"In the Bible, Cain slew Abel
and east of Eden he was cast
You're born into this life paying for the sins
of somebody else's past."
-Bruce Springsteen, "Adam Raised a Cain"
A female friend was trying to text me the other day, when she complained about her phone. "It's taking forever to send messages."
"Taking forever, eh?" I remarked, "your phone must be a woman."
AMIRITE fellas?!
We men and women have fun berating each other. It reminds me of the playful boys-vs-girls debate among believers, and even non-believers, about whose fault it truly was that mankind fell into sin in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve, the first two human beings on Earth, disobeyed God and ate of the forbidden fruit. And while the man in me wants to put the blame at 60/40, judging by Scripture I can only surmise that the Fall in the Garden was equally the fault of man and woman.
We read in Genesis 2:15 "Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it." Concerning Eve's creation, she was described in relation to Adam as "a helper comparable to him." Further, Genesis 2:24 tells us, concerning the spousal relationship, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."
In the third chapter of Genesis, we're sent headlong into the Fall of Man. "The serpent," it says, "was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made."
Note here the distinction - maybe I'm just reading too much into semantics, but the serpent (who we of course know was Satan) is identified with "the field," not with the Garden. If one accepts any significance about the use of the word "field" rather than "garden" in describing the serpent, we can logically assume he had no business in the Garden of Eden. He was an intruder. And, as we read previously, God had given Adam the specific duty of tending and keeping the Garden. So, Adam had overlooked one responsibility already in preventing the serpent from entering his home - just as we today must keep evil influences and destructive behaviors from our own doors.
What happens next is infamous - it should be, because it led to the world sucking. The serpent persuaded Eve, through lies and twisting of speech, that there would be no disastrous consequence to eating of the fruit of "the tree of life." So she did, her and "her husband with her" (emphasis added, Genesis 3:6).
Long story short, mortality and sin entered the world, Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and every ugly, hurtful deed that's ever been done can be traced back to this fateful day.
But concerning whose "fault" it was that this happened, we see plainly that Adam and Eve were "one flesh," that Adam had a responsibility and duty in overseeing the Garden of Eden, that he faltered in negligence when he allowed the serpent near his wife, and that Eve too stumbled when she heeded the word of the enemy. The man and woman were one flesh.
In the New Testament, Paul at two points seems to distribute responsibility evenly. In his masterpiece of Romans, Paul writes in the fifth chapter, "through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned". (It would be an injustice to grace if I didn't include Paul's complete thought here - he writes that though sin entered the world through one man, "the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man's offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many.") Later, in his first epistle to his protege and faithful companion Timothy, while referring to the authority of men in the church, Paul scolds Eve particularly for her part in the Fall, writing, "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression." (1 Timothy 2:14)
I used to read a lot about serial killers. One thing that linked almost all of them was an abusive and painful childhood. So many of these murderers' parents or guardians beat or neglected them, allowed them to be exposed to hideous things, or forced them to commit atrocious acts at tender ages. These killers' parents made them pay for their twisted actions, leading them to paths of darkness and destruction.
In God's grace, He often won't punish us for our sins - but we sure make each other pay for them.
It goes right back to the beginning of man on Earth - if Cain's parents had not sinned, he would not have been envious of his brother Abel, would never have killed his own flesh and blood. (Not to suggest our sins as individuals, much like Cain's sins, are merely results of environment or ancestry - rather, they are the result of our surrender to temptation, as it was from the beginning in the Garden).
But it should also be noted that the first Biblical prophecy of the Messiah, Jesus, is spoken directly by God, during His casting of Adam and Eve from the Garden - He says to Satan the serpent, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel." (Genesis 3:15) In the bruising of His heel, God was speaking of the unthinkable pain His Son would endure on the cross as the ultimate sacrifice to atone for the sins of man; this would bring doom to Satan, a destiny for a lake of fire, therefore the bruising of his head. But compared to the abundant life, on Earth and after, which Jesus' death and resurrection gives to so many, the pain He would endure on account of sin would seem like a wound of the heel.
Some might ask "Why didn't God just atone for the sins of all mankind right then and there?"
Thousands of years passed between the casting of man from the Garden of Eden and the death of Jesus on the cross. In those thousands of years, not only were we given prophecy after prophecy of the coming Savior who would atone for us, but we see the Hebrews who lived under the rigorous Law of Moses - which was fulfilled by the final, ultimate sacrificial Lamb in Jesus Christ. So, we have thousands of years of prophets foretelling the suffering and victory of the Messiah, and years of "the law of sin and death" as Paul described it. These things were an ominous prelude to what was to come, a prologue if you will, so that we would have more reason to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.
Despite this, there are still many who don't believe - how much less would believe if Jesus had been sacrificed on the same day as the Fall of Man? We would have had no prophets, no anchor of history, to affirm to Jesus' Authority.
Speaking of prophecy and the rotten things we do to one another, individually or collectively, sometimes I let the assurances of Biblical prophecy turn into apathy. For example, I know there will never be world peace, at least until Christ's millennial reign, so I don't fret about it; I know we'll never eliminate poverty and starvation from the world because the Bible tells us that people will become more and more evil, always swindling, stealing, and wronging each other. I believe in global warming and climate change, but I believe it to be a prelude to the Great Tribulation which Jesus described. And all of this was entered into the world through the devil's deception in the Garden.
But I shouldn't think that the fact that the world will always be a rotten place excuses me from my responsibility as an individual - Christ has given us a responsibility to live peaceably as individuals even if many others don't, to give and bless those in need, even if there are many who don't, not to litter and to care for the environment, even if so many don't even acknowledge that the environment is changing, and not for the better.
Will it bring peace to the Middle East or Washington DC? No. Will it eliminate tyranny and poverty? No. But each good deed done in Christ's name, no matter how small in the world's eyes, sends a ripple of hope in a sea of very ugly, bloody water.
“Another parable He put forth to them, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’ But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”
-our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Matthew 13:24-30
