Was the fruit of this tree a natural poison? We do not know. God has not told us. It may have been or it may not. God does not base his prohibition on this ground. There are other grounds, all-sufficient, without this. It might perhaps be urged with some plausibility that the analogy of this earthly life favors the affirmative inasmuch as for the most part, God’s prohibitions of food and indeed of animal indulgence in general, are based on this principle—Abstain from poison; do thyself no harm. God is not wont to prohibit aught that is good for food or pleasurable to any sense, except because it is pernicious, poisonous.
What was this threatened penalty? Death, in what sense?
In the same sense in which it actually falls upon all who reject Christ and fail of his salvation. Upon such the curse of the law falls without abatement or modification. Their doom must surely be taken as the exponent and measure of the meaning of this threatened death. Of course it includes the loss of God’s favor;the incurring of his frown.——That eternal death did not begin instantly was due to arrest of judgment for a new probation under the scheme of redemption; and to nothing else.
Was natural death a part of this penalty?——Plainly natural death became the doom of the race, equally of the redeemed and of the unredeemed, under the scheme of redemption—a scheme which carried with it more or less of earthly life before the death of the body. But this proves nothing as to the breadth of the original threatening—“Thou shalt surely die.” What would have been in respect to natural death if no scheme of redemption had intervened and the original threatening had been executed at once, we have no means of knowing. Mortality as at present resting on the race and terminating in natural death is one of the incidents of the new probation under mercy, and gives us no light on the other question, viz. What if no mercy had come in? In general, it is of small account for us to ask, What would have been if something else had happened otherwise than it did? e. g. What would have taken place if the first pair had endured all temptation? How long would the trial have continued? Would it have terminated by removing the tree, or by taking off the prohibition, or only by such complete victory over temptation that its presence could have been only a joy and a triumph?——What part would have been borne by “the tree of life”? And after their sin, what if they had put forth their hand to take and eat of this life-tree?——Speculations of this sort never make men wiser.
III. The Temptation.
On this point the history is remarkably full and distinct. To those who have given attention to what may be called the law of temptation—the way it works and gains its object—little explanation of the narrative is needed.——We may note that Satan took care not to be recognized as an enemy; that he made his first approaches with subtlest caution and skill, bringing up the case of the prohibited fruit as a question—Is it indeed so that God hath said, Ye shall not eat of every tree? As if he would say—What do you think about this prohibition? Is it quite pleasant to be put undersuch restraint?——When Eve recited the words of God’s prohibition and added something more—viz. “neither shall ye touch it,” it is at least supposable that Satan had already sprung in her mind the feeling that the injunction was indeed very stringent, perhaps unreasonably and unkindly so. It is plain that Satan is emboldened and now ventures to strike out squarely against God. Putting his word unqualifiedly against God’s word, “ye shall not surely die,” he became “the father of lies,” “a liar from the beginning,” and threw all the weight of his influence into the scale to break down Eve’s confidence in God’s veracity as well as in his real kindness. Then with Satanic cunning he took advantage of the name given to this forbidden tree to make Eve think that knowledge, great and enviable like that of the gods, would come from eating this fruit. Artfully he charges that God knew this, and sought by the prohibition to debar them from this boon of knowledge so desirable. The gilded bait was swallowed but too soon and too thoughtlessly! Eve had listened; she had more than half believed these lies; she still dallied with the temptation; she looked again at the tree and its fruit; she saw it beautiful and seemingly good for food; and, far beyond this, it appealed to her imagination as giving her that unknown wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods—so she took of it and ate!——Then she brought of it to her husband. Her words to him are not on record. We are left to imagine how her example may have wrought upon him, and sympathy also with her doom if Adam thought of that; how the feeling—I must stand or fall, live or die, with this only human friend I have on earth—may have overcome every scruple. So far as appears he yielded without a word of question, much less of reproof. He yielded—and the awful deed was done!
IV. The Fall and its Immediate Effects.
The first human pair are in sin; they have risen against God their Maker in rebellion. Instantly “their eyes are opened.” They realize how strangely different are the sensations that come after sin from those that are before. The false hopes, the fascinations, the bewildering, bewitching charms of temptation’s hour give place to the awful sense of folly and of wrong—asense of passing suddenly into a world of solemn and dread realities pertaining to God, duty, and doom. “They knew that they were naked”; an awful sense of being unfit to be seen; a consciousness of being ugly, loathsome, as if the inner guilt of their souls stood out visibly over their whole bodies—this seems to have been their first sensation, and they set themselves to sewing fig-leaf coverings. As evening drew on they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden. That voice which up to this day had been their sweetest music now fills their very souls with shame and terror.——It is remarkable that Adam’s words and his acts also make so much account of his nakedness, apparently of person. Was it that his convictions of sin and guilt were yet superficial, so that his sense of shame for his sin turned his thought first to his personal nakedness? Had he yet to learn that “God looketh on the heart”? If so the Lord’s searching question must have met his case—“Who told thee that thou wast naked”? How camest thou by this sense of shame, this dread of the eye of thy divine Father? “Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat”?——Adam could not do otherwise than confess his sin, yet with an apology which almost or quite reflected upon God; “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me, and I did eat.” The woman too sought to screen herself somewhat under the apology of a subtle temptation. “The serpent beguiled me and I did eat.”
The secondary results of the fall appear in the curse severally pronounced of God upon the serpent, upon the woman, and upon the ground for his sake.——As to the serpent, since he stands before us in this entire transaction as a double character, so the curse upon him comes in a sort of double meaning. The most obvious sense of the passage assigns a measure of this curse to the literal serpent—the animal under the guise of whom Satan beguiled his victim. But the responsibility and guilt being upon the very Satan, this curse falls chiefly on him. He is degraded, doomed to eternal shame; and in his great conflict against God and goodness, to disgrace, defeat and damning ruin. Words of telling significance were these;—“I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and herseed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.” The serpent guilefully assumed to be your friend. I tear off his mask and expose him in his true nature; I ordain eternal enmity between serpent and woman, and pre-eminently between the serpent’s seed—the children of the devil—and the great, distinguished Personage known as “the seed of the woman.” This enmity underlies the mighty conflict of the ages—Christ and Satan each leading on his host to battle and no peace or even truce arresting hostilities till the victory of the King of Kings shall be complete and ineffably glorious. Thus the first relation between serpent and woman—that of assumed but treacherous friendship—develops into everlasting enmity—God, her real friend, becoming in the person of his incarnate Son, born of woman—her champion and the mighty antagonist of Satan and all his offspring. Here and thus mercy breaks in upon this scene of sin and ruin, and God begins the wonderful process of making the wrath of Satan the occasion of his own infinite glory.——The words which put so tersely the result of this great conflict take their shape and borrow their drapery from the guise under which Satan here appears—that of the crawling serpent. He shall wound the heel of his opponent—the natural place for the serpent’s bite; but his own head bruised and crushed, shall end the fight.——This first promise of God to our fallen race sweeps the eye over the whole vast field of moral conflict between Christ and Satan, and testifies of glorious victory over Satan as the sublime result. It was inexpressibly kind in the Lord to bring in these gleams of light and hope upon the trembling souls of the first sinning pair before he proceeded to speak of the specific forms of suffering that must righteously come upon them and their offspring as the testimony of God’s displeasure against sin. Having said this, he proceeds to the curse upon woman—sorrow in the birth of offspring; and the curse upon man—toil and struggle for subsistence on a soil prolific in noxious growths and demanding labor as a condition of fruitfulness.
Yet let the minor points of this scene sink into the shade in the presence of the sublime glory of the great first promise. In the light of this we see that though Satan plotted the ruin of the race, yet God counter-plottedthe ruin of Satan and the salvation of the masses of mankind. When it might have seemed that all was lost, it proved that this extremity was God’s great opportunity, for his strong arm was made bare for help and real victory. This is the birth-hour of most momentous issues. Sin came in upon Eden and upon earth; and many a bitter sorrow, many a cup of suffering and woe, must needs follow in its train; but Redemption comes in also; it enters upon its co-ordinate work to save the soul from sin and from eternal death and to bring in everlasting righteousness. The history of our world in its most vital aspects is foreshadowed here in this first short meeting of their Maker with this sinning pair. The spoken recorded words were few, but their significance was momentous; the sweep of their bearing, the issues of the divine policy here indicated, were destined to fill up the ages of time with stirring and strange conflict, and to send their influence down through the endless ages of man’s being and of God’s kingdom.