Sin and Death (1)

When Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, they were in unity with each and with God. They could perceive spiritually, as well as physically. They could talk with God, and they could see him, in a way that was real. They were free to choose how they would behave. God taught them his will, but they were free to disobey.

What Happened?

God had told Adam and Eve that if they disobeyed him, they would die.

You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat from it you will certainly die (Gen 2:17).

Yet after they ate from the tree, they carried on living. Adam lived for nearly a thousand years. This was not a sudden death, so what did happen to them? In what sense did they die? I will answer this question in the next few posts.

What did God did do?
God pronounced three curses” on the serpent, the woman and the man.

1. He physically changed the serpent, by removing its legs and modifying its body so that it would have to crawl upon the ground.
2. God is not recorded as changing Adam and Even in any way. He explained that their relationship to each other would be changed. This would be the natural outworking of their personalities, without the restraining influence of the Holy Spirit. The man’s strength would distort into domination. The women’s sociability would distort into fear.
3. The land would become hard to work and toil would be painful. However, God did not change the man, or the land. The land was changed by the powers of evil (more on that in a moment).

God withdrew from his people. His holiness meant that he could not be close to sin, so he had no choice but to withdraw from the sinful humans (Is 59:2). They had grieved the Holy Spirit, so he could no longer dwell with them in the way that he did.

The key thing that God did was to exclude Adam and Eve from the garden.

The Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:23)
He drove the man out (Gen 3:24).

Although God had warned them that they would die, he did not put them to death. Instead, he drove them away from his presence, and out of the place where he had been working. Certain death manifested in exclusion.