Sin and the Fall

OBJECTIVE

To understand:

"Original" Sin
What is Sin
What are the Effects of My Sins to Me

INTRODUCTION

When we sin, do we know what that means and how it affects us? The more I understand what sin is, the more I should be able to see how grave it is. To really understand sin, I need to go back to the beginning.

HOLY SCRIPTURE

"So the Lord God said to the serpent:'Because you have done this, You are cursed more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field: On your belly you shall go, And you shall eat dust All the days of your life. And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel.'"(Genesis 3:14-15)
"I will raise up for them a Prophet like you from among their brethren, and will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I command Him." (Deuteronomy 18:18)
"Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because all sinned--." (Romans 5:12)

CONTENT (KEY POINTS)

Sin

The word most often used for "sin" in the Bible is the Greek word amartia, which literally translated means to "miss the mark." Adam and Eve, whose target was to build a relationship with God and be in communion with Him, missed the mark of their goal. Instead, they fell away from God and their true calling. They exchanged God's truth for the lie that they or something other than God can make them whole, and exercised their will to choose a path different from what came most natural to them. They were misled to believe that their rebelliousness would make them "free" of God's provisions, but what they found instead was slavery to their own passions and death instead of life.

Corrupted Nature: Shame and Self-Justification

The first effect of man's sin and disobedience is that their "eyes became opened, and they realized they were naked" St. John Chrysostom explains:

It wasn't the eating from the tree that opened their eyes: they could see even before eating. Instead the eating from this tree was the symptom of their disobedience and breaking of the command given by God; and through their guilt they consequently divested themselves of the glory surrounding them, rendering themselves unworthy of such wonderful esteem... Because of the fall they were stripped of grace from above, and they felt the sense of their obvious nakedness so that through the shame that overcame them they might know precisely what peril they had been led into by breaking the Lord's commandments.

By rejecting God, Adam and Eve experienced, for the first time, their weakness apart from God. God clothed and protected them with His Grace in Paradise, but when they deliberately rejected Him, they realized their own brokenness without Him and this perversion of their original nature filled them with shame.

Even after they sinned, Genesis described how God searched for them in the Garden. The Church Fathers see the dialogue that happened after as God's call for man to repentance. St. John Chrysostom writes regarding God asking Adam "where are you?" while he was hiding:

God asks about this not because He did not know: He knew, and knew perfectly; but in order to show His love of mankind He condescends to their weakness and call them to confess their sin.

But this is where we begin to learn of the consequences of sin and the fall on man's corrupted and disfigured nature. St. Athanasius explains:

Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of grace which belonged to them in the Image of God. No repentance could not meet the case.

Adam doesn't respond with repentance but with self-justification. The corruption of human nature is manifested in man's pride, unwillingness to repent, and his deep-seated desire to justify his own behavior even when it is exposed as sinful by God Himself. The consequence of sin caused humanity to forget their original and glorious position as God's children, and instead continuously manufacture a series of pseudo-selves and delusional realities to give a false-sense of well-being and control over their lives. However, the more humanity lived this way, the more fragmented they became and the deeper they fell away from their God-given orientation of finding their true selves in Him alone.

"Original Sin"

Orthodoxy does not share the view that we inherit Adam and Eve's "punishment" because of the sin they personally committed. We are NOT accountable or being punished for their personal sin. The concept of "original sin" is instead seen in light of the reality of man's infected nature and status as a consequence of sin, as St. Cyril of Alexandria states, human nature itself has "fallen ill with sin." Sin became so deeply rooted in human nature that not a single descendant of Adam has been spared from the hereditary disposition to it. Adam and Eve may have been the first to sin, but all men have contributed to the further corruption and brokenness of the fallen world we live in because of their own personal sin.

The "original sin" of man is the turning of their God-centeredness to self-centeredness, for the opposite of love is self-love. Man stopped looking at the world and other human beings in a Eucharistic way, as a sacrament of communion with God. He no longer viewed them as gifts to be shared in love and to be offered back unto God in thanksgiving, and, instead, began to treat them as his own possession, to be used selfishly, exploited, and devoured. St. Athanasius explains "how man turned away from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising" and were thus in the "process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion." What man inherited as "original sin" is not the sin of Adam itself, but rather the distortion of his original nature seen through their inner-disposition to selfishness as opposed to love for others and their willingness to commit evil acts for their own fleshly-pleasures.

How the Fall Affects Us

Through the fall, sin entered the world. As a result mankind inherits the sinful state/status:

1. We inherited separation from God.

Thus, in inheriting a sinful status, we also inherited separation from God. "But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He does not hear" (Is 59:2). As St. Irenaeus explained, "Separation from God is death, and separation from light is darkness; and separation from God consists in the loss of all the benefits which He has in store." St. Gregory of Nyssa also speaks of sin as separation or alienation from God.

Now sin is nothing else than alienation from God, Who is the true and only life. Accordingly the first man lived many hundred years after his disobedience, and yet God did not lie when He said, In the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die." For by the fact of his alienation from the true life, the sentence of death was ratified against him that same day: and after this, at a much later time, there followed also the bodily death of Adam.

For this reason, our Lord came to reunite the heavenly with the earthly, "to abolish death and show forth life and produce a community of union between God and man." In the Incarnation, our Lord takes humanity and unites it with Himself in a full and perfect union. He also provides for us the Holy Mysteries as the means to unite Himself with us: "Abide in Me and I in you" (Jn. 15:4).

In addition to separation from God, Genesis 3:7-8 describes three other separations from the Fall, which continue to affect humanity.

Separation from Within -- Psychological disorders, guilt and shame
Separation from Each Other -- Dissension, accusations, rivalries, and murder
Separation from Nature -- Imbalance and natural disasters become common

As St. Athanasius says, Adam and Eve, in their separation, lost their innocence in the Fall. They were naked, but they realized their nakedness when they ate from the tree.

2. We inherited a condition of disobedience.

Human nature, which was contained in Adam, became susceptible to sin and we inherited this susceptibility to sin from Adam. As St. Clement of Alexandria explains, "The first man . . . was as a child seduced by lusts, and grew old in disobedience; and by disobeying his Father, he dishonored God." St. John Chrysostom asks:

What, then, is now the question? It is the saying that "through the disobedience of one man many were made sinners." (Rom 5:19). For nothing is unreasonable in the fact that one committed sin and was made mortal, and that they who are from him are in the same condition. On the other hand, the fact that another one is made a sinner from the disobedience of that man, however should this have followed? For if one does not become a sinner out of himself, one is not bound to punishment.

As when David writes in Psalm 50, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me," he declares his own sin, but also acknowledges the condition of disobedience which he inherited with all humanity.

The sin of Adam began in the mind. When they accepted the idea from the serpent, they saw the tree differently. The tree existed from before, and she certainly saw it previously. God told them not to eat from the tree. Eve didn't call it the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but she called it "in the midst."

3. We inherited death (θάνατος), mortality and the state of disobedience.

As God warned Adam and Eve in the day they eat of the fruit they will "surely die" (Ge 2:17). This is in direct contrast to the Tree of Life. As St. Paul summarizes, "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive" (1 Co 15:22). As many Fathers wrote, we inherit death and mortality through Adam's disobedience. Thus, death is the universal consequence of Adam's fall and sin is associated with death. As St. Basil the Great describes, "Withdrawing from life, Adam drew near to death, for God is life, and death is the privation of life." Death and affliction passed to us from Adam "on the basis of our relation to him," but not on the basis of our actual guilt. When most of the Fathers speak about us being "sinners" from Adam's fall, it is understood as being condemned to death. St. John Chrysostom explains in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans:

What, then, in this context is meant by "sinners"? It seems to me to mean "being liable to punishment," and "having been condemned to death." Therefore, that through the death of Adam we were all made mortal, he shows clearly and through many things. The question is, for what purpose did this happen? But he extends this no further, for it does not achieve anything beyond the former arguments.

Adam died the death of defeat, but Christ died a death of victory, which granted victory to all humanity. His death granted life. As St. Athanasius says, since they lost life with God, they lost existence.

4. We inherited the loss of the Holy Spirit.

According to St. Cyril of Alexandria, while corruption and death are direct and immediate due to Adam's sin, the complete loss of the grace of the Holy Spirit only occurs by stages. St. Cyril often describes the whole creation and fall in terms of the gift and loss of the Holy Spirit This is one of God's main purposes in coming to earth, dying for us, and lifting us to Heaven to grant us again the grace of the Holy Spirit. Why? Because God wills to transform and renew our human nature, so it can shine again as they did previously.

As Bulus Al-Bushi explains when God says "Surely you will die," this is not just a physical death, but the intellectual death of the separation of the Spirit of God from the soul:

That is, God, when He created our father Adam and placed him in paradise, forbade him to eat from the branch of disobedience, saying, "On the day that you eat from it, you will die" (Gen. 3:3). He did not die that day itself, but after nine hundred and thirty years. God's statement is not false, but rather, just as tangible death is the separation of the soul from the body---for by the separation of the greater from the lesser, death is (made) real for the lesser---so too we understand that intellectual death is the separation of the Spirit of God from the soul of the person. This is the strongest and most horrible death.
As the Spirit of God was with Adam in the beginning... His Logos was likewise with him at first in the endowments of the Spirit. But when he ate from the tree, at that time, God extracted from him the Spirit of His holiness, and separated it from his soul. The Spirit was the reason for his eternal life with God: it was connected with (his) non-bodily intellectual faculties, and lived eternally with God. Adam truly died that day, (experiencing) an intellectual death, according to the trustworthy statement of God, "On the day that you eat from it, you will die" (Gen. 3:3). Then, after that intellectual death, God sentenced him to a tangible death, saying to him, "You will eat your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the dust from which you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you will return" (Gen. 3:19).

5. We inherited the corruption (φθορὰ) of death.

6. We inherited poverty.

7. We inherited the slavery and bondage to sin, with passions.

DISCUSSION/ACTIVITY

Sin is not just breaking a rule. Sin has lasting effects.

One of the main things that lead to Adam and Eve's fall were two things 1. Conversed with the devil 2. Disbelieved God and God's goodness, God's love for mankind.

The fall didn't just happen because Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the fruit. The devil convinced Adam and Eve that God is not faithful or truthful or fully cares about them. That God is not honest in His love for mankind. In believing this, Eve ate of the fruit of the tree.

The devil looked to bring enmity/separation between man and God. And we see this separation (effect of sin), in the way Adam and Eve reacted to their disobedience. What did they do? They hid. They hid from their Creator, from the One who is everywhere and everything is in Him.

The devil always looked and continues to look to separate mankind from God.

He still does this today. Through the false hopes and lies he provides us. But not just in the lies but once we fall into the false hopes of sin, the devil pounces on us and tries to create a canyon from a crack. He tries to permanently separate us from God. How?

He feeds us with more lies. When we sin, he tells us things like:

we are not God's children,
God doesn't love sinners,
God won't forgive us,
we don't deserve to pray,
God won't listen to us because we're sinners
we should be too ashamed to do anything concerning God
Since I've already sinned, so I'm going to voluntarily keep sinning
There's no hope for me
Keeps reminding me about my sin. Won't let me let it go and move on
We should leave God (e.g. not coming to church, praying, confessing) and when I'm ready or holy then come back to God (hide from God, like Adam and Eve)

These are all lies and ploys that the devil tells us. He uses the same tricks that he used on Adam and Eve. Lies about who God is, who I am to God or who God is to me.

Adam and Eve sinned and then as a result of their sin they decided to run from God who is everywhere. They covered themselves from the one who sees the hearts of all.

When we are tempted with these same lies, we have to fight them. Remember God's compassion and love for you, you personally. That these are all lies from the devil to separate us from our Father, our Life, our Truth.

Ultimately The more dirt and noise and separation and darkness that I put in my heart the harder it is for His voice and presence is noticed by me.

*Godly sorrow and remorse is ok. Hopelessness is not ok.*

For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death. (2 Corinthians 7:10)
"In the life with God, there is nothing that is impossible; there is hope whatever the sin, whatever the hardship, and however difficult the matter may seem." -- H.H. Pope Shenouda III.

We see this especially in the Story of St. Paisa, (other examples of repentance include David the Prophet, Manasseh LXX, Zacchaeus, St. Paul, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Mary of Egypt, St. Moses the Strong).

APPLICATION (Action)

The Church Fathers tell us that God called to Adam after he sinned, to bring Adam to repentance and confession, however, Adam ran and hid and then tried to blame Eve.

 What was the result...Adam failed to repent and was then kicked out of Paradise and the Garden. He was left to toil. He lost the grace of the Holy Spirit. He was changed. He was corrupted.

God continues to call us to repentance, to change our mind/way (metanoia).

God also provides for us a very special mystery (sacrament) as a

Completion of repentance (loosening of sin through the hands of the bishop/priest)
See the reality of our sin, to face our sin
As a means to be accountable of sin
As a means to gain help and advice for our problem(s)
As a means to receive comfort
As a means to to have someone praying for us and coaching us

This is the mystery of confession.

God is still calling us to repentance and confession.

Do not delay. Do not avoid it or neglect it.

It is for EVERYONE, lest in sin we become bound by satan (cf. Matthew 12:29, Luke 13:15-17, Matthew 9:1-3)

Please look up the lives of any of those saints listed below (can give a prize/reward to those that do or have someone volunteer to talk about it for the next class or make a skit relating to them)
- Story of St. Paisa, (David the Prophet, Manasseh prayer mentioned in the LXX, Zacchaeus, St. Paul, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Mary of Egypt, St. Moses the Strong)
For those that don't have a father of confession, your goal for the next 2 weeks is to get one and make an appointment with them.
For those that do have one, make sure that you're confessing regularly. Make an appointment with your father of confession
Look at your life and see where your weaknesses are. What are the triggers? And to figure out ways to not sin. Whether that's evaluating my current life or getting helpful advice on how to resist sin when tempted.

SERVANT RESOURCES

Genesis 3:7
St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, 16, 14
Genesis 3:9
St. Cyril of Alexandria, In Romans, 5, 14
St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 1, 4
St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.27.2.
St. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, 2.13.
St. Irenaeus, In Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, 6.
Clement of Alexandria, Exhortations, 11
St. John Chrysostom, Commentary on Romans (5:19), Homily 10 (PG 60:477).
St. Basil, Hexameron, 9:7.
Bulus al-Bushi, On the Incarnation, 153 (Davis, 304).
St. John Chrysostom, Commentary on Romans (PG 60:477).
St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John (Pusey, i. 183).
Bulus al-Bushi, On the Incarnation, ed. Samir Khalil Samir, trans. Stephen Davis, Coptic Christology in Practice, p. 303