The Bible teaches us that Adam and Eve’s fall into sin was not just an isolated act of disobedience.  Rather, it was an event of catastrophic significance for the whole of creation.

Romans 8 describes all of creation as “groaning” under the corrosive effects of the Fall.  Not just human beings, but all of God’s good handiwork has now been drawn into the sphere of our mutiny against a good God. 

Look around you and consider the scope of the Fall…

Marriage… marriage is a good creation of God, designed for our benefit.  But can you think of even one marriage that is not distorted and violated in some way by sin? 

Family… families fall apart all the time.  And even the best of families are often severely strained by our fallen tendencies — like the materialistic bent which encourages parents to neglect the children for the sake of other things.

The State… the state is a good ordinance of God, but one that is now often twisted and distorted by outright tyranny in many places in the world.  And even the most democratic of countries cultivate political systems that form government policies as a response to pressure from special interest groups, rather than as a response to the demands of justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

We could go on.  Art, technology, work, sexuality, eating, drinking… everywhere you look in the wide scope of creation you’ll see the same sort of distortions.  The good possibilities of God’s creation are being misused, warped, and exploited for sinful ends.  Everything has now been caught up in the train of Adam’s failure to obey God.

But perhaps the distortion is most obviously found in the mirror.

Consider how the effects of the Fall have disfigured God’s good, creational design for your personal life.  How easily we are given to murder (literal or figurative), adultery (literal or figurative), theft, envy, pride, lies, unrighteous anger, greed, sloth, emotional disturbances, disease, sickness, and finally death.  This is all a part of the groaning of creation.

You know what’s really tragic?  The fact that we now consider all of the above to be ”normal.”

But once it was not normal.  We’ve forgotten that we were not made for these things.

All of these things are terribly abnormal.  They are indications of a grave sickness in God’s good world. 

Wherever you find something that’s wrong in this world, there you are looking at an effect of the Fall.  There you see a perversion of God’s good creation.  You were not made for that.

This is part of a continuing study in our “Faith” category, in which we are considering the three foundational themes of the Bible:  Creation, Fall, Redemption.  If you’d like to start from the beginning, click on the “Faith” category at the top of the right hand column and go to the July 17, 2007 entry, “What You Believe.”