Genesis 3:1-24
The Fall
1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LordGod among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13 Then 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,
“Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
16 To the woman he said,
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
John 3:16-21
God So LOVES Mankind
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.
When man fell and sinned and disobeyed God, God said that, man has now become like one of Us, and now knows good and evil...So before the eating of the forbidden fruit, we were less like God and we did not know about good or evil...Adam and Eve were in Paradise, and in Paradise they would have been happy...And we know that they did not know all things (and we today still do not know all things) and the first couple were in the goodness of Paradise and what God had created...God saw all that He had created and it was very good...So we might assume that in all this goodness that God had created, that Adam and Eve were happy in all things being good around them...
Now after the fruit eating our eyes were opened to both good and evil...So during the Fall of Man, Adam and Eve learn about pain and goodness and evil and can distinguish those differences...We see that pain and goodness and evil can be seen and now better understood by the two...We must believe that since there is evil, there must be good after the fall...Because we are told now, after the eating of the fruit that they both knew good and evil...They learned about evil, so learning new things are not necessarily good...So now Eve and Adam can distinguish between the two...And now we know evil...We can believe that evil was not in Eden, but now it has entered their Paradise, or at least evil has entered Adam and Eve's lives...
And that if we have this knowledge of goodness, like we did in Eden, then we can contrast goodness to evil...And if we study this contrast between goodness and evil, we can see that God is a Moral God...paradise originally did not have evil, until man brought it there...There is a natural law of goodness in Eden, a natural order without evil...And things were good...We can better see that God has given us before the Fall of Man and after the Fall of Man an understanding of Moral Law, or this natural goodness in life or our Natural Laws...We learn more about goodness and evil, and that to have both goodness and evil in life (and in trying to discover and figure out where it came from) we can better see that goodness came from God and that evil came about with our disobedience to Him in Genesis and the Fall of Man...And disobedience to God cuts us off from Him, and so God drove man and woman out of the Garden of Eden, and God had cherubim and a flaming sword to guard the way to the tree of life, so man would not live forever...
If we believe in the Fall of Man we can believe that this is the time when evil came into our world...One can assume that the natural laws of the world came from God and that He is the Absolute Moral Law Giver...We can see that God is a Moral God, because He originally created Paradise without evil...But to love His first two children, He had to give them complete free will to make their own decisions (and not make decisions for the ones He LOVED) about what they did and would do in their lives...We can believe that the natural goodness we feel that should dominate and be in our world and is only partly there, because we now know of evil and temptation...And evil and temptation are all around the world with our Moral beliefs, if one believes that man and woman fell and we now know (for the first time) the difference between good and evil...
So this evil and temptations remain in our world and we better see where this brokenness first came from...We better see that the disobedience that happened showed us separated from God...But He tells us that He would put Enmity between the evil one and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He will crush your head, and you will strike His heel...When the time was right, we would see who Enmity was...We would see God's LOVE for mankind, and this was in His Redemptive Plan to help us...God's Redemption would be that He would send His Son to us, to dwell with us and to teach us and be a Redeemer for us, that again we would have access to the Tree of Life and eternity...
God so LOVES the world that He gave his One and Only Son, that whoever believes in His Son shall not perish but have eternal life...God's Saving Plan gives us access again to eternal life...For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him...By sending His Son to save us from our sins, God shows the Moral Lawgiver that He is...