Volume 38: Don’t Miss The Details: After The Fall

DON’T MISS THE DETAILS: AFTER THE FALL

Yesterday, we ended with Adam and Eve standing beneath a covering they had made for themselves. They had disobeyed God, recognized their nakedness and sewn fig leaves together in an attempt to cover their shame.

Then one of the most fascinating things happened. God came looking for them.

THE VOICE OF THE LORD GOD WAS WALKING

“And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8).

Read that carefully. The KJV does not simply say they heard God speaking. It says they heard “the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden.”

This language is significant because when we get to the Gospel of John, we are told exactly who the Word is: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

John then tells us, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). So when I read that the voice of the LORD God was “walking” in Eden, we see more than God simply making a sound. The Word of God is personally present in the garden.

Before the Word was made flesh and walked among humanity as Jesus Christ, Genesis gives us this remarkable picture of the voice of the LORD God walking among humanity in Eden. Genesis 3:8 shows us an early appearance of the preincarnate Christ.

This is a Christophany, an appearance of Christ before His incarnation.

GOD ASKED, “WHERE ART THOU?”

There are hundreds of rhetorical questions throughout Scripture, and our all-knowing God clearly knew Adam and Eve’s location.

“And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9).

God was not asking because He had lost Adam. The question exposed Adam’s condition.

Adam answered, “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10).

Notice what sin immediately produced: fear, shame and separation. The man who had been created for fellowship with God was now hiding from His presence.

I SEE MEN AS TREES

There may be more happening when Adam hides “amongst the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8) than we first notice. Scripture later repeatedly uses trees as pictures of people: the righteous person is “like a tree planted by the rivers of water” (Psalm 1:3), and when Jesus healed the blind man, the man initially said, “I see men as trees, walking” (Mark 8:24). Jesus also used fig trees to speak spiritually—one that failed to produce fruit (Luke 13:6–9) and another whose budding branches taught His disciples to recognize what was happening (Matthew 24:32–33).

That makes Adam hiding among the trees worth noticing. Genesis is describing a real physical creation, but Scripture teaches that the visible world itself came from an unseen reality: “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3). From the beginning, God was using the physical world He created to reveal spiritual realities we would continue encountering throughout Scripture. The trees of Genesis do not disappear from the biblical story—their imagery grows with it.

So this leaves us with a question worth following through the entire Bible: Were the trees only vegetation—or was God establishing, from the beginning, a picture of living entities that Scripture would later use to represent people, kingdoms, and spiritual life?

WHAT ARE YOU HIDING FROM?

Adam hid among the trees as though hiding from God could somehow keep God from seeing exactly where he was.

Yet Adam did not initiate the encounter. God did.

Thousands of years later, Jesus would describe His mission with similar language: “For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).

Humanity hides, but God comes looking.

THEY DID NOT EAT APPLES

Eating apples has never been a sin. When God confronted Adam, he answered, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:12).

The woman responded, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:13). To be beguiled is to be deceived, misled, or persuaded into believing something that is not true, often through subtlety or cunning. So then, what did they really eat? Because there is not a physical fruit known to mankind that will give you knowledge of good and evil.

Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4; Deuteronomy 8:3). Jeremiah said, “Thy words were found, and I did eat them” (Jeremiah 15:16). Ezekiel was commanded, “eat this roll” and then to “eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel” (Ezekiel 3:1), and John was likewise told, “Take it, and eat it up” concerning the little book (Revelation 10:9).

So throughout Scripture, to eat can become a picture of taking something into yourself until it becomes part of you. That makes the language of eating in Genesis especially worth studying—not to deny the physical sense of the text, but to ask whether Scripture later develops a deeper spiritual pattern around what humanity consumes, receives, believes, and ultimately lives by.

SIN WILL CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE OF A GOOD THING

Before sin, Adam had celebrated the woman as “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). After sin, she became “the woman whom thou gavest.”

Sin had not only affected humanity’s relationship with God. It had already begun affecting their relationship with each other.

This pattern continues today. Sin makes us hide what should be confessed and blame others for what we should acknowledge.

GOD ANNOUNCED VICTORY BEFORE THEY LEFT EDEN

In the middle of God’s judgment upon the serpent comes one of Scripture’s earliest promises of redemption:

“And I will put enmity (a strong sense of hatred) between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15).

Think about when God said it. Adam and Eve had just sinned. The consequences of the fall were still being pronounced, yet God was already announcing that the devil would not win.

The New Testament returns to this imagery when Paul writes, “And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly” (Romans 16:20). Hebrews also declares that through death Christ would “destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14).

The serpent would wound, but the promised Seed would ultimately crush him. Before humanity ever left Eden, God had already announced the enemy’s defeat.

GOD REPLACED THEIR COVERING WITH HIS OWN

Their first response after recognizing their nakedness was to attempt to cover themselves. They recognized a condition and immediately manufactured their own solution. Later, God Himself provided their covering.

Earlier, Adam and Eve had “sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Genesis 3:7). Then Scripture tells us, “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21).

Humanity had made a covering, but God provided another. Why? Their covering of skins required death, establishing an early biblical pattern: sin brought death, yet God provided the covering. As Scripture unfolds, that pattern becomes unmistakable—“the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22), and ultimately Christ would bear our sin and provide what mankind could never provide for itself.

The Principle of First Mention means that the first time something appears in Scripture often helps reveal God’s original thought, purpose, or pattern concerning it, giving us a foundation for understanding it throughout the rest of the Bible.

The significance of an animal’s death becomes difficult to ignore when we know where the biblical story is going.

Later God will establish blood sacrifice in Israel, declaring, “It is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” (Leviticus 17:11). Hebrews later says, “Without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). Finally, John points toward Jesus and declares, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

Throughout Scripture, figs and fig trees repeatedly appear as pictures associated with fruitfulness, prosperity, peace and blessing (Deuteronomy 8:8; 1 Kings 4:25; Micah 4:4). How striking, then, that after disobeying God, Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves. They rejected God’s instruction yet reached for leaves associated throughout Scripture with blessing. People still do the same today: we want God’s covering, favor and blessings while resisting His instructions. Everybody wants to be covered in blessings, but not everybody wants to obey the God who blesses.

THE TYPE OF TREE MATTERS

Genesis begins with humanity in God’s presence with access to the tree of life. Sin enters, humanity is expelled, and access is blocked. Revelation ends with God’s people restored to His presence, death defeated and the tree of life appearing again.

Genesis introduces the problem that the rest of Scripture reveals God solving. And here’s a detail we cannot overlook: before the fall, Adam and Eve were permitted to eat from the tree of life.

God said, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat,” with only one exception: “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:16–17).

Scripture never says they could not eat from the tree of life before sin entered. Access to the tree of life was compatible with mankind’s original condition, but after the fall, God restricted that access, placing cherubim to guard “the way of the tree of life” (Genesis 3:22–24).

Think about the picture developing here: sin entered mankind when Adam and Eve ate from the wrong tree, and redemption from sin came when Jesus died on the right tree.

Peter says Christ “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). What mankind did at one tree brought death; what Christ accomplished on another tree brought life. Paul draws the contrast between Adam and Christ plainly: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22).

This establishes a powerful biblical pattern in which trees, eating, death and life carry spiritual significance beyond ordinary vegetation and nutrition.

Humanity could freely eat from the tree associated with life, yet chose what God had forbidden. Once sin entered the equation, access to the tree of life was restricted, but through Christ the way to eternal life was restored.

The Bible begins with mankind choosing the wrong tree and losing access to life, but it ends with mankind redeemed through Christ on the right tree and receiving access to the tree of life again.

The two trees leave us with one final picture. The tree of life points us toward life received from God, while the tree of knowledge of good and evil warns us about knowledge pursued independently of God. Adam and Eve already had God’s Word, but chose another voice. We face the same danger today: surrounded by information, yet starving for revelation. Information can fill the mind, but revelation received from God can transform the life.