CHAPTER II. MAN'S PROBATION AND FALL. 1. The Trees of Life and Knowledge. § 2. The Law and its penalty. § 3. The Temptation and Fall. § 4. Effects of the Fall. § 5. God's judgment-i. On the Serpent-ii. On the Woman-iii. On the Man. § 6. Promise of a Redeemer-The name of Eve. § 7. Institution of sacrifice-Dispensation of mercy. § 8. Traditions of heathen natious. § 1. THE happiness of Paradise was granted to the first human pair on one simple condition. A restraint was to be placed upon their appetite and self-will. Abundant scope was given for gratifying every lawful taste: "The Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food." But two trees are distinguished from the rest, as having special properties. The tree of life had, in some mysterious way, the power of making man immortal.' The tree of the knowledge of good and evil revealed to those who ate its fruit secrets of which they had better have remained ignorant; for the purity of man's happiness consisted in doing and loving good without even knowing evil. § 2. The use of these trees was not left to man's unaided judgment. God gave him the plain command: "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The vast freedom granted to him proved the goodness of the Creator; the one exception taught him that he was to live under a law; and that law was enforced by a practical penalty, of which he was mercifully warned. We must not regard the prohibition merely as a test of obedience, nor the penalty as arbitrary. The knowledge forbidden to him was of a kind which would corrupt his nature-so corrupt it, as to make him unfit, as well as unworthy, to live for ever. § 3. The trial of man's obedience was completed by a temptation from without. The tempter is simply called in 1 Gen. ii. 9. 2 Gen. iii. 22. Gen. ii. 16, 17. temptation is confused by the modern senses of the words tempt, try, prove. The whole Scripture doctrine of God tries his people's faith (as in the Genesis the Serpent, but that creature was a well-known type of the chief of the fallen angels, the Evil Spirit, whose constant effort is to drag down man to share his own ruin. From this enmity to God and man, he is called SATAN (the adversary), and the DEVIL (the accuser or slanderer). He slandered God to our first parents, teaching them to doubt his truth, and to ascribe his law to jealousy. "Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that, in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." He addressed the temptation first to the woman, who fell into the threefold sin of sensuality, pleasure, and ambition, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life." She "saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise," and she ate the fruit, and gave it to her husband. The threefold appeal of the tempter to the infirmities of our nature may be traced also in the temptation of Christ, the second Adam, who " was in all points likewise tempted, but without SIN." 998 9910 § 4. In one point the devil had truly described the effect of eating the forbidden fruit. "Their eyes were opened. They had "become as gods" in respect of that knowledge of evil, as well as good, which God had reserved to himself and mercifully denied to them. They became conscious of the working of lawless pleasure in place of purity, in the very constitution given them by God to perpetuate their race; and they were ashamed because they were naked. Toward God they felt fear in place of love, and they fled to hide themselves from His presence among the trees of the garden.' 11 § 5. Thus they were already self-condemned before God -called them forth to judgment. Then the man cast the blame upon the woman, and the woman upon the serpent; and God proceeded to award a righteous sentence to each.12 i. The judgment passed upon the serpent is symbolical of the condemnation of the devil. The creature, as Satan's instrument and type, is doomed to an accursed and degraded life; and the enmity that has ever since existed between him and man is the symbol of the conflict between the powers of hell and all that is good in the human race. ii. The woman is condemned to subjection to her husband, case of Abraham), desiring that it may stand the trial: Satan tempts them, hoping for their fall. Gen. iii. 1; comp. 2 Cor. xi. 3. See Notes and Illustrations. 6 διάβολος. 7 Gen. iii. 4, 5. 9 Gen. iii. 6. 11 Gen. iii. 8. 8 1 John ii. 16 10 Gen. iii. 1. and sorrow and suffering in giving birth to her children; but she had the consolation of hearing that her seed was to conquer in the battle with the serpent, crushing its head, after the reptile had inflicted a deadly wound upon his heel.is iii. The man is shut up to a life of toil, and the earth is cursed for his sake, to bring forth, like himself, evil weeds, that require all his exertions to keep them down. But, as before, a promise is added; his labors shall not be without its reward—" in the sweat of thy brow, thou shalt eat bread." Reminded of the doom they had incurred, though its execution was postponed-" dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return "—and clothed by God's goodness with the skins of beasts, they were driven out of Paradise. An angelic guard, with a flaming sword, debarred them from returning to taste the tree of life; for it would have perpetuated their suffering." § 6. But yet they had received the revelation of eternal life. The curse upon the serpent and the promise to the woman pointed clearly to a Redeemer, who should be born of a woman, and, by his own suffering, should destroy the power of the devil; and here we have the first prophecy of the Messiah. Henceforth the woman lived in the expectation of the promised seed, which should make her the mother of a truly living race; and, to signify this hope, Adam gave her the name of EVE (Chavah, that is, living). Thus already life began to spring from death." § 7. There can be no reasonable doubt that the sacrifice of living animals was now instituted as a prophetic figure of the great sacrifice which should fulfill this promise. Animals must have been slain to provide the skins that clothed Adam and Eve; and wherefore slain, except in sacrifice? This might not seem conclusive in itself; but the whole reason for sacrifice began to exist now: its use is taken for granted in the next chapter (Gen. iv.); and it continues throughout the patriarchal age without the record of any other beginning. Thus early, then, man learned that, "without shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin;" that his own forfeited life was redeemed, and to be restored by the sacrifice of the coming "seed of the woman;" and that he was placed by God under a new dispensation of mercy. Nay, even his punishment was a mercy; for his suffering was a discipline to train him in submission to God's will. The repentance of 13 Comp. Rom. xvi. 20. 14 Gen. iii. 21-24. 15 Gen iii. 20. our first parents is nowhere expressly stated: but it is implied here and in the subsequent narrative. § 8. We must not omit to notice the traces of these truths, which are found among many nations. The Greek legend of Pandora traces the entrance of evil to a woman; the Buddhist and Chinese traditions refer the beginning of sin to eating forbidden fruit and desiring forbidden knowledge; and most systems of mythology make the serpent a type of the power of evil, and a divine personage his destroyer. Delitzsch well says, "The story of the Fall, like that of the Creation, has wandered over the world. Heathen nations have transplanted and mixed it up with their geography, their history, their mythology, although it has never so completely changed form, and color, and spirit, that you can not recognize it. Here, however, in the Law, it preserves the character of a universal, human, world-wide fact: and the groans of Creation, the Redemption that is in Christ Jesus, and the heart of every man, conspire in their testimony to the most literal truth of the narrative." The recollection of the tree of life is preserved in the sacred tree of the Assyrians and Hindoos, and in other Eastern systems of mythology." * See Layard, "Nineveh and its Remains," vol. ii. p. 472. 16 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. THE SERPENT. Ir has been supposed by many commentators that the serpent, prior to the Fall, moved along in an erect attitude, as Milton (Pur. L. ix. 496) "Not with indented wave Prone on the ground, as since, but on his rear, Circular base of rising folds that tower'd the animal to move its body from place to place; consequently, had the snakes before the Fall moved in an erect attitude, they must have been formed on a different plan altogether. It is true that there are Saurian reptiles, such as the Saurophis tetradactylus and the Chamasaura anguina of S. Africa, which in external form are very like serpents, but with quasi-feet; indeed, even in the boa-constrictor, underneath the skin near the extremity, there exist rudimentary legs; some have been disposed to believe that the snakes before the Fall were similar to the Sau Such an hypothesis, howev But it is quite clear that an erect mode of progression is utterly incompatible with the structure of a serpent, whose motion on the ground is beautifully effected by the mechanism of the vertebral column and the multitudinous ribs, which, forming as it were so many pairs of levers, enable rophis. er, is untenable, for all the fossil quent to the Fall its form and pro Ophidia that have hitherto been found gression were to be regarded with hadiffer in no essential respects from tred and disgust by all mankind, and modern representatives of that order; thus the animal was cursed "above it is, moreover, beside the mark, for all cattle," and a mark of condemnathe words of the curse, "upon thy tion was forever stamped upon it. belly shalt thou go," are as charac- There can be no necessity to show teristic of the progression of a Sauro- how that part of the curse is literally phoid serpent before the Fall as of a fulfilled which speaks of the "enmitrue Ophidian after it. There is no ty" that was henceforth to exist bereason whatever to conclude from tween the serpent and mankind; and the language of Scripture that the though, of course, this has more esserpent underwent any change of pecial allusion to the devil, whose inform on account of the part it played strument the serpent was in his dein the history of the Fall. The sun ceit, yet it is perfectly true of the serand the moon were in the heavens pent. Serpents are said in Scripture long before they were appointed for to "eat dust" (see Gen. iii. 14; Is. "signs and for seasons, and for days lxv. 25; Mic. vii. 17); these aniand for years." The typical form of mals, which for the most part take the serpent and its mode of progres- their food on the ground, do consesion were in all probability the same quently swallow with it large porbefore the Fall as after it; but subse- tions of sand and dust. |