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Catechism #15



Q. By what sin did our first parents fall from their original condition?


A. Our first parents’ sin was eating the forbidden fruit.

The first sin we see in the Bible was in the eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve. But as we saw last week, there are sins of commission and omission. The eating of the fruit was an act of commission—a sin that was committed in the Garden of Eden.

But before Eve ever took her first bite, a few sins of omission occurred that led up to the sin of commission. First, notice that it was Eve, not Adam, that did all the talking with the serpent in Genesis 3. Yet it was Adam, not Eve, who was created as the spiritual leader of the family. For whatever reason Adam abdicated his role as the spiritual leader and stood silently by as Eve ate the fruit. After Eve’s bite, she gave it to Adam, and he ate it too.

Not only did Adam omit his role as leader, Eve omitted her trust in the goodness of God. Not only did she misquote God when speaking with Satan, but she bought the lie that God did not want her eyes to be opened to the fact that she was a god.

(Still today some miss the truth of this passage and believe that we are born as gods and just don’t realize it yet. Jesus called Satan “a liar from the beginning”, and the first words we see from Satan in Scripture is this lie to Eve)

If Eve believed that God is good she never would have believed what the devil said. A good God has rules that are for our good, yet Eve questioned that. Her decision to eat the fruit was not based on hunger or wanting to try a new fruit; it was motivated by her distrust in the goodness of God.

Most sins that we commit today are based on an omission in the goodness of God. Deep down we buy into the lie that God’s rules and ways are not good for us. If we trust that God is good then we would obey Him more.


Do you trust that God is good? If so, keep His rules, because they are for our good.
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