The fall

A generous command and a crafty question

Why is the world so beautiful and so broken at the same time? Why do we want what is good and still do what is wrong? The Bible's answer begins in Genesis 3, with the event Christians call the fall. But the story opens with a gift before it mentions a limit.

And the LORD God commanded him, "You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die."

Genesis 2:16-17

Every tree but one was theirs. The command was not a trap but a fence around a good life: God would say what is good and what is evil, and the man and woman would trust him and live freely within his word. Life lay in that trust.

The serpent came with a question before it told a lie: "Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’" (Genesis 3:1). God had given them every tree; the question made him sound stingy. Then came the flat denial, "You will not surely die" (Genesis 3:4), and the hint that God was holding something back. Doubt God's word, then doubt his heart: temptation still works that way. Later Scripture unmasks the serpent as "that ancient serpent called the devil and Satan" (Revelation 12:9); the lesson on angels and spiritual beings says more about him.

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, she took the fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.

Genesis 3:6

Matthew Henry traces the steps (she saw, she took, she ate, she gave) and observes: "Satan may tempt, but he cannot force" Matthew Henry. The temptation came from outside; the choice was theirs. Their eyes were opened, as the serpent had promised, but what they saw was not godlike wisdom, only their own nakedness. They stitched fig leaves together and hid among the trees. Questioned by God, the man blamed "The woman whom You gave me" (Genesis 3:12), and the woman blamed the serpent.

Once trust in God was broken, everything else came apart with it: the bond between the man and the woman, and between humanity and the ground. Pain in childbirth followed, thorns and sweat, and at last the sentence "dust you are, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19).

The root of sin

John gives a short definition: "sin is lawlessness" (1 John 3:4), living as if God's law did not exist. The New Testament's commonest word for sin, hamartia (ἁμαρτία), comes from a verb that could be used of missing a target, and Paul's "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23) carries the same picture. Sin crosses the line God has drawn, and it falls short of the purpose for which he made us.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it with care: "Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God" Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q14. A ‘want of conformity’ is falling short of what we ought to be and do; a ‘transgression’ is doing what God forbids. Genesis 3 shows what lies underneath both. Beneath the act was unbelief: the man and the woman stopped trusting that God's word was true and his intentions kind. Beneath that was pride: the wish to be like God, deciding good and evil for ourselves. Sin, at bottom, is turning away from God towards the self.

Augustine found this in a petty theft. In the second book of his Confessions he remembers stealing pears from a neighbour's tree as a teenager, with a gang of friends. He was not hungry, and he had better pears at home; they ate hardly any and threw the rest to the pigs. What drew him, he confesses, was simply that it was forbidden Augustine, Confessions 2.4. In that small act he discovered a heart that wanted to be its own master, a crooked imitation of God's freedom.

Grace already at work

Genesis 3 does not end in judgment. When the man and woman hid, God came looking for them: "Where are you?" (Genesis 3:9). Matthew Henry hears in that question the good Shepherd: "This lost sheep had wandered without end, if the good Shepherd had not sought after him" Matthew Henry. God replaced their fig leaves with "garments of skin" (Genesis 3:21), and in his sentence on the serpent he placed a promise.

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.

Genesis 3:15

Christians have long called this verse the ‘first gospel’ (protoevangelium). They read the woman's seed who crushes the serpent's head as the Son whom God sent when the time had fully come, "born of a woman" (Galatians 4:4). Paul echoes the picture when he promises that "The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet" (Romans 16:20). And Matthew Henry notes that "This gracious revelation of a Saviour came unasked, and unlooked for" Matthew Henry.

Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, saw Christ as the new Adam. Christ gathered up in himself the humanity that had fallen in the first man, so that where we were defeated in Adam we might conquer in him; the disobedience that began at a tree he undid by his obedience on the tree of the cross Irenaeus, Against Heresies. Gregory the Great draws the same contrast from the temptation in the wilderness: "By the same method in which he had overcome the first Adam, in that same was he overcome when he tempted the second Adam" Gregory.

How should we read Adam and Eve?

Christians read this account in more than one way. Through most of the church's history, and for many Christians today, Adam and Eve are the first historical couple, the ancestors of every human being. They point out that Luke traces Jesus' family line back to "the son of Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38), and that Paul sets the disobedience of one man beside the obedience of one man (Romans 5:19).

Other Christians understand the opening chapters of Genesis as history told in figurative form, using the symbols and patterns of ancient storytelling. They note, for example, that adam is also the ordinary Hebrew word for a human being or for humankind (Genesis 5:2), and that the garden story is rich in symbols such as the tree of life. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, teaches that the account of the fall uses figurative language but affirms a real event that took place at the beginning of human history Catechism of the Catholic Church, 390. Christians also differ over how the story fits the science of human origins. Some hold that God created the first couple directly; some, that God formed humanity through a long process and then set Adam and Eve apart as its head and representatives; some take Adam more broadly as a name for the first humanity as a whole.

What they hold in common is the doctrine of the fall itself: humanity really did turn away from God, and death and alienation came into the world through sin. In Paul's words, "sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin" (Romans 5:12). How that sin reaches every one of us is the subject of the next lesson. For more on reading Genesis, see Is Genesis history?, and on sin itself, What is sin?.

Genesis 3 is also our story. We too doubt God's word, decide good and evil for ourselves, cover our failures and blame others. But the God who called out to the hiding couple still calls, for "the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost" (Luke 19:10).

Practice