Where Would We Be Without Genesis 3? Understanding the Significance of Sin

Any sane person knows that there is something wrong with us. No one can honestly examine history, let alone their own lives, without being struck by the extent to which we as a human race have “missed the mark” and not lived up to our ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr keenly observed that “the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”[1] The “human condition” has been the subject of countless books, films, and plays, as people have wrestled with the reality of good and evil. One of my favorites is “The Lord of the Rings” as Tolkien explores the insidious power of the ring and the evil that lurks in every heart.

1. Reinhold Niebuhr, Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 24.

But although everyone admits that there is something wrong with us, we do not explain the “human condition” in the same way. Why? Because one’s explanation of the human condition is worldview dependent. Yet from a Christian perspective, despite the diversity of worldviews, all non-Christian views explain the human problem in a similar way: the human condition is the result of a “structural” or “metaphysical” defect, not the result of our “moral” rebellion against God. And the main reason why is because of their common rejection of Scripture’s affirmation of God, creation, and specifically an historical Adam and fall. This is also why all non-Christian views end up not sufficiently grasping the true and serious nature of the human problem. This in turn inevitably leads them to underestimate the radical solution necessary to solve the problem, namely, the incarnation of the divine Son and his work to redeem, restore, and reconcile us to God and to destroy the power of sin in our hearts and lives. For this reason, all non-Christian explanations of the human condition and its solution are ultimately denials of reality.

The Significance of Genesis 3 for Theological Anthropology

Scripture’s explanation of the desperate nature of the human condition is directly dependent on Genesis 1–3, and especially chapter 3. Yet in our day there is probably no text of Scripture that is more scoffed at than Genesis 3. After all, what are to make of “talking serpents,” “forbidden fruit,” and “naked people?” Is this not the stuff of legend and myth? After all, have we not read Charles Darwin, who supposedly undermined our naïve understanding of this text? In our day, John Haught reflects this sentiment when he asserts: “Evolutionary science . . . has rendered the assumption of an original cosmic perfection, one allegedly debauched by a temporally ‘original sin,’ obsolete and unbelievable.”[2] Or, Paul Ricoeur states something similar: “The harm that has been done to souls, during the centuries of Christianity, first by the literal interpretation of the story of Adam, and then by the confusion of this myth, treated as history, with later speculations, principally Augustinian, about original sin, will never be adequately told.”[3]

But is this actually the case? I cannot delve into the numerous arguments against evolutionary theory, although there are many.[4] But the truth of the matter is that evolution’s grand metanarrative that seeks to explain God, self, and the world is a myth of gigantic proportions. For starters, evolutionary theory can’t account for ultimate origins, design, meaning, truth, rationality, moral norms, and human dignity, let alone what is wrong with us.

4. See J. P. Moreland et al., eds., Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017).

This is why Genesis 3 can’t be dismissed so easily. In fact, in contrast to the mindset of our day, I contend that there is probably no text of Scripture that is more significant for our grasp of the true nature of our problem and the rationale for the Bible’s redemptive story than Genesis 3. As Herman Bavinck astutely notes, without the Bible’s account of the fall “this world is inexplicable.”[5] As such, Genesis 3 is crucial in describing how, in history, sin and death came into the human race, and how the desperate nature of human depravity is the condition of all people (Rom. 3:23). Furthermore, Genesis 3 reminds us that our situation is so awful that only God can remedy it, if he so chooses to do so, which thankfully he has done. Indeed, apart from Genesis 3, we have no explanation of how humans were created “very good” (Gen. 1:31) but are now in their present state: abnormal, fallen, and cursed. Genesis 3 alone gives us the only true explanation of our problem along with the Bible’s glorious solution in our Lord Jesus Christ. Apart from it, all explanations of the human condition are superficial, inadequate, and in the end, yield no rationale ground to think that our condition ultimately can ever be remedied.

5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003–8), 3:53. Italics removed.

In what follows, I will offer five reasons why Genesis 3 is crucial for understanding the nature of our human problem over against non-Christian views. In so doing, we will discover how Genesis 3 is foundational for Christian theology and for our understanding of why we need a Redeemer to rescue us from our desperate plight. It is not to be ignored.

Reasons why Genesis 3 is Foundational for Understanding Sin and Salvation

1. No Other Explanation for Humanity’s Fallen Sinful Condition

Genesis 3 alone describes how the entrance of sin and evil came into the world and the desperate nature of the human condition. Mark it well: Scripture and Christian theology take sin and evil very seriously, and both are explained in Genesis 3. The opening chapters of the Bible remind us of how God created humans unique as his “image and likeness” (Gen 1:26), morally upright, and in right relationship with him and with one another. Yet these same chapters also remind us how quickly we went from this “very good” (Gen. 1:31) and “no shame” (Gen. 2:25) situation to being exiled from Eden. Apart from Genesis 3, we have no explanation of why humans are both significant and now fallen, corrupt, under God’s wrath, judgment, and the sentence of death (Rom. 6:23; Eph. 2:1–3). Genesis 3 is the only place in Scripture that describes how, why, and when this occurred in the human realm.

2. No Other Explanation for Sin’s Universality

Genesis 3 alone explains why our now fallen, abnormal condition is universal. In Scripture, Adam is not only the first biological man that all humans descend from; he is also chosen by God to be the covenant head of all humanity, and thus our representative before God. By creation, Adam was created morally upright and able to obey God and thus to be confirmed in righteousness due to God’s covenant promise. Yet, sadly and tragically, by his one act of disobedience, Adam not only incurred God’s wrath and judgment for his own sin; he also acted on the behalf of all humans. As the covenant head of humanity, God imputed Adam’s guilt to all of his descendants, which also has resulted in our corruption and abnormality (Rom. 5:12–21; Eph. 2:1–3). For this reason, Paul can say that all humans, without exception (other than our Lord Jesus), “have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Apart from Genesis 3 and Adam’s disobedient action as our covenant head, there is no way to explain the universality of sin and evil in us and in the world, which alone explains what we see around us and experience daily.

3. No Other Explanation For Why Sin is Not Essential to Humanity

In contrast to all non-Christian worldviews and sub-Christian views that deny the historicity of Adam and the fall, Genesis 3 refuses to equate finitude/creatureliness with sin. The significance of this point is momentous, so let’s develop it a bit more to grasp its full importance.

Scripture presents Adam as the first man of history, and his fall as an historical event. This means that sin and evil are not part of God’s original creation. All that God created—including humans—was created good and morally upright (Gen. 1:31). Sin and evil, then, were introduced into the world by Adam’s moral rebellion against God. Or, to employ older language, sin/evil and its consequences are “accidental rather than essential to being human, a point that Scripture reinforces both in terms of the goodness of the original creation and the promise of glorification.”[6] As such, Scripture doesn’t equate our creatureliness with our sin/fallenness.

6. Kelly M. Kapic, “Anthropology,” in Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic, ed. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 184.

But in order to make this distinction, it requires a historical Adam and fall as taught by Genesis 3. However, if Adam and his fall didn’t occur in history, then we have to equate God’s creation of us with our sin/fallenness; humans simply were created the way we presently are. Thus, we would have to conclude that our sin is bound up with our creation and that sin is more of a structural/metaphysical problem than a moral/ethical one. In other words, without a clear distinction between Adam’s creation and fall in history, sin is not accidental to us but essential or intrinsic to what it means to be human.

The implication of such a view is both disastrous and destructive of the entire teaching of Scripture, which I will note below. But thankfully Scripture doesn’t teach that God created Adam structurally flawed so that what we presently are is what we have always been. As Andrew Leslie rightly reminds us: “[T]here is nothing inevitable about our God-given natures, no inherent design flaw, no hairline fracture, let alone any fatalistic divine determination, that would make our fall physically necessary or unpreventable, and therein somehow excusable.”[7] If this were not the case, then our human problem would be comparable to the ill-fated Ford Pinto—a car that came off its 1971 assembly line structurally flawed.

7. Andrew Leslie, “Incurvatus Est in Se: Toward a Theology of Sin,” in Ruined Sinners to Reclaim: Sin and Depravity in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, ed. David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2024), 742.

Yet apart from a correct understanding of Genesis 3, we would have to affirm, like the Pinto, that humans came off God’s assembly line flawed, thus equating our finitude/creatureliness with our sin, making sin intrinsic/essential to us. But thankfully Scripture rejects such an equation. Given that God created Adam good, and that in history he disobeyed God, sin is not intrinsic to us. Instead, sin is the result of an act of the will. The nature of sin, then, is not due to our finitude, heredity, environment, and emotional makeup. Rather, sin has everything to do with Adam’s and our willful transgression of God’s law (Gen. 2:15–17; 1 John 3:4).

All of this is good news in contrast to the alternative, and it is also foundational to Christian theology. Let’s capture its good news significance in three points.

Sin is Not Essential to Humanity

First, Scripture’s distinction between creation and fall in history allows us to view sin as ethical without reducing sin to our ontology, or essence. Sin is an act of the will, not something intrinsic to our nature. In fact, if sin is intrinsic to us then any appeal to freedom is also undercut. The bottom line is this: when sin is reduced to ontology it becomes “the very ingredients of being . . . [with] its seed and its root in the very creation.”[8] But thankfully this is not the case, given the historicity of Adam and the fall.

8. Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross, trans. David G. Preston(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 63.

God’s Righteousness is Upheld

Second, the Bible’s distinction between creation and fall also upholds the goodness, justice, and righteousness of God. From God’s creative hand, humans and the world were created good, and not sinful, evil, and fallen. Thus, God is not to blame, and he is not responsible for the fallenness of this world; responsible creatures—including angels and humans—are. Yet if there was no historic Adam and fall as Genesis 3 describes, it would seem that God created us “flawed” from the start, thus making both sin part of our ontology and God responsible for it. Unequivocally, Scripture rejects such a conclusion as God’s glory and goodness are upheld as a non-negotiable. But apart from the teaching of Genesis 3, these wrong conclusions would follow. Hence Genesis 3’s importance.

Sin Can Be Reversed

Third, Genesis 3, with its distinction between creation and fall in history, also accounts for the Bible’s confidence that the problem of sin can be reversed. Why? Because if our sin is intrinsic to us, then what hope is there that we will be different in the future than what we have always been? In other words, if we are intrinsically fallen and structurally flawed from the moment of our creation, then what hope is there that we will be any different in the future? There would be none. But Scripture denies this possibility because the problem of sin is moral, and not ontological, which means that we can become what we once were. By God’s effectual work of regeneration and Christ’s obedient life and death for us, we can be re-made and restored to the purpose of our original creation. The Bible’s story is wonderful at this point: God created us good, but due to Adam’s sin in history, we are now fallen. But God can restore what was lost, not by scrapping us, but by transforming us to be what he created us to be in the first place (and even greater moral perfection in our glorification). Thus, given the Bible’s affirmation of a historic Adam and fall, Christian theology is able to affirm that sin is not part of our original, created nature, but that now—due to Adam’s sin—all humans are currently fallen, yet we may be redeemed and transformed by God’s provision of a Redeemer in Christ Jesus our Lord.[9]

9. Henri Blocher, Original Sin: Illuminating the Riddle, New Studies in Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 58–62.

4. No Other Explanation for the Resolution of Scripture’s Redemptive Story  

Genesis 3 gives us the needed rationale for the Bible’s entire covenantal story leading us to Christ and the new creation, and apart from it the Bible’s story makes little sense. As Henri Blocher states it, Genesis 3 not only “belongs decisively to the structure of Genesis and to that of the Torah,”[10] it is also uniquely situated in the entire canon to set up the nature of the human problem and to prepare for God’s gracious provision of a Redeemer.

10. Blocher, Original Sin, 32.

After Genesis 3 describes the effects of sin on the human race, it moves forward due to God’s promise of a coming Redeemer (Gen. 3:15) to anticipate a solution to and reversal of our sin. As we move from Genesis 3 through the Old Testament, the universal effects of Adam’s sin are evident. Sin wasn’t limited to Adam’s action; it was passed on to his children by imputation and transmission. For example, Cain kills his brother Abel (Genesis 4), and sin multiplies throughout all of Adam’s offspring. In Genesis 5, the constant refrain—“And they died . . .”—reminds us of Adam’s sin and that God’s verdict of death has not escaped anyone (Gen. 2:15–17; 3:17–19), other than Enoch, who is a glimmer of future hope (Gen. 5:21–25). However, in Genesis 6–9, sin is so egregious that God brings a global flood. Then in Genesis 11, we see that with the multiplication of Noah’s line after the flood, the human heart has not changed. Humans continue to raise their fist in rebellion against God at Babel. If we ever doubt that Adam’s sin affected all his descendants, all we need to do is see how Adam’s sin is transmitted to all of his progeny throughout history.

Yet alongside the desperate condition of humanity, we also have God’s promise to provide a Redeemer, a last Adam, who will reverse the effects of sin and death, and his promise to bring about a new covenant, resulting in the forgiveness of our sins (Gen. 3:15; cf. Jer. 31:31–34; Heb. 8). This glorious plan of redemption is unfolded step-by-step through the biblical covenants, which ultimately culminates in the incarnation and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. But why must God the Son become human? Why must he die on our behalf? The answer to these questions is answered in Genesis 3, and the entire context of God’s creation and the consequences of Adam’s sin on all of humanity. Adam in his covenant headship failed and disobeyed, thus bringing sin and death into the world (Rom. 5:12–21). But the divine Son, who assumes our human nature (John 1:1, 14) does so in order to undo what Adam did and to accomplish our eternal redemption, all because of God’s promise to reverse what Adam did in Genesis 3.

All of this is to say that the Bible’s entire covenantal story of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation turn on the loss of goodness in creation by Adam’s sin, and the restoration of goodness in Christ’s work. Without Genesis 3, we cannot make sense of the message of Scripture and our triune God’s plan of redemption.

The Folly of Denying Genesis 3

But note: once someone denies the historical significance of Genesis 1–3, and especially Genesis 3 (as many current theistic evolutionists do), then an alternative storyline must emerge. For example, Patrick Franklin—who is a theistic evolutionist and who denies the historicity of Adam and the fall—argues that “the incarnation of the Son was always part of God’s plan, because union with Christ by the Spirit was always God’s goal, irrespective of the Fall.”[11] In other words, as Hans Madueme astutely observes, “Franklin’s ‘incarnation anyway’ scenario moves like a forward slash from creation to consummation. Sin and redemption are ‘intervening acts’ that are marginal to the primary plotline from creation to new creation.”[12]

But why does Franklin make this move contrary to Scripture’s own structure? The answer is simple but consequential: this move allows him to explain (without affirming an historic Adam or fall) how “human sin/fallenness does not drive the logic of eschatological consummation; creation does (along with incarnation, the divine assumption of humanity).”[13] Yet by such a move, Scripture’s creation, fall, redemption, and new creation plotline is now recast to one of “creation-incarnation-new creation.”[14] But this recasting of the Bible’s story is highly problematic for at least two reasons. First, there is no biblical warrant for it, especially if we read Scripture on its own terms and not through the extratextual grid of evolutionary thought. Second, this alternative reading of Scripture uncouples Christ’s work from the fall, thus prioritizing Christus Victor over penal substitution, which sadly leads to a different understanding of the gospel.

This illustrates why Genesis 3 is so significant for our understanding of Scripture, theology, and indeed the gospel itself. As Hans Madueme rightly notes, when we lose Genesis 3 as history, we change “the overall shape of the canonical story and distort the interrelations of the doctrinal loci. Cutting ties with the first Adam leads theistic evolutionists to redirect emphasis to the last Adam. Since the dogmatic pressure must be released somewhere, they compensate by overemphasizing Christology and soteriology.”[15] But the cost is high. If we get the Bible’s covenantal story wrong, failing to understand the goodness of creation and the tragic results of the fall, we will also fail to grasp why the incarnation is necessary and what Christ’s redemptive, new creation work is all about. No wonder Genesis 3 is so important since it is foundational for understanding our entire vision of Christianity and the nature of the gospel.

15. Madueme, Defending Sin,243.

5. No Other Explanation for Christianity’s Uniqueness Among Other Worldviews

Genesis 3 is also significant because it sets Christianity apart from other worldviews in its explanation of sin and evil. As we have noted, all worldviews must explain sin/evil, but they do so differently. No doubt, there are questions and mysteries surrounding the “origin” of sin and evil tied to God’s eternal decree. But when we compare a Christian view of these matters to non-Christian views, we discover that these other views cannot explain the human condition as Scripture does, which results in their denial of reality along with serious consequences that follow. In fact, because all non-Christian views reject a historic Adam and fall, they make sin and evil part of our nature, which we have already noted leads to disastrous consequences. Here are some examples of some non-Christian views, which in the end are incapable of explaining the true nature of sin, and thus unable to provide any solution to it. All of this reminds us that we need a sound theological anthropology in regard to humans and sin, for apart from it, human thought independent of Scripture has no answers to the basic questions of life.

For example, naturalism—the idea that nothing exists beyond the material world—cannot make sense of the category of good and evil, ultimately leaving much of life inexplicable and without any hope for a solution to the human problem, and susceptible to dehumanization. Or some Eastern religions (e.g., Hinduism and Buddhism) and western cults (e.g., Christian Science) argue that sin and evil are merely illusory due to their metaphysical belief that all is “one.”[16] In these monistic views, “god” transcends both good and evil, and thus all good and evil are ultimately the same. But the problem is that if “good” and “evil” are the same, we simply cannot account for misery, pain, suffering, and death, let alone the human heart. Such a view is a sad and disastrous denial of reality.

16. On sin as an illusion, see Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 13–14.

Or other worldviews trivialize sin, which is another form of a denial of reality. Georg Hegel made “evil” a necessary step in the development of history, a view taught by evolutionists. Yet such a view cannot account for what we know to be the case: sin and evil is abnormal, hideous, and an intrusion that reflects what should not be. Again, it is only Genesis 3 that can account for what sin truly is, along with providing an answer to sin’s hideous nature in the sovereign work of the triune God centered in Christ. Or think of various dualist views that think of sin/evil as an equal “power” in conflict with the “good.”[17] Dualism, such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism that greatly affected the early church, holds that there is a moral conflict on the basic metaphysical level. There is a “good” power and an “evil” power in the universe, and they are equally matched. In the world these two powers are intermingled, and both are aspects of human nature.

17. On sin as dualism, see Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 15–16.

But again, such views are contrary to Scripture, and they offer no answers to the serious nature of the human condition. In these systems evil is often tied to matter, thus devaluing creation and our physical bodies. This not only denies the goodness of God’s creation, but it also robs us of a Redeemer who assumed a human nature, and in that human nature redeemed us from sin, securing our justification and the reality of a new creation. Ultimately, such views deny the uniqueness, transcendence, self-sufficiency, and absoluteness of God, since it posits another “eternal” thing that exists that is not subject to God’s sovereignty. Furthermore, such views, like all non-Christian views, make sin a “substance”—thus rejecting the notion of sin as a “moral” evil—which entails that there is no such thing as human responsibility, and ultimately no remedy for it.

Concluding Reflection

Any sane person knows there is something wrong with the human race, but it is only the Bible’s answer, grounded in Genesis 3, that truly explains what is wrong with us. All non-Christian views, in the end, are a denial of reality, and the consequence of such views is disaster, not only in failing to understand who humans are, but also in providing no solution to the problem of sin. If we fail to understand the true nature of the human problem, as Scripture defines it, we will never appreciate the Bible’s only solution to it. In this regard, Genesis 3 is indeed one of the most significant texts in Scripture, because apart from a correct understanding of it in its immediate context and in light of the entire canon, we will fail to appreciate our desperate condition due to Adam’s sin, and the glorious solution to it in Christ Jesus our Lord.