Question 19
What was the sin committed by our first parents when they fell from the state in which they were created?
Q. What was the sin committed by our first parents when they fell from the state in which they were created?
A. The sin of our first parents was their eating the forbidden fruit.
Commentary
The catechism points to the particular act in which the fall took place: their eating the forbidden fruit. God had set before Adam and Eve a single, clear prohibition, the one tree from which they were not to eat, and in taking and eating they broke it. The act looks small, a piece of fruit, but the smallness of the thing forbidden only magnifies the greatness of the rebellion. The issue was never the fruit itself; it was whether the creature would submit to the word of his Creator. In reaching for what God had forbidden, our first parents declared that they would be their own judges of good and evil, and the whole law was broken in that one act.
Beneath the outward eating lay a heart already turned from God. They believed the serpent’s lie above God’s truth, doubted His goodness, coveted what was not theirs, and grasped at a forbidden wisdom. What began as unbelief ended in open disobedience. When God came to them, their guilt showed itself further in the shifting of blame: “The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.’ ... The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate’” (Genesis 3:12–13). Adam blamed his wife and, by implication, God who gave her; Eve blamed the serpent. Neither would own the sin as his own, and in this we see the bitter fruit of the fall already at work in the human heart.
The reason this single act carries such weight becomes plain in the questions that follow. Adam did not sin as a private individual but as the appointed head of the human race, so that his one act of disobedience brought guilt and corruption upon all his posterity. The same pattern of sin he displayed in the garden, unbelief, pride, and the refusal to own our guilt, runs through every one of his children. We are quick to excuse ourselves, to blame our circumstances, and to charge God foolishly, and in this we prove ourselves true sons of Adam who need a second and better Adam to undo what the first one did.
Scripture Proofs
“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (Genesis 3:6).
“The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.’ Then the LORD God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate’” (Genesis 3:12–13).
2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689
6.2: Our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them whereby death came upon all: all becoming dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.