When man received the probationary law in paradise, the imminent reality of his fall was inescapable, otherwise the law would have been given only positively. Adam was commanded not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because he was made with a weakness. The law did not guarantee further perfection and righteousness; rather, as Augustine wrote, “Prohibition increases the desire of illicit action.”¹ John Calvin commented that when the law came to man with a threat, it was not enough to maintain man’s original rectitude nor to avoid the fall:

Then, by denouncing punishment, he strikes terror, for the purpose of confirming the authority of the law. So much greater, then, is the wickedness of man, whom neither that kind commemoration of the gifts of God, nor the dread of punishment, was able to retain in his duty.²

Instead of providing a way to higher perfection and eternal bliss for Adam, the law was the strength of sin (1 Cor. 15:56). Man, though perfect, was created with a weakness, that is, he was lapsible. But such a weakness was not present in the person of Jesus Christ. He is the perfect Adam. And as to Christ’s person, he is pure thesis. It is not superfluous to assert that, unlike Adam, Christ received from God only the positive aspect of the law, that is, to love God with all his heart, strength, soul, and mind. Christ knew no sin. Together with the truth that Christ never sins, cannot sin, and has no sin in him is the idea that he does not know sin as the law is the knowledge of sin. Prohibition gives the creature the knowledge of what sin is. Jesus Christ knows no prohibition. In the fellowship of the triune God, there is no prohibition. Only a lapsible creature deserves a prohibition. The law was like a fence restricting man within the will of God and guarding him from going outside that will. Ever since man’s creation, his liberty has consisted in the will of God. To do anything contrary to that will is slavery and imprisonment.

Our Lord Jesus Christ is not a lapsible creature. He is perfect—the highest perfection of human life. God never commands Christ, “Thou shalt not…” God’s Son in human flesh as the mediator does not have a weak nature nor a tendency to transgress God’s will. On the contrary, man—a mere creature, though perfectly made in the image of his creator—has a weak nature and a tendency to disobey. Only Christ is pure and perfect in the highest sense.³

Since man could fall into sin due to the weakness of his nature, he actually fell. He was created above the earthly creation, but he immediately fell into sin and subjected the entire creation to sin. He took heed to the lies of the devil and made himself the devil’s servant. After despising the image of God with which man was created, he willingly clothed himself with the image of the devil. God commanded man to love God with all man’s being and to serve God alone, but through the instigation of the devil, man fell drastically and became totally depraved and wicked. Since the fall man cannot choose God and his Christ. And part of man’s misery is his inability to do good.

Evil upon evil is the life of man since the fall. Whatever he thinks and wills serves only his flesh. No mere creature can save man from this misery. By nature man is hopeless and destitute of righteousness and holiness. Ultimately, man became totally depraved. Judgment came upon him and his posterity—as the juridical head of the human race, his sin is reckoned to every human being. Life in man is death. He is not in any sense a friend of God; by nature it is impossible for man to have fellowship with God. The tree of life, where God had communed with man, became distant scenery because of sin. Man became so wicked that God could no longer have fellowship with him in paradise, and thus man was expelled from God’s sight—from paradise. Spiritually dead, man became alienated from God. Being spiritually dead, what remains is man’s natural state. Man is now rightly called the “natural man,” who “receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).

Prof. D. Engelsma asserted the same truth:

When Adam sinned, he separated himself from God, the good One and the source of all goodness. Yes, and God punished Adam by banishing him from Himself, particularly from God revealed in the tree of life. Adam lost the goodness with which God had created him. Adam lost all the spiritual abilities with which he was enabled and ennobled by his creation. Adam’s nature became wicked. His entire human being became incapable of any good. Adam died spiritually. Adam was a dead stick on the ground in paradise, separated from the vine, who is God.⁴

Sin is always committed in relationship to God.⁵ As the covenant God, Jehovah designed the creation and put man in paradise in a relationship to God. All things were made not in separate existence from their creator but always dependent upon the life that God eternally has in himself. Thus all things move and live in relationship to him, so that when the moral, ethical creatures in heaven and on earth fell, the sin committed ultimately was against God alone. The psalmist is convicted of this when he confesses before Jehovah, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight” (Ps. 51:4).

Natural men have the “work of the law” written in their hearts, that is, their consciences bear witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accuse or else excuse one another (Rom. 2:15). The conscience of man is the tribunal where God sits as judge, condemning every work of man. Man does not have the law of God written in his heart. Only those who have been regenerated by the Spirit of Christ have the law written in their hearts. Rather, the conscience of man accuses him day and night. And it will surely drag him down to utter judgment when Christ comes again to judge the living and the dead and all the books are opened (Rev. 20:12). Man’s conscience will be opened like a book, and plainly written there will be his guilt and transgressions and all his works that were done without faith. All men will be judged according to the work of the law in their hearts. The law surely will be against them on that day because Jesus Christ is not their righteousness and justification.

Though man has the vestiges of the knowledge of God (Belgic Confession 14; Canons of Dordt 3–4.4), he cannot discern his errors. “Instead of knowledge of God there has come darkness and the lie.”⁶ Man cannot see his misery and depravity before the just, holy, and merciful God in the sense that man cannot repent of his sinful condition nor humble himself because of that misery. David needed the wonder of grace to realize his sins and to recognize that every sin that he committed was against God alone (Ps. 51). Nevertheless, the conscience of man, even apart from grace, is enough to testify against man that his works are wicked and disapproved of God. Man’s conscience leaves him without excuse because God sits there convicting him to death. Because man has no grace and faith of Jesus Christ, man suppresses those vestiges of the knowledge of God in order to remain willingly in darkness despite the coming judgment upon all reprobate, wicked men and all workers of iniquity.⁷ Despite the knowledge of the coming judgment, he still develops in sin. “Sin is not a substance.”⁸ That sin is not a substance means that it does not exist in itself, but sin develops in a substance with a moral, rational soul—man—so that sin develops according to the operation of the nature of the creature.

This is explained simply by Rev. Nathan Langerak:

In that extreme wickedness man can also grow and develop. Man’s depravity is his spiritual death. Just as a dead corpse can rot, so can the totally depraved sinner become worse in his sin. As a rebel against God, man assiduously cultivates his life of rebellion and sin, testing his life apart from God in the ways of wickedness, and advancing in it both personally and socially until the cup of iniquity is full.⁹

Man cannot escape the fact that his sins are against God alone because man’s fall into sin did not separate him from God in the absolute sense. Though spiritually separated from God and his intimate, covenant fellowship of love, man is still related to God. Fundamentally, man stands related to God by virtue of his creation.¹⁰ No creature exists apart from his creator. Man remains and will continue to remain related to God; however, man is no longer God’s friend-servant but his enemy who only exists in relationship to God as his creator and judge. The relationship radically changed into the complete opposite of friendship.

This was also the assertion of Hoeksema and Danhof:

The sinner is an enemy of God, and apart from regeneration, he does not allow himself to be changed into a friend of God. He is also treated by God as an enemy.¹¹

Man became destitute of that intimate fellowship he once had with Jehovah in paradise. Man spiritually died immediately and was expelled from paradise where Jehovah had communed with him in all liberty and grace. And this alienation from God is the source of death in man.¹² For to be in intimate communion with God is life. God is a covenant God in himself, and his harmonious life was revealed to man as communion with God in paradise at the tree of life, which was comparable to the holy of holies in the temple.¹³ As bearer of the image of God, life for man is God himself.¹⁴ But because of sin, man died spiritually and was alienated.

Threatened by death—“for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17)—Adam experienced death because God would never let sin go unpunished, for “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Grammatically, the Hebrew word construction in Genesis 2:17 suggests that more than one death was declared. The word מוּת (mooth), which means to die, is not in the dual form but is repeated in the very last part of the verse to indicate more than one sense of the word “die.” God said, “For in the day thou eat from it, dying thou shalt die.” It was clear to Adam that this death was more than a physical death. It was clear that it was more than an annihilation of earthly existence. Rather, it included also spiritual death, that according to which Adam became liable to physical and eternal death.

Augustine commented on this probationary command of God to Adam, asserting that more than one death was inflicted on man because of his disobedience:

When, therefore, God said to that first man whom he had placed in Paradise, referring to the forbidden fruit, “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,” that threatening included not only the first part of the first death, by which the soul is deprived of God; nor only the subsequent part of the first death, by which the body is deprived of the soul; nor only the whole first death itself, by which the soul is punished in separation from God and from the body; —but it includes whatever of death there is, even to that final death which is called second, and to which none is subsequent.¹⁵

Adam earned these deaths, so to speak, by just one act of disobedience to God’s probationary law. Adam then bore the wrath of God.

Hoeksema and Danhof rightly asserted the same truth concerning the death of man:

This bearing of wrath brings about separation from God. Thus, the essence of death does not consist in the separation of soul and body, or a severing of that which naturally belongs together, nor even in a local separation, but it is a spiritual disharmony with and spiritual separation from God.¹⁶

The paradisal narrative of Genesis fundamentally includes the historic fall of man. As one can observe, the probationary law, the temptation of the serpent, and the heavy penalty for disobedience all involved eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Some will deny the historicity of the narrative and the inclusion of the prohibited tree. Philo, for instance, believed that the Genesis account concerning creation is figurative or a mere allegory:

And these statements appear to me to be dictated by a philosophy which is symbolical rather than strictly accurate. For no trees of life or of knowledge have ever at any previous time appeared upon the earth, nor is it likely that any will appear hereafter. But I rather conceive that Moses was speaking in an allegorical spirit, intending by his paradise to intimate the dominant character of the soul, which is full of innumerable opinions as this figurative paradise was of trees.¹⁷

Such a denial of the account of Genesis disrupts all the elements and steps of the fall. This was also the assertion of Homer Hoeksema:

We must emphasize from the outset that this tree was a real tree. It was that, or it was nothing. It was perceptible to the senses, or it had no reality whatsoever; in the latter case, all that stands connected with that tree–the command of the Lord God, the threatened penalty of death, and temptation, the eating of that tree, and sin–have no reality either. Besides, if the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not real, then neither is the tree of life, which is mentioned in the same breath with this tree, nor are all the other trees concerning which we read specifically that the Lord God made them to grow out of the ground and that they were pleasant to the sight and good for food. Every presentation that would deny in one way or another the reality of these trees is a Bible-contradicting and faith-destroying concept. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, unique though it was, was a real tree.¹⁸

To deny that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was real is an absurd notion that makes man to be someone who could not fall since he was given only one choice: to eat freely from every tree of the garden, including the tree of life. Moreover, through the probationary command of God concerning the tree of knowledge, God was working out his good pleasure that man would not remain in paradise and that man and Eden were not the culmination of all things. This signifies that Jesus Christ always has been at the heart of God’s counsel, even during the dreadful event of the fall. According to God’s eternal will and purpose in Jesus Christ, man had to sin.

The assertion that man had to sin in paradise negates the notion that God is the author of sin. It is such a mystery why the perfectly made servants of God, like Lucifer and his minions, thought so highly of themselves that they rebelled against Jehovah. The same holds true with man, who was made a little lower than the angels but above the earthly creation regarding his dignity and glory. In his pride man thought himself to be as sufficient as God and to decide what was good and evil for himself. The answer to this apparent mystery is unattainable “by inquisitively prying into the secret and deep things of God” (Canons of Dordt 1.12, in Confessions and Church Order, 157), but it is revealed to God’s people through his spoken word. However, the purpose of any inquiry always must avoid the hackneyed accusation that God is the author of sin, for he eternally determined the plight of man at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Through the mind of Christ, which is ours by faith, when the knowledge of God makes its ascent, we should hear the voice of Jehovah graciously revealing to us that the secret things belong to him.¹⁹

We are reminded by John Calvin that

although God in all his works does not demonstrate to us by plain and satisfactory arguments his own righteousness, our bounden duty is to be assured that whatever he does, he does righteously. It is therefore our duty to rest in God’s will alone. Thus our knowledge of his will and pleasure in whatever he does, although the cause of his doing it should surpass our comprehension, ought to suffice us more than a thousand reasons.²⁰

Faith humbles the believer at the incomprehensibility of the Lord. We should put our shoes from off our feet, for whenever we are in contact with the word of God, the place whereon we stand is holy ground. Thus regarding the origin of sin, the blame should be put solely on man (including the fallen angels), but the explanation always should be provided in relationship to God’s sovereign and eternal purpose in Jesus Christ without making God the author of sin. But keep in mind that “the Scriptures teach very plainly that the Lord, although he certainly is not the author of sin, nevertheless controls absolutely all the wicked deeds of evil men.”²¹

Why did man fall into sin? According to God’s determinate counsel, man must sin; God willed that man must sin. Is God then the author of sin by ordaining the entrance of sin into paradise?

By no means; but God created man good, and after His own image, in true righteousness and holiness, that he might rightly know God his Creator, heartily love Him, and live with Him in eternal happiness to glorify and praise Him. (Heidelberg Catechism, A 6, in Confessions and Church Order, 85)

Moreover, God commanded Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—all goodness was provided for him!

God created man as a moral, ethical creature so that man might consciously serve and know his creator. Man was put in paradise as a living soul to walk freely on earth and to subdue all things to serve his creator. But because man was not created to remain forever in that original but earthly rectitude—that is, he was made unto salvation according to God’s electing love—man had to then fall into sin, which would happen without the coercion of God.

Regarding the will of God’s command, his will was that man not sin. But regarding his eternal counsel and the will of his decree, God nevertheless accomplished what he had determined before time. Adam could ascribe the fall only to his own willful sin. Never did Adam feel that God had forced him to sin. God never forces anyone to sin. Though God sovereignly governs even the hearts of men, he does so without tainting himself with wickedness and deceit. Experience can attest to the fact that the depravity of the whole human being should suffice as the sole source of wickedness.

John Calvin contended that the fall happened according to God’s will, but man is the one to be blamed for that wickedness:

Adam could not but fall; according to the foreknowledge, and will of God. What then!–is Adam, on that account, freed from fault? Certainly not. He fell by his own full free will; and by his own willing act.²²

Thus, even in the way of sin, God sovereignly is there, assuring that nothing happens by chance but by his eternal purpose in Jesus Christ.

This is evident by the prophecy of John, when he says, “All that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). The book of life is determined through eternal predestination—to which belong divine election and reprobation—and the book was determined even before the foundation of the world. Whether “from the foundation of the world” refers to God’s eternal counsel of creation or to the time before the creative act of God clearly makes no difference. The idea is that there are those whose names were not written in the book of life, and we infer not only that the cause was reprobation but also that their reprobation was in relationship to Jesus Christ’s death. The Son, according to God’s eternal purpose, died exclusively for the elect even before all beginnings. It is quite inescapable that the purpose of the fall in paradise was governed by eternal predestination. And if Christ was slain from the foundation of the world, that means that sin had to enter paradise so that the first man fell together with all his posterity. So the must of the fall should be ascribed only to God’s eternal counsel and not to his prescriptive will of command given to Adam in paradise in Genesis 2:16–17.

Arthur Pink even contended that Adam should do the eating from the forbidden tree.²³

This is also the observation of Robert Harbach in his commentary on Genesis 2:15:

“To keep it” implies a danger which threatened Adam and Eve in the garden. Adam had to protect it against the inroads of God’s great adversary. Adam in his work was instructed to watch against the approach of Satan.²⁴

The fall was imminent already when man was put in paradise to keep it. God foreknew that Satan would approach paradise in the very near future. The devil’s coming was at hand; he was already on course, and the next event in God’s decreed schedule was the fall. The devil’s coming was imminent, and Adam would have to protect the cause of God against Satan and sin. But because of unbelief, when the devil arrived at the exact place where God had given the probationary law to Adam and said to man, “Eat!” man altogether despised his God.

Nevertheless, the fall happened by God’s divine providence. By this truth we ever are comforted that even sin was an instrument in the hand of God to bring his elect people into a higher, more blissful life than what our first parents had in paradise. The purpose was always the salvation of Christ’s elect church. The elect are saved in the way of sin so that Jesus Christ might be exalted as the savior from sin and death. This, I know, is a bold statement but one not made without great cause and care: I contend that Adam sinned for the sake of Jesus Christ—the fall was perfectly and infallibly carried out to serve the cause of God and his Christ.

When Adam sinned he destroyed himself, but his sin was not personally unto eternal death and damnation. “All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death” (1 John 5:17). I am not minimizing the sin of Adam. God forbid. But he had to die to pave the way for a much higher expression of life, which is only found in the last Adam, who was made a quickening spirit. Adam sinned for the sake of Jesus Christ—for the sake of the salvation Christ would bring according to what God had determined in eternity. This I intend to treat next time, the Lord willing.