sin and the community of God

God made the world, but the world is no longer the way God made it.

Genesis 2-3 provide a narrative of how the world came to be something different than the world that God made. If we pay attention to the narrative structure of Genesis 2-3 we see an amazing rhetorical and theological structure. Narratively speaking, the structure of the creation story in Genesis 2 is as follows: 

  

First, God creates the man, Adam, and then notices that he is incomplete... so God creates an equal partner for him, a helper, Eve. Together they are given charge of caring for God's creation, the garden--nature--the same way that God has cared for it.

It is important to note here that this is not a hierarchical structuring, but a narrative structure. This is not to be misunderstood in such a way that women are seen as subjugated in any way to men. The very point of the creation of women is because the only thing in creation that God says "is not good" (2:18) is that the man is alone--he has no adequate partner.

Compare the narrative structure of Genesis 2 with that of Genesis 3:

The serpent, which is a part of nature deceives the woman who eats from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and then shares it with the man. When confronted by God about their actions they quickly turn and blame God for creating all of this in the first place. 

Narratively, this is a masterful arrangement with profound theological implications. The order of God's creation is turned on its head by the chaos of sin. Sin has a way of taking what God has made and completely turning it on its head. Sin creates chaos where God created order. 

Sin has unleashed a chaotic energy in the world that echoes through all of reality. Nature become hostile, work becomes toil, relationships become contests for power, childbearing becomes painful, and death becomes a universal reality. The world is no longer the way God made it.

Theologians have referred to this moment as "the fall," but we wrongly understand this only in terms of how humans fell. Notice carefully that in this story, all of creation has fallen. The whole world, all of creation, history itself now exists in a fallen state. Creation exists now subject to sin, and the effects of sin are not small. 

Most Christians tend to see sin in terms of activity--it is something we do at a given time. I steal something, and right then I sinned. Adam and Eve ate from the tree, so they sinned right then. But sin is not simply an action. Scripture says that sin is an actor. In Genesis 4 we find out that sin is a predator waiting to pounce on Cain and destroy him. Paul describes sin as a tyrant and an oppressor. He even goes so far as to say that the wrong that he does is because sin is acting in him to do it. Sin is not simply something that we do; sin is something that does to us and does to the world.

And so it is that we must learn to adopt the prayer: 

God forgive us of our sins and heal us of our sinfulness.