At some point in their little lives, my kids got the impression I knew the origins of everything. Well, not everything. Mostly baseball. I’m inundated daily with questions about the history of the game. Who was the first to hit a grand slam? Which team recorded the first triple play? What is the fastest a pitcher has ever thrown?
What makes historical facts about baseball especially difficult to answer with absolute certainty is that, of all our major sports, it has the most ambiguous beginning. We don’t know where it started, when it started, or who started it. There are written accounts of a game like baseball that stretch back centuries. Of course, we can point to the start of professional baseball as we know it today, but that leaves much to be desired for young fans of the game. Unfortunately, some things just aren’t knowable.
A Well Enough Beginning
Many people believe the same is true of other, far more important, questions. Questions such as our origins. We can’t know for sure how we arrived in our current form. Perhaps we evolved. Maybe it was a big bang that started it all. But unlike the origins of baseball, we have very good written documentation of how things got to where they are today. The opening pages of Genesis are our sure guide.
It begins well enough. God spoke and life began. He formed the man of the dust of the earth and formed the woman out of the rib of the man. So here is our start. But looking at the paradise of Genesis 2 leaves a question of how we got into the mess we’re in now. How did it all go so wrong? Well, the Bible has an answer for that as well.
The great twentieth-century pastor Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “Nothing in the world is as practical as the teaching of the Bible. Indeed, the whole purpose of that book is to come to us with its instruction and its enlightenment concerning the very situation in which we find ourselves.”[1] What Lloyd-Jones highlights is our need for answers. The Bible is our great answer book. What ails us? The Bible tells us.
The Origin of What Ails Us
What the Bible tells us about what ails us is found in Genesis 3. We don’t have to wonder how things went so wrong. We can know with certainty what happened. Way back in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve desired something more than God. Out of the pride of their heart, they reached for fruit from a tree of which God commanded them not to eat. They transgressed God’s law and, with a bite, fell into sin.
Since that day, our world has suffered the consequences. Lloyd-Jones says it well.
We are all conscious of problems in this world—problems in our own personal lives and in the world at large. There is no such thing as complete and perfect happiness. No one is without difficulties. Everyone knows what it is to be weary, to be disappointed, and to struggle. We find conflict within ourselves. We find conflict round and about us. That is the experience of every human being. There is always a fly in the ointment. There is no such thing as unmixed pleasure. We have all discovered—and no matter how young we are, we have discovered this—that life does involve us in difficulties, in problematical situations. And we have a feeling that we were not meant for this. We do not like it; we want to be delivered from it. That is ultimately the cause of all quests in the lives of men and women. We are all searching for some solution to the problems of life. There are difficulties; there are such things as heart searchings and disappointments; we are all somehow or other seeking for some way out of some impasse.[2]
The problem, of course, is where we go to find our way out of the impasse. If Genesis 3 shows us how we got into this mess, does it have anything to say about how we’re going to get out of it? Surprisingly, it does. But not in a way we would expect, and not in a place we would expect.
Glimpses of Hope
Genesis 3:15 is called by theologians the protoevangelium or “first gospel.” As God is pronouncing judgment upon the serpent, he says something utterly surprising. How will the world get out from under the belly of the beast? How will evil be dealt with? Through the offspring of the woman.
“I will put hostility between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring.
He will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
Who would expect a promise of hope for mankind in the midst of a judgment oracle? But here is it.
Of course, we must read on to see the fulfillment of this promise in Jesus Christ. Yet from this origin story, we not only see what is wrong with us, but also the way out. It’s a surprising one. God gets us out through his Son.
We may not know who turned the first triple play or thew the fastest. Those events are lost to history. But we can know how we got into the mess we’re in, and, better yet, we can know how God will get us out. Adam and Eve were the first to strike out, but Jesus hit the game-winning home run and, in him, we’re making our way back home.
[1] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Gospel in Genesis: From Fig Leaves to Faith (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), Kindle edition.
[2] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Gospel in Genesis: From Fig Leaves to Faith (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), Kindle edition.
This post is written by David McLemore, and is published as a companion to Unit 2, Session 1 of The Gospel Project for Adults Vol. 1 (Fall 2021): From Creation to Chaos.