What Killed Manhood?

There was much more wrapped up in that piece of fruit in the garden than just a bad decision. With sin, there always is. We talk ourselves into thinking that sin is just a bad choice; it's not. It's much deeper than that for us, just as it was for Adam. When Adam chose willful rebellion against the law of God, he was choosing to forfeit his birthright by rejecting his calling to represent, be responsible, and enjoy his relationship with God, his wife, and the rest of creation. This single act placed in motion the initial and progressive fall of creation and its order, one whose effects still ravage every facet of the world today. We could speak at length on all things that were lost - peace, harmony, joy, order - these were put aside for temporary pleasure.

Did Adam know the full implications of his choice? Probably not. But sin is like that. It blinds us to the consequences of our actions. We get so nearsighted when we see something we want to experience that everything else fades away. Adam chose to set aside his representation of God, responsibility for God, and relationship with God, and these things were lost because of the price of his sin. Although men and women are equal, their function in the fall was different. As the man, Adam is held responsible for it (Rom. 5:12). Sin entered through Adam and spread to men and women alike. When Adam sinned, all of God's intentions for man fell with man. Peace and enjoyment of God and His creation was lost. The spread of God's reign across the earth was lost. Dominion over the world was lost. The development of the undeveloped earth for the Lord was lost. Gone.

Adam made this choice in the most perfect of environments. It would only get worse from there. As more people were born, after the fall in Genesis 3, they would be born without Adam's responsibility, representation, and relationship, at least in the sense that God meant in the beginning. The definition of being an image bearer of God would be marred at the core of man's being for millennia. Man would struggle and replace what was meant to be reflected as a sign of his relationship with Yahweh with himself and creation. Without a relationship with God to navigate and give value to responsibility and relationship, humankind would spiral out of control.

Consequently, manhood was lost along with the rest of God's original design for creation. Instead of responsibility, representation, and relationship, things like chauvinism, violence, passivity, insecurity, and addiction would characterize generation after generation of men in a continually increasing way.

Things got worse

Genesis 2:17 records the solemn warning God gave to Adam: he would "surely die," or literally "dying you shall die," if he ate from the tree. The death described ominously here encompasses both a spiritual and physical sense. Physical death is pointing to termination of physical life; worse still, spiritual death means the termination of relationship with God. Once separated from God, men would continue in a downward spiral over the ages as that separation became more and more fully fleshed out.

One of the saddest statements about the state of man is found in Genesis 6:5-6.

"The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart." (ESV)

Chilling. Man, the centerpiece of God's creative activity, His very representative meant to be the apex of the projection of His glory, was so grievous to God's heart that God was sorry He had ever made man.9 Since Genesis 3, man continued to devolve until, in Genesis 6, God took an inventory of the state of mankind. All that man intended to be and do was being used for evil intent. Responsibility and representation had fallen to selfish motives of personal gain. Man was using the power that God gave him to rule as a way to dominate and corrupt what God once called good.

Sin experts

Fast-forward to now, and not much has changed. Things are getting worse, not better. In our cities men are becoming more and more inventive in their acts of crime and violence. If Hollywood is a cultural barometer, which it often is, we can see example after example of our capacity for evil. In the movie Seven, two police officers seek to stop a serial killer who justifies his murders by positioning himself as a vigilante creating a murderous masterpiece against those who personified the seven deadly sins: envy, greed, lust, anger, sloth, gluttony, and pride. Each murder is a gory - and creative - depiction of the particular sin of the guilty. The guilty are punished with an even more perverse form of their sin of choice. As you watch the movie, you get a visceral sense at how innovative all of us are at sinning.

The longer creation exists in a state of separation from God, the effects of that separation become more and more clear. First Timothy 3, written thousands of years after the events recorded in Genesis 6, predicts this. And in our world today, two thousand years after Paul penned his letter, the depth of our depravity has come even starker into view. Our separation from God is so embedded that our dysfunction has become the new normal. From music videos to the multibillion-dollar porn industry, you see anywhere and everywhere the effects of the disastrous fall. As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 8:11, "Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil" (ESV).

Even so, things are not as bad as they could be. God by His grace continues to restrain how comprehensively expressive man's sin is fleshed out in the world. If the Lord gave all of mankind over to the full extent of our sinfulness, we would totally destroy ourselves. In Romans 1:24–28 Paul speaks of God giving already sinful people over to a deeper level of sinfulness. Inferentially, it seems that the Lord somehow restrains this from being a norm in the lives of all fallen humanity. Second Thessalonians 2:7 infers that the Lord in some way holds back the immensity of how destructive evil becomes on the earth. Accordingly, it is only due to the goodness and patience of the living God that any of us are still here, as He has throughout history acted to place a cap on our wickedness.

Throughout the events recorded in the Bible, we see the Lord revealing Himself, disciplining, judging, preaching, performing miracles, and ultimately sending Jesus to keep the clutches of sin from taking full grip on creation. These intervening acts only serve to highlight the full destructive nature of sin:

As a result of the fall, sin has become universal; except for Jesus Christ no person who ever lived on this earth has been free from sin. This sad fact is acknowledged even by those who are neither adherents of Christianity nor believers of the Bible.

Because the scope of the fall is so great, the solution to the fall must be equally great or greater. Solutions like self-help, community programming, and training groups all have their place, but it's not at the foundation. These can only help to treat the symptoms, to prolong the inevitable. We need something deeper. We need to be born again. Being born again reverses the polarity of creation (John 3). Because sin was the cause, sin must be eradicated for an end to come to the pervasive depravity in the world. And because sin has not only destroyed humanity but creation as well, all of redeemable creation must be re-created - born again in its own way - for things to finally be as they should.

Unfortunately, not all beings in the universe long for this to happen.

Scriptures marked "ESV" are taken from the English Standard Version, Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2007.