Children do not understand sin. They know when an adult tells them something is wrong. They don’t necessarily know why, just that there are consequences for doing the action. It will be years before they see a connection between the act and a moral law.
But for adults it is a different matter. We all know what the first sin was. It was not eating fruit; that was the act. The sin was taking the initiative to disobey a direct order from God. Adam and Eve were never children; they were created as adults and had knowledge of who was in charge – God. God said, no fruit from one single tree. Simple.
But the next thing that happened was after God called them on it, they committed another sin. That sin is blame and it is the consistent reaction of sinful man to knowledge of his accountability.
Adam blamed two people – God first and then his wife. In case that sounds familiar it should. It happens across the world today. Many divorces are fathers saying the wives were at fault. And then secretly blaming God for not preventing the marriage.
But keep in mind that human beings do not seem to have any built in propensity to obey God under any circumstances. The history of civilization is the slow but aggressive movement of moral men against the wall of evil that pervades the planet, a wall that seems stronger than ever.
I quote from The Message, a modern translation:
8 When they heard the sound of God strolling in the garden in the evening breeze, the Man and his Wife hid in the trees of the garden, hid from God.
9 God called to the Man: “Where are you?”
10 He said, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid.”
1 God said, “Who told you you were naked? Did you eat from that tree I told you not to eat from?”
12 The Man said, “The Woman you gave me as a companion, she gave me fruit from the tree, and, yes, I ate it.”
God said to the Woman, “What is this that you’ve done?”
13 “The serpent seduced me,” she said, “and I ate.”
Eve on the other hand blamed the devil – as in “the devil made me do it.”
Blame is the first line of defense
My newspaper (the Epoch Times) tells me this week that China blames the USA while the USA and much of the rest of the world blames China for the advance of the Covid-19 virus. The Democrats are blaming President Trump for everything else.
Newspapers are filing for bankruptcy, big ones as well as small ones, and they blame TV but television is losing money and viewers rapidly as well. in the presence of blame nothing is accomplished.