The creation story was so remarkable that even the Creator looked at His work and said that it was good. This truth is stated seven times in the first chapter of the Bible. Near the end of the sixth day, “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). In six short days, He had not made a single thing which was not very good. Life could not get any better for Adam and Eve in their first home, the Garden of Eden, which God made especially for them.
Then, it all changed—rebellion, ignoring God, disobedience, guilt, fear—it all changed. Driven from the presence of God, they were no longer allowed to walk with their Maker in the cool of day. There were consequences of sin for Satan, whose head would someday be bruised; for the serpent, who would no longer be the most cunning and crafty of any beast made by God; for the woman, there would be subjection and greater sorrow and pain in childbirth; and for Adam, who now had to deal with a cursed earth, the toil and sweat every day just to have food to survive, thorns and thistles to create greater adversity and the fact that someday his body made from the dust would become dust again.
Such a simple story filled with eternal truth. God makes everything very good, but we so often turn His work upside down. We have changed the home into something hardly recognizable. Whatever happened to men seeing a wife as a treasure brought to him by God and his response that “she shall be bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”; whatever happened to “I will be a helper fit and comparable to him”?
How have we failed to learn that sin with all of its consequences can be as simple a thing as eating fruit from a tree? How did we ever arrive at the conclusion that only “big sins” matter? If “little sins” like eating fruit from a tree brings such judgment from God, how much greater will there be toward “big sins”? How have we forgotten that sin is disobedience and manifests a heart of rebellion? In the Eden story, we can vividly see the truth the Lord later proclaimed when He said, “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry” (1 Sam. 15:22).
Such simple truth with daily reminders. The sight of the enmity we have toward that serpent slithering on its belly should remind us of sin. The pain of childbirth and the sorrow in rearing children should remind us of sin. The sweat from the long hours we work and tiredness we feel at the end of each day should remind us of sin. The unhappiness and conflict in the home as we seek to deal with rule and subjection should remind us of sin. God help us to remember Eden!