The Fall – In its despair.

The fall didn’t simply stain man, but robbed him of his relationship with God, his place in creation, and his first estate.  The fall proved a headlong descent into a dark and forbidding world.  I cannot imagine that absent a special dispensation of grace, that Adam and Eve could have continued with any will to live, so great was the fall and its impact on life and creation.

Around them, death began to spontaneously emerge.  Violently, insidiously encroaching on their  existence, stalking them like so much prey.  Threatening to blot out the sun as it drug them down to the grave.  The glorious brilliance of creation was fading into muted grays and blacks; and at the end, all of their toil and fretting would be rewarded with a grave.

We simply cannot imagine the terror and dread they knew, as the implications of their fall began to dawn more fully upon them.

Banished from their home, and estranged from the presence of their creator, they found a new world, hostile, demanding, and unpredictable.  Finally, as the galling reality dawned upon them, that their tempter had now become their tormentor, their humiliation was complete.  How bitter the aftertaste of the forbidden fruit.  The tempters words which fell like honey, now hung in their memories, vicious lies and deadly poison.