SIN

Genesis commences with a grand accounting of God’s creation of the universe and His ordering of it. Let’s pause here for a moment. In the Creation story, we come to see that God, acting under no requirement but out of His own desire to create, makes a place in which on the seventh day He will come to rest. As Biblical scholar John Walton points out in his work on Genesis, ancient peoples would have understood this imagery to indicate that the universe becomes by the hand of God the temple in which God will dwell. In short, God makes the world so that it can be the place He lives with His creatures. When God takes His place in the temple that He has made, it is the culmination of what the world was made to do: God at home in His temple is a holy thing, and the whole world is in proper order when this happens. This well-orderedness and right-functioning of the world with God as the starter and finisher of all things is reflected in the Hebrew word shalom, or the peace of God in everything.

The Creation of human beings in this context takes on a new meaning. When God creates the first humans Adam and Eve, He issues them this command: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” In this command, we see a mirroring of God’s own action in the command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”; these are the very things that God Himself had just done on a cosmic scale. Thus does God create humanity in His own image; He makes them creative and communal and commanding. They are to be a bit like the world out of which they were taken and a bit like God whose Spirit was breathed into them. They are the go-betweens, the meeting place of God and the world. In short, humans were made to be something like priests or caretakers in the house that God had made for himself, to be images and representations of God to all the other creatures of the world. 

It is in this context that the Fall comes about. As the story goes in our reading, the Serpent tempts Eve through subtlety, offering her to be like God, knowing good and evil. In one sense, the Serpent is offering Eve what she already has. As a human being, Eve and her husband Adam are already like God--alive through God’s breath and tasked to be godlike caretakers of the world, God’s temple. This is how sin works, we see it from the beginning: sin is the taking of something in God’s good world and distorting it. When Adam and Eve eat of the tree, they abandon their mission to be the meeting place of God and the world, the caretakers of God’s temple and home. They  In doing so, they turn their backs on and step outside of the shalom or peace of God and step out of their right-functioning and the peace that comes with it. They violate the limits of their humanness as images, representatives, and priests of God. This Fall is made evident in the realization of their nakedness. It is fitting and descriptive. With sin always comes a common crushing fact: I am not well, I am not okay. I need to fix this, and I need to hide. Having abandoned God, the world, and each other, we are turned inward on our own shame. 

In his description of the world’s condition, St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, first explains how human beings have taken the things in this world and made them into gods and means to harm themselves and others. He immediately follows this by addressing the condition of Jews as those who received the law of God to govern them, but who failed to follow it and who also made an idol out of it. Against this backdrop, Paul in Romans 3, our reading for today, concludes that all the world (Jew and non-Jew) stand guilty of rejecting the authority of God as expressed through the law given to Israel, and through the natural world given to all people. Because all should have known, all are guilty of disobedience. As we saw in Genesis 3, we see again the violation of law and nature, of command and of the order of the world we occupy. What we also see here is an important quality of sin: sin is redundant, sin is boring. For all of the seeming variety and creativity of sin, we see in the connection between Genesis 3 and Romans 3 the sobering fact that all of our sins are repetitions of the sin of our first parents. Sin doesn’t get more complex: it is a tired song that at a sad party that no one wants to be at. Rather than being fruitful and multiplying and being creative, we simply recycle and regurgitate the tired old habit. 

Romans 3 culminates in a rapid-fire succession of quotations from the Psalms. Paul, being the good rabbi he is, attends to the rules of Hebrew poetry in pulling together strands of religious poetry and ordering them in a progression so as to arrive at an ultimate conclusion. In short, human sin is abandoning our place in God’s peace, that word shalom we talked about earlier. God’s order, the experience of the world in which God sits enthroned as King of the universe is an experience of everything functioning as it ought to function. This is what the peace of God is. The Fall of humanity means that we abandoned the world of God’s order and our place in it as God’s images or representatives, his priests, and as caretakers of his world. Our Fall means exile from the peace of God, exile from the temple and home of God so to go out into the wilderness to look upon our shame in a vain attempt to hide. Here is the conclusion of sin: to be alone and without a purpose in shame and turned to look upon ourselves in exile forever.

We are sinful, and all have sinned. And so we need to be saved from sin. In understanding the nature of our Fall, we are able to see better the desperate condition out of which we await a Savior, one who will do what must be done to bring us back again to our humanness and to the shalom of God, so that we might by grace take our place in His house forever.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon us!