Great Doctrines of the Bible—God the Father, God the Son/ Martyn Lloyd Jones

16. The Fall 

It is affirmed that what was written in the Bible concerning the fall of humans shall be taken as literal history. (See Job 31:33; Hosea 6:7; 1 Corinthians 11:3; 1 Timothy 2:14). 

Genesis tells us these: 

a). “[E]vil, sin and temptation came from the outside; they came from Satan, using the serpent. . . . and he had perfect free will to decide what to do with it” (182). 

b). The steps to the fall: the serpent attacked the woman, and she listened to the slanders of the devil against God. She “began to doubt God’s word and God’s love” and to “to look at the thing which God had prohibited” (183). She began to “desire it and to lust after it”; finally, it is humans’ “definite act of disobedience” (183). We cannot answer what made them do this, but the “most we can say is man’s moral constitution, his being made in the image of God, and his possession of free will, at any rate held the possibility of his disobedience” (183). (See the corresponding verse: 1 John 2:15-16). 

There are two special points: 

a). “[Si]n is only possible, and was only possible to man at the beginning because he had a free spiritual personality. Sin is not possible for an animal” (184). 

b). “[W]e never told anywhere in the Bible that the angels, the fallen angels, are going to be redeemed. Salvation is only for man” (185). 

“What were the results of this disobedience, this transgression of God’s law and commandment?” (185). 

a). The sense of shame: they “became conscious of their flesh” (185). (See Genesis 2:25 and 3:7). 

b). The sense of guilt. 

c). A fear of God: “they lost their fellowship with God, and their sense of fellowship with God” (186). 

d). They “underwent a spiritual death” (186). 

e). They had an entirely new relationship to nature: they have to toil and to sweat. 

f). They have “undergone a perversion in their moral nature” (186). 

g). It is “physical death”: “there was no need for a man to die. . . . Now he must die. It is impossible for him not to unless there is some special intervention” (187). (See Genesis 3:19 and Romans 5:12). However, man “did not lose his intellectual power, nor immediately die physically. Indeed, there does not seem to have any immediate physical change” (187). 

Lloyd Jones continues, “certain legal results happened at once. . . . The moment he sinned, he lost that unrighteousness, that correspondence with the moral character of God. And equally, he was separated from God at once” (187). The last thing that Lloyd Jones emphasizes is that, “when men fell, he did not cease to be man; he did not lose any of his essential qualities or attributes. His intellect, his power of self-analysis, his understanding, his will, all these things remained. But he lost his original righteousness and his fellowship with God. He became fearful, he hid himself, he became ashamed, ‘self-conscious’ in a bad sense—he did not know what to do with himself” (188).