By Lewis Sperry Chafer
[Author’s note: This article continues the discussion of the most vital features of Anthropology. Other discussions are to follow which enter into the nature of sin, its effects, and the judgments of God upon it.]
III. Man’s Estate at Creation
3. The Environment of the First Man.
The description of the environment of the first man is recorded in Genesis 2:8, 9, 15, which reads: “And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” It may be assumed that when Jehovah planted a garden in which was “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food,” the prospect was as pleasing as could be secured by means of material things. The attractiveness of the garden was in harmony with all else that God had created and concerning which He had said it was “very good.” The evidence points unmistakably to the fact that a poor environment tends to encourage all manner of evil. The situation in which the first man was placed could not by any reasoning have been a contributing cause of his failure. What remains of this wonderful garden is only a poet’s dream. Vondel (1654), the greatest of Holland’s poets, in his greatest work, Lucifer, represents Apollion reporting to Beelzebub of his visit to the Garden of Eden thus (translation by Leonard Charles van Noppen):
“Apollion:
I have, Lord Belzebub,
The low terrene observed with keenest eye,
And now I offer thee the fruits grown there
So far below these heights, ‘neath other skies
And other sun: now judge thou from the fruit
The land and garden which even God Himself
Hath blessed and planted for mankind’s delight.
Belzebub:
I see the golden leaves, all laden with
Ethereal pearls, the sparkling silvery dew.
What sweet perfume exhale those radiant leaves
Of tint unfading! How alluring glows
That pleasant fruit with crimson and with gold!
‘Twere pity to pollute it with the hands.
The eye doth tempt the mouth. Who would not lust
For earthly luxury? He loathes our day
And food celestial, who the fruit may pluck
Of Earth. One would for Adam’s garden curse
Our Paradise. The bliss of Angels fades
In that of man.
Apollion:
Too true, Lord Belzebub,
Though high our Heaven may seem, ‘tis far too low.
For what I saw with mine own eyes deceives
Me not. The world’s delights, yea, Eden’s fields
Alone, our Paradise excel.
* * * * *
Round is the garden, as the world itself.
Above the centre looms the mount from which
The fountain gushes that divides in four,
And waters all the land, refreshing trees
And fields; and flows in unreflective rills
Of crystal purity. The streams their rich
Alluvion bring and nourish all the ground.
Here Onyx gleams and Bdellion doth shine;
And bright as Heaven glows with glittering stars;
So here Dame Nature sowed her constellations
Of stones that pale our stars. Here dazzle veins
Of gold; for Nature wished to gather all
Her treasures in one lap.
* * * * *
No angel us among, a breath exhales
So soft and sweet as the pure draught refreshing
That there meets man, that lightly cools his face
And with its gentle, vivifying touch
All things caresses in its blissful course:
There swells the bosmn of the fertile field
With herb and hue and bud and branch and bloom
And odors manifold, which nightly dews
Refresh. The rising and the setting sun
Know and observe their proper measured time
And so unto the need of every plant
Temper their mighty rays that flower and fruit
Are all within the selfsame season found.”
4. The Responsibility of the First Man.
As to his manner of life, the obligation resting on the first man—aside from the task of dressing and keeping the garden—is the norm or pattern for all human life on the earth. During that undetermined period in which Adam lived before the fall, that ideal was realized to the fullest satisfaction of his Creator. That responsibility is easily stated in the words, he did the will of God. Evidence is not wanting to prove that in unbroken fellowship with God Adam received daily counsel and direction from God. But one prohibition was imposed upon him. This, indeed, formed an exceedingly small proportion of all the gracious instructions which fell from the lips of Jehovah. The present ideal for the redeemed is that they also may find and do the will of God for them. Too often the negative side of God’s will is stressed out of all proportion. There are things which are evil and not convenient from which the Christian should abstain, but the will of God is positive. It is that which one may do, and in joyous fellowship with the Father and with His Son (1 John 1:3, 4). That the Christian may walk and talk with God, that the guiding and teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit is vouchsafed to him, and that enabling power to realize God’s perfect will and plan is freely bestowed, illustrates, to some measure, the high privilege and responsibility of the first man when no cloud intervened between his Creator and himself. “That the husbandman’s calling is an ancient and honourable calling; it was needful even in Paradise, the garden of Eden, though it needed not to be weeded, for thorns and thistles were not yet a nuisance, yet it must be dressed and kept. Nature, even in its primitive state, left room for the improvements of art and industry. It was a calling fit for a state of innocency, making provision for life and not for lust; and giving opportunity of admiring the Creator, and acknowledging his providence; while his hands were about his trees, his heart might be with his God.”[1]
5. Moral Qualities of the First Man.
Since holiness may be either active or passive-positive virtue, or the absence of evil-, the moral qualities of the first man were passive. He was innocent of wrong. There had been no opportunity to develop a tested moral character; yet no record asserts that he had not understood the difference between right and wrong. What might have been required morally of the first man and the measure of his obligation, depended largely upon the degree of his development as created. If, as some have claimed, he was only an infant in his mental powers—being an infant as to days of his existence—, then his moral responsibility is lowered to the vanishing point and the transgression by which he fell called for no judgment whatsoever. In the matter of his transgression, God treated Adam as being wholly accountable and this fact alone certifies the moral development which he sustained. God created a mature man. It is true that he could recall no past history, nor could he marshal the value of accumulated experience; but these values were possessed to the degree required for maturity of action. Such was the character of the creative act of God. No higher attestation of full-grown human excellence could be found than is exhibited in the truth that man as created was well-pleasing to God and thus received into divine companionship. By so much the thought of immaturity or of irresponsibility is precluded; yet the holiness of the unfallen first man was passive in that it was innocence and untested character.
6. The Tempter of the First Man.
Of this being—identified as Satan—much has been written under Angelology as to his person and the temptation he imposed, and more will be introduced at a later time under Hamartiology.
It is to be recognized that the tempter is not identified in the Genesis account which reads: “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman” (Gen 3:1). It is not until the writing of Revelation 12:9 that the title serpent is identified as referring to the devil and Satan. Earlier in the New Testament there are clear references to the fact that it was Satan who tempted the first parents (2 Cor 11:3; 1 Tim 2:14). It is to be observed that, in the progress of doctrine, the clear revelation respecting the tempter is not given until after redemption is completed in the Cross. The fact that the original account as given in Genesis does not identify the tempter but deals only with the creature Satan employed as his means of communication, has encouraged various explanations of this momentous event, and drawn out much criticism. The record states that the man and the woman, being created evidently outside the garden, are placed in it and appointed to dress it. Within the garden are two trees-“the tree of life,” and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” From the latter the first parents are restrained from eating. The penalty for eating is death in all its forms, for God said to them, “In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” The serpent appears and denies the word God has spoken, and declares that in the act of eating their eyes would be opened, they would be as Elohim, and know good and evil. The woman first partook of the fruit and then gave it to her husband who ate of it also. According to the Word of God, they became death-doomed and were expelled from the garden. In the light of subsequent Scriptures it is not difficult to identify the tempter as Satan who is later revealed as ever going about seeking the ruin of God’s human creatures. That he should have sought the downfall of Adam and Eve is in harmony with all his wiles which are faithfully depicted in the later Scriptures.
Three opinions relative to this narrative may be listed, namely, (a) Those who treat the record as a fiction, a mythos, and to these it is ever a difficulty to define the moral of the fable. Having departed so completely from the natural interpretation, they introduce freely as many ideas as the human mind may invent. (b) The second group of interpreters are those who attempt to blend reality with allegory and to varying degrees of reality and allegory. The absurdity of introducing allegorical features into that which purports to be real has been well pointed out by Bishop Horsley (1733–1806) thus: “No writer of true history would mix plain matter of fact with allegory in one continued narrative, without any intimation of a transition from one to the other. If, therefore, any part of this narrative be matter of fact, no part is allegorical. On the other hand, if any part be allegorical, no part is naked matter of fact: and the consequence of this will be, that every thing in every part of the whole narrative must be allegorical. If the formation of the woman out of the man be allegory, the woman must be an allegorical woman. The man therefore must be an allegorical man; for of such a man only the allegorical woman will be a meet companion. If the man is allegorical, his paradise will be an allegorical garden; the trees that grow in it, allegorical trees; the rivers that watered it, allegorical rivers; and thus we may ascend to the very beginning of the creation; and conclude at last that the heavens are allegorical heavens, and the earth an allegorical earth. Thus the whole history of the creation will be an allegory, of which the real subject is not disclosed; and in this absurdity the scheme of allegorizing ends.” (c) A third group believe the record to be literal. They contend that the Mosaic account, while doubtless conveying deeper truths than those which appear on the surface, is, nevertheless, an historical record regarding actual beings and conditions. That it is a literal account is proven, first, by the fact that it is a part of a continuous history. The narrative goes on without a break into all subsequent history. If this record be fable and not history, the historical character of the entire Pentateuch is to be called in question, for none could point out a convenient place where early fable becomes history. The argument based on a continuous history cannot be refuted. The story is as clearly literal at its beginning as it is at its end, or at any point in its progress. In the second place, the literal character of this record is evidenced by the fact that reference is made to it in all candor in later Scriptures and is there made the basis of instruction and appeal which would have no weight if drawn from a fable. The Bible, as a whole and without exception, treats the Genesis record as literal. This suggests an extensive theme which can be pursued here only to a limited degree.
Since the book of Job is earlier as to its writing than the Genesis account by Moses, it is significant that this book states: “Knowest thou not this of old, since man was placed upon earth, that the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment?” (20:4, 5). In this text the word man could as well be translated Adam. Again Job declares: “If I covered my transgressions as Adam, by hiding mine iniquity in my bosom” (31:33). Thus, also, since God made man upright (Eccl 7:29), the first sin of the woman is implied when Eliphaz says, “What is man, that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?” (Job 15:14). “Eden, the garden of God” is mentioned by the prophets, and the “tree of life” is four times referred to in Proverbs and three times in Revelation. Perhaps no word is more conclusive than the words of Christ as they appear in Matthew 19:4, 5, “And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh?” In this Scripture it is to be seen that Christ recognized that God made the first man and first woman and that the marriage relation rests on that basic fact to which Christ refers, namely, that the woman was taken from the man, and, because of that truth, Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh” (Gen 2:23, 24). In this instance, there could be no serious doubt as to the truth that Christ was contemplating an historical event. The whole field of typology which obtains between Christ and Adam ceases to have any meaning or purpose if Adam, and all that concerns him, is unreal. “As by one man sin entered into the world”; “Adam to Moses”; “One that sinned”; “For by one man’s offence”; “One man’s disobedience” (Rom 5:12–21); “Since by man came death”; “For as in Adam all die” (1 Cor 15:20, 21); “The first man Adam was made a living soul”; “The first man was of the earth earthy” (1 Cor 15:45, 47). “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Cor 11:3); “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (1 Tim 2:13, 14). Not one of the passages presents a rhetorical allusion. They are rather the basis of sound reasoning and the ground of far-reaching doctrine which is altogether sacrificed if the events recorded early in Genesis are no more than fable. The only motive that promotes argument against the historicity of these Mosaic records is that they seem absurd since, as is claimed, they are unlike to present human experience; but such reasoning not only assumes that God is restricted to those modes of operation which are current today, but that man is free to sit in judgment upon the Word of God. The contention gathers around the two trees and the serpent. Of these objections Dr. Richard Watson has discoursed to some length as follows: “The fallacy of most of these objections is, however, easily pointed out. We are asked, first, whether it is reasonable to suppose, that the fruit of the tree of life could confer immortality? But what is there irrational in supposing that, though Adam was made exempt from death, yet that the fruit of a tree should be the appointed instrument of preserving his health, repairing the wastes of his animal nature, and of maintaining him in perpetual youth? Almighty God could have accomplished this end without means, or by other means; but since he so often employs instruments, it is not more strange that he should ordain to preserve Adam permanently from death by food of a special quality, than that now he should preserve men in health and life, for three-score years and ten, by specific foods; and that, to counteract disorders, he should have given specific medicinal qualities to herbs and minerals; or if, with some, we regard the eating of the tree of life as a sacramental act, an expression of faith in the promise of continued preservation, and a means through which the conserving influence of God was bestowed, a notion, however, not so well founded as the other, it is yet not inconsistent with the literal interpretation, and involves no really unreasonable consequence, and nothing directly contrary to the analogy of faith. It has been, also, foolishly enough asked whether the fruit of the prohibited tree, or of any tree, can be supposed to have communicated ‘knowledge of good and evil,’ or have had any effect at all upon the intellectual powers? But this is not the idea conveyed by the history, however literally taken, and the objection is groundless. That tree might surely, without the least approach to allegory, be called ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,’ whether we understand by this, that by eating it man came to know, by sad experience, the value of the ‘good’ he had forfeited, and the bitterness of ‘evil,’ which he had before known only in name; or, as others have understood it, that it was appointed to be the test of Adam’s fidelity to his Creator, and, consequently, was a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a tree for the purpose of knowing (or making known) whether he would cleave to the former, or make choice of the latter. The first of these interpretations is, I think, to be preferred, because it better harmonizes with the whole history; but either of them is consistent with a literal interpretation, and cannot be proved to involve any real absurdity.
“To the account of the serpent, it has been objected that, taken literally, it makes the invisible tempter assume the body of an animal to carry on his designs; but we must be better acquainted with the nature and laws of disembodied spirits before we can prove this to be impossible, or even unlikely; and as for an animal being chosen as the means of approach to Eve, without exciting suspicion, it is manifest that, allowing a superior spirit to be the real tempter, it was good policy in him to address Eve through an animal which she must have noticed as one of the inhabitants of the garden, rather than in a human form, when she knew that herself and her husband were the only human beings as yet in existence. The presence of such a stranger would have been much more likely to put her on her guard. But then, we are told that the animal was a contemptible reptile. Certainly not before he was degraded in form; but, on the contrary, one of the ‘beasts of the earth,’ and not a ‘creeping thing;’ and also more ‘subtle,’ more discerning and sagacious ‘than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made’—consequently the head of all the inferior animals in intellect, and not unlikely to have been of a corresponding noble and beautiful form; for this, indeed, his bodily degradation imports. If there was policy, then, in Satan’s choosing an animal as the instrument by which he might make his approaches, there was as much good taste in his selection as the allegorists, who seem anxious on this point, can wish for him. The speaking of the serpent is another stumbling-block; but as the argument is not here with an infidel, but with those who profess to receive the Mosaic record as Divine, the speaking of the serpent is no more a reason for interpreting the relation allegorically, than the speaking of the ass of Balaam can be for allegorizing the whole of that transaction. That a good or an evil spirit has no power to produce articulate sounds from the organs of an animal, no philosophy can prove, and it is a fact which is, therefore, capable of being rationally substantiated by testimony. There is a clear reason, too, for this use of the power of Satan in the story itself. By his giving speech to the serpent, and representing that, as appears from the account, as a consequence of the serpent having himself eaten of the fruit, he took the most effectual means of impressing Eve with the dangerous and fatal notion, that the prohibition of the tree of knowledge was a restraint upon her happiness and intellectual improvement, and thus to suggest hard thoughts of her Maker. The objection that Eve manifested no surprise when she heard an animal speak, whom she must have known not to have had that faculty before, has also no weight, since that circumstance might have occurred without being mentioned in so brief a history. It is still more likely that Adam should have expressed some marks of surprise and anxiety too, when his wife presented the fruit to him, though nothing of the kind is mentioned.”[2]
As to the equity of the judgment which fell upon the serpent, Dr. Watson continues thus: “An objection is taken to the justice of the sentence pronounced on the serpent, if the transaction be accounted real, and if that animal were but the unconscious instrument of the great seducer. To this the reply is obvious, that it could be no matter of just complaint to the serpent that its form should be changed, and its species lowered in the scale of being. It had no original right to its former superior rank, but held it at the pleasure of the Creator. If special pain and sufferings had been inflicted upon the serpent, there would have been a semblance of plausibility in the objection; but the serpent suffered, as to liability to pain and death, no more than other animals, and was not therefore any more than another irrational creature, accounted a responsible offender. Its degradation was evidently intended as a memento to man, and the real punishment, as we shall show, fell upon the real transgressor who used the serpent as his instrument; while the enmity of the whole race of serpents to the human race, their cunning, and their poisonous qualities, appear to have been wisely and graciously intended as standing warnings to us to beware of that great spiritual enemy, who ever lies in wait to wound and to destroy.”[3]
That no direct sentence is pronounced upon Satan is in harmony with the evident divine intention to withhold the fuller revelation to a later place in the Divine Oracles. None can doubt but that unmitigated judgment does fall on Satan eventually for his original sin, for his share in the lapse of man, and for all his subsequent wickedness. The real issues between God and Satan belong to another sphere of existence which could not be incorporated into the records of human history at this point without complicating the simplicity of the narrative of man’s fall. Attention is called in passing to the veiled intimation, in the curse which fell on the serpent, as to the judgment which descended upon the real tempter at the cross and those judgments, also, which will yet descend upon him in future times. No uncertainy exists as to the judgment of Satan in the word of God to the serpent when He said: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen 3:15). Archbishop King (1650–1729) has written: “As the literal sense does not exclude the mystical, the cursing of the serpent is a symbol to us, and a visible pledge of the malediction with which the devil is struck by God, and whereby he is become the most abominable and miserable of all creatures. But man, by the help of the seed of the woman, that is, by our Saviour, shall bruise his head, wound him in the place that is most mortal, and destroy him with eternal ruin. In the meantime, the enmity and abhorrence we have of the serpent is a continual warning to us of the danger we are in of the devil, and how heartily we ought to abhor him and all his works.”
Five quotations from the Apocryphal writings serve to reveal the truth that the Jews of the early times believed in the literal character of the Genesis account: 2 Esdras iii, 4–7, “O Lord, thou barest rule, thou spakest at the beginning, when thou didst plant the earth, and that thyself alone, and commandest the people; and gavest a body to Adam without soul, which was the workmanship of thy hands, and didst breathe into him the breath of life, and he was made living before thee; and thou leddest him into paradise, which thy right hand had planted, and unto him thou gavest commandment to love thy way, which he transgressed. and immediately thou appointedst death in him and in his generations, of whom came nations, tribes, people, and kindreds out of number.” 2 Esdras vii, 118, “O thou Adam, what hast thou done? for though it was thou that sinned, thou are not fallen alone, but we are all that came of thee.” Wisdom ii, 24, “Nevertheless, through envy of the devil came death into the world.” Wisdom x, 1, “She [wisdom] preserved the first-formed father of the world, that was created alone, and brought him out of his fall.” Ecclesiasticus xvii, 1, etc., “The Lord created man of the earth, and turned him into it again. He gave them a few days and a short time, and also power over all things therein—he filled them with the knowledge of —, and showed them good and evil.”
7. The Temptation of the First Man.
The chronicle of the temptation is in like manner presented in the simplest of terms. It is written: “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Gen 3:1–7).
The plain question raised by Satan, as stated in verse 1, may have breathed the suggestion that there was injustice in the divine restriction touching the one tree. This question served to draw out the reaction of the woman who, in turn, was bold enough to add the words “neither shall ye touch it” to what God had said, and this altered to no small degree the divine command. Whether a resentment is present in these added words could not be proven. However, Satan is even bolder in his response when he asserts, “Ye shall not surely die,” which is a flat contradiction of Jehovah’s decree. It is possible that, as Satan was seeking the allegiance of Adam and Eve in his own great cause which involved his independence of God, he was promising that by power which he would exercise they would be saved from this divine judgment. Aside from this contradiction, Satan disclosed the truth that by independent action, such as disobedience really is, they would become as Elohim. As before stated, the word Elohim occurs twice in verse 5, and there is as much reason for translating the name Elohim ”gods” in the first instance as in the second, and no reason can be assigned in either case. The ambition to become “like the Most High” (Isa 14:14) was the original sin of this great angel, and no little meaning is attached to the fact that he brought his own identical sin of independence of God as a temptation to Adam and Eve and that they adopted his philosophy of life. It is even more significant that in the threefold temptation of Christ—the Last Adam—, Satan sought in the sphere of Christ’s humanity to get Him to act outside the will of God. Thus it is evident that there resides in this disposition to independence of God the essential character of sin. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that the final act in Satan’s tragic enterprise is to promote and exalt the man of sin whose identification is ever his avowed claim to be God. A more exhaustive treatment of this great theme, beyond what has already appeared under Satanology, awaits the time of its logical consideration under Hamartiology.
Since Adam and Eve had known enough of the difference between right and wrong to form a basis for right action concerning the will of God as involved in the one prohibition placed upon them, it is evident that the new knowledge of good and evil which came to them through their disobedience was deeper and of a different character. Though there was nothing attractive in the exploit of coming to know evil by the sorrow which the experience of it secures and the value of good by the loss of it, there is, nevertheless, a strange zest in free action. Of Moses it is written that he chose “rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season” (Heb 11:25). To the woman the forbidden fruit appeared as that which was “good for food,”, “pleasant to the eyes,” “and a tree to be desired to make one wise” (cf. 1 John 2:16). The inner cravings of her own being responded to the temptation from without and she yielded to evil, and thus repudiated God. That Adam followed in the same sin adds nothing to the account more than that, as declared in 1 Timothy 2:14, he was not deceived but sinned knowingly and wilfully.
The range of possible testing for unfallen Adam was greatly restricted. He was not subject to the solicitation of avarice and covetousness since he was lord over earth’s creation. He could not be drawn into immoral sexual relations since he was united in marriage to the only one in the world who might attract him. The one supreme sin of the repudiation of God was possible. The fallen man is susceptible to sinful desires; the unfallen man was susceptible to innocent desires. There was no inherent wrong in eating of fruit. The first sin did not consist in a dietetic error. It was not a question of nourishing or injurious food. The tree and its fruit became the ground of testing as to the creature’s obedience to his Creator—an issue as extensive and real as life itself. The end in view was whether the creature would abide in the sphere into which he had been placed by creation, or will he revolt against his Creator? The importance of this tree as a means of testing unfallen man is stated by Dr. William G. T. Shedd in the following words: “The ‘tree of knowledge’ was an actual tree bearing fruit in the garden. It might have been a date-tree, or any other kind of tree, and still have been the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Because, when once God had selected a particular tree in the garden, and by a positive statute had forbidden our first parents to eat of it, the instant they did eat of it they transgressed a Divine command, and then knew consciously and bitterly what evil is, and how it differs from good. The tree thus became ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,’ not because it was a particular species of tree, but because it had been selected as the tree whereby to test the implicit obedience of Adam. The first sin was unique, in respect to the statute broken by it. The Eden commandment was confined to Eden. It was never given before or since. Hence the first Adamic transgression cannot be repeated. It remains a single solitary transgression; the ‘one’ sin spoken of in Rom 5:12, 15–19.”[4]
The prohibition imposed upon Adam has been made the subject of many “a fool-born jest.” Likewise, its penalty has been deemed to be out of all proportion to the seeming wickedness of the sin. Enough has been said already to serve as an answer to such shallow suggestions. Bishop Butler (1692–1752) in his Analogy distinguishes between precepts which are positive and precepts which are moral. He states: “Moral precepts are those the reasons of which we see; positive precepts those, the reasons of which we do not see. Moral duties arise out of the nature of the case itself, prior to external command: positive duties do not arise out of the nature of the case, but from external command; nor would they be duties at all, were it not for such command received from him whose creatures and subjects we are.”
Very much has been written with reference to the action of the will of unfallen Adam. The problem is difficult and psychological in character. The influence of the tempter over Adam cannot be estimated. There was a kingdom of evil already abroad in the universe when Adam was created. God had permitted the fall of the greatest of the angels and he had led, by the same permissive will, an unnumbered host of angels into rebellion against God. The problem arises rather with Adam’s own desires. If he were lusting after forbidden knowledge and independence of God, he was fallen already. The situation is exceeded in complexity only by the fall of Satan; in which instance there was no tempter nor was there any inward urge which springs from a fallen nature. Yet Satan was lifted up with pride (1 Tim 3:6) and became subject to unholy ambition desiring to reach beyond the sphere into which he was placed by creation-a sphere determined by infinite wisdom, in which he might know the benefit of infinite power, and be sustained and blessed by infinite love. The same sin is reenacted by Adam. It is written: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom 5:12). The precise nature of sin was not changed by its entrance into the world.
A cause may be assigned for sin, but it is never rational. Of this truth Augustine (354–430) wrote: “Let no one look for an efficient cause of the evil will; for it is not efficient, but deficient, since the evil will itself is not an effecting of something, but a defect. To seek for an efficient cause of sin out of the will, and other than the will, is like attempting to see darkness, or hear silence.” Again he says, “God made man upright, and consequently with a good inclination. The good inclination, then, is the work of God. But the first evil inclination, which preceded all of man’s evil acts, was rather a kind of falling away from the good work of God to its own work, than any positive work; the will now not having God, but the will itself, for its end.”
The penalty threatened upon Adam was death, and death in all its forms—spiritual, physical, and eternal. On the day they disobeyed God, the first parents died spiritually, they began to die physically having become mortal; and they were at once subject to eternal death unless redeemed from it. As created, Adam and Eve seemed to have had before them the possibility of death, but were not subject to death. They were rather subject to life with the prospect of ever closer conformity to the One in whose image and likeness they were made. The immortal body which these beings possessed before their sin, was such only in a relative sense. It was subject to that which did actually eventuate. It has been held by some that, had Adam stood the test, he would have become immortal in the absolute sense. He would have put on, it is claimed, a spiritual body; but there is no clear assurance of such a prospect. It is certain, however, that had the test been withstood, it would not have returned again. Its pressure was not to have remained as a constant experience until the first parents were broken down. The prohibition concerning the specific tree and its fruit seemed not to have disturbed them until it was accentuated and made the point of attack by the tempter. The stress of the moment was not the prohibition itself, but the tempter’s use of it. The mental process through which Eve passed is more fully disclosed than that through which Adam passed. She had observed the tree and was aware of the divinely imposed restrictions placed upon it, but quite suddenly she saw that it was beautiful to the eye, that it was good for food, and that it offered an avenue into greater wisdom. These new impressions were but for the moment. Had they been resisted, the test would have passed forever. The experience of these two parents is not a norm or pattern of temptations which beset fallen humanity, whose experience is that of a ceaseless stress and trial with the depressing consciousness of many failures and defeats.
There yet remains the urgency to consider the great protevangelium declaration which fell as a word of hope from the lips of Jehovah at the conclusion of the judgment pronounced upon the serpent, and beyond the serpent to the incarnate tempter himself. A literal bruising of a serpent’s head and a corresponding injury to the heel of a man will not fulfill this prophetic expectation. The serpent, in this instance, is Satan himself and the “seed of the woman” is none other than the incarnate Christ of God. This abrupt extension of the divine judgment into universal and eternal realms lends encouragement to the belief that all that this narrative records is applicable far beyond the natural limitations which the simple story chronicles.
Dallas, Texas
Notes
- Matthew Henry’s Commentary, Vol. I, p. 8.
- Theological Institutes, Vol. II, pp. 24-26.
- Ibid., p. 27.
- Systematic Theology, Vol. II, p. 154.
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