Everyone has a natural ability to render God faithful obedience, but after the fall our moral ability is held captive to our own selfishness and idolatry.
The fault lies not in that we cannot but that we will not turn from our sin to the living God. Since God is holy, no one can enter his presence unless they are holy as well Lev. No matter how much we try to cover up or clean up the darkness of our hearts, we remain in bondage to sin and guilty before God—a state of ugliness—the opposite of beauty. Thankfully, there is more to the story.
There is one key verse in the entire Bible that points us to the only way for people to be returned to a right relationship with God: In Genesis , a verse known as the protoevangelium the first announcement in the Bible of the gospel , God pronounces his curse on the serpent, and with the curse is the great promise that summarizes the Bible:. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden was actually a divine mercy. If Adam and Eve were now to eat from the tree of life, they would be condemned to live forever in their sinful state.
Yet, God had a plan all along. A second Adam must pass the test Adam failed to pass. Adam and Eve would not die right away, because they must bring forth children from whom the Savior would come.
In Jesus, God would finally have a perfectly obedient Son. His followers might try to make him an earthly king, and that is not why Jesus came. Jesus was indeed a king, but his kingdom was not of this world. As he approached the cross, Jesus spoke more plainly about his mission to redeem the world:.
From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. Jesus came to be far more than a good example: he came to destroy sin, death, and the devil. Jesus came to save us from hell and bring us into the kingdom of God. As a result of this first meal in the Bible, they were aware of their nakedness, filled with shame, cursed with difficulties, and kicked out of the Garden.
Their disobedience caused a ripple effect of sin and death that stretched beyond themselves to all of humanity across all of time. According to his omniscience and sovereignty, God caused the Tree of Knowledge to grow in paradise, and he made a covenant with Adam and Eve to refrain from eating from it so they would have a choice between receiving the eternal blessings that come through obedience and worship to a gracious God or the consequences from disobedience and idolatry against a just God.
When you do, it does not even harm the tree. More than that, God gave Adam and Eve the opportunity of eternal life in paradise. Instead of embracing their destiny to rule creation in joy, freedom, and life, they sadly chose their own path to pain, enslavement, and death. God gave them an invitation to fully satisfy their desires, yet they ignored it and chose dissatisfaction and a diminishing life instead.
And as representatives for mankind, their consequences affected and are still affecting all of humanity. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness Paul goes on to explain that:.
As descendants of Adam, all human beings are born into sin. Yet it also draws a connection between the tree of knowledge and the salvation of man.
Jesus takes the way of the Cross as a sacrifice to save man from sin. In this respect, Jesus is the new Adam. Adam is disobedient, because he ate fruit from the forbidden tree, while Jesus is obedient, allowing himself to be nailed to a cross, the tree of Calvary, to atone for Adam's sin.
In the Middle Ages and modern times, an apple represents overcoming original sin, often depicted as a snake with an apple in its mouth — as in English Greeting by Veit Stoss Lorenzkirche, Nuremberg. The Hebrew Bible doesn't actually specify what type of fruit Adam and Eve ate. Related: What led to the emergence of monotheism?
The pivotal scene is described in Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, shortly after God warns Adam not to eat from the "tree of knowledge. She also gave some to her husband, and he ate" Genesis , according to the Jewish Publication Society's translation at Sefaria.
As for the type of fruit, it's described as "just the 'fruit of the tree,'" Zivotofsky said. No identification. We don't know what kind of tree, we don't know what fruit.
The Hebrew word used in that verse is "peri," a generic word for fruit in both biblical and modern Hebrew, according to Zivotofsky. The modern Hebrew word for apple, "tapuach," on the other hand, does not appear anywhere in Genesis or in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, Zivotofsky said.
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