Genesis 3:8-13
8And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” 10And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” 11He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Why didn’t Adam and Eve die when they ate the fruit? Didn’t God say that they would? This is an old question and the answer is a simple one. They did. We are all born in sin and the Scriptures are clear that that sinful nature is death. We are born into the world dead in trespasses and sins and Adam and Eve were the first to experience it and they passed it on to all who have ever been born. Many claim this is unfair. But this is just the way things are. Just as our parents pass on skin, hair, and eye colour, so too they pass on a sinful nature.
The fact is, we are born with a propensity to sin. We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners. It’s our nature. This needs to be accepted if we are to understand the Gospel at all. Adam and Eve had a freedom to choose sin in a way that we do not. They did not have a sinful nature. They had complete free will. While we are free to choose good or evil, we are not a blank slate that is unaffected by our hearts desires. We are prone to do the wrong thing, the thing that satisfies the selfish desires of our hearts.
The Gospel is God breaking in upon our lives to save us even before we wanted saving. Scriptures such as Ezekiel 37, John 3:1-19, Ephesians 2:1-10, Romans 5:1-12 and many others, are very clear about this. Salvation is God initiated because we would never seek after God and be able to find Him at all. And this is what we see in Adam and Eve’s case. God comes looking for them. They were not looking for God. They were running away from Him. (Need another example? Think about what the Apostle Paul was on his way to do when God staved him on the road to Damascus.)
What a glory the Gospel is!! He has come to us when we could not and would not go to Him. He has done what we would not and could not do, because we love sin. He set out to rescue us before we even knew we needed rescuing.
Today, as you continue to celebrate Christmas, reflect upon the fact that the Son of God coming into the world is not what any human being would ever have come up with. It is a plan devised in the eternal councils of heaven to rescue a sinful people who were by nature evil and who loved their sins more than they loved God. And He came to those dead ones and redeemed them. What a wonder !!
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