THE FALL

An eloquent preacher said a few years 'ago that man's only fall was a fall upward. It is in such flashy, flippancy of language that modern infidelity clothes itself. But man is a fallen being just the same. All human history proves it. Notice.

I. The Circumstances of the Fall,

1. There was an animal used by a higher agency. We will pass over all the fanciful interpretations of this remarkable passage of Scripture. Treating it in the most natural way as plain matter of fact history, there was a superior intelligence at work in the temptation, one who knew God, and had a knowledge of the divine command, and was able to reason with craft and cunning, and knew about good and evil, and could outwit Eve. There is no open reference to Satanic agency; but there was a malignant cunning displayed which plainly points to him and his "devices."

This may be plainly inferred from other Scriptures. Indeed this seems to be the underlying idea of the Bible that Satan caused the downfall of the race. He is depicted as a murderer, and a liar from the beginning and there is no truth in him (John 8: 44). He is "that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world" (Rev. 12: 9). "But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve in his craftiness, your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity and the purity that is toward Christ" (2 Cor. 11: 3). There can be no question that the temptation in the garden by Satan is the underlying thought of these passages of Scripture.

2. Notice the method of the temptation.

The subtlety of the Devil is apparent in the whole process. First Eve was tempted when alone and her downfall would be easier of accomplishment. Second, a subtile suggestion is made against the fairness of the restriction placed upon them. Third, suspicion was placed on the veracity of God. Fourth, the penalty of sin was flatly denied. "Ye shall not surely die." "Eve was assured that there was great advantage in knowing good and evil. Thus their, or her, reverence for God! and confidence in His wisdom and goodness and love were aroused to possess the Godlike knowledge, and through the awakened desire for a new experience she fell, and carried her husband with her into disobedience. It was the saddest knowledge ever gained.

3. The penalty.

Death had been announced to them as the penalty of disobedience. A Congregational preacher of London of unenviable reputation, in one of his infidel books, sneers at this story of the fall, and calls this sin a "mere peccadillo." It is ever so. Cheap theology always gets on the Devil's side of the sin question. But any sin is no peccadillo, however, whenever, wherever, or by whomsoever committed. Sin is the fatal gangrene, the consuming leprosy of the moral universe. "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die"; "For the wages of sin is death."

There is in the law no explanation of this term death. We must find its meaning in subsequent Scripture, and in the after condition of the race. The term seems to have meant:

(1) Physical death. Apparently there was a provision for perpetual life, as the heritage of man. By this we mean exemption from death as we know it by sickness, and pangs, and agony and dread. As we have noted elsewhere God might have removed His children to their eternal home by translation as He did Elijah, or by some other delightful way. Death as we know it-the terror of the race would have been unknown. "This was provided for by the tree of life, probably by a sacramental use of its fruit." But through the first sin came expulsion from the tree of life and the sad penalty of physical death.

(2) There is also a spiritual death, as distinguished from the spiritual life which man originally had, and which comes back only through grace. The Scriptures speak of a moral death of being "dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2:1). It consists in a separation of the soul from communion with God, and is manifested by the corrupt dispositions and habits and carnal tendencies of the soul, as utter aversion to spiritual and heavenly things. All who have not been made alive by regeneration are now regarded as in that death. Such was now the state of Adam and Eve. "With the full execution of the penalty this death must have been utter. But it is reasonable to think that in this case, as in that of physical death, there was a partial arrest of judgment, or an instant gift of helping grace, through the redemptive mediation at once inaugurated" (Miley).

(3) There is still a third sense of the term-that of eternal death. This subject will have ample discussion hereafter. But for the present it is sufficient to call to mind the fact that eternal j death is the final penal allotment of the unsaved. It means that the present separation from God's Spirit will be intensified, into complete and absolute alienation that will be prolonged eternally. And the divine displeasure with the wicked will also have some especial manifestation.

4. We may remark here that the primal sin of our first parents had a race-wide consequence. This will be directly considered in the following chapter. But, by the sin of Adam his whole physical, mental and moral nature was demoralized, injured and depraved. When he came to propagate the human family, he could not reproduce in them the primitive holiness. That was forever lost. When he begat sons and daughters "in his likeness" they were born in depravity, the only nature he could give them.

The Congregational infidel of London may say with a sneer: "Why should God feel Himself so much aggrieved by Adam's peccadillo? If it were not for the theological atmosphere which surrounds the question we should see at once that it was ridiculous. The doctrine of the Fall is an absurdity from the point of view of ethical consistency and common sense." Let us hear from one wiser in theology: "Sin begets depravity. It degrades and corrupts, if it does not possess the whole man. It bears sway in soul and body, becomes an evil habit, gathering strength with time-self-perpetuating. Though not a disease it works like a disease in its hidden depths, blinding the mind, hardening the heart, exciting inordinate passions, producing infirmity, misery, despair and death. From its evil effects none can deliver himself" (Hyde). Another shall speak: "That sin exists, not only in idea or fancy, but in fact, is even more evident in common life than in Scripture. We find it in the plays of children; in genius, wit and culture; in arts and fashions; in feasts, speeches, songs, novels, dramas; in secret haunts, public offices, the pursuits of money, honor, pleasure; in the daily papers, popular books, all the records of falsehood, discord, vice and crime. Without it, comedy and tragedy would not be true to life, laws and penalties, courts and prisons, indeed the whole world's history would be a shocking farce. We can learn much about it from Plato as well as from Paul, from Byron, Dickens, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, as truly as from Moses, David or Jesus Christ. Is sin a fact? I wish you could enter into a more thorough, out and out conviction of the FALL OF MAN" (Bushnell). "Nor is sin restricted to any individual, family or tribe. So far as observation or history can tell, it attaches to the race. Its presence everywhere confronts or haunts us. Hebrew ethics, looks evil earnestly and squarely in the face, and regards it as a sad, all-prevalent reality, the guilt of which lies in the free act of man and is participated in by all without exception" (Wuttke). "The race was not liable to the original penalty (of Adam's sin) in the same manner as its progenitors who transgressed the law; yet it is in a state of moral depravity, and subject to death in consequence of their sin and fall. This is the teaching of Scripture" (Miley).

II. MAN FREE TO FALL, CONTRARY TO THE WILL OF GOD.

1. There is an old catechism which declares: "God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass." We cannot say which is the greater, the moral monstrosity or the absurdity of such a statement. The infinite holiness and goodness of God make it incredible that He decreed the sin and consequent misery of the fall. That He should unchangeably foreordain that moral beings should break His own commands is unthinkable. He must have electively preferred obedience. "The contrary is not to be thought, for God's preference of obedience must always go with his command." Obedience would have brought holiness and happiness. It is absurd to suppose that a holy God of love could prefer sin, and the ruin and consequent misery of a. race.

2. It must be a rational principle with God that the preference of obedience is accompanied by the ability of obedience.

Much more rational is it to suppose that the command of God implies the possibility or the requisite faculties to obey. Therefore, Adam and Eve must have had the needed gifts to obey God. They were on probation, being tempted or tested, and what was being tested but their use of their faculties actually possessed. When the government sends an officer of the navy to test a newly made war vessel he does not test what is not there; he tests the machinery actually in the ship. Timothy Dwight truly said "that a state of trial supposes of course a capability of falling, and cannot exist without it"; but with equal truth it may be said that a state of trial presupposes ability to stand. POWER TO STAND and FREEDOM TO FALL! It may be said, then, with absolute certainty that God is eternally opposed to sin. He does not decree it, nor desire it; nor is He responsible for it in any way. But in a moral universe there must be free moral beings, and sin must forever be a possibility. This is the only philosophy that can be in harmony with the facts of the moral universe. There is a holy God, and there are moral beings, and sin is here. It must have come through the finite moral beings who were free to fall.

III. How HOLY BEINGS SIN.

How can a holy being fall? This question is often asked, often with a sneer at people who profess holiness. President Noah Porter said: "The existence of sin is the one comprehensive mystery." There are perplexing questions that may be asked about the matter; but the fall of a holy being may yet be explained psychologically. Cheap intellects sneer at the Bible account of the fall, but it has been observed that the Mosaic narrative of the sin and fall of man is not the cause of the prevalent moral evils, but simply the account of its origin in the human race. There is no more rational account. Set it aside with sneers and laughter, and what has been accomplished? We still have sin on our hands to be accounted for. Its reality, its malignity, its magnitude are still the same. Either God created man sinful or he has fallen from a state of primitive holiness. The former view is unreasonable; the latter must be the truth, and harmonizes with the despised Scripture. It implies the sinning of holy beings. How did they sin?

Let it be remembered that our first parents possessed intellect, sensibility and free will. The first two are aroused necessarily in the presence of the appropriate object that excites them. Here were the susceptibilities to temptation-"a ground of temptability."

When the tempter called Eve's attention to the forbidden fruit, "the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise; she took of the fruit thereof and did eat." The woman fixed her attention. What she saw with her eyes and heard with her ears enlisted her thought, aroused her desires, awakened appetencies. So far all is spontaneous and innocent, and quite consistent with primitive holiness. But these spontaneous thoughts and feelings, in view of God's known command, were unduly entertained, and became perilous. The entertained desire by nursing grew into a lust. "Then the lust when it hath conceived beareth sin" (James 1: 15). Eve consented to entertain her desire till it became so strong that, under its influence, she made the fatal sin-jid choice.

There were moral forces at Eve's command, quite available. She might have taken more time to deliberate. She might have consulted with her husband about it. She might have summoned the motive of reverence for God's authority and love for His goodness, as a practical power leading to obedience. She might have brought to her aid motives of fear-the awful consequences of disobedience -the threatened penalty of death, that awaited her if she rebelled against God. But every helpful influence failed, because she did not summon them to her aid and give them time to make their due impression. She acted precipitately, foolishly and fell. No doubt by a similar process the angels fell, and any holy being may fall.

IV. Why God Permitted The Fall.

He did not permit it in the following senses:

1. By consenting to it. The deed was expressly forbidden, and the heaviest penalties were pronounced against it. A civilized state cannot be said to permit murder when it forbids it, and punishes it with the death penalty.

2. He did not permit it in the sense of "unchangeably ordaining" it. To say that He "unchangeably ordained" the fall, and then solemnly forbade it, and pronounced against it the death-penalty, is to array God against Himself. It is theological fiction, and not fact-Calvinistic tomfoolery!

3. The only sense in which God did permit the sin of our first parents, or any sin is that HE DID NOT SOVEREIGNLY AND EFFECTIVELY INTERPOSE TO PREVENT IT BY FORCE. A father might forbid his boys to steal. And then, to make sure that they did not, he might hand-cuff them and chain them to posts in his dwelling. But the state would arrest and punish such a father for tyranny. So God could not forcibly restrain the moral beings he has created from the commission of sin without unjustifiable tyranny.

We cannot say that it was not permissible in God to create a moral universe. That would be to put bounds and restraints on the Almighty and limit His creative work to the sphere of impersonal existences. "Only a most arrogant and daring mind would prescribe such limitations for God, or deny Him the rightful privilege of creating moral beings capable of a worshipful recognition of Himself" (Miley). Our very greatness and essential glory in which we rejoice is fraught with peril, of which we cannot consistently complain.

Even God could not release such moral beings as we are, endowed with such faculties, from duty and responsibility. We cannot impugn God's wisdom and goodness in making us as He has, or in governing us as He does. In the very nature of the case, such beings must have a probation, and the essential fact of probation under a testing law of duty is moral responsibility, and the possibility of sin. To say that the existence of sin and its consequent misery is inconsistent with the goodness of God is equivalent to saying that it was inconsistent with His goodness to create moral beings at all.

"There was in our first parents, the knowledge that to eat the forbidden fruit was wrong, forbidden by the highest wisdom and goodness. They yielded in spite of the protests of their better knowledge. Sin, as we know it, is precisely the same. The tendency to self-gratification against the protests of reason in our first parents, was like that in all their children, and the yielding to this impulse, in opposition to a better knowledge, is still the same" (Fair-child's Theology, p. 156).

Now such flagrant, open, willful disobedience, against the dictates of reason merits punishment. This is the verdict of conscience within us. And if the punishment be just the permission of the sin was not unjust, "The obedient who reap the rich harvest of spiritual good and the disobedient, who suffer the penalty of sin, are under the same moral economy. If that economy be right to the one it can not be wrong to the other. If the moral economy be righteous there can be no requirement of providence sovereignly to prevent the sin which forfeits the blessing" (Miley, p. 438).

4. THE FALL AND REDEMPTION.

It is often said by theologians that "God permitted the fall of man that He might provide a redemption for the race so ruined, and through its grace and love bring a far greater good to the moral universe and especially to the human race." Mr. Wesley thought that this view cleared the question of the fall of all perplexity, so far as it concerned the divine wisdom and goodness. The argument is that through the atonement in Christ, rendered necessary by the fall, mankind has gained a higher capacity for holiness and happiness in the present life and also for eternal blessedness (Sermon 64).

This is not the most logical and helpful way of stating the case. God permitted sin because, as we have seen, he could not wisely and righteously prevent it. Having created moral beings, he must let them be moral beings, free to work out their own destiny as self-sovereigns, exempt from external compulsion. Beings cannot be moral beings at all without the possibility of choice between right and wrong, and so without the possibility of sinning. Let us hold fast to this fundamental truth.

But it is still true that the fall did open the way for, and give occasion to, the great plan of redemption. And this work of redemption has brought additional glory to God, and the possibility of increased blessing to men. If Satan, out of his intense hatred to God, hoped to tarnish his glory by achieving the ruin of man, he defeated himself.

(1) So far as we can see, had there been no sin in the universe, God never could have made a full and perfect manifestation of His character and glory. Calvary is the only adequate measure of the divine love. Without the fall of man the radiance of God's forgiving love would never have shone on human hearts. What conception could we ever have had of the divine pity or sympathy, or compassion, or mercy or grace? Only as human "sin abounded" could divine "grace much more abound." Redeemed saints could never fill heaven with eternal praise of God for their redemption had humanity never been lost. And so it comes about that Satan's foul act of corrupting our first parents, has been so overruled by God that it redounded to His infinite glory by the unexpected and astonishing displays of His hitherto unknown attributes.

(2) It is true also, that the fall with the redeeming grace that accompanied it, has put us all on a better probation than Adam had, and "has provided for man the necessary condition for the development of the graces of patience, meekness, gentleness, long-suffering, which contribute so much to the highest Christian character."

But all this only proves that God overmatched Satan's wickedness and forced him, with all his wicked machinations, however unwillingly, to glorify his Maker. It does not at all prove that He permitted the fall for that purpose. While it is true that the fall occasioned the gift of the Only Begotten Son and the highest manifestations of divine goodness the universe will ever know; and, therefore, the fullest warrant of faith and love. Yet it is also true that the fall weakened our entire race, brought upon it untold misery and will be the eternal ruin of many. We must look at both sides, and all the facts. Then it is not so clear that the fall was permitted "to bring infinite gain to the race." We may, however, affirm that the fall was not unwisely prevented by force, and was overruled and made subservient to the glory of God and the eternal good of an infinite number of the finally redeemed.

Theologians must be conscientiously careful to be consistent in their arguments. "If the fall was permissible for the sake of a greater good to the race, why might it not have been procured for the same end? The theory must thus appear to be in open contrariety to the divine holiness. This result discredits it; for not even the love of God must be glorified at the expense of His holiness. Nor is it within the grasp of human thought that sin, the: greatest evil can be necessary to the greatest good of the moral universe. It is still true that an unmeasurable good will arise from the; atonement in Christ; but it is not the sense of Scripture that it was part of a providential economy for the sake of that good" (Miley, Vol. I, p. 439).

V. The fall of the angels, is more difficult to explain than that of Adam. They had a more glorious intelligence, a larger acquaintance with God, and a greater experience of His holiness. Their sin was so excuseless and wantonly wicked, that it seemed not good to God to make an atonement for them. But there must have been the same underlying principles, viz., the possession of moral attributes, a probation, the power of choice, ability to stand, and freedom to fall. There, was one marked difference. Each angel stood for himself alone; Adam was to be the progenitor of a race, each member of which was to suffer through him a lapse from holiness.