The Fall of Adam and Eve
We said that God created Adam and Eve, our first parents, in a state of perfection. What happened? God allowed their trust and their love for Him to be tested. Why did God do that? It was because He intended for them to have freedom. Without freedom, you cannot love because love needs to be a free choice. A robot cannot love you because a robot doesn’t really have a choice; it can only do what’s programmed. Only a free creature can truly love.
What God desires from us is not just our worship or admiration or respect, and certainly not any of our material goods, but what God desires from us is our love. He wants to invite us into a communion of love with Himself. Again, that love requires freedom. Love requires an ability and a choice to be able to not love. So, although the creation was perfect, God did include within it an opportunity for Adam and Eve, should they so desire, not to choose love. That is what we find taking place in Genesis 3.
We observe the serpent whom Scripture and Tradition later identify as the devil or Satan (Revelation 12:9; 20:2). This serpent tempted Adam and Eve to distrust and to disobey God their Father by encouraging them to eat the fruit which God had forbidden for them. The Scriptures say that Eve saw the fruit and she recognized that it was good for food and pleasing to the eye and desirable to make one wise (Genesis 3:6). This is the origin of what we call “concupiscence,” that weakness within ourselves that leads us to sin.
The traditional exposition of concupiscence is that it breaks down into three basic categories: lust of the flesh, lust to the eyes, and pride of life. We get those categories from 1 John 2:15-16. The Apostle, when he writes those verses, is really reflecting on the temptation that Eve experienced in the Garden. Seeing that the fruit was good for food, refers to physical desire and that is lust of the flesh. Seeing that it was pleasing to the eye is a correspondence to lust of the eyes, which we usually describe as avarice or greed (the desire to acquire things for their beauty or their value). Then, the desirability of the fruit to make one as wise as God, that is really an ego-trip, wanting to become a rival of God in terms of His omniscience. That is pride, which is the third of the aspects of concupiscence.
Tempted by the serpent, who we know to be Satan or the devil, Adam and Eve gave in to the three-fold concupiscence. They desired this fruit, they ate it, and by doing so, they acted in a way of distrust and disobedience to God, their loving Father. It had the following results:
- It broke the family relationship with God;
- It lost them the Holy Spirit, along with the loss of original justice and the preternatural gifts (perfections that they enjoyed in their human person);
- The implantation of concupiscence into their nature. Now, there’s weakness in these three-fold aspects that would be part of their very being that would be transmitted to their children.
Despite these sadnesses, and despite these tragic results of the fall into sin and this rupture in the family relationship with God their Father, there is some good news already.
Immediately after the fall into sin and the breaking of the relationship, we find in Genesis 3:15, where in placing a curse upon the serpent (who is Satan), God the Father says to Adam and Eve (and really to the whole world) that there will be enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, but the seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head. In hindsight, we recognize that this is a mystical prophecy of our salvation, of the coming of the Christ, of the coming of Jesus who is the seed of the woman. There is no seed of a man involved in His generation. He was born and conceived by a virgin alone. Being the true seed of the woman, He is the one in human history to crush the head of the serpent who is the evil one, the tempter. That’s precisely what Jesus does through the Paschal Mystery which we will describe and explore in much greater depth in a few more lessons.
After the fall into sin on the part of Adam and Eve, things basically degrade from bad to worse in the intervening centuries. We quickly see the first murder with Cain and Abel. Human society degenerates following that until a few centuries and generations later, when we arrive at Genesis 6:1-5. Here, we find that the entire world is filled with a kind of sexualized violence. It becomes so bad that God has to intervene to keep human history, as it were, from careening off the rails into a great disaster. That will lead us into our next discussion in our next covenant which is the covenant with Noah.
Why is the Fall important for evangelism? As I mentioned with the Adamic covenant, it’s important for all of us to realize that the mess, the evil, the sorrow, the violence, etc. that we see around us in human society, are not due to God’s original plan of creation. They were not invented or formed or made by God. These woes, these sufferings, these challenges are the result of our choices, in fact the choice of our first parents. They are perpetuated by our own choices. Not only is the fall into sin of Adam and Eve an historical event, but it’s also a kind of paradigm of how we undergo temptation on an almost daily basis.
At any given moment in our daily lives we are often faced with something that is attractive, a sin that draws on us, that pulls on our lust of our flesh, the lust of our eyes, our pride. So often throughout even our daily lives we repeat that fall into sin of our first parents and that perpetuates the woes that we see in the culture, the society, the world around us. It is human wrongdoing that is the major problem in the universe, not God’s activity, not God’s creativity. The solution to our own sorrow and to the sorrow of those around us is a healing of the human heart and finding a way to be free from this sad reality that we call sin.