The Consequences of Sin

The immediate effect of sin was shame.  Instead of joyfully running to speak to Jehovah, the couple hid themselves.  (Genesis 3:8) Their friendship with God was shattered.  When questioned about what they had done, they showed no remorse, although both of them were aware that they had broken God's law.  By eating the  forbidden fruit, they turned their backs on God's goodness.

As a result, God indicated that increased pain would accompany childbearing.  Eve would crave her husband, and he would dominate her.  Her attempt to grasp independence thus resulted in the exact opposite. Adam would now eat the produce of the ground in pain.  Instead of satisfying his hunger without toil in Eden, he would have to struggle to eke out an existence until he returned to the dust from which he had been made. -Genesis 3:16-19.

Finally, Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden of Eden.  Jehovah said: "Here the man has become like one of us in knowing good and bad, and now in order that he may not put his hand out and actually take fruit also from the tree of life and eat and live to time indefinite . . ."   "The sentence ends in mid-air," notes scholar Gordon Wenham , and we are left to supply the rest of God's thought-presumably, "let me expel him from the garden."  Generally, a Bible writer reports God's complete thought.  But here, continues Wenham, "the commission of the conclusion conveys the speed of God's action.  He had hardly finished speaking before they were sent out of the garden.  (Genesis 3:22, 23)  With that, all communication between Jehovah and the first couple apparently ceased.

Adam and Eve did not die physically during that 24-hour day.  However, they died in a spiritual sense. Ireemediably alienated from the Source of life, they began a decline into  death.  Imagine how bitter their first encounter with death must have been when their second son, Abel, was murdered by Cain, their firstborn! -Genesis 4:12-16.

After that comparatively little is known about the first human couple. Their third son, Seth, born when Adam was 130 years old. Adam died 800 years later, at the age of 930, after fathering "sons and daughters." -Genesis 4:25; 5:3-5.

Next time: A Lesson For Us

The Watchtower, 2000