Topical Studies
What the Bible says about
Adam and Eve's Sin
(From Forerunner Commentary)
Genesis 3:6
Worldliness has been described as the love of beauty without a corresponding love of righteousness. This is correct, and comes right out of the “original sin” story that is told in Genesis 3:6. Eve saw that the fruit was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and something to be desired. These three references concern the appeal of beauty. Unfortunately, as the record clearly shows, Adam and Eve did not love righteousness. Also contained in this sin are inferences of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (I John 2:15-17). The love of beauty and the pulls of temptation are inextricably entwined. People do not ordinarily desire ugly things. We have been made by Almighty God to love beauty and to seek it out even though no one's notion of beauty is exactly the same. Beauty is being used in a very broad sense, simply as a term for things that are appealing and have the power to create desire within us. Thus, we desire things we deem beautiful, but the problem is that we do not have a corresponding love of righteousness, like Adam and Eve. We will break the laws of God in order to have what we consider beautiful. Sometimes people commit vicious evils to have what they find appealing and beautiful at the time. Beauty is what is delightful to the senses, gratifying, and evokes admiration and excitement within a person. Therein lies its danger, and it does not matter what one finds delight in. The result of having a love of beauty without a corresponding love of righteousness is, rather than dressing and keeping as we are commanded to do in Genesis 2, that we use and abuse. Unfortunately, much of this abuse is to our own body. Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, the most beautiful spot on earth, because they did not love righteousness. This is a seriously simple, powerful lesson! The beauty was there to behold, even the beauty of the forbidden fruit, luring them. Did God put it there to tempt them into sin? No! He put it there for them to admire and bring glory to the Creator God in their rightful use of it. Instead, they abused their privilege because they did not love righteousness, and the beauty was taken away from them.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Laodiceanism
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Genesis 3:24
Not only were Adam and Eve and their progeny separated from God and removed from dwelling with Him in the Garden of Eden, they were also separated from the source of life, the Tree of Life! The tragic results are evident for anyone to see! Throughout the Bible, God simply and clearly expounds upon the results of sin.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Division, Satan, Humility
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Matthew 16:6
The key to understanding the leaven of the Pharisees (Matthew 16:6, 11-12) does not hinge on their zeal in keeping the law, but on their zeal in finding loopholes to twist it to their own ends. Their motto could have been, "How close can we get to the edge without going over?" We could refer to this practice as brinkmanship (pushing a situation to the limit to force a desired result) or marginalism (taking an extreme position on an issue). A former homiletics teacher, also an avid skier, conveyed to his class an analogy of the Ten Commandments as the boundary markers along the ski trail. Every year, when contemplating the boundary markers at Vail or Aspen, he reflected that only an idiot would ski as close to the edge as he could. Yet this describes many practices of the scribes and Pharisees! The legalist and the lawbreaker both have a morbid curiosity about those boundaries rather than concentrate upon the vast latitude of choices between those markers. This is reminiscent of our parents Adam and Eve developing a morbid curiosity about the one tree that God forbade, ignoring the thousands upon thousands of varieties that He did not forbid (Genesis 2:16-17; 3:1-6). This behavior dwells on the negative and ignores the positive. These examples point out that the spirits of legalism and lawlessness are twin siblings. When we place the critical points of the law/grace and legalism/lawlessness issue in proper perspective, law and grace are powerful allies opposing legalism and lawlessness. They give Christians great freedom to do good for others while also doing what is right.
David F. Maas
Righteousness from Inside-Out
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Romans 5:12
When Adam and Eve sinned, God judged them. Since they were the father and mother of all of mankind, and they were the only representatives of mankind at the time, all of mankind figuratively sinned in Adam and Eve. God's judgment was correct, because given the chance, every human has sinned. What then happened to Adam and Eve? They were ushered out of the Garden, and God put cherubim at its entrance to guard the Garden and the Tree of Life so that nobody could get back in. This is why at times the Bible bids people to return to God when they had never seemingly turned away from Him. Yet, all of mankind did turn away from God in Adam and Eve, and He invites us to return to the place, symbolically, where everything started, back to the environs He occupies, where the Tree of Life is. The relationship with God is everything to our salvation. Without what Christ did in dying for our sins, we would not be in the position to have one with Him. Christ's payment of our sins opens up the way for a relationship to be built and for us to grow in the Holy Spirit, because now we have access to the Tree of Life in a relationship with God.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Holy Spirit and the Trinity (Part Seven)
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Ephesians 1:10
We say that we are "in Christ." We say that there is "one church." We say that there is "one Body," "one Family," "one Kingdom." What is said here in Ephesians 1 is where God is headed with all this. He will unite everybody who has ever been born and makes it into His Kingdom into one—one family, the God Family—one kingdom, the Kingdom of God. The church is simply the beginning of an awesome process—a tremendous project—that will eventually cover the 50 or 60 billion people who have ever lived on the face of this earth. We who are now begotten children of God are at the prow of the ship, as it were, cutting the water as we forge ahead. It is our calling to have gotten in on the ground floor, the very beginning of the process. We have entered the process even before all of the great men and women we have read about in the histories of the nations. They will get their opportunity, but we are way ahead of them. Why has God had to do this? The basic cause is what happened in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve sinned. Sin is disruptive; it divides, and it divided our first parents away from the one Family. As Paul says in Romans 5:12, "All have sinned." We have all sinned—maybe not exactly as Adam and Eve did, but everybody has sinned. We have followed our parents in becoming separated from God. Sin divides away from God, and man from man. The world has been shattered by sin. One could say, then, that the central object of salvation is to reunite all mankind into one Family.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Unity (Part 6): Ephesians 4 (C)
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