Q. 13. Did our first parents continue in the estate wherein they were created?
A. Our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the estate wherein they were created, by sinning against God.
“They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden …., and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.” (Gen. 3:8)
Original sin is in us, like the beard. We are shaved today and look clean, and have a smooth chin; tomorrow our beard has grown again, nor does it cease growing while we remain on earth. – Martin Luther
Michael R. Nichols writes: "I myself am a Presbyterian, and we do believe in original sin. I've always thought that if you are going to sin, you ought to be original about it."
He tells the story of driving home to see his mother, and passing on the highway a great big church with a lighted board out front, on which they put slogans and sayings for the edification of the saints and sojourners. "That week the motto was, 'If you're done with sin, come on in.' I got a little closer, and someone had written in lipstick, 'But if you're not quite through, call 272-0200." - Nichols, "Finding Your Own Lake Wobegon: The Healing Power of Humor," Hometown Humor, USA, ed. Loyal Jones and Billy Edd Wheeler (Little Rock, Ark.: August House Publishers, 1991), 209-10.
Dallas Willard writes about a 2½ year old girl in her backyard who one day discovered the secret to making mud (which she called "warm chocolate"). Her grandmother had been reading and was facing away from the action, but after cleaning up what was to her a mess, she told little Larissa not to make any more chocolate and turned her chair around so as to be facing her granddaughter.
The little girl soon resumed her "warm chocolate" routine, with one request posed as sweetly as a 2½ year-old can make it: "Don't look at me, Nana. Okay?" Nana (being a little co-dependent) of course agreed.
Larissa continued to manufacture warm chocolate. Three times she said, as she continued her work, "Don't look at me, Nana. Okay?"
Then Willard writes: "Thus the tender soul of a little child shows us how necessary it is to us that we be unobserved in our wrong."
Any time we choose to do wrong or to withhold doing right, we choose hiddenness as well. It may be that out of all the prayers that are ever spoken, the most common one—the quietest one; the one that we least acknowledge making—is simply this: Don't look at me, God.
It was the very first prayer spoken after the Fall. God came to walk in the garden, to be with the man and the woman, and called, "Where are you?"
"I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid," Adam answered, "so I hid." Don't look at me, God. - John Ortberg, God Is Closer Than You Think (Zondervan, 2005), p. 40-41
Ever since the fall of Adam the world knows neither God nor his creation. It lives altogether outside of the glory of God. Oh, what thoughts man might have had about the fact that God is in all creatures, and so might have reflected on the power and the wisdom of God in even the smallest flowers! Of a truth, who can imagine how God creates, out of the parched soil, such a variety of flowers, such pretty colors, such sweet vernal grass, beyond anything that a painter or apothecary could make! Yet God can bring out of the ground such colors as green, yellow, red, blue, brown. Adam and those around him would have been elevated by all this to the praise of God, and they would have made use of all created things with thanksgiving. Now we enjoy all this to overflowing, yet without understanding, like cattle or other beasts trampling the most beautiful blossoms and lilies underfoot. - Luther's Tabletalk from No. 4201
“But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 11:3, NRSV)
Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning Psalm: 3, 143
Evening Psalm: 91, 129
Jeremiah 1:11-19
Romans 1:1-1
John 4:27-42
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