The Fall 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’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 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.’” “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil . . .” Genesis 3:1-6, 3:15
Why would a nice girl like me, committed in service to God, devoted to family and faithful to my husband of 21 years, want to do a devotional focused on the Fall? It’s not a nice story. It shows woman in a very bad light and makes men look like pushovers. And the result of the story is terrible, the stuff of horror movies. Well, I’ll tell you why. I think it is the single most important story in the Bible. Frankly, I would go so far as to state that if you don’t really grasp the meaning of the Fall and its result, the rest of the Bible just becomes a good read with some nice guidelines by which one should live. The Fall caused a stain on us all. It is the great equalizer; we all come into this world a sinner, before we even utter our first breath or form our first thought, whether sinful or not. It immediately unifies us in our need for redemption, because the Fall separates all mankind from the eternal presence of God. Our only hope is the grace of God through Christ’s sacrifice to cover our sin, the sin of the Fall. He alone, and our faith in Him, makes it possible for us to again be in the eternal presence of God, to restore what was lost for all in the Garden. Virginia Beane |
