What Went Wrong?

Genesis 3

    It's pretty clear to even the casual observer that we don't live in an idyllic garden anymore! Genesis 3 tells us what went wrong.

    Genesis 3 tells how humanity, designed to be God's wise stewards of creation, decided that being a steward wasn't enough. They wanted to be the owners. Hence the serpent's terrible temptations: "You will be like God." The temptation wasn't just that they'd intellectually know the difference between right and wrong but that they could choose what was right and wrong.

    The consequences were immediate and dire. Notice, first, that they hid from each other. Where there had been openness, honesty, and complete transparency, now there was distrust, secrets, and blame. When asked what happened, Adam immediately threw Eve under the bus. Then, even more catastrophically, they hid from God; their relationship with Him was ruined, too, which ultimately led them to be banished from His garden. God made permanent their alienation from him (banishment) and from each other (hide clothing). They were under a death sentence. And so are we.

    That's the first lesson for us: what Adam broke, we endure. We deal with the ramifications of his sin. In Lutheran lingo, we call it original sin: the corruption of our nature we inherited from Adam. It means we inherited (no choice in the matter) a nature turned away from God, centered on itself, dead in trespasses and sin.

    The good news in that is that in the very middle of cursing our first parents, the Lord made a promise: the woman's offspring would eventually crush the serpent's head. That's a promise we see fulfilled finally in Jesus' death and resurrection. In Jesus, we still have a corrupted nature, but we also receive by our Baptism into Him, a new--renewed--nature. The healing has begun.

    Finally, we find a glimpse of what the Lord's ultimate plans are for His world and for us in His world. He does not intend to give up on either. The grand promise is that the world will be restored to its original condition on the last day. We will receive the gift of resurrection onto life.

    There's so much more we could say. Genesis 3, like Genesis 1-2, are foundational to the rest of Scripture. But this is enough by summary: Adam and Eve introduced a terrible sickness into God's world and into our very nature, but it is in the Lord's nature to heal, and that's what He did in Jesus and what He will bring to completion on the day of Jesus' return.