The Fall as Covenant-Breaking

Catechism question this week is number 15. What was the sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created? And the answer is the sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created was their eating the forbidden fruit. Now this is important for us because we are considered in our first parents. Remember this first parents language about their continuing in the estate wherein they were created.

All leading up to our being in Adam, the covenant being made with him not only for himself but for his posterity. So this view of Adam and the woman under him and we in him all being in covenant with God is very important for understanding what’s happening in Genesis 2 and 3. Because the estate where they were created was not just knowledge and righteousness, but holiness, a consecration unto God that comes from a covenant with God in which God had bound us to himself in Adam. There are many sins involved in the complexity of the event of the fall. Even though the woman was not deceived, she did receive as a teacher and explainer of God’s word, another creature than her husband, whom the Lord had brought her to.

He had not brought her to the servant, he had brought her to the man. And the man was the one who had the words of God for her, particularly the words of God concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And so there were already sins, although not so willful and impudent as Adam’s sin, yet there were sins of the woman along the way, even not deferring to her husband, for instance, or accepting some sort of twist on God’s word. The woman was deceived, but 1 Timothy 2 tells us that Adam was not deceived, and so there were more and more willful sins on Adam’s part. But the sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created, the sin whereby our first parents broke covenant with God and forfeited the blessing of the covenant, which was life.

Remember, the catechism is very intentionally chosen the language, he entered into a covenant of life with them. Because there’s a focus here, not so much on how the covenant would be maintained, in which we would call it the covenant of works. But the focus is on the estate into which the covenant was designed to bring us from the time of probation into the time when this life would be secured and sealed forever. And so we’re in a covenant of life, the state that they were in was not just knowledge and righteousness, but holiness. And the sin then, the sin whereby our first parents fell from that estate was they’re eating the forbidden fruit.

Even the language, the catechism answer does not say they’re eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, although that is true, isn’t it? That’s what fruit it was. But our catechism very specifically says the forbidden fruit to remind us that this was the singular great term of the covenant of life in the garden, that God had entered into a covenant of life with them upon condition of perfect obedience. Forbidding them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil upon the pain of death and so he had forbidden them to eat and they ate the Forbidden fruit and we in them and so this estate Into which we were created to be being bound to God in a covenant that would eventually bring us into everlasting and unlosable life in Him and with Him and fellowship with Him. This was what we fell from.

It’s not just that we fell into sin and misery, but it’s that we fell into sin against God and we fell into misery from Um, the offense, uh, given against God, the misery of being, uh, having broken covenant with God brought ourselves under covenant curse and we’ll, we’ll have sin and misery, uh, sin and the catechism. But then, by comparison, of course, Christ has brought us into a new estate, not just a state of being forgiven, praise God, yes, that’s true, not just an estate of being able to think and speak and do righteously and eventually only righteously, yes, that’s true, but especially an estate of being bound to God and objects of his blessing by virtue of what Christ has done. What an amazing thing the covenant of grace is. It is a covenant of life even more than the original covenant of life had been. And so, Catechism Answer 15 is teaching us and reminding us to see our sinning as belonging to that estate into which Adam brought us.

So that when we come to be in Christ, we will A, be grateful for what we have been brought out of, but B, because there is that which remains in us from our original nature. It is not our nature anymore. There is not a sinful nature inside the Christian. I heard that recently. It’s important to repeat.

There is not a sinful nature inside the Christian. We have to follow Romans 7, 17, Romans 7, verse 20, and say, it is not I, but sin that dwells in me. There is sin dwelling in me, but I, and you, if you’re a Christian, and even if you’re not a Christian, you only have one nature at a time, but if you’re not a Christian, you don’t want the nature that you do have, you want a new one. But if you are a Christian, it is important to recognize that which comes from your former nature, that which remains or dwells in you from your former nature, so that you can identify it as a hostile and take it out, which is what he describes not only in the last half of Romans 7, but especially for the first third or so of Romans 8. And part of that is recognizing the covenantal nature of our sin.

That sin is a transgression of, a breaking of, that we sin specifically in the transgression of and the breaking of the covenant of life. So what was the sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate when they were created? The sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate when they were created was their eating the forbidden fruit