Suffering from Adam's Sin

Please read the 1-minute devotion Hisses and Whispers as an introduction to this study.

When Adam and Eve sinned God put his plan of redemption into place. The Old Testament is filled with "whispers and clues" of Christ's coming (See Jesus in the Old Testament).

But Adam's sin changed mankind's standing in significant ways:

1. After the fall of man, all men and women were born in Adam's image. 

Secular psychology teaches that we are born good and then corrupted or improved by environment. Environment has an important impact on us, but the Bible tells us we are born fallen. We still bear the image of God; but that image was corrupted by Adam, and we are born in Adam's image.

Genesis 5:1-3: "This is the written account of Adam’s family line. When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. 2 He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind" when they were created. 3 When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image...." 

2. Men and women became too corrupted for heaven.

God will not corrupt heaven with sin. Heaven would not be heaven if it was inhabited by unrepentant sinners.

Genesis 3:22: "And the LORD God said, 'The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.'” 

What does God mean when He says, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil"?

This is an area where Bible scholars disagree:

↪ Some believe God was saying this in sarcasm because it was what the serpent promised Eve if she ate the fruit (Genesis 3:1-5). 

↪ Others believe the Hebrew in this verse is best translated "was like one of us," meaning pure and sinless before eating the fruit. 

↪ I tend to believe the third option: when they ate the fruit, for the first time they understood evil, something God has always understood. However, they understood evil because they had committed evil. God understands evil because He knows everything.

3. Every man and woman deserves condemnation.

Adam and Eve were created innocent, but untested. When tested, they chose to sin, and this damaged God's perfect world. Would we have made the same bad choices as Adam and Eve? We like to think otherwise, but we probably would have.

Theologians propose that Adam was our representative. This is called federal headship. This means we inherited sin from our father, Adam.  But we are also sinners in our own right. We inherit condemnation and we earn it.

Romans 5:12: "Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned...."

4. God offers us something we don't deserve: 

We can overcome our father Adam's wrong choice by making the right choice to follow Christ. 

1 Corinthians 15:45-49: "So it is written: 'The first man Adam became a living being'; the last Adam [Christ], a life-giving spirit. 46 The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. 47 The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. 48 As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. 49 And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man."  

When we choose Christ, we again are given what was lost in the garden: the right to eat from the tree of life and live forever.

Revelation 2:7: "Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God."

Amen!

Copyright 2013, Gail Burton Purath, BiteSizeBibleStudy.com

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