Daily Devotional

“Do you think Adam would have sinned if God had never created Eve?” asked one of my students a few Sundays ago. In some sense, it may be an unhelpful question: to quote Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia, “no one is ever told what would have happened.” This student may be on to something, however: a deep dive into Scripture will show some aspects to the story of the Fall that we may not have considered before.

In 1 Timothy 2:14, Paul implies that in eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve sinned for different reasons. “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived.” When we look at Genesis 3:1-6, we see the serpent direct his temptation to Eve specifically (“he said to the woman,” v. 2, 4). The serpent’s lie is just enough to cause Eve to question what God has told her. Eve chooses to eat the fruit because “the tree was good for food... a delight to the eyes... and desired to make one wise.” In other words, Eve let the allure of the fruit and the words of the serpent make her distrust what she had heard from God. Eve disobeyed because she was deceived into thinking she knew better than God about the benefits of eating the forbidden fruit. This substitution of our judgment for God’s is ultimately a form of idolatry.

Did Adam disobey for the same reasons? Consider one of the most famous literary depictions of the scene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In Milton’s rendering, Eve comes to Adam, half-eaten fruit in hand, and invites her to join him. Adam is initially horrified, knowing Eve is now under the curse of “you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:17) But rather than lose Eve, Adam chooses to join her in sin:

How can I live without thee…
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart.

It’s possible that Adam chose to follow Eve into sin out of misplaced love for her. But Milton’s depiction misses a feature of the text. Genesis 3:7 says that Eve “gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” In other words, Adam heard the serpent’s entire temptation, and yet 1 Timothy tells us “he was not deceived.” Yes, Adam’s love for Eve may have influenced his decision, but in the end he ate the fruit eyes wide open, knowing fully well the consequences. If idolatry was Eve’s sin, Adam’s was rebellion. He chose to live in a world of his making, not God’s: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”

Consider this from another angle: twice in this passage Adam abdicates his God-given responsibility. God put Adam in the Garden of Eden to “work it and keep it” (Gen 3:15). Keep here has the idea of guard or watch. When Adam heard the serpent begin to cause his wife to question God’s truth and goodness, he should have moved to protect his family and his kingdom. I think Adam would have been perfectly justified to reach into the tree, grab the snake by the tail, and curb-stomp him in the head. But Adam failed to become the Snake Crusher.

Second, Adam failed in his responsibility to save Eve. At the moment when Eve eats the fruit, she becomes a sinner, subject to a death curse. What is Adam to do? Does he go to God and offer himself in Eve’s place, the sinless dying in place of the sinner? No. Adam fails to become the perfect sacrifice.

In the aftermath of Adam and Eve’s idolatry and rebellion, however, God makes a promise. Someone will succeed where Adam failed. A Snake Crusher is coming: “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” (Genesis 3:15). This verse, sometimes called the protoevangelion (first gospel) may be the first indication of God’s grand story of redemption, but it’s not the only one in this passage. Remember God told Adam that “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die”? But Adam and Eve didn’t die immediately. How? The text says that God “made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them” (v. 21). Last I checked, animals don’t give up their skins willingly. An innocent sacrifice died in Adam and Eve’s place on that day. Here in the earliest chapters of the Bible, an indication is given of how the Snake Crusher will undo the curse of sin—through substitutionary, sinless sacrifice.

Jesus, the “last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45) did what Adam could not. Faced with the same situation – a bride (the Church) guilty of sin and under a death curse, Jesus willingly offered Himself as a sacrifice to pay the penalty and redeem His bride. “God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Then He rose from the dead, triumphing over the forces of sin, Satan, and death (Hebrews 2:14). Jesus is our Snake Crusher and our Sinless Sacrifice... truly the last Adam.

Today, take a moment to thank Jesus for His work of redemption on our behalf... a work that was foreshadowed all the way back in Genesis 3!

"English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers."