The Temptation And The Fall

Questions This Sermon Answers:

1. What was the serpent's strategy in Genesis 3?

The serpent's opening question — "Did God actually say...?" (Genesis 3:1) — targeted the authority and goodness of God's word. He first introduced doubt ("Did God say?"), then misrepresented the prohibition (implying God had banned all trees), then denied the consequence ("You will not surely die"), and finally impugned God's motive ("God knows that... you will be like God"). The strategy moves from doubt to distortion to denial to accusation. Jesus identified Satan as "the father of lies" (John 8:44) — Genesis 3 is where lying began.

2. What was Eve's failure?

Eve's failure was believing the serpent's reinterpretation of God's word over God's actual word. She also added to the prohibition — God said not to eat; she reported that God said not to touch (Genesis 3:3) — a subtle legalism that can actually undermine the original command. She "saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise" (3:6) — an appeal to appetite, aesthetics, and ambition, the three channels through which temptation consistently operates (compare 1 John 2:16).

3. What was Adam's failure?

Genesis 3:6 records that Adam "was with her" when Eve took and ate the fruit — he was present during the conversation and the decision. His failure was not ignorance but abdication: he failed to exercise headship, failed to correct the serpent's distortion, and "listened to the voice of his wife" (Genesis 3:17) — not wrong in itself, but catastrophic in this context. Paul interprets the Fall's significance through Adam, not Eve (Romans 5:12): "through one man sin entered the world." The representative head's failure determines the outcome for all he represents.

4. What is the Protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15?

Genesis 3:15 — "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel" — is called the Protoevangelium: the first gospel. In God's curse on the serpent, He embeds a promise: a descendant of the woman will strike the serpent a mortal blow (head), even while suffering injury himself (heel). This is the first prediction of Christ's victory over Satan — achieved at the cross, where Satan "bruised" Christ's heel (death) and Christ crushed Satan's head (resurrection, defeating death). The rest of Scripture is the story of how this promise is fulfilled.

5. What are the consequences of the Fall?

The Fall's consequences are comprehensive: spiritual death (separation from God), physical mortality ("to dust you shall return"), relational fracture (Adam blames Eve; she blames the serpent), painful toil in work and childbirth, and exile from the Garden. Westminster Confession 6.2 states that Adam and Eve, by their fall, "fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body." The doctrine of total depravity — that every dimension of human nature is affected by sin — is derived from Genesis 3.

6. Why did God clothe Adam and Eve?

Their attempt to cover themselves with fig leaves (Genesis 3:7) was inadequate — leaves wither. God made "garments of skin" and clothed them (Genesis 3:21). This required the death of an animal — the first sacrifice, the first shedding of blood. God provided what human effort could not: a covering adequate to the problem of shame before His holiness. This act prefigures the gospel: human beings cannot cover their own shame; God provides a covering through sacrificial blood. The progression runs from fig leaves to animal skins to the righteousness of Christ imputed to sinners by faith.

7. What does the expulsion from Eden mean?

Expulsion from Eden was both judgment and mercy. Judgment: the intimacy of walking with God in the cool of the day was forfeited. Mercy: God drove them out before they could eat from the tree of life and be eternally fixed in their fallen state (Genesis 3:22–23). The exile from Eden is the condition of all humanity east of the Garden — separated from God, east of the place of His blessing. The entire biblical narrative from Genesis 4 to Revelation 22 is the story of how God brings His people back — and restores not just the Garden but a glorified, uncursed new creation.

8. How does Genesis 3 explain the world as we experience it?

Genesis 3 answers the question every person eventually asks: why is there suffering, evil, and death in a world made by a good God? The answer is not that God made the world this way — He made it "very good." The answer is that the world as we experience it is not as God made it — it is a fallen version of the original. Pain, conflict, decay, and death are not God's original design; they are the consequences of human rebellion. This is simultaneously a profound diagnosis and a profound hope: if the world's brokenness is the consequence of a historical fall, it can be addressed by a historical redemption.