The first thing sin does is destroy innocence. Innocence is that quality of being free from blame. It means to be pure, virtuous, above suspicion. Just think of the verses we just read there in I John 3. It means to be pure, virtuous, above suspicion. It means to be simple, fresh, undefiled, completely harmless. An innocent person is one whom others feel no sense of threat to be around. There is no fear, no competition with that person.
This illustration is showing us that no one can ever be quite the same after one has sinned with knowledge. Notice they sinned after God instructed them. Nobody had to tell them. They knew. Do you know why? Their conscience that had been educated by God convicted them. This is why I said a little bit earlier, when we sin with knowledge, the psychological effects - the damage - is much greater than when a person sins in ignorance.
Nobody had to tell Adam and Eve they sinned. They knew. They now looked at things in a different light from the way they did before, and a sense of wrongfulness rushed in on them immediately. A moment before, brethren, they had been friendly and joyful, and all of the garden seemed to be obedient to their every wish. Suddenly there was guilt and fear, and it seemed as though every creature in the garden was witness to their act, condemning them. They felt exposed, and they tried to hide. Separation from the purity of God began immediately. The virtue of their innocence began to lose its vitality. In Psalm 40, David wrote a few interesting things in regard to this:
Does that remind you of Adam and Eve? Did David feel guilty? Did he feel condemned? Did he feel unworthy? What does a child do when he is caught telling a lie? He hides his face. What do criminals do when they are taken out of the police car and the television cameras are there taking a picture of them while they are hauled off into the corridor, or whatever? They pull their jackets over their faces. They try to hide. They turn. They know. The innocence is gone.
Why are children so adorable? Do you know what it is we love about them? It is the beauty of their innocence. What happens on our trip to adulthood? Sin changes our view. It changes the way we look at life. We become distrustful, sophisticated, worldly, competitive, cosmopolitan, cynical, suspicious, sarcastic, prejudiced, self-centered, cool, and uninvolved. Sin drives people apart, and it creates fear. Sin and its companion - worldliness - does that to us.
The result of the sin was hiding from God, desperately attempting not to be in His company. But God was up to the task here. He knew what was going on. Let us drop down to verse 22 after He gives the curses on the serpent and then on the woman and the man.
God could not just have them hide from Him. He had to go farther than this because of their sin. Because of their sin they were no longer fit to dwell in His presence. They were no longer fit to dwell in His garden, the place of His abode, you would say. They could not live with the symbol of the Tree of Life so close. They had to be guarded from it. So they were shown the door because they had shown their hand. They did not love God, at least not to the measure that they were supposed to - with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their mind. They would not love Him. It is pretty evident that they had made up their mind that they would go their own way.
The result was not what He was looking for: two becoming one. Now it was them going their own way. There was disunion, not unity, there was divorce, there was separation between the two parties, that is, God and man. His purpose of two becoming one would not work in an environment of hatred, of disobedience, and of selfishness. So He cut off man's access to Him. That was the penalty. Man has been cut off ever since.
In Genesis 3, from the very beginning, we find evidence of opposition to God. By following Satan's misdirection, Adam and Eve found themselves in opposition to God, and they attempted to hide from Him. However, a critical choice had been made. According to Romans 5, the same choice has been made by every one of us to join in opposition to God rather than submitting to Him.
This is kind of interesting, because immediately after sin, and the knowledge of what they had done begins to enter, they immediately begin to make do. Adapt things. This is illustrated by them making clothing for themselves. Remember that quality of clothing is later used in the Bible as a symbol of the quality of righteousness; and making do is showing you and me that going in the direction…they were creating their own standards of righteousness. And then, to add insult to injury, they hid from God when they knew He was about.
Remember that Jesus later said, I am truth. They hid themselves from truth, and all the while they were making do. What we are looking at here are the world's major spiritual, moral, and ethical characteristics.
There are two things that happened here that changed our relationship with God and each other. They go hand-in-hand with what has been the point so far in this sermon, because they are both, perhaps, the most significant part of the problems we face today. There is failure to stand by the decisions not to be disturbed in the truth of God's Word. And there is a drive away from God by Satan's own self-deception of, This is your right!
Brethren, we live in such divisive times that are only getting worse as rights are being demanded, and the making of decisions that are not built on truth, but on what is best for our side and convincing others that it is to ensure our rights! Do we really think that we can make proper decisions based on the truth of God's Word as long as we hold on to the this is my right, attitude that is trumpeted all around us throughout this world from all sides?
Well, immediately, they noticed that they should be ashamed - that they were naked, that they did not have anything on in front of this other person, and they were ashamed of it. It is interesting that that was the first thing that registered with them - a sexual thing.
Another effect was that they wanted to hide from God - that they had some dirty little secret that they did not want God to know. There was some part of their lives that they wanted to put in a closet and not reveal to anyone. And so we can see immediately that the gap between men and God was widening at an ever-increasing speed.
