Continuing In Communion With God—The Sin Spiral (Part 3): Genesis 3:8–24 Paradise Lost

by on October 7, 2025 | Comment

Although biased as a Birminghamian, I think that southerners have great skill for developing words that are most helpful and useful to get at realities of life. Y’all is perhaps our most famous. But another highly useful one is comeuppance. This word is about how every wrong deed has a deserved bad outcome. Usually, we use this word to remind someone that even if the negative consequences of our actions are not presently obvious, the deserved penalty is inevitable.

In Genesis 3:8–24, we read about the comeuppance for Adam, Eve, and even the serpent. The fallout of breaking God’s law and rebelling against him is coming to bear so that we learn the consequences of what it means to sin against God.

Although we can read this section as a running list of comeuppances for Adam and Eve, we also need to see the implications it has for us. Not only does the fallout of their sin apply to them; it affects us as well. Considering the nature of what happens here between God and our first parents also helps us to consider more carefully how we think of our own sin.

The consequences of sin are dire enough, as we can see them on the surface. Underneath the surface, we find the fallout runs far deeper than we might first realize. When we think about this passage of judgment in front of us, we see a fragmentation of nearly every relationship. People turn against one another. Our place in the world is reconfigured. We need to take account of those things in order to see how this first sin informs the way we think about our own sin.

We have in Genesis 3 a set of diagnostic tools. We have some considerations here to help us analyze our own sin and to resist aspects of the corruption we have inherited from Adam. This article shows we need awareness of how sin’s heavy toll affects us.

Responsibility

In the first section of our passage—namely verses 7–13—Adam and Eve try to avoid dealing with what they realize they have just done. Having broken God’s law, they became aware that they are exposed before the Lord. In verse 7, they made loincloths from fig leaves to cover their nakedness. Then they hid themselves.

You can see the irony in God’s questions: “Where are you?” and “Did you eat of the tree?” It is not as if he did not know the answers to these questions. It is more like when you walk into a room to find something broken in the middle of the floor covered by a blanket, and the top of your child’s head poking up over the back of the sofa as he or she tries to hide.

In that context, “Where are you?” means “Come out.” You can imagine a child’s response to the question: “Do you know what happened to cause this broken mess?” “Oh, would you look at that! You know I didn’t even realize this had happened until you pointed it out. Was I hiding? Come on! Why would I do that?” This interaction among God and Adam and Eve plays out basically in that way. It is an opportunity for Adam and Eve to own up to what they have done, not a true investigation to find out what had happened.1 The fact that they were hiding and that they had made clothes for themselves said everything that could be said.

So, Adam and Eve first tried to avoid the consequences of their sin by attempting to dodge the confrontation with God altogether. When that approach did not work, they both blame shifted.2 Neither would take responsibility for what they had done. Adam blamed Eve and sort of blamed God as if it was God’s fault for giving Eve to him as his wife. Eve blamed the serpent.

Adam especially seems to portray himself as passive in the whole event, almost like there is nothing he could have done.3 Indeed, he was passive as he watched the serpent tempt his wife and watched her succumb to the temptation. He was passive where he should have gotten involved. In this case, Adam’s passivity made him all the more guilty.

We need to think hard about this whole set of affairs. Although Adam is more than a bad example since his sin made all of us sinners, these events certainly provide a bad example of how to deal with our sin. For one, we must realize that our impulse is going to be to excuse our sin and to blame someone else.

How quickly do we look for reasons why we cannot possibly be the problem? It must be someone else. Adam was supposed to protect and love his wife. But he blamed her. How easily we too turn against those closest to us so that we can remove our own sense of guilt?

More than that, we can follow Adam’s example of thinking ourselves as passive victims of our own sin. One of the moments in pastoral ministry when it is harder for me to bite my tongue and say something gentle is when someone says something about their sin like, “I don’t know how this happened to me.” I have the impulse to say, “Well, it happened because you decided to sin.” We should not pretend our sin just happens to us. We should be different than Adam and Eve by taking responsibility for our sin in whatever ways we need to repent.

Retribution

In verses 14–24, we see the consequences for this first sin. God rolls out the retribution that affects us all in light of Adam’s sin. God responds to Adam and Eve’s attempts to dodge the issue in three sections, addressing in order the serpent, Eve, and Adam. That order, which is reverse of the first section, seems to indicate where God finds the levels of blame. He asked Adam first and cursed him last because he held him most responsible.

In each of the consequences, we see that there is a fracturing of the way things are supposed to be. Most importantly, Eve and Adam’s critical contributions to the world became infected with great trouble in doing them. For Eve, her childbearing would now come with lots of pain and her role as a wife would be troubled with relational difficulty.

People debate exactly what the problem is that is being described in the saying, “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” Without surveying the options, we can certainly see that it involves relational trouble between husband and wife.

The fifth commandment reminds us to honor our mothers. We have great reason to do so when our moms and wives conduct themselves with godliness, because we see here the obstacles that have been in place for them since the fall. Being an honorable mother and wife is not easily achieved nor does it come naturally in a fallen world. Godly moms and wives are a gift from the Lord, who gives great blessings to our church and to our families by providing ladies who care for us and add so much to our lives by living well for the Lord in all that he gives them to do.

Adam recognized this value in verse 20: “The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” Adam saw that the promise for crushing the serpent came through his wife as she became a mother. Although the mothers in our life are not the source of this sort of redemptive promise, nonetheless we too should recognize the hope that comes from having mothers and wives devoted to God’s promise.

For Adam, his work is cursed. He had been made to work the ground and now the ground would be trouble. If he was supposed to be a gardener­—well, thorns and thistles are inedible. The curse upon his work means that most of his efforts would not be profitable.4 I imagine that resonates with all our experiences as well. We put so much effort into our commitments and often see so little fruit. Our labors are cursed.

Hence, sin fractured our relationships with one another as husband and wife quickly turned to blame one another. It also fractured our standing in the world so that even our most fundamental roles in life become difficult and troublesome. The retribution for sin is the cursed difficulty in all that we do.

Redemption

God’s interactions after the fall are striking. He pointedly asked Adam and Eve questions to give them opportunity to own up to what they had done. More jarring, he never let the serpent talk.5 He did not ask the serpent anything. He went straight to cursing him. The reason is because God has no grace for the devil. There is no redemption for Satan and his demons. But God has grace for us.

As those who belong to God in Christ, God is reversing the curse that came upon sin. In Romans 16:17–20, Paul exhorted the church to be on guard against divisions, which is relevant because we have seen that the curse upon sin fundamentally fractured relationships with one another and with our callings. Those who belong to Christ learn to listen to God’s direction rather than their own appetites, rather than to what is just a delight to the eyes.

In that respect, through the church, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” Christ is the seed of the woman who crushes the serpent’s head. Yet, God extends that victory through the church. God crushes Satan under our feet because we are the community of Christ who has dealt that crushing blow to the serpent’s head. He did so in his life, death, and resurrection.

Christ came to live on earth as the victorious Adam, triumphing over the devil and winning everlasting life for all who trust in him. He died on the cross that he might pay for all our transgressions and forgive our sins before God’s throne. And he rose from the grave to prove his saving victory and to extend it through the church by the power of the Spirit.

There is an interesting aspect to how Adam and Eve tried to make their own clothes to hide their sin. As it turned out, their attempt to clothe themselves so that they might somehow undo the fallout of their sin proved to be inadequate. God had to make new clothes for them because their own efforts to overcome their sin were not good enough.6

How true is that of us with our sin as well? Our best efforts can never overturn our own sin. We can never make ourselves clean or cover over our own wrong doings. In that specific respect, we would find ourselves in the same position as Adam and Eve trying to explain away why we have tried and failed to handle our sins.

Praise be to Christ. As he clothed Adam and Eve when their efforts failed, he has clothed all who believe in Jesus with Christ’s righteousness. God provides the covering in Jesus Christ that effectively does away with our sin. He turned Adam and Eve out of the garden so that they could not eat of the tree of life. But, as the end of Revelation tells us, he welcomes us into the new creation and gives us the right to eat from that very tree because we have been robed in the work of Christ, crowned with everlasting life. Redemption is for all who belong to the last Adam, Jesus Christ.

Notes

  1. C. John Collins, Genesis 1–4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary (P&R, 2006), 174.
  2. Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15 Word Biblical Commentary (Zondervan, 1987), 77–78; John D. Currid, Genesis, 2 vol. (EP Books, 2015), 1:125.
  3. Currid, Genesis, 1:125.
  4. Bruce K. Waltke and Cathi J. Fredericks, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan Academic, 2001), 95.
  5. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 78.
  6. Collins, Genesis 1–4, 175; Currid, Genesis, 1:139.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find this whole series here.

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