"What was the first sin?"
"When Eve and Adam plucked the fruit." This was the answer given by all.
I want you to think about it. Adam and Eve owed everything to God, for He had created them in His own image; and had blessed them, and given them "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth," and had put them in the beautiful garden which He had planted. How dreadful that they should disobey the only command God gave them, and thus sin against Him! But had not Eve sinned against God, even before she put out her hand and "took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat?"
Chrissie said that when the serpent asked Eve that question about what God had said, she ought not to have taken any notice; and Sharley thought that the first beginning of the sin was listening to the serpent at all, and that the devil now puts it into our hearts to ask, "Is there any harm in doing it?" when he wants to make us listen to him, and forget what God has said. And then we all agreed that the way to answer Satan is in Scripture words.
I think Sharley was right in saying that the first beginning of the sin in the Garden of Eden was when Eve listened to the serpent—lent her ear to one who dared to ask such a question as "Hath God said?" The next step in the road which led away from God, Eve took when she answered that daring question; the next, when she believed the lie of the serpent, instead of the word of God.
The devil is a liar, and when he spoke to Eve he tried to make her think that God was not so good to His creatures as He might be, for He would not allow them to have the very best thing in the garden—that forbidden fruit. The great enemy of God envied His creatures their happy place where they received everything from Him, and were dependent upon Him for everything; and God allowed the man and woman whom He had made, to be proved; and, when weighed in the balance, they were found WANTING. And so we read in God's book how "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned."
As Eve gave her confidence to the serpent, she lost confidence in God, and went on to believe that when God had said, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," and the serpent said, "Ye shall not surely die," it was the serpent that spoke the truth. How dreadful it was for God's creatures to look to the devil for happiness, to give up God who created them, and take Satan for their master!
Instead of happiness they found only shame and misery. The serpent had said that their eyes should be opened, and they should be as gods, knowing good and evil. We read, "And the eyes of them both were opened;" but God in His word tells us of those whose eyes "the God of this world hath blinded." They had no power to choose what was good; and tried to hide away from God.
And so the first man was driven out of God's garden, and there has never been any way back to it at all! No way back to God either, for Adam or for his children, except through Christ, "the Second Man, the Lord from Heaven."
It was of this wonderful way, of Him who is "the Way," that God spoke when
He told the serpent that the Seed of the woman should bruise his head.