When Everything Fell Apart: Grace Came Right Behind It

G.K. Chesterton famously said: “Original sin is the only doctrine that’s been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.” You do not need a seminary degree to believe that something has gone wrong with the world. You need only pay attention to the news for about a day.

The question is what to do with that ache. And here is where all the roads of the world quietly part company.

All roads do not meet at the top of the mountain

We are told, gently and often, that all religions really teach the same thing. All roads meet at the top of the mountain, so you climb up your side and I’ll climb up mine, and we’ll all meet at the top. Call it the “Oprah-fication” of American religion. It is a nice thought … but it’s also not true. The great Eastern faiths tell us that all is one, that god is in all and all is in god (or gods, or goddesses, etc.), and that we are all sparks of the divine fire, drops of water flowing inexorably back into the same great ocean.

Genesis says something quite the opposite. There is a God, and He is not you, and you are not Him. He made you, and has a great deal to say about how you live.

That is the dividing line of the whole Bible. Either there is a Creator who stands over His creation, or every road simply leads wherever we please. Genesis 3 is where that dividing line gets drawn in blood, because it tells us how a very good world came to feel so very broken. And the whole tragedy can be organized around three questions:

Who will we believe? How will we respond? And what will we experience?

Who will we believe?

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made” (Genesis 3:1). Notice: he does not come in denying God. He is far too clever for that. He comes in asking a question. “Did God actually say …?”

Watch the strategy, because it is the same one aimed at you this day, this week. First he misrepresents what God said, stretching one prohibition into a caricature: “Did God actually say … you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?” Then he flatters the pride, whispering that Eve knows better, that her eyes will be opened, that she will be like God. And finally he flatly contradicts the word of God: “You will not surely die.” Misrepresent, flatter, deny. He has been running that same play ever since the garden, and he has never needed a new one.

Underneath every temptation is that single question. Who will we believe: God, or somebody else? And if it isn’t God, it doesn’t really matter who the somebody else is.

How will we respond?

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate” (Genesis 3:6).

She did not weigh what God had said against what she wanted. She simply went with what looked good in the moment. Good for food, a delight to the eyes, desirable to make one wise. Eve is, if I may put it this way, the first postmodern woman: feelings over facts, appetite over what she knew to be right and true. And the tragedy is, that gravitational pull has never let up. It rarely announces itself as rebellion. It arrives dressed as freedom, as reason, as your own right and privilege. And it begins as a thrill, a rush, a taste of forbidden fruit … but that taste eventually turns bitter in our mouth. Look what it cost Eve in verse 16:

To the woman he said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”
(Genesis 3:16)

From that point on, childbirth would be, as any woman who has delivered a baby can tell you, a painful, exhausting ordeal.

And one other thing would result from Eve’s rebellion: her “desire shall be for [her] husband,” meaning, she would want to control him, to dominate him. That, according to the Bible, she must not do. It’s a surefire formula for marital and familial disaster.

But let’s not let Adam off the hook. That same verse ends with these words: ”… and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (emphasis added). Did you notice those four quiet words we tend to read right past, “who was with her”? The Hebrew word is imah, “with her.” Adam was standing right there while this whole tragic scene went down. His sin was twofold: he, too, fell for the lie, and he stood there passively when he should have spoken truth and led, should have stepped in and protected his wife, while she committed the first sin, the first act of disobedience in the history of the human race.

Passivity is its own quiet kind of disobedience. Men are not supposed to be passive. Men are not supposed to be re-actors, spectators in life, standing idly by while their wives or others make their decisions for them. That is another guaranteed recipe for marital, familial and societal disaster.

If Eve’s sin is that she’s easy to fool, easy to play for a sucker, Adam’s sin is that he doesn’t do a thing to protect his wife from her own weakness. There is a warning in that for husbands and wives, for parents, for anyone God has given something to protect and a voice to protect it with.

What will we experience?

The serpent had promised their eyes would be opened. And they were … but not in the way they expected. “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). Tragically, they opened not to glory, but to shame. The very first gift sin gave the human race was not enlightenment. It was the desperate urge to cover up, to sew fig leaves, and to hide.

That is what sin always does. It takes the good gifts of God and twists them. Their nakedness had been a gift, given so a husband and wife could rejoice in one another without shame, and sin warped it into something to conceal. Then death enters, in every dimension of life: intellectually, emotionally, volitionally, morally, relationally … every aspect of what makes us human, God’s image-bearers. It warps the relationships between man and God, between man and the woman, between us and the ground itself. It was never supposed to be this way. If you have ever stood in a hospital room, or at a graveside, or in the wreckage of a marriage, and felt in your bones that this is not right, this is not how it ought to be, you were not being naive. You were being biblical.

Right behind it, so does grace

If the story ended there, it would be a sad one indeed. We would be a people without hope. But watch what God does next, because it runs against everything we instinctively assume about Him.

Adam and Eve tried to hide themselves among the trees. And “the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” (Genesis 3:9). He was not asking for directions. He knew exactly where Adam was hiding. His question is mercy in the guise of a search. God could have scrapped the whole experiment and started over with a fresh pair. He didn’t. As sin, destruction, misery and death enter the world, right behind them, so does grace. Before man could ever go looking for God, God came looking for man.

And then, in the middle of the resultant curse, spoken not even to Adam and Eve but to the serpent, comes the most extraordinary sentence in the chapter: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). Theologians call it the proto-euangelion, the first gospel. One day, an offspring of the woman would crush the enemy’s skull. Grace is wrapped up inside the sentence of judgment.

Go one verse further, to the part we hurry past. “And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). To cover their shame, something had to die. An innocent animal, a substitute, had to die to cover our first parents’ sin … a foreshadowing of the time an innocent substitute would give Himself as the ultimate sacrifice for the sins of mankind … a glimpse of a cross all the way back at the beginning of the story.

Jesus packed His bags for Bethlehem

Paul makes the connection for us. “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). What the first Adam’s disobedience broke, the second Adam’s obedience reverses. Where the first Adam grasped at being like God, the second Adam, who was and is God, emptied Himself and obeyed all the way to a cross. The remedy was promised in the same breath as the curse.

Do not read Genesis 3 only as the day everything fell apart. Read it as the day the rescue was first announced. The same God who walked into His garden calling for the ones who fled is the same God who would one day walk out of His tomb. Whatever has fallen apart in your life this week, and I would not for a moment pretend the dark isn’t dark, the promise still holds. A Redeemer has come, and He has crushed the serpent’s head.

So no, all religions do not teach the same thing … all roads do not meet at the top of the mountain. The story of redemption that begins here in Genesis 3 does tell us that any sincere search for truth, any true search for God, will lead to a hill outside Jerusalem, where a unique Man, offspring of a woman prophesied to come ages and ages ago, took upon Himself the curse His first ancestors (our first parents) let loose on the world.

When Adam and Eve took that first bite, Jesus packed his bags for Bethlehem.

Would you pray with me? Our Lord and our God, we hid, and You came looking. We reached for the fruit, and You carried a cross. Thank You that Your grace is greater than our sins. Where our lives have fallen apart, help us hear Your voice still calling our name, and give us grace to answer, “Here I am.” In the name of the offspring of Eve, the One who crushed the serpent, Jesus, amen.

This Sunday we keep walking through Foundations together. Come, and bring somebody with you.

Frequently asked questions