The second after sin.
Genesis 3:7
It is amazing that immediately after Adam and Eve choose sin
their eyes are opened. They do not die and at this moment they are filled with
the knowledge of good and evil. It is imperative that we understand that in
God’s economy there are only two kinds of knowledge. You understand them both
at once. But to be sure there is no neutral knowledge. This is the way God lays
it out. This is His hard word but we must get on board because He makes clear
that everything we can know boils down to good or evil. If there were a third
option God would have laid that out for us.
This is troubling for most of us because there is so much
that feels neutral to us. It is this place where most of us reside. Most of us
are not going about our day doing things that are inherently or intuitively
evil. But be sure that if it is not something of, by or for God my guess is
that it falls under the category of evil. And for me it is a struggle as I
write this but I want to fully understand Him, to know His ways and not just be
ok with His ways but desire them fully.
Adam and Eve have eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and
evil. As a result they are changed in an instant and know things that God never
intended for them to know. So there is this element of God that He protects us
from things we should not know. I get that. I do that all the time with my
daughters, especially my oldest who is on the verge of knowing all that the tree of
knowledge reveals. So there is something to this knowledge that is not good for
us. We were not designed to navigate the reality of the knowledge of good and
evil apart from God. That is one really important truth to hold on to. This is
why God sends His Son because He understands that the gap is unbridgeable by
man and if the gap is not bridged then we hopelessly wander toward darkness and
away from light.
From the moment of sin until we see murder is just two
births. We don’t know how old Adam and Eve are when Cain and Abel are born.
(Both those birth lines become unimportant. Which is really interesting when
you think about it.) We do know that Eve gives birth to Seth when Adam is 130
years old. We know they have Seth to replace Abel. It is through the line of
Seth that we move toward Noah. Noah is born 1056 years after Adam is created by God or
roughly 126 years after Adam dies. From the moment of murder until “the Lord
saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intention
of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”(Genesis 6:5) is roughly
1500 years. And since a lifetime at that point was nearly 1000 years that is
not too far removed from creation. In truth, we are talking about six hundred
years give or take after Adam dies. So the point here is that the knowledge of
good and evil without a savior and without the Holy Spirit pretty much leads
only to evil. At least according to God.
It is interesting what the first moment after sin
reveals. Genesis 3:7 tells us,
“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked.” Isn’t that
interesting? The horror that they experienced, the knowledge that was revealed,
was that they were naked. There is something more to this than the symbolic
revelation of their gender difference.
Here is my take. At the heart of our disconnect from God is
an immediate revelation that the flesh has a desire for intimacy.(Lack of a
better term) Once there is a disconnect from the creator (loss of intimacy with
the Father) this desire is played out in the perversion of what was once pure
in the eyes of God. So while all sin in God’s eyes is equally dark the
ramifications of sexual impurity has a deeper impact on our hearts. This
disconnect is at the heart of our lust. Because we have become separated from
God we cannot quench our desire. (Our desire is for intimacy) We are told that
in Him is the fullness of Joy. Apart from Him is only darkness so we cannot
find the joy we would experience in God, So for whatever reason this
unquenchable desire has shown itself throughout history as sexual dysfunction.
To be sure we see our sin played out in many areas but we cannot forget that
Adam and Eve notice nakedness not idolatry or murder, jealousy or any of the
other many possibilities.
We have seen that our selfishness is usually played out
through a sexual dysfunction. It may be something as simple as obsession with
personal beauty or something more devastating like fornication, adultery or
same sex attraction. These things lead to countless other sin issues. The point
here is that this aspect of our sin nature is revealed in the second after the
fall.The truth is that the immediate effect of their sin is a devastating loss of the fullness of joy. And that is played out in the revelation of nakedness and shame. At least that's my take.
So Adam and Eve see that they are naked and they desire to
be clothed. They want to run and hide, they long to be apart from God not with
Him. This is also a critical component of our choosing sin. We have a deep
shame that leads us farther from the creator. We literally head in the other
direction leading to dark. This is the catch 22 that Jesus came to fix. He came
to take our sin and give us His righteousness. Apart from Him there is only
dark. And in the dark there is not a path to light. Contrary to what most believe
there is only one way out of the dark and His name is Jesus. Without Him you
are trapped in the dark forever. In the dark we create an entire system to make
dark feel like light. In the beginning we put on some fig leaves and hope God
won’t notice. After long enough in the dark we forget that God can even see us.
Pretty soon we don’t care that we are naked. In the dark we can’t tell the
difference anymore.
