Section IV.—Origin Of Sin In The Personal Act Of Adam.
With regard to the origin of this sinful nature which is common to the race, and which is the occasion of all actual transgressions, reason affords no light. The Scriptures, however, refer the origin of this nature to that free act of our first parents by which they turned away from God, corrupted themselves, and brought themselves under the penalties of the law.
Chandler, Spirit of Man, 76—“It is vain to attempt to sever the moral life of Christianity from the historical fact in which it is rooted. We may cordially assent to the assertion that the whole value of historical events is in their ideal significance. But in many cases, part of that which the idea signifies is the fact that it has been exhibited in history. The value and interest of the conquest of Greece over Persia lie in the significant idea of freedom and intelligence triumphing over despotic force; but surely a part, and a very important part, of the idea, is the fact that this triumph was won in a historical past, and the encouragement for the present which rests upon that fact. So too, the value of Christ's resurrection lies in its immense moral significance as a principle of life; but an essential part of that very significance is the fact that the principle was actually realized by One in whom mankind was summed up and expressed, and by whom, therefore, the power of realizing it is conferred on all who receive him.”
As it is important for us to know that redemption is not only ideal but actual, so it is important for us to know that sin is not an inevitable accompaniment of human nature, but that it had a historical beginning. Yet no a priori theory should prejudice our examination of the facts. We would preface our consideration of the Scriptural account, therefore, by stating that our view of inspiration would permit us to regard that account as inspired, even if it were mythical or allegorical. As God can use all methods of literary composition, so he can use all methods of instructing mankind that are consistent with essential truth. George Adam Smith observes that the myths and legends of primitive folk-lore are the intellectual equivalents of later philosophies and theories of the universe, and that “at no time has revelation refused to employ such human conceptions for the investiture and conveyance of the higher spiritual truths.” Sylvester Burnham: “Fiction and myth have not yet lost their value for the moral and religious teacher. What a knowledge of his own nature has shown man to be good for his own use, God surely may also have found to be good for his use. Nor would it of necessity affect the value of the Bible if the writer, in using for his purpose myth or fiction, supposed that he was using history. Only when the value of the truth of the teaching depends upon the historicity of the alleged fact, does it become impossible to use myth or fiction for the purpose of teaching.” See vol. 1, page 241 of this work, with quotations from Denney, Studies in Theology, 218, and Gore, in Lux Mundi, 356. Euripides: “Thou God of all! infuse light into the souls of men, whereby they may be enabled to know what is the root from which all their evils spring, and by what means they may avoid them!”
I. The Scriptural Account of the Temptation and Fall in Genesis 3:1-7.
1. Its general, character not mythical or allegorical, but historical.
We adopt this view for the following reasons:—(a) There is no intimation in the account itself that it is not historical. (b) As a part of a [pg 583] historical book, the presumption is that it is itself historical. (c) The later Scripture writers refer to it as a veritable history even in its details. (d) Particular features of the narrative, such as the placing of our first parents in a garden and the speaking of the tempter through a serpent-form, are incidents suitable to man's condition of innocent but untried childhood. (e) This view that the narrative is historical does not forbid our assuming that the trees of life and of knowledge were symbols of spiritual truths, while at the same time they were outward realities.
See John 8:44—“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and standeth not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father thereof”; 2 Cor. 11:3—“the serpent beguiled Eve in his craftiness”; Rev. 20:2—“the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan.” H. B. Smith, System, 261—“If Christ's temptation and victory over Satan were historical events, there seems to be no ground for supposing that the first temptation was not a historical event.” We believe in the unity and sufficiency of Scripture. We moreover regard the testimony of Christ and the apostles as conclusive with regard to the historicity of the account in Genesis. We assume a divine superintendence in the choice of material by its author, and the fulfilment to the apostles of Christ's promise that they should be guided into the truth. Paul's doctrine of sin is so manifestly based upon the historical character of the Genesis story, that the denial of the one must naturally lead to the denial of the other. John Milton writes, in his Areopagitica: “It was from out of the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into, that is to say, of knowing good by evil.” He should have learned to know evil as God knows it—as a thing possible, hateful, and forever rejected. He actually learned to know evil as Satan knows it—by making it actual and matter of bitter experience.
Infantile and innocent man found his fit place and work in a garden. The language of appearances is doubtless used. Satan might enter into a brute-form, and might appear to speak through it. In all languages, the stories of brutes speaking show that such a temptation is congruous with the condition of early man. Asiatic myths agree in representing the serpent as the emblem of the spirit of evil. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the symbol of God's right of eminent domain, and indicated that all belonged to him. It is not necessary to suppose that it was known by this name before the Fall. By means of it man came to know good, by the loss of it; to know evil, by bitter experience; C. H. M.: “To know good, without the power to do it; to know evil, without the power to avoid it.” Bible Com., 1:40—The tree of life was symbol of the fact that “life is to be sought, not from within, from himself, in his own powers or faculties; but from that which is without him, even from him who hath life in himself.”
As the water of baptism and the bread of the Lord's supper, though themselves common things, are symbolic of the greatest truths, so the tree of knowledge and the tree of life were sacramental. McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 99-141—“The two trees represented good and evil. The prohibition of the latter was a declaration that man of himself could not distinguish between good and evil, and must trust divine guidance. Satan urged man to discern between good and evil by his own wisdom, and so become independent of God. Sin is the attempt of the creature to exercise God's attribute of discerning and choosing between good and evil by his own wisdom. It is therefore self-conceit, self-trust, self-assertion, the preference of his own wisdom and will to the wisdom and will of God.” McIlvaine refers to Lord Bacon, Works, 1:82, 162. See also Pope, Theology, 2:10, 11; Boston Lectures for 1871:80, 81.
Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 142, on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—“When for the first time man stood face to face with definite conscious temptation to do that which he knew to be wrong, he held in his hand the fruit of that tree, and his destiny as a moral being hung trembling in the balance. And when for the first time he succumbed to temptation and faint dawnings of remorse visited his heart, at that moment he was banished from the Eden of innocence, in which his nature had hitherto dwelt, and he was driven forth from the presence of the Lord.” With the first sin, was started another and a downward course of development. For the mythical or allegorical explanation of the narrative, see also Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 164, 165, and Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 218.
2. The course of the temptation, and the resulting fall.
The stages of the temptation appear to have been as follows:
(a) An appeal on the part of Satan to innocent appetites, together with an implied suggestion that God was arbitrarily withholding the means of their gratification (Gen. 3:1). The first sin was in Eve's isolating herself and choosing to seek her own pleasure without regard to God's will. This initial selfishness it was, which led her to listen to the tempter instead of rebuking him or flying from him, and to exaggerate the divine command in her response (Gen. 3:3).
Gen. 3:1—“Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden?” Satan emphasizes the limitation, but is silent with regard to the generous permission—“Of every tree of the garden [but one] thou mayest freely eat” (2:16). C. H. M., in loco: “To admit the question ‘hath God said?’is already positive infidelity. To add to God's word is as bad as to take from it. ‘Hath God said?’ is quickly followed by ‘Ye shall not surely die.’ Questioning whether God has spoken, results in open contradiction of what God has said. Eve suffered God's word to be contradicted by a creature, only because she had abjured its authority over her conscience and heart.” The command was simply: “thou shalt not eat of it” (Gen. 2:17). In her rising dislike to the authority she had renounced, she exaggerates the command into: “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it” (Gen. 3:3). Here is already self-isolation, instead of love. Matheson, Messages of the Old Religions, 318—“Ere ever the human soul disobeyed, it had learned to distrust.... Before it violated the existing law, it had come to think of the Lawgiver as one who was jealous of his creatures.” Dr. C. H. Parkhurst: “The first question ever asked in human history was asked by the devil, and the interrogation point still has in it the trail of the serpent.”
(b) A denial of the veracity of God, on the part of the tempter, with a charge against the Almighty of jealousy and fraud in keeping his creatures in a position of ignorance and dependence (Gen. 3:4, 5). This was followed, on the part of the woman, by positive unbelief, and by a conscious and presumptuous cherishing of desire for the forbidden fruit, as a means of independence and knowledge. Thus unbelief, pride, and lust all sprang from the self-isolating, self-seeking spirit, and fastened upon the means of gratifying it (Gen. 3:6).
Gen. 3:4, 5—“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil”; 3:6—“And when 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; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat”—so “taking the word of a Professor of Lying, that he does not lie” (John Henry Newman). Hooker, Eccl. Polity, book I—“To live by one man's will became the cause of all men's misery.” Godet on John 1:4—“In the words ‘life’ and ‘light’ it is natural to see an allusion to the tree of life and to that of knowledge. After having eaten of the former, man would have been called to feed on the second. John initiates us into the real essence of these primordial and mysterious facts and gives us in this verse, as it were, the philosophy of Paradise.” Obedience is the way to knowledge, and the sin of Paradise was the seeking of light without life; cf. John 7:17—“If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from myself.”
(c) The tempter needed no longer to urge his suit. Having poisoned the fountain, the stream would naturally be evil. Since the heart and its desires had become corrupt, the inward disposition manifested itself in act (Gen. 3:6—“did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her” = who had been with her, and had shared her choice and longing). Thus man fell inwardly, before the outward act of eating the forbidden fruit,—fell in that one fundamental determination whereby he made supreme choice of self instead of God. This sin of the inmost nature gave rise to sins of the [pg 585] desires, and sins of the desires led to the outward act of transgression (James 1:15).
James 1:15—“Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin.” Baird, Elohim Revealed, 888—“The law of God had already been violated; man was fallen before the fruit had been plucked, or the rebellion had been thus signalized. The law required not only outward obedience but fealty of the heart, and this was withdrawn before any outward token indicated the change.” Would he part company with God, or with his wife? When the Indian asked the missionary where his ancestors were, and was told that they were in hell, he replied that he would go with his ancestors. He preferred hell with his tribe to heaven with God. Sapphira, in like manner, had opportunity given her to part company with her husband, but she preferred him to God; Acts 5:7-11.
Philippi, Glaubenslehre: “So man became like God, a setter of law to himself. Man's self-elevation to godhood was his fall. God's self-humiliation to manhood was man's restoration and elevation.... Gen. 3:22—‘The man has become as one of us’ in his condition of self-centered activity,—thereby losing all real likeness to God, which consists in having the same aim with God himself. De te fabula narratur; it is the condition, not of one alone, but of all the race.” Sin once brought into being is self-propagating; its seed is in itself: the centuries of misery and crime that have followed have only shown what endless possibilities of evil were wrapped up in that single sin. Keble: “'Twas but a little drop of sin We saw this morning enter in, And lo, at eventide a world is drowned!” Farrar, Fall of Man: “The guilty wish of one woman has swollen into the irremediable corruption of a world.” See Oehler, O.T. Theology, 1:231; Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:381-385; Edwards, on Original Sin, part 4, chap. 2; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:168-180.
II. Difficulties connected with the Fall considered as the personal Act of Adam.
1. How could a holy being fall?
Here we must acknowledge that we cannot understand how the first unholy emotion could have found lodgment in a mind that was set supremely upon God, nor how temptation could have overcome a soul in which there were no unholy propensities to which it could appeal. The mere power of choice does not explain the fact of an unholy choice. The fact of natural desire for sensuous and intellectual gratification does not explain how this desire came to be inordinate. Nor does it throw light upon the matter, to resolve this fall into a deception of our first parents by Satan. Their yielding to such deception presupposes distrust of God and alienation from him. Satan's fall, moreover, since it must have been uncaused by temptation from without, is more difficult to explain than Adam's fall.
We may distinguish six incorrect explanations of the origin of sin: 1. Emmons: Sin is due to God's efficiency—God wrought the sin in man's heart. This is the “exercise system,” and is essentially pantheistic. 2. Edwards: Sin is due to God's providence—God caused the sin indirectly by presenting motives. This explanation has all the difficulties of determinism. 3. Augustine: Sin is the result of God's withdrawal from man's soul. But inevitable sin is not sin, and the blame of it rests on God who withdrew the grace needed for obedience, 4. Pfleiderer: The fall results from man's already existing sinfulness. The fault then belongs, not to man, but to God who made man sinful. 5. Hadley: Sin is due to man's moral insanity. But such concreated ethical defect would render sin impossible. Insanity is the effect of sin, but not its cause. 6. Newman: Sin is due to man's weakness. It is a negative, not a positive, thing, an incident of finiteness. But conscience and Scripture testify that it is positive as well as negative, opposition to God as well as non-conformity to God.
Emmons was really a pantheist: “Since God,” he says, “works in all men both to will and to do of his good pleasure, it is as easy to account for the first offence of Adam as for any other sin.... There is no difficulty respecting the fall of Adam from his [pg 586]original state of perfection and purity into a state of sin and guilt, which is in any way peculiar.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.... There is but one satisfactory answer to the question Whence came evil? and that is: It came from the great first Cause of all things”; see Nathaniel Emmons, Works, 2:683.
Jonathan Edwards also denied power to the contrary even in Adam's first sin. God did not immediately cause that sin. But God was active in the region of motives though his action was not seen. Freedom of the Will, 161—“It was fitting that the transaction should so take place that it might not appear to be from God as the apparent fountain.” Yet “God may actually in his providence so dispose and permit things that the event may be certainly and infallibly connected with such disposal and permission”; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 304. Encyc. Britannica, 7:690—“According to Edwards, Adam had two principles,—natural and supernatural. When Adam sinned, the supernatural or divine principle was withdrawn from him, and thus his nature became corrupt without God infusing any evil thing into it. His posterity came into being entirely under the government of natural and inferior principles. But this solves the difficulty of making God the author of sin only at the expense of denying to sin any real existence, and also destroys Edwards's essential distinction between natural and moral ability.” Edwards on Trinity, Fisher's edition, 44—“The sun does not cause darkness and cold, when these follow infallibly upon the withdrawal of his beams. God's disposing the result is not a positive exertion on his part.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:50—“God did not withdraw the common supporting grace of his Spirit from Adam until after transgression.” To us Adam's act was irrational, but not impossible; to a determinist like Edwards, who held that men simply act out their characters, Adam's act should have been not only irrational, but impossible. Edwards nowhere shows how, according to his principles, a holy being could possibly fall.
Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 123—“The account of the fall is the first appearance of an already existing sinfulness, and a typical example of the way in which every individual becomes sinful. Original sin is simply the universality and originality of sin. There is no such thing as indeterminism. The will can lift itself from natural unfreedom, the unfreedom of the natural impulses, to real spiritual freedom, only by distinguishing itself from the law which sets before it its true end of being. The opposition of nature to the law reveals an original nature power which precedes all free self-determination. Sin is the evil bent of lawless self-willed selfishness.” Pfleiderer appears to make this sinfulness concreated, and guiltless, because proceeding from God. Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 288—“The wide discrepancy between precept and practice gives rise to the theological conception of sin, which, in low types of religion, is as often a violation of some trivial prescription as it is of an ethical principle. The presence of sin, contrasted with a state of innocence, occasions the idea of a fall, or lapse from a sinless condition. This is not incompatible with man's derivation from an animal ancestry, which prior to the rise of self-consciousness may be regarded as having been in a state of moral innocence, the sense and reality of sin being impossible to the animal.... The existence of sin, both as an inherent disposition, and as a perverted form of action, may be explained as a survival of animal propensity in human life.... Sin is the disturbance of higher life by the intrusion of lower.”
Professor James Hadley: “Every man is more or less insane.” We prefer to say: Every man, so far as he is apart from God, is morally insane. But we must not make sin the result of insanity. Insanity is the result of sin. Insanity, moreover, is a physical disease,—sin is a perversion of the will. John Henry Newman, Idea of a University, 60—“Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion or corruption of that which has substance.” Augustine seems at times to favor this view. He maintains that evil has no origin, inasmuch as it is negative, not positive; that it is merely defect or failure. He illustrates it by the damaged state of a discordant harp; see Moule, Outlines of Theology, 171. So too A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 190, tells us that Adam's will was like a violin in tune, which through mere inattention and neglect got out of tune at last. But here, too, we must say with E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 124—“Sin explained is sin defended.” All these explanations fail to explain, and throw the blame of sin upon God, as directly or indirectly its cause.
But sin is an existing fact. God cannot be its author, either by creating man's nature so that sin was a necessary incident of its development, or by withdrawing a supernatural grace which was necessary to keep man holy. [pg 587] Reason, therefore, has no other recourse than to accept the Scripture doctrine that sin originated in man's free act of revolt from God—the act of a will which, though inclined toward God, was not yet confirmed in virtue and was still capable of a contrary choice. The original possession of such power to the contrary seems to be the necessary condition of probation and moral development. Yet the exercise of this power in a sinful direction can never be explained upon grounds of reason, since sin is essentially unreason. It is an act of wicked arbitrariness, the only motive of which is the desire to depart from God and to render self supreme.
Sin is a “mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thess. 2:7), at the beginning, as well as at the end. Neander, Planting and Training, 388—“Whoever explains sin nullifies it.” Man's power at the beginning to choose evil does not prove that, now that he has fallen, he has equal power of himself permanently to choose good. Because man has power to cast himself from the top of a precipice to the bottom, it does not follow that he has equal power to transport himself from the bottom to the top.
Man fell by wilful resistance to the inworking God. Christ is in all men as he was in Adam, and all good impulses are due to him. Since the Holy Spirit is the Christ within, all men are the subjects of his striving. He does not withdraw from them except upon, and in consequence of, their withdrawing from him. John Milton makes the Almighty say of Adam's sin: “Whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Such I created all the Etherial Powers, And Spirits, both them who stood and them who failed; Freely they stood who stood, and fell who failed.” The word “cussedness”has become an apt word here. The Standard Dictionary defines it as “1. Cursedness, meanness, perverseness; 2. resolute courage, endurance: ‘Jim Bludsoe's voice was heard, And they all had trust in his cussedness And knowed he would keep his word.’ ”(John Hay, Jim Bludsoe, stanza 6). Not the last, but the first, of these definitions best describes the first sin. The most thorough and satisfactory treatment of the fall of man in connection with the doctrine of evolution is found in Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 73-240.
Hodge, Essays and Reviews, 30—“There is a broad difference between the commencement of holiness and the commencement of sin, and more is necessary for the former than for the latter. An act of obedience, if it is performed under the mere impulse of self-love, is virtually no act of obedience. It is not performed with any intention to obey, for that is holy, and cannot, according to the theory, precede the act. But an act of disobedience, performed from the desire of happiness, is rebellion. The cases are surely different. If, to please myself, I do what God commands, it is not holiness; but if, to please myself, I do what he forbids, it is sin. Besides, no creature is immutable. Though created holy, the taste for holy enjoyments may be overcome by a temptation sufficiently insidious and powerful, and a selfish motive or feeling excited in the mind. Neither is a sinful character immutable. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth may be clearly presented and so effectually applied as to produce that change which is called regeneration; that is, to call into existence a taste for holiness, so that it is chosen for its own sake, and not as a means of happiness.”
H. B. Smith, System, 262—“The state of the case, as far as we can enter into Adam's experience, is this: Before the command, there was the state of love without the thought of the opposite: a knowledge of good only, a yet unconscious goodness: there was also the knowledge that the eating of the fruit was against the divine command. The temptation aroused pride; the yielding to that was the sin. The change was there. The change was not in the choice as an executive act, nor in the result of that act—the eating; but in the choice of supreme love to the world and self, rather than supreme devotion to God. It was an immanent preference of the world,—not a love of the world following the choice, but a love of the world which is the choice itself.”
263—“We cannot account for Adam's fall, psychologically. In saying this we mean: It is inexplicable by anything outside itself. We must receive the fact as ultimate, and rest there. Of course we do not mean that it was not in accordance with the laws of moral agency—that it was a violation of those laws: but only that we do not see the mode, that we cannot construct it for ourselves in a rational way. It differs from all other similar cases of ultimate preference which we know; viz., the sinner's immanent preference of the world, where we know there is an antecedent ground in the bias to [pg 588]sin, and the Christian's regeneration, or immanent preference of God, where we know there is an influence from without, the working of the Holy Spirit.” 264—“We must leave the whole question with the immanent preference standing forth as the ultimate fact in the case, which is not to be constructed philosophically, as far as the processes of Adam's soul are concerned: we must regard that immanent preference as both a choice and an affection, not an affection the result of a choice, not a choice which is the consequence of an affection, but both together.”
In one particular, however, we must differ with H. B. Smith: Since the power of voluntary internal movement is the power of the will, we must regard the change from good to evil as primarily a choice, and only secondarily a state of affection caused thereby. Only by postulating a free and conscious act of transgression on the part of Adam, an act which bears to evil affection the relation not of effect but of cause, do we reach, at the beginning of human development, a proper basis for the responsibility and guilt of Adam and the race. See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:148-167.
2. How could God justly permit Satanic temptation?
We see in this permission not justice but benevolence.
(a) Since Satan fell without external temptation, it is probable that man's trial would have been substantially the same, even though there had been no Satan to tempt him.
Angels had no animal nature to obscure the vision; they could not be influenced through sense; yet they were tempted and they fell. As Satan and Adam sinned under the best possible circumstances, we may conclude that the human race would have sinned with equal certainty. The only question at the time of their creation, therefore, was how to modify the conditions so as best to pave the way for repentance and pardon. These conditions are: 1. a material body—which means confinement, limitation, need of self-restraint; 2. infancy—which means development, deliberation, with no memory of the first sin; 3. the parental relation—repressing the wilfulness of the child, and teaching submission to authority.
(b) In this case, however, man's fall would perhaps have been without what now constitutes its single mitigating circumstance. Self-originated sin would have made man himself a Satan.
Mat. 13:28—“An enemy hath done this.” “God permitted Satan to divide the guilt with man, so that man might be saved from despair.” See Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 16-29. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 103—“Why was not the tree made outwardly repulsive? Because only the abuse of that which was positively good and desirable could have attractiveness for Adam or could constitute a real temptation.”
(c) As, in the conflict with temptation, it is an advantage to objectify evil under the image of corruptible flesh, so it is an advantage to meet it as embodied in a personal and seducing spirit.
Man's body, corruptible and perishable as it is, furnishes him with an illustration and reminder of the condition of soul to which sin has reduced him. The flesh, with its burdens and pains, is thus, under God, a help to the distinct recognition and overcoming of sin. So it was an advantage to man to have temptation confined to a single external voice. We may say of the influence of the tempter, as Birks, in his Difficulties of Belief, 101, says of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “Temptation did not depend upon the tree. Temptation was certain in any event. The tree was a type into which God contracted the possibilities of evil, so as to strip them of delusive vastness, and connect them with definite and palpable warning,—to show man that it was only one of the many possible activities of his spirit which was forbidden, that God had right to all and could forbid all.” The originality of sin was the most fascinating element in it. It afforded boundless range for the imagination. Luther did well to throw his inkstand at the devil. It was an advantage to localize him. The concentration of the human powers upon a definite offer of evil helps our understanding of the evil and increases our disposition to resist it.
(d) Such temptation has in itself no tendency to lead the soul astray. If [pg 589] the soul be holy, temptation may only confirm it in virtue. Only the evil will, self-determined against God, can turn temptation into an occasion of ruin.
As the sun's heat has no tendency to wither the plant rooted in deep and moist soil, but only causes it to send down its roots the deeper and to fasten itself the more strongly, so temptation has in itself no tendency to pervert the soul. It was only the seeds that “fell upon the rocky places, where they had not much earth” (Mat. 13:5, 6), that “were scorched”when “the sun was risen”; and our Lord attributes their failure, not to the sun, but to their lack of root and of soil: “because they had no root,” “because they had no deepness of earth.” The same temptation which occasions the ruin of the false disciple stimulates to sturdy growth the virtue of the true Christian. Contrast with the temptation of Adam the temptation of Christ. Adam had everything to plead for God, the garden and its delights, while Christ had everything to plead against him, the wilderness and its privations. But Adam had confidence in Satan, while Christ had confidence in God; and the result was in the former case defeat, in the latter victory. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 385-396.
C. H. Spurgeon: “All the sea outside a ship can do it no damage till the water enters and fills the hold. Hence, it is clear, our greatest danger is within. All the devils in hell and tempters on earth could do us no injury, if there were no corruption in our own natures. The sparks will fly harmlessly, if there is no tinder. Alas, our heart is our greatest enemy; this is the little home-born thief. Lord, save me from that evil man, myself!”
Lyman Abbott: “The scorn of goody-goody is justified; for goody-goody is innocence, not virtue; and the boy who never does anything wrong because he never does anything at all is of no use in the world.... Sin is not a help in development; it is a hindrance. But temptation is a help; it is an indispensable means.” E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 123—“Temptation in the bad sense and a fall from innocence were no more necessary to the perfection of the first man, than a marring of any one's character is now necessary to its completeness.” John Milton, Areopagitica: “Many there be that complain of divine providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions” (puppet shows). Robert Browning, Ring and the Book, 204 (Pope, 1183)—“Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time! Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph? Pray ‘Lead us into no such temptations. Lord’? Yea, but, O thou whose servants are the bold, Lead such temptations by the head and hair, Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, That so he may do battle and have praise!”
3. How could a penalty so great be justly connected with disobedience to so slight a command?
To this question we may reply:
(a) So slight a command presented the best test of the spirit of obedience.
Cicero: “Parva res est, at magna culpa.” The child's persistent disobedience in one single respect to the mother's command shows that in all his other acts of seeming obedience he does nothing for his mother's sake, but all for his own,—shows, in other words, that he does not possess the spirit of obedience in a single act. S. S. Times: “Trifles are trifles only to triflers. Awake to the significance of the insignificant! for you are in a world that belongs not alone to the God of the Infinite, but also to the God of the infinitesimal.”
(b) The external command was not arbitrary or insignificant in its substance. It was a concrete presentation to the human will of God's claim to eminent domain or absolute ownership.
John Hall, Lectures on the Religious rise of Property, 10—“It sometimes happens that owners of land, meaning to give the use of it to others, without alienating it, impose a nominal rent—a quit-rent, the passing of which acknowledges the recipient as owner and the occupier as tenant. This is understood in all lands. In many an old English deed, ‘three barley-corns,’ ‘a fat capon,’ or ‘a shilling,’ is the consideration [pg 590]which permanently recognizes the rights of lordship. God taught men by the forbidden tree that he was owner, that man was occupier. He selected the matter of property to be the test of man's obedience, the outward and sensible sign of a right state of heart toward God; and when man put forth his hand and did eat, he denied God's ownership and asserted his own. Nothing remained but to eject him.”
(c) The sanction attached to the command shows that man was not left ignorant of its meaning or importance.
Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Cf. Gen. 3:3—“the tree which is in the midst of the garden”; and see Dodge, Christian Theology, 206, 207—“The tree was central, as the commandment was central. The choice was between the tree of life and the tree of death,—between self and God. Taking the one was rejecting the other.”
(d) The act of disobedience was therefore the revelation of a will thoroughly corrupted and alienated from God—a will given over to ingratitude, unbelief, ambition, and rebellion.
The motive to disobedience was not appetite, but the ambition to be as God. The outward act of eating the forbidden fruit was only the thin edge of the wedge, behind which lay the whole mass—the fundamental determination to isolate self and to seek personal pleasure regardless of God and his law. So the man under conviction for sin commonly clings to some single passion or plan, only half-conscious of the fact that opposition to God in one thing is opposition in all.