Talk Together
Family conversations with God’s Word.
If you could live in a perfect place, what would it be like? Who would you want to live there with you?
Adam and Eve, who God perfectly created in His image, lived in the beautiful garden of Eden. They listened to God and spent time with Him. They lived peacefully and happily with each other and with all of God’s creation. Everything was perfect.
God, the Creator of all things, knows what’s best for His creation. He loved Adam and Eve and gave them rules about the garden to protect them. Adam and Eve were allowed to eat fruit from any tree in the garden, except the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Let’s read what God said about the tree in Genesis. Can you help me find Genesis 2, verses 15-17?
ESV
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Even though Adam and Eve lived in a perfect place and had a perfect relationship with God, they disobeyed Him. Instead of listening to their Creator who made them in His image, they listened to the serpent who told them they could eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve sinned. Sin is anything we think, say or do that disobeys God. (Big kids can read about this in Genesis 3.)
When Adam and Eve sinned, everything changed. They were ashamed of their nakedness and tried to make clothes for themselves from leaves. When God came to speak to them, they were afraid and hid from Him. God is perfect and holy, and He cannot be around sin. Because of this, Adam and Eve’s sin immediately caused separation between them and God. God told them they could no longer live with Him forever.
Even though they sinned, God still loved and cared for Adam and Eve. Before God sent them out of the Garden He clothed Adam and Eve with animal skin. An animal died because of their sin, and death entered the world.
Adam and Eve no longer lived in a perfect world. Because they sinned, pain, suffering, sickness and death are now present. There are now floods and fires, disasters and devastation. We can see sin affects all of creation, just as God said.
It would be easy to blame Adam and Eve for all the sin in the world. But the Bible says we are all sinners. Can you help me find Romans chapter 3, verse 23? Romans is the sixth book in the New Testament and was written by the apostle Paul.
ESV
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
This verse says we have ALL sinned. Every single one of us is separated from God because of sin. But that’s not all the book of Romans says. Can you help me find Romans chapter 6, verse 23?
ESV
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The payment, or wages, God requires for sin is death. When Adam and Eve sinned, the death of an animal covered their sin. When you and I sin, a payment of death is also required. But just like Adam and Eve, God still loves us and cares for us and has a perfect plan for how to save us. Sin is a big problem, but God’s Big Story isn’t over yet!