Adam fell. He let himself be tempted by a beast, by the serpent. How, we cannot tell: but so we read. He took the counsel of a brute animal, and not of God. He chose between God and the serpent, and he chose wrong. He wanted to be something in himself; to have a knowledge and power of his own, to use it as he chose. He was not content to be in God’s likeness; he wanted to be as a god himself. And so he threw away his faith in God, and disobeyed Him. And instead of becoming a god, as he expected, he became an animal; he put on the likeness of the brutes, who cannot look up to God in trust and love, who do not know God, do not obey Him, but follow their own lusts and fancies, as they may happen to take them. Whether the change came on him all at once, the Bible does not say: but it did come on him; for from him it has been handed down to all his children even to this day. Then was fulfilled against him the sentence, In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. Not that he died that moment; but death began to work in him. He became like the branch of a tree cut off from the stem, which may not wither at the instant it is cut off, but it is yet dead, as we find out by its soon decaying. He had come down from being a son of God, and he had taken his place in nature, among the things which grow only to die; and death began to work in him, and in his children after him. He handed down his nature to his children as the animals do; his children inherited his faults, his weaknesses, his diseases, the seed of death which was in him, just as the animals pass down to their breed, their defects, and diseases, and certainty of dying after their appointed life is past.
For this, my friends, is the lesson which Adam’s fall teaches us, that in God alone is the life of immortal souls, whether of men, or of angels, or of archangels; and in God alone is righteousness; in God alone is every good thing, and all good in men or angels comes from Him, and is only His pattern, His likeness; and that the moment either man or angel sets up his will against God’s, he falls into sin, a lie, and death. That He has given us reasonable souls for that one purpose, that with our souls we may look up to Him, with our souls we may cling to Him, with our souls we may trust in Him, with our souls we may understand His will, and see that it is a good, and a right, and a loving will, and delight in it, and obey it, and find all our delight and glory, even as the Lord Jesus, the Son of Man, the New Adam, did, in doing not our own will, but the will of our Father.