Who died in the garden

Have you ever done something you regretted? Do you remember the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realised you had made a terrible mistake? We are all prone to failure. Now think about the biggest mistake you have ever made. I am guessing it does not come close to Adam's in the garden of Eden. Worse, for Adam it was not really a mistake. Paul calls it a transgression (Romans 5:14). To transgress is to step over a line that has been clearly drawn.

Paul also calls it disobedience (Romans 5:19), which in his language means a refusal to listen. God had spoken plainly. Adam heard, and chose otherwise. It was not a stumble. It was a decision against a word he knew.

And it was a killer of a mistake, quite literally. The Lord had said: "in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (Genesis 2:17). Adam ate, and death came. Not a thunderbolt. Shame, and hiding. "I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid." Adam was still breathing, but he had died on the inside. He was cut off from the presence of God, and his nature changed. Sin became a drive within him, and it did not stay in one corner. It reached the whole of him: how he thought, what he wanted, how he felt, and in the end his body too.

Genes are powerful. I only have to look at my children to see it. When our second child was a toddler he developed a hernia near his navel, the same one I had at his age, and the same one my father has had. There is something inescapable in our genes. Sin passed from Adam to every one of us just as surely. That is what Paul means: "sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned." You inherited the nature, and then you added your own sins to it. Both are true, and the second one is why the next chapter opens in a courtroom.

Genes are powerful.

Paul describes what you were before Christ in Ephesians 2, and he does not soften it. "Dead through the trespasses and sins." Walking "following the course of this world." "By nature children of wrath." That was not an insult. It was a diagnosis, and a doctor who will not tell you what is wrong cannot help you.

Notice what God did next. He did not leave them in the trees. He came into the garden and called, "Where are you?" He promised that the woman's offspring would crush the serpent's head (Genesis 3:15). And before He sent them out, "the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife and clothed them" (Genesis 3:21). Something died so that their shame could be covered. That is the first hint of the blood, and the rest of this course is what it became.

Hold that picture of Adam hiding in the trees. The rest of this chapter is about how God came looking, and what He did when He found you.