The Fall

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

You’ve read that many times. But have you stopped to think about what it really means? John 1 says:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.

God in the form of the Word spoke, and it was. Light before the sun. Plants before photosynthesis. Sea creatures before any net was cast to catch them. Man from the dust of the ground, with the breath of God in his lungs, placed in a garden where every tree was for food except one.

And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

The Hebrew: Vayyiqra Elohim la’or yom velachoshekh qara layelah vayehi-erev vayehi-voker yom echad.

You see the word yom. Everywhere in the Hebrew Bible where yom appears with a number — first day, second day, forty days — it means a 24-hour day. Over 350 times outside of Genesis 1, not one exception. When Moses wrote “the first day” and “the second day,” he meant exactly that. A morning and an evening. Twenty-four hours. The same way you’d read “three days’ journey” or “on the seventh day” anywhere else in the Old Testament. So we can be assured that God, the Word, created all that we know in six days. Light. The firmament to divide the waters. Heaven. Dry land. Vegetation. Lights in the sky. The swarm of living things in the sea and the sky. The beasts of the earth and every creeping thing.

Then He said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.” And He gave man dominion over the birds of the sky and every living thing.

Elohim — God — declared it all to be very good.

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The Law of Information

But a point needs to be made about the creation itself. We run into something called the Law of Information. It states that information does not arise from matter by natural processes. Information comes from a mind. It always has. It always does.

Norbert Wiener founded the field of cybernetics at MIT. He was not a theologian. He was not a creationist. In 1948, he wrote: “Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.”

That is not a Christian saying that. That is one of the founding fathers of information theory, stating what his own field proved: information is not matter. It is not energy. It is its own category. And it does not spontaneously generate from dead chemicals. DNA and RNA — the master codes for how living things are built — are information. Code. The question is not whether the code exists. The question is who wrote it. Every code anyone has ever found the origin of came from a mind. Not one has been shown to arise from matter alone. Look around your house. Everything you see was made by someone — from an idea in someone’s mind.

Now look at Romans 1:

That which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, both His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

God made His creation evident within us. We have all seen His attributes. A beautiful forest. A patch of flowers exquisite in their beauty. The dogs and cats we love. Every living thing carries the code — DNA, RNA — the master plans for how living things are built. Not one of those codes wrote itself. Not one arose from dead chemistry. Information comes from a mind. Always has.

So when the evidence of creation is this plain — written into every cell of every living thing — what do some people do with it? Paul says they suppress it. They hold it down. Romans 1:18: “Who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” Not that they didn’t have the truth. Not that it wasn’t available. They had it, and they held it under. Scientists who deny the Creator are not different in kind from the Pharisees who denied Christ. They have worked long and hard to attain their titles, as did the Pharisees. They were all educated in the same worldview, as were the Pharisees. They love the prestige of their education, as did the Pharisees. And when they come to evidence that tells them plainly to change their worldview, they are loath to do so — as were the Pharisees.

Jesus said to Nicodemus, a Pharisee, in John 3:3-5:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” He couldn’t see past his framework. But Nicodemus did eventually change his worldview — along with Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy man and a disciple of Jesus, but secretly, for fear of the Jews (John 19:38). They both had a change of mind, and it cost them in this life. But they attained salvation, which is more than worth the loss of stature among their friends. There were others who were offered the same change. I’ll let you find them on your own. Consider it homework.

We are without excuse. But we continue.

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The Fall

Adam, who is made from the dust of the ground — God breathed life into him (Genesis 2:7) — is told he may eat from every tree in the garden, except one. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam is then given a helper, taken from his rib. She is called Woman because she was taken out of Man (Genesis 2:23). And Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”

This will become important later.

The Bible does not say how long Adam and his woman had before a visitor showed up. We are told in Scripture that satan and the angels who rebelled were cast down — Revelation 12:7-9:

And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and satan, who deceives the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

So we don’t know how long Adam and his woman had before the serpent showed up and started asking questions. Why Adam was not out in front of his woman, we don’t know. Perhaps, going back to Genesis 2:24, he was cleaving to his wife. Whatever the reason, his woman was the one talking to the serpent. 2 Corinthians 11:3: “But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” Cunning. Not smarter. The word is panourgia — craftiness, shrewdness, trickery.

Genesis 3:1 — The serpent said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”

Genesis 3:2-3 — The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God said, ‘You shall not eat from it, and you shall not touch it, lest you die.'”

Adam had conveyed the command from God to his woman, and she repeated it back to the serpent.

And the serpent said to the woman, Genesis 3:4-5: “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Have you ever been offered something so good it couldn’t possibly be true? It is a temptation, to be sure. Adam’s woman thought what the serpent said sounded pretty good. What Adam thought, we don’t know. Before this, before he was missing a rib, God had run all the animals past him so Adam could name them (Genesis 2:18-20):

Then Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” And out of the ground Yahweh God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and He brought each to the man to see what he would call it; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. And the man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

Now that he has a helper, does he delegate and run the show from the back? We don’t know. We do know from the dialog with the serpent that the woman had never encountered craftiness and deceit before. Previous to this, God and Adam had been honest and without guile. The serpent brought something new into the world: deception.

To summarize: God creates the heavens and the earth and everything else. It takes six yom, six 24-hour days. God declares His workmanship to be very good. Sometime later — we don’t know how long — one of His creations makes an error in judgment. Genesis 3:6:

Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, so she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.

Adam was with her. He was not deceived — he ate willingly. Genesis 3:7:

And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

Paradise became something other than what it was designed to be.

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Sources

1. Yom with a number = 24-hour day: James Stambaugh, “The Meaning of ‘Day’ in Genesis,” ICR Impact No. 184, 1988. Over 350 instances of yom with a number outside Genesis 1 — every one means a 24-hour day. Zero exceptions.
2. Law of Information — Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948), p. 132: “Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.” Wiener was not a theologian or a creationist — he was the founder of cybernetics at MIT. For the corollary that information originates from a mind, see Werner Gitt, In the Beginning Was Information (Christliche Literatur-Verbreitung, 1997).
3. Women initiate ~69% of divorces: Michael Rosenfeld, “Who Wants the Breakup? Gender and Breakup in Heterosexual Couples,” Social Networks and the Life Course (Springer, 2018). Data from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey, 2,262 adults, nationally representative. Presented at the American Sociological Association annual meeting, 2015.