What was the first sin?

Question

True Bible Answers · Accepted Answer

Every history of human trouble has a starting point, and Scripture places it in a garden where one tree was off limits and the woman was persuaded to take its fruit. What exactly went wrong there — and why so much hangs on so small an act — is what the commentators press.

Disobedience

Asked to name the sin, writers answer with one word. The setting makes the act inexcusable: there was nothing lacking that could push them toward it.

Surrounded by every natural good, he was subject to the simplest and least burdensome of divine commands — to keep away from the fruit of a single tree, the test of his obedience. This he broke at the enemy's first temptation, following his wife into evil instead of guiding her in good.

William Kelly

The root

Behind the eating lay something earlier and quieter. The serpent's first work was to make God look like a withholder, so that the heart had to fend for itself.

The beginning of all sin was losing confidence in God: "He is keeping back that tree." If I do not trust God, I must do the best I can for myself: then follow lust, transgression, ruin. Christ comes into the world of sinners and says, "Now you can have confidence in Me."

J. N. Darby

That poison was already at work before a hand ever reached out.

The serpent's master-stroke was to instil lust into the soul, and distrust of God; to cast suspicion on the fullness and freeness of His nature to give. This was the poison of the serpent, which has spread through humanity ever since that day. It was done before ever a sin was committed.

F. G. Patterson

The three appeals

The way the fruit looked to Eve is not random; one writer lines it up with the three appeals John names, and with the temptations the Lord Himself later faced.

As Luke presents the three temptations a moral order can be seen in them, matching those by which Eve was seduced, which may be described in the language of Scripture as "the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life" (1 John 2:16). She saw that the tree was good for food, was pleasing to the eyes, and was a tree to be desired to make one wise (Gen. 3:6). So she took of its fruit and ate, and Adam after her.

C. E. Stuart

Two different failures

Eve and Adam did not fall in the same way. Scripture treats Adam as the responsible one, and commentators point to 1 Timothy 2:14 for the reason.

The woman, Eve, becomes the means of it. Approached by the serpent, she listened, and then taking the lead, which was not her place, she acted and disobeyed. Adam, however, was the responsible transgressor. It is always Adam's sin that Scripture speaks of, and 1 Timothy 2:14 gives us the reason. Eve was deceived but Adam was not. His eating of the forbidden tree was therefore an act of pure defiance of God. It was undiluted lawlessness, and that is the very essence of sin.

F. B. Hole

Others add that affection, not deception, moved him — he followed his wife with his eyes open, and that made it worse rather than better.

What it let loose

The size of the act and the size of the result do not match, and that is the point. One man's choice changed the standing of everyone after him.

When man fell, he abandoned God as Master; he gained by sin another master, even Satan, the great rebel against the true God. The race followed the fallen parents. "Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned" (Rom. 5:12). So blind is every man that he tends to go no higher than himself in accounting for sin. But it is not so: neither Jew nor Gentile started sin. It began with the head of the race.

William Kelly

The answer

Because the first sin was disobedience, the remedy had to be obedience — and Scripture sets two men side by side.

The first Adam and the second, the Lord from heaven, the great heads and types of ruin and of blessing, are distinguished in this way as the disobedient and the obedient ones. The first Adam did his own will. He was put under a test of obedience... He did eat, and was ruined: death, the wages of sin, came in... but mercy entered before man was shut out, so that he might carry it with him into the desert into which he was driven.

J. N. Darby

Summary

- Distrust first. Before any fruit was touched, the serpent had already sown suspicion that God was keeping something back.

- Disobedience next. Trust gone, self-will follows; the act itself was breaking the one simple command given to a man who lacked nothing.

- Desire as the road. The fruit appealed to appetite, to the eyes, and to the wish to be wise — the same three lines of attack the Lord later met and refused.

- Two failures, one guilty head. Eve was deceived and took the lead; Adam was not deceived, and Scripture lays the fall at his door as pure defiance.

- Ruin, then remedy. Through one man sin and death spread to all — and the answer is the second Man, the obedient one, with mercy entering before the gate ever closed.