2. The Fall (Genesis 3:1-24).

by Wesley Blackburn

And now, only one day into these 100 days of readings, we are already at mankind’s darkest hour. The Fall.

Reading this passage, I actually see several things; a few I’d never really thought about before. First off, I see one technique that the devil uses to cause us to stumble, and that’s distrust. When we stop trusting God wholly and completely, that is just a recipe for bad stuff to happen. Look at the serpent’s first words to Eve in 3:1 - “did God really say...?” But it doesn’t just stop there. The serpent continues to cultivate distrust in God by essentially saying in verse 5 that God just doesn’t want Eve to eat the fruit of the tree because He wants to have the corner on the market of truth. Essentially, in this scenario, God is being painted as a figure who is holding stuff back from his people. He wants to be top dog, and He doesn’t want Adam and Eve to have this supposedly awesome thing.

But that’s where fall in all of us begins:

• Did God really say that?
• Does God really have a problem with this? It sees so innocent.
• Do I really believe that?
• Does God really know what He’s talking about?
• Does God really have my best interests in mind?

When I look at my life and when I see my greatest sins, I can usually see questions like these lying at the root. Yeah, sin is a complex issue, but after reading the story of the fall, I have a feeling that at its very root, all sin comes down to trust. It’s easy enough to trust God with my eternity... after all, I don’t have a say in that anyway. But it’s a lot harder to trust God with my life. That’s where we need to make the real determination about what we really believe about God, about life, about what’s important, and about ourselves.

But I think that the fall shows us another thing. The fall is my story.

It’s really easy to be tough on Adam and Eve. After all, they just had to not eat something. Doesn’t seem like too tough an assignment. But really, I’m the same way. God’s given all of us a simple to understand task (to love God and love other people; Matthew 22:34-40), but we totally fail at it. And what’s more, when we fail, we act just like Adam... we blame everyone and everything else. This story is one of the reasons I believe the Bible. It’s just too brutally honest about the human condition. It only takes two chapters before we find a way to make the bottom fall out. That’s too true. Just like Adam and just like Eve, we try to take control of our own lives and then when everything screws up, we pass the buck.

Just last night, I was really talking in prayer to God about how scary I find it that within me, I have the capacity to do the greatest of good, but also the vilest of evils. It’s also scary to me how things can be cruising along just fine and dandy, and then all of a sudden, without warning, I can just turn on God. The fall makes me realize just how deeply sin is woven into me... and it makes me rely on Jesus because the fall draws me to a realization that only Jesus can ever cure my sin problem.