

And as we’ve noted before, when we lose hold of God Himself, our identity as His image will also get lost. And the result is societies where gender issues become far more important than anything we have in common. It’s a very strange thing that the worldly people tend to complain that Christians are always concerned about sex when, actually, the boot is on the other foot.

And we’ve come into a time when the loss of the sense of God and therefore the loss of the sense that we are made as the image of God has led to all kinds of alienations and antagonisms, not just generally among people, but between male and female as well. So, it’s a great thing for Christians to know that we are all people made as the image of God, and therefore we’re called to reflect Him, to live for His glory according to His word. And when we refuse to do that, we then no longer enjoy Him. And when we don’t enjoy Him, things begin to disintegrate all around us—vertically in relationship to God and horizontally in our relationships with one another. And that’s our world today.

But what brings us stability as Christians in a world like this is that the Bible gives us an explanation for why things are not the way they were meant to be. And although Genesis doesn’t use this specific term, we know that at the back of our human situation is what we traditionally refer to as the tragedy of the fall. And that’s what we’re going to reflect on this week.

What’s the fall all about? It’s the story of how we were made for glory but have fallen into a deep tragedy. But the first thing I want to try to do today is to clear up an issue I’ve noticed sometimes seems to bother people in our very gender-conscious world, and actually anger some. It’s the fact that when the Apostle Paul comments on the significance of the fall in 1 Timothy 2:14, he says this: “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”

I don’t need to tell you why that creates a fair amount of heat for the Apostle Paul: “Paul the misogynist,” “Paul the woman hater,” “Paul the bigot,” and so on. And all I want to do today is to help us see why these accusations are so false. In fact, they actually display a sad illiteracy. Why do I say that? Well, for this reason: Paul is simply quoting Eve. This isn’t Paul’s interpretation of the fall; it’s Eve’s. It’s not misogynistic; it’s simply factual reporting. It’s almost simply quotation. It’s there in Genesis 3:13: “The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.’”

Now, there are two points I think worth making here. Actually, point number one is that there’s a real lesson here for us in getting to know our Bibles as well as we possibly can. The more we know them, the better equipped we’ll be to deal not only with opposition to the Christian worldview, but as I think is happening more frequently, a twisting of the teaching of Scripture. And when we are equipped in that way, then we are able to expose the opposition for what it really is—so often factual ignorance of the truth claims of Christianity. And as I say, we’re seeing more and more of that Scripture twisting in the secular media today, and the better we know the Scriptures, the better prepared we’re going to be able to handle that twisting.

But there’s also a second point here, something else, and in some ways a deeper issue: Why did the serpent, the instrument of Satan, approach the woman first? Indeed, why would he do that when the Bible tells us that the first human being and the representative head of the whole human family was not Eve, but Adam? After all, Paul says it’s in Adam all die, not in Eve all die.

Now, the Bible doesn’t directly give us the answer to this question in so many words. So, we need to work it out from what it does say. And maybe you’ve already thought out the answer. I think it’s this: What would give the devil the strongest leverage that would help him prize Adam away from love for and obedience to his Creator and Sustainer? Yes, it would be using the very best gift the Creator had given to Adam and making him choose between the Lord on the one hand, who had given him life, and the woman on the other hand, who was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, and the source of so much of his happiness. Satan used God’s very best gift to Adam to steal Adam away from the Giver of that best gift.

There are many lessons for us to learn here, but let me leave you with this one today: sometimes Satan uses the best gifts God has given us to draw us away from God Himself. He is, as Genesis 3 tells us, very skilled at his craft. And we need to be alert, don’t we? And we need to make sure that it’s the Lord who comes first in our affections.