Adam and Eve fell through unbelief; the restoration of the world is by faith in the Word of God. The question that remains for us, and the one that should burn daily within our hearts and weigh upon our consciences like a millstone, is, Do we believe this Word?

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.”
(Genesis 3:4)

At the centre of Adam and Eve’s fall into sin and ruin was a singular and all-important question: Whose word will you obey?

For Eve, this issue was presented in the dichotomy between the word of the serpent and the word of God: the serpent came with one promise where God had given quite another. For Adam the challenge was similar, but slightly altered, and lay in the choice between the word of his wife and the word of his God.

Indeed, when God condemns Adam for his failure, this is one of the principal issues that is highlighted: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you…” (Gen. 3:17). Both the man and the woman, then, were faced with the decision either to obey the word of the Lord or to obey the word of another, and in both instances they chose the latter.

Thus whatever else we may say about the Fall (and there is certainly much here to say), one of the chief things to note is the way in which God’s word was disbelieved while another’s was accepted. This was the first step toward destruction, the first stone to be toppled in a landslide of rebellion. As Calvin notes, “…never would they have dared to resist God, unless they had first been incredulous of his word.” Unbelief was the mother of our misery; suspicion toward the word of God the root of our undoing.

Faith and Unbelief

Recognizing the pivotal role of unbelief in Adam’s Fall should produce in us two very potent and visceral effects. In the first place, it should undermine completely any foolish confidence we may be tempted to place in ourselves. This, after all, was Eve’s downfall. Seeing 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,” Eve followed her intuitions, misguided though they were, and took that first fatal bite.

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