GENESIS 3: THE FALL OF MAN

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He created them by the Word
of His voice, speaking everything into existence from nothing. In a small part of the earth called
Eden, God planted a garden. In this garden he placed the crowning achievement of His beautiful
creation, man. He creates for the man a wife and they are given the charge to be fruitful,
multiply, and subdue the earth. They are blessed to have the joy of completing these tasks in
perfect fellowship with the Creator God. They are to be His image-bearers to all the earth from
their temple garden.
The Temptation
But all will not remain well in their garden. Chapter 3 of Genesis introduces to us a
new character, the serpent. The text describes him as more crafty than any other beast of the
field. The word here has connotations of subtle (as the KJV renders it), cunning, and deceptive.1
Though the serpent is not identified here in verse 3, he is referenced many times throughout
Scripture as the Enemy, Satan. Revelation twice calls Satan that ancient serpent,2 and both
Isaiah and Ezekiel seem to refer to this ancient tempter.3


can also be translated as prudent (Cf. Prov. 12:23 or 14:18), but here it obviously
maintains the negative sense of the word
1

All Scripture quotations are taken from the English Standard Version, Wheaton, IL (Good News
Publishers, 2002).
3

Cf. Isaiah 14:11-19 and Ezekiel 28:11-19. Though each passage is directed to the king of
Babylon and the king of Tyre respectively, the language used there seems much higher than
would be directed to a mere king of an earthly realm. Both of the prophets here are speaking to
the one who has deceived these earthly kings, the Day Star, Lucifer.

We are not given reasons for his deception, but we know from Isaiah that it stems from
pride. It is possible that this signet of perfection was jealous of mankind. God had created
these small creatures in his image and then told the glorious angels in heaven to be ministering
spirits sent out to serve them. We can only assume that this command would begin to grate on
one so beautiful and prideful. But again, all of this is speculation.4 What we do know is that this
incredibly wise and crafty creature now sets his sights on the innocent woman, seeking to destroy
her.
All other things being equal, Eve was outmatched here. She does not yet know good
and evil; she does not really even know that evil exists. All she can see is the good garden that
God has created. Then the tempter enters with nothing but evil in his heart. It would be easy to
say that there was no chance for Eve, she was blindsided and taken advantage of. And she was.
But Eve had the Word of God. She knew God's command and knew that she and Adam were to
have dominion over the animals. As soon as the serpent began to speak to them, Adam or Eve or
both should have immediately rebuked the serpent, exercising their dominion over the animal,
and put the whole thing to rest. Instead, they listened.
On the surface, the serpent's question seems innocent enough. Did God actually say,
'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden'? It is the word actually that tips it toward deceit.
The serpent is bringing into question the command of God. He is planting a seed of doubt into
the woman's mind. Often, this is enough to set the faithful down a path to destruction. But Jesus
should be our example here in the face of temptation. As believers we must continually immerse
4

Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Record (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1990), 108.

ourselves in the Word of God so that we are prepared to resist the devil with it.
Eve replies to the serpent in an attempt to correct him. We may eat of the fruit of the
trees of the garden, but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of
the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.' She knows that the serpent's claim is false.
God had not forbidden them to eat of any tree, just the one.
Tragically, however, Eve has misquoted God's word. We do not know if Adam failed
to pass the command down properly, if neither of them held it with the reverence it deserved, or
if Eve was already beginning to chafe at the command. What we do know is that His words were
altered in two different ways: she adds to the command with neither shall you touch it, and
leaves out the surety of God's judgment you shall surely die.5 It is certainly possible that her
addition of the prohibition against touching the tree was innocent. If she did not touch the tree it
would be impossible for her to eat it.6 This could simply be a case of building a fence around
the law to ensure that it was kept, and that is neither sinful nor legalistic on its own. Or it could
simply be that she is paraphrasing the command of God. It is important the remember that the
Bible does not say that Eve has sinned yet. Perhaps there was sin there, but we know for certain
that sin comes later, and it is more profitable for us to see it there.
The tiniest seed of doubt now planted, the serpent turns to a more direct attack, an
outright denial of the Word of God. You will not surely die, he says to her. God is a liar. His
Word cannot be trusted. And then comes the deception, the temptation. For God knows that
5
6

John D. Currid, A Study Commentary on Genesis (Webster, NY: Evangelical Press, 2003), 118.

Andrew Fuller, Three Expository Discourses on Genesis, The Southern Baptist Journal of
Theology 5, no. 3 (2001): 76.

when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
Satan now tries to make Eve believe that God is a harsh master who has been holding out on his
creatures. He portrays God as selfish, always wanting to keep them under His thumb, keep them
from what will make them truly happy.
The next two verses are some of the most important in the Bible. Certainly the two
most tragic, yet they set in motion the rest of the history of mankind. Eve looks at the tree again.
Something is different about it. It looks...good. Good for food, delightful to the eyes, something
to be desired to make her wise. She had never seen the tree this way before. God had
commanded them not to eat of it, and she had not given it a second thought. But now it has
changed. In reality, she has changed. Sin is crouching at the door for Eve just like it would for
Cain in the future.
It doesn't seem like there is any coincidence that the description of the tree here
parallels John's description of sin in his 1st letter as the desires of the flesh and the desires of the
eyes and pride in possessions. God gives his people desires as part of His good creation. We
need food, we enjoy relationships, and God has given us dominion over the world to subdue and
rule it. But we must not let those desires move past the boundaries God has set for them.7 When
we elevate the desires past their proper place, we begin to serve the creature instead of the
Creator as Paul notes in Romans 1. And that is exactly what Eve did.
Having been convinced that God was lying and that the fruit of the tree would be good
for them, Eve took, ate, and gave it to her husband who was with her. Adam has completely
7

Allen P. Ross, Creation and Blessing (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 136.

shirked his responsibility as a husband. We see that he has been standing beside her the whole
time! He never speaks, never leads, never protects. And instead of disassociating with her once
she has sinned, he caves to the emotional pressure and eats, as well. The chain reaction from that
first lustful look to sin took no time at all. As James says, they were lured and enticed by their
desire and it gave birth to sin.
Immediately we begin to see the consequences. Their eyes were opened and they knew
that they were naked. Gone are the days of Chapter 2 where they were both naked and not
ashamed. As it is, or should be, for believers, their disobedience brings immediate guilt and
shame. From the other side, their sin looks disgusting. And though they tried to hide their
nakedness with fig leaves and themselves in the trees, they could not hide their guilt from God.
They listened. They took. They ate. And Paradise was lost.
The Confrontation
God is obviously not confused by their hiding. He knows where they are and what they
have done. Imagine your children are playing in the other room and you hear a loud crash. You
burst into the room and see them standing shamefully around a broken vase. The words out of
your mouth are, What's going on in here?! Of course, you know what is going on. Your kids
broke the vase.
Here you have presented your children with the opportunity to confess to their crime and
seek forgiveness as they should. And that is what Adam and Eve should have done, as well. The
first words out of their mouths should have been confession and repentance. Instead, they begin

blaming one another. Adam truly has fallen, his moral character bent and tainted.8
Sin hates to take responsibility. Sin does not know how to take responsibility; it is outside
of its nature. The only thing sin knows how to do is to attempt to keep itself out of trouble. So it
blames. It justifies. It seeks to destroy another so that the focus is off of its own treason.
Adam starts passing the blame to Eve. Really, he passes it to God. The woman whom
you gave to be with me... Again we see the wickedness that now plagues Adam's heart. That he
could blame God for his evil! But he is desperate to place the guilt on another, whether it be God
or the woman. With what I can only imagine is a sigh of disappointment, God turns to Eve.
Taking Adam's example, she passes the blame as well; no confession is forthcoming.
Now, God shifts his fiery gaze to the serpent. Foregoing anymore questions, He begins
to pronounce judgment. Our holy God cannot abide sin. He must pass a sentence on the guilty.
The serpent is cursed above all other livestock. On your belly you shall go and dust you shall
eat all the days of your life. There are two parts that we should look at here. First, does this
mean the serpent could walk prior to the curse? Possibly, but we cannot know for sure. Scientists
have found some anomalous bones on the skeletons of boa constrictors and a few other snakes
that they claim are vestigial legs. The claim that these are evidence of evolution is nonsense,
but it may lend support to the idea that snakes could once walk.
Secondly, we should look at the dust you shall eat phrase. Evolutionists also try to
use this line to disprove the Bible. Snakes do not really eat dust, they eat other animals. This
proves that the Bible is false. I think that does an injustice to the genre of literature here. God is
8

John Phillips, Exploring Genesis (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), 60.

using a figure of speech on par with what is used in Isaiah 49:23 or Psalm 72:9. The phrase
describes the lowest of the low, those who sit in utter defeat.9 God's enemies will lick the dust of
his feet. They will be in complete ruin and prostrate before Him, acknowledging His supreme
power. That is how it is used here, too. The serpent is cursed. One day he will be crushed. We
will come back to that below.
Next, God turns to the woman to mete out judgment. The curse affects Eve in two
ways. First, her pain in childbirth will be multiplied. This pain probably refers to both physical
and emotional pain during the entire process from conception to delivery, possibly beyond.10 Any
mother will be glad to tell you that the pain of childbirth neither begins nor ends in the delivery
room. Morning sickness, emotional stress, hormonal fluctuations. All of these seem to stem from
the curse of Eve.
The second part of Eve's curse affects her relationship with Adam. Your desire shall
be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. There will be a change in how she and Adam
relate to one another. This desire should not be read as romantic desire. Created from his side
to be his perfect helper, she will now have a desire to rule over him. She will look at her
husband, see how he continues to fail and think, I could lead this family so much better. And
he will rule over her. We have already alluded to Genesis 4:7 above, but we see the same
language again. God tells Cain that sin's desire is for him, but he must rule over it. That is, it
desires to control him, but he must crush it, stomp it out. Eve's desire will be to usurp her place
9

Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987),
79.
10

Ross, Creation and Blessing, 146.

as Adam's helpmeet and try to control him. And he will rule over her harshly. All of our marital
problems come back to Genesis 3. Instead of submitting and loving, our sinful tendency is to
seek ourselves first, manipulate, and dominate. This is not how marriage is supposed to be.11
Now, God turns to Adam to pronounce judgment. Again, his punishment is twofold,
but in Adam the curse is magnified to affect the entire creation. Cursed is the ground because of
you. Adam was given the responsibility to work the ground and expand the temple of Eden to
the ends of the earth. But there were no thorns, no weeds. When he planted and cultivated
something, it grew. There was no toil in his work, there was joy. Now, there would be sweat.
Instead of fruit, he would get thistles. Paul speaks of this in Romans 8. All of the creation groans
in the pains of childbirth. Adam's punishment did not just affect him, it distorted all of God's
good creation.
And nowhere is this seen better than in the second part of Adam's curse. For you are
dust, and to dust you shall return. God had told Adam that in the day that he ate of the fruit, he
would surely die. God will not break promises. Adam ate, and so he will die, as will all of
creation after him, for the wages of sin is death. Sin entered the world through one man, and
death through sin. No longer will Adam live forever as God's image. His body will cease to
function and return to the dust from which it came.
Now obviously, Adam did not immediately cease to exist the very second that he ate
of the forbidden fruit. Do not think that this is God being lax in His judgment. We have already
seen that Adam will die. But there is another aspect of death, their spiritual death that occurs
11

Tremper Longman III, How to Read Genesis (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005),
109.

immediately. Their fellowship with God has been fractured by sin. Instead of joyfully rushing to
meet God when He walked in the garden, they hid from him in the bushes. Soon they will be
driven from the garden. The couple surely did die that very day; a death that, I am sure, was
more devastating for them than physical death could ever be.
Sin and death are hotbed issues in the scientific community today. Those who would
try to synthesize Christianity with evolution make the claim that death is not part of some
prehistorical curse of God. Death and decay has been a part of life on earth for millions of years;
it is a necessary part of being a human. Instead of an enemy to be defeated, it should be
embraced as the final piece of life.12 But someone who believes that the Bible is true in anything
that it claims should not come to any other conclusion that sin came from Adam, and strife,
disease, and death came from sin.
The Expulsion
Verse 22 is an example of God's righteous judgment alongside His mercy. God cannot
live with sin, and so he must drive the first couple out of the temple garden. But there seems to
be another reason for their being cast out. Alongside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
grew the Tree of Life. God's love could not stand the thought of Adam and Eve reaching out and
taking from that tree in their current state. An immortal life of sin would made their ultimate
salvation an impossible task. So, he casts them out and places an armed guard at the entrance to

12

Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2012), 147 and John R.
Schneider, Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins: An 'Aesthetic'
Supralapsarianism, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 62, no.3 (2010): 201.

the Tree of Life to protect them from eternal damnation.13

Protoevangelium
The man and a woman are in a horrible place. Cast out of the Garden with no way to
return. A flaming sword guards the way back to the Tree of Life, perfect union with God. They
have been cursed to spend the rest of their infinitely-shortened lives in backbreaking toil to eke
out a living from the soil to which they will now one day return. All hope for fellowship seems
lost.
But God has given them a promise in verse 15. A promise of one who will come from
the woman's seed who, though his heel will be bruised by the seed of the serpent, will crush his
head and remove the curse forever. The seed, of course, is Jesus Christ.
This verse is often called the protoevangelium, the first announcement of future
salvation. A return to perfect fellowship with God requires a complete removal of sin. But, as
Paul says in Romans 5, death reigned through Adam because of sin. Because all of humanity is
in Adam (1 Cor. 15:22), we are all separated from God. A second Adam, one without sin,
would be necessary to restore that fellowship.14 Christ, through His perfect obedience in life and
death, is that last Adam. Through Him, sin and death are conquered. Through Him the temple of
Eden is restored. Through Him, the way to the Tree of Life is opened. Jesus Christ, the woman's
seed, the last Adam, the Lamb who was slain, is God's hope for the nations, the reversal of
Genesis 3. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.
13

Phillips, Exploring Genesis, 63.

14

Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 104.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Currid, John D. A Study Commentary on Genesis. Webster, NY: Evangelical Press, 2003.
Enns, Peter. The Evolution of Adam. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2012.
Fuller, Andrew. Three Discourses on Genesis. The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
5, no. 3 (2001): 76-84.
Longman, Tremper, III. How to Read Genesis. Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press,
2005.
Morris, Henry M. The Genesis Record. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1990.
Phillips, John. Exploring Genesis. Chicago: Moody Press, 1980.
Ross, Allen P. Creation and Blessing. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996.
Schneider, John R. Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins: An
'Aesthetic' Supralapsarianism. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 62, no. 3
(2010): 196-211.
Waltke, Bruce K. Genesis: A Commentary. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001.
Wenham, Gordon J. Genesis 1-15. Word Biblical Commentary, Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987.