No one wakes up and says, “Today, I’m going to destroy my life”.

Not only does no one wake up saying that, no one actually does it.  I guess somewhere on this huge planet with billions of people, there’s some idiot who’s actually said that.  Nevertheless, no normal person does that.  Ever.

But something happens while their lives are falling apart.  At some point in the middle of all that they look out into the abyss of hopelessness and whisper those words, “How did I get into this?”  When people talk to me with these words, I know they honestly don’t know.  Truthfully, it’s not an easy answer because the pathway from the very first decision taking us off the “straight and narrow” to the point they are talking to me is usually a long period of time.

But if we go back far enough in the history of humanity—I mean WAY back—we find the first decision that ended up with all of us being in this mess.  In the birthplace of marital intimacy and intimacy with almighty God, everything, says God, was good.  In every way, the world of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 was a paradise.  And then in Genesis 3 came “that first decision” that wrecked everything.  Here it is in verses 6 and 7:

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.  Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

The wording in the Bible almost seems insignificant compared to the magnitude of the action.  Humanity, as it stood then, was Adam and Eve (although she wasn’t called “Eve” yet).  And they had a few things to tend to in the Garden, one of which was to “not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17).

But they failed.

They fell.

And so did we.

Our paradise was lost by the very first humans.  The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 5:12, “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.”

We inherited a faulty piece of “DNA” called “sin”.  It has been passed from Adam and Eve all the way to us today.  Unfortunately, no matter what we do, we are completely incapable of genetically engineering this bad DNA out of our system.

Their fall is our fall.  Their choice is our choice.  How did I get into this?  The Fall.

All the brokenness, abuse, hatred, prejudice, hypocrisy, bad relationships, tension, stress, pressure, image problems…started at that one decision to do what God had told us not to do.  We had a choice.

Although we’ll talk more about this in future posts, I’ll leave you with this: until we understand the depth of sin and its horrible consequences on humanity, we cannot understand the depth of the love of God the Father in sending Jesus to be our Savior.