The Consequences of Sin

Genesis 3:8-24

When we study scripture, we need to remember that the Bible is not a disconnected set of stories, each of which has a little moral about how to live life. Though the Bible compiles the writings of many individuals over a long period of time, it is, in fact, one story—written by God. From the historical accounts in the Old Testament to the miracles and parables recorded in the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible tells this one narrative. Primarily, the Bible is a single story in which God reveals Himself to us by presenting how God created the world, what is wrong with the human race, what God does to remedy it, and how it’s all going to turn out. We could label these four major plot movements: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.

In Genesis 1-2 we saw the first of these themes: creation, how God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them, then placed man and woman in the garden of Eden as rulers over His creation. God created everything good and provided all that man needed. These chapters told us why everything exists.

As we saw last time, Genesis 3 introduces the second theme, the fall of humanity into sin. It tells what is wrong with the human race, why the human race is so prone to selfishness, violence, wars, atrocity, and corruption. In Genesis 3:1-7 we saw the temptation of the serpent which also showed us how we are tempted to sin: Satan challenges the authority of God’s word; impugns God’s character; denies God’s judgment; and peddles half-truths. We then saw how Adam and Eve sinned by distrusting and disobeying God. They took and ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which God had commanded them not to eat. Immediately their eyes were opened to their sin and shame so they tried to cover themselves and hide.

So today we resume the story in Genesis 3:8,

8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” 10 So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.” 11 And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?” 12 Then the man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.” 13 And the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

14 So the Lord God said to the serpent:
“Because you have done this,
You are cursed more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you shall go,
And you shall eat dust
All the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.”

16 To the woman He said:
“I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;
In pain you shall bring forth children;
Your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”

17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:
“Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
18 Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”

20 And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. 21 Also for Adam and his wife the Lord God made tunics of skin, and clothed them. 22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”– 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. 24 So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

Here we see how God comes to that first guilty, fig-leaf-wearing, hiding couple and deals with their sin and guilt. Many of us may have wrong ideas about how God deals with sin and guilt. You may think that God came looking for Adam and Eve in the garden, chewed them out, cursed everything in sight, kicked them out of the garden, and locked the door behind them. In this view, God is the one who lowers the boom on guilty sinners.

However, I don’t think that’s an accurate picture of God in Genesis 3. Rather, what this chapter shows is God graciously seeking the guilty sinners, confronting their sin, promising their restoration, and providing for their needs. God promises victory over the tempter, covers their nakedness, and even His expelling them from the garden was gracious, in that He protected them from living forever in their fallen condition. It is a chapter which gives us, as guilty sinners, great hope.

In this lesson we will review the immediate personal consequences of sin for Adam and Eve; the divine judgment of God for their sin; and the grace of God toward them as sinners.

I. The personal consequences of their sin (Gen. 3:8-13)

Our text is all about the consequences of the first sin. Genesis 3:7-13 tell us what happened to Adam and Eve personally. These verses are like a case study in human nature. As we ponder how our first parents reacted to sin, we will see ourselves in them. What they did, we still do today.

The first obvious consequence was,

A. Shame

Genesis 3:7 says, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.” There is no mistaking it. As H. C. Leupold observes, “Here is one of the saddest anticlimaxes of history: They eat, they expect marvelous results, they wait–and there grows on them the sense of shame” (Exposition of Genesis [Baker], p. 154). This sense of shame confirmed the spiritual death that they experienced due to their sin. Death, remember, is a separation. Their right relationship with God was severed. They felt separated from God. Shame was the symptom of the disease of death. The man and woman are ashamed of themselves, out of harmony with themselves and with each other because they are separated from God.

Along with shame the second consequence that follows is,

B. Fear

Genesis 3:8 says, “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” This verse seems to imply that this was a regular activity where God and the first couple met for fellowship. It should have been a time of refreshment and delight, but it now was a time of fear. Genesis 3:9 says, “Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?”” God calls out to the man, seeking him. Obviously God does not ask this because He can’t find them. God is probing the man’s heart so Adam would realize what he had done. God never ignores sin or brushes it aside, as we do. He graciously seeks the sinners and confronts them.

Genesis 3:10 goes on, “So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”” Why did they hide? Because they heard God’s voice. Why were they afraid? Because they feared being exposed. Adam said, “I was afraid because I was naked.” Not, “because I sinned.” Adam had been naked every other time the Lord had walked with him in the garden. The problem wasn’t his nakedness, but his sin. Sinners always try to hide their sin. We fear being exposed so we lie about it; we cover up; we run away; we blame others; we change the subject; we shred the documents; we destroy the evidence; and we get angry and say, “How could you accuse me of that?”

The immediate personal consequences of sin were shame and fear. These two reactions lead to the third,

C. Blaming

God continues to confront these sinners in Genesis 3:11, “And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?”” Again, God does not ask the question because He needed information, God used this question to get Adam to see that he was corrupted in his heart because he had disobeyed.

Adam is cornered, caught red-handed, stripped naked if you will of all his excuses. What will he do? He points the finger away from himself: “Then the man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”” Did you get that? “The woman you put here with me.” First Adam points the finger at the woman. It was she who “gave me of the tree.” “Lord, it was her fault. She gave me the fruit and so I ate it. What was I supposed to do? She’s my wife. What else could I do?”

But then, worse than blaming the woman, Adam really is blaming God. He says, “The woman whom You gave to be with me.” “God, it’s really your fault. You gave her to me. You put her in the garden.” And so it goes. The first man, the father of the human race, is also the first one to pass the buck. We are not any different are we? It is our natural reaction to deny our own guilt and to try to shift the blame to others.

Adam established the pattern: disobedience which leads to shame, which leads to fear, which leads to hiding, which leads to blaming others. Eve follows the pattern (Genesis 3:13), “And the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.””

Sin brings forth death. Sin always separates. It separates us from God and from those close to us, and it even separates us from ourselves. So now Adam and Eve are separated from God and from each other because of their sin. He blames her; he blames God; she blames the serpent. It’s always someone else’s fault. It’s my wife, my husband, my children, my parents, my teacher, my boss, my neighbors—everyone else but me.

These first three consequences of sin are really expressions of the fourth,

D. Guilt

In the end, they both have to own up to the truth. Adam finally says, “And I ate.” Eve finally says, “And I ate.” You can only hide so long, you can only lie so long, and you can only make excuses so long. God gave us a conscience that will not let us rest until we confess our sins. Proverbs 28:13 reminds us that “He who covers his sins will not prosper, But whoever confesses and forsakes them will have mercy.” When we sin, we only have two options. Option 1 is to cover it up. That means to hide it, to make excuses, to rationalize, to blame others. But even though we can mask our feelings of guilt, concealing our sin can never remove our guilt. When we refuse to confess our sin we feel like David did in Psalm 32,

When I kept silent, my bones grew old
Through my groaning all the day long.
For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me;
My vitality was turned into the drought of summer. (Psa. 32:3-4)

Our other choice is to repent and confess our sins. David makes this choice in Psalm 32:5:

5 I acknowledged my sin to You, And my iniquity I have not hidden. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” And You forgave the iniquity of my sin.

To confess means to say the same thing about your sin that God does. When you confess your sins, you are saying, “Yes, I did it and I know it was wrong.” To repent means to turn away from your sin and turn to God. You are saying, “I’ve been walking in the wrong path and now, with God’s help, I’m not going to walk in that path anymore. I’m going to change the direction of my life.”

The wages of sin is death. There is no getting around this eternal principle. Sin separates. It destroys our relationships. What we see in Genesis 3 is every single relationship being destroyed by sin. Sin destroys our relationship with God, our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with others, and even our relationship with nature and the world around us.

II. God’s judgment on sin (Gen. 3:14-19)

Genesis 3:14-19 reveals God’s judgment on sin from a broader point of view. God speaks first to the serpent, then to Eve, and finally to Adam. The judgments are different in each case.

A. On the serpent (Gen. 3:14-15)

God questioned the man and the woman because He wanted to lead them to repentance; but He did not question the serpent because there was no mercy for him. God cursed the serpent. The curse is directed both to the actual snake and to Satan who used the snake for his evil deeds.

The serpent is told two things. First, in Genesis 3:14 the serpent was literally condemned to crawl on its belly and eat dust, a sign of his total humiliation. As Donald Barnhouse explains, “To eat dust is to know defeat, and that is God’s prophetic judgment upon the enemy” (Genesis: A Devotional Exposition [Zondervan], p. 22). Behind the serpent, Satan is condemned to an existence of frustration and defeat. This is seen most pointedly in the cross, where Satan thought he had finally defeated God’s program by killing Christ. But the cross was God’s greatest victory, because in it and in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, Satan’s final doom was secured. Though now for a time God allows Satan some leash so that he wins some battles, he’s already lost the war! God declared it here in Genesis 3 and finished it at the cross.

Second, in Genesis 3:15 there will be unending warfare between the descendants of Eve and the offspring of the serpent. Although it is true that most of us have a natural fear and dread of snakes, I think this verse is saying more than just that. God promises to put enmity between the serpent and the woman. Satan already hated Eve, but God graciously put it into Eve’s heart to hate Satan. Then God says that this enmity will be between Satan’s seed and the woman’s seed. This is an expansion of the conflict between Satan and Eve. It’s not just an individual conflict between those two. This refers to the battle of the ages between the ungodly, who are children of their father, the devil (John 8:44; Matt. 13:38), and those who are children of God by faith (John 1:12; Gal. 3:26; 1 John 3:10).

But then God gets even more specific, “He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel.” Here God says that He (singular, a particular seed of the woman) shall bruise Satan on the head, and Satan would bruise Him on the heel. This refers to Christ, born of a woman (Gal. 4:4), the last Adam, who would redeem the fallen race. It is a remarkable verse in that it refers to the seed of the woman, not the man. Elsewhere in the Bible descent is determined through the male, through the seed of the man. But here it is the seed of the woman, not the man, who will bruise Satan’s head. It is a prophecy, veiled at the time, but evident now, of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.

Genesus 3:15 has rightly been called the “proto-evangelium” or the “First Gospel” because it is the first prophecy of the coming of the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. Although the first readers of Genesis would not have understood it fully, this verse predicts an ultimate showdown between Satan and Jesus, the seed of the woman. At the cross Satan would “bruise His heel,” a prophecy fulfilled literally when the nails were driven through our Lord’s feet. But Jesus would bruise the head of Satan by rising from the dead on the third day. Satan’s defeat was predicted from the beginning and the outcome of the battle was never in doubt.

Here we see God’s grace. When Adam and Eve could rightly have expected to be condemned to eternal death in hell for their sin, God promises the defeat of Satan and the victory of the Redeemer who would come from Eve’s descendants. What amazing grace!

Conclusion

Next time we will continue with Genesis 3:16 to the rest of the chapter to see God’s judgment on the woman and the man as well as God’s gracious provision for them. But today let me wrap it up by asking the question that God asked Adam: Where are you? Are you hiding, afraid of God, because of sin in your life? Are you trying to cover your sin with the fig leaves of your good works? Are you running from God like Jonah because of your disobedience to Him? Do you have sin that you have not repented of and confessed to God?

Your guilt may make you afraid that God is pursuing you to punish you. But the Bible declares that God sent His Son to save you from condemnation and eternal death. As God did with Adam, He is graciously calling, “Where are you?” If you will come to Him in repentance and confess your sin, He will deliver you from Satan’s domain of darkness and transfer you to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom you will have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Col. 1:13-14).