Our house turned 10 this year and right on cue everything is falling to pieces. That’s not strictly true, of course. The parade of breakdowns has actually been underway for a while now. Almost since the day we moved in. It’s the nicest house I’ve ever lived in and probably the worst built. Our roof has already been repaired twice. Same for the HVAC. Our washer, dryer, dishwasher, and built-in microwave all gave up the ghost long before the 10-year mark. The sliding glass door randomly shattered without an apparent cause, and when the master shower had to be replaced, it cost roughly five times my first car. Lord willing, we’ll have it paid for in about six more years. Both exterior doorknobs had to be replaced. Same for the handle on our sliding door. The ice maker and filtration system died long ago, and a portion of our refrigerator is now held together by duct tape.

American craftsmanship is not what it used to be. Or should I say South Korean craftsmanship? In a globalist economy where U.S. companies manufacture their goods abroad and foreign companies manufacture theirs in the States, it’s difficult to assign blame for product failures. That’s probably the point, since products that break are more lucrative than ones that don’t. Granted, the real culprit is far more ancient and entrenched. We might call it entropy, or more precisely: sin. While it’s true that work predates the fall (Genesis 2:15), it fundamentally changed after the fall. “Cursed is the ground because of you.” That was the judgment God pronounced upon Adam. “In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you… By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground [from which] you were taken.”

God had warned Adam that “in the day that you eat [from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil] you shall surely die,” but the serpent delivered to Eve precisely the opposite message: “You will not surely die,” he told her, “For God knows that when you eat [from this tree] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Eve, as we all know, did eat of the forbidden fruit. So did Adam, but the serpent, it turns out, was telling the truth. At least in the most literal sense. Adam and Eve did not die on the day they ate of the fruit, and they did become like God—knowing good and evil. Scripture concedes as much in Genesis 3:22. “Then the LORD God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.’” Adam and Eve were apparently together when they ate the fruit, but they did not eat it of it together, which is telling. Eve took and ate first, then gave some to Adam who followed suit. So not only did Adam fail to prevent Eve from eating the fruit, he used her as a guinea pig—waiting to see what happened to her before committing to the trespass himself. He saw her eat. He saw her not die. And so he considered it safe to cast the world into darkness.

What would have happened if Eve had eaten the fruit but Adam had resisted? We’ll never know. Just as we’ll never know what would have happened if there had been no tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or no prohibition against eating it, or no villainous serpent allowed to roam the garden. These are what ifs. The what is goes like this. Adam and Eve ate the fruit. They didn’t die. But instead of rejoicing in their audacity and survival, they were immediately filled with shame. They somehow sewed loincloths for themselves out of fig leaves and foolishly tried to hide themselves from God. They didn’t die physically. Not yet, at least, but they did die metaphorically. Their fellowship with God devolved into fear. And lest Adam “reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever,” they were banished from the garden from that day forth—an exile that was ensured by the placement of a cherubim with a flaming sword.

We don’t know how much time elapsed between creation and exile. We don’t even know precisely how time was measured. Genesis 1 says God made the heavens and the earth in six days. Genesis 2 refers instead to “the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” Whatever the timespan, the implication from the text is that Adam and Eve had yet to have children when they were banished from the garden. So in relatively short order, they went from walking with God in an earthly paradise, where their every need was met, to living in a wilderness suddenly antagonistic to them, where they had to labor for survival.

In chapter 4, a measure of healing came to Adam and Eve through the birth of Cain. “I have gotten a man,” Eve proclaimed, “with the help of the LORD.” But their joy was short-lived because that first-born son would kill their second-born son—a fate for parents that is worse than death. Adam and Eve may not have died on the day they ate the fruit, but they lived to see their son die and their other son banished, just as they had been before him. And the Lord’s confrontation of Cain went much the same as it had with his parents. Nary a one of them expressed anything like remorse. They merely complained and cast blame. “The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.” That, no doubt, was a bitter pill for Adam and Eve to swallow.

When Cain was condemned to wander the earth, he lamented that whoever found him would kill him—which is something of a head scratcher because who else was out there for Cain to be afraid of? Some suggest these were his own brothers and sisters, but the text doesn’t much allow for this possibility. We know that Seth wasn’t born until after Abel was killed. And the implication is that Seth was the third son born to Adam and Eve. I say that because of Eve’s response to his birth. “God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel, for Cain killed him.” Seth’s birth would have been far less significant if Adam and Eve already had additional unnamed sons. And Eve’s proclamation would make no sense. But as it apparently stood, Cain was banished. Abel was dead. So Seth became the heir. And it was through Seth that Noah, Abraham, and eventually Christ all descended. Genesis tells us that Adam “had other sons and daughters” after Seth, but Cain and Abel appear to be the only ones who came before him.

We do know that Satan himself—identified by the apostle John as the serpent in the garden—was on the earth in those days, along with at least one sword-wielding cherubim. And in Genesis 6, we read of “sons of God” who started having children with the daughters of men. So perhaps it was angels or demons who Cain was afraid of. This would also help explain how they would know who Cain was, what he’d done, and be able to recognize the enigmatic mark God placed upon him. But it leaves other questions unanswered. Like who lived in the city Cain built and named after his son, and who were the people who began “to call upon the name of the Lord” with the birth of Seth’s son (Gen 4:26)? Nor does it solve the problem of Cain’s wife. Who was she? His sister? Perhaps, but God takes a pretty dim view of incest. “Cursed be anyone who lies with his sister, whether the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother.” We read that in Deuteronomy 27, and if God is one who never changes, would he really use a practice deemed anathema to get the human race off the ground?

The third possibility is that Adam and Eve were not the only people God created and placed on the earth. There’s no indication in Genesis 1 that God made only one pair of each species or only one pair of humans. We sort of assume that from Genesis 2, but it’s never explicit. Genesis 9:19 reveals that “from [the three sons of Noah] the people of the whole earth were dispersed.” Scripture says nothing so definitive of Adam and Eve. At one level, this is a moot point. Since we are all descended from Noah, we are all descended from Adam. But if the question is: could there have been, prior to the flood, other lines of men not related to Adam? Scripture seems to at least allow for such a possibility. Adam himself is called a “son of God” in the book of Luke. That is, someone who was not born of woman but created directly by God. So maybe the “sons of God” referenced in Genesis 6 were more like other Adams than angels or demons. Their offspring, after all, were called mighty men.

While it’s true that the name Adam gave to his wife means “mother of all living,” he seems to have given it to her in the garden, before she was a mother at all. And if there were other people living outside the garden at that time, Adam may not have known it. In either case, Eve is certainly the figurative mother of all men, so it need not be a literal descriptor. The bigger difficulty with the idea that there may have been people walking the earth who were not descended from Adam has to do with our inherited sin nature. If all men were not from the line of Adam, how could all men be condemned in Adam? Interestingly, and this surprised me, nobody made this connection until the apostle Paul. In other words, it’s not until Romans 5 that we encounter the idea that Adam’s sin condemned us all. Original sin makes no explicit appearance in the Old Testament or gospels. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, but it does mean that Moses and the prophets never held up Adam as the universal ancestor of all men. Nor did Christ. Paul’s articulation of original sin goes like this:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned… For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many (Romans 5:12 & 15)… For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22).

The purpose of this argument is to demonstrate how the death of one man is sufficient to pay for the deaths owed by all men. Since our guilt was accrued through one man, Paul argued, our redemption could also be gained through one man. Assuming that man didn’t owe a death himself, which Christ did not. Some might contend that only those who physically descended from Adam could be culpable for his sin, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If God appointed Adam as mankind’s universal representative, then we would all be culpable for the choices he made, whether we we were his literal descendants or not. He would still be acting in our stead. Though it’s a concept difficult to grasp for those of us who have never lived under a monarchy, there are overlaps even today. Most of us are not related to those who represent us at the state or federal level, but we are still liable for the decisions they make on our behalf. Even if we don’t agree with them. More to the point, we are none of us physically descended from Christ, but that doesn’t prevent him from being the second Adam. Something beyond physical ancestry is here in play.

While Genesis tells us how old Seth and his descendants were when they first had children and when they died, the same is not true for Cain and his descendants. So we can’t know for certain how these two family branches fit together on the timeline. But we do know that Cain’s line went from bad to worse, culminating in Lamech who took two wives and boasted of killing a man. Maybe two. By the time we get to Noah, ten generations from Adam, things have gotten so bad that there is literally only one righteous man on the planet. Out of how many, you ask? Nobody knows, but starting with even one couple, if they and their descendants averaged four children each, there would likely be more than a million living descendants ten generations in.

With lifespans reaching 800 and 900 years, some scholars believe the world’s population would have been closer to a billion than a million 1,600 years in—which is roughly how much time Genesis says elapsed between creation and the flood. It works out to 165 years per generation, or 140 years more than we typically assign to generations today. That said, people in those days did not typically have children until they were 100 or older. Noah didn’t have children until he was 500. Something happened at the flood to dramatically lower the age of parenthood, but prior to that, it seems that fewer children were born to these early generations than we would have expected based on the lengths of their lives alone. There’s also the violence.

“Noah was a righteous man,” we read in Genesis 6, ”blameless in his generation… [but] the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.” This is the reason God gave Noah for destroying the earth. “I have determined to make an end of all flesh,” God said to Noah, “for the earth is filled with violence through them.” All flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. Here again, we don’t know precisely what a world “filled with violence” looked like, but we might be able to imagine it. The world is a violent place today, to be sure, but it is not an anarchic free-for-all where all men, save one, engage in physical acts of violence against their neighbors. A world like that, it’s safe to say, would not be conducive to population growth. So maybe the flood claimed fewer lives than the “experts” imagine.

However many souls perished in Genesis 7, the material point is the same. On a planet full of people, it seems unfathomable that there could have been only one man who walked with God. This goes beyond narrow is the way that leads to life and few are those who find it. This is narrow is the way that leads to life and one is he who finds it. Just imagine if that were the case today. I have no idea how many names are written in the book of life, but with a global population topping 8 billion, I’d like to think it’s more than one. Because if it’s not, what hope does that leave for someone like you or me? But maybe that’s the wrong way of looking at it. Maybe it had to be one, because Noah is pointing us to THE one. The one righteous man in a world full of sinners. The one man who actually can save us from our iniquity. Noah was blameless in his generation. He saved humanity from destruction, but he was not sinless. He still owed a death. Just like Moses. Both men are pictures of Christ, but their inadequacies and failures highlight the fact that no mere mortal can save us.

The prophet Joel wrote that whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Both Peter and Paul would repeat that declaration in the New Testament. Does that mean that none of the men and women who perished in the flood called out to God for salvation? Or was it simply too late? Or is it possible that some whose bodies died in the flood had souls that were nevertheless redeemed? This too is a question Scripture doesn’t answer. We would assume that those whose wickedness cost them their physical lives on earth also lost their eternal souls to hell, but the Pentateuch says almost nothing of life after death. It isn’t until Daniel that we get much concrete indication that something awaits us beyond the grave. Interestingly, Daniel recorded that “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Does the word many indicate that some will not awake to eternal reward or judgment? I don’t know.

Ancient Hebrews seemed to believe that all men met the same fate after death—at least initially. And physical death, more than damnation, was the perceived penalty for sin. T. Desmond Alexander, from Union Theological College in Belfast, wrote in an old piece for Themelios that “the Old Testament contains no detailed account of the fate of the righteous [following] death.” The best we can do, he maintains, “is (to) piece together various snippets of information in the hope of producing a clear picture.” In the ancient world, that which separated a good death from a bad death was largely dependent upon the circumstances surrounding it. Generally speaking, a bad death was marked by three things. One, it was premature. Two, it was violent. And three, it left the deceased without an heir. I can’t help but notice that all three explicitly apply to abortion.

I would submit that, even today, Christians are far more ignorant about how this whole thing wraps up than most of us would like to admit. There are as many end-times theologies as there are denominations—virtually all of which are held with more conviction than they should be. My own eschatology doesn’t go much beyond Hebrews 9:27: For it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment. The danger in becoming too fixated on the speculative and unknown is that it risks taking us away from the very real needs that are right before us. “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?” That’s the question James asks in the second chapter of his epistle. What good is it to offer a neighbor-in-need peace and blessing if you don’t feed and clothe them? One of the unfortunate results of what we might call our fuller understanding of eternity is a sort of laissez-faire indifference to the fate of the world around us. What do we care what happens to the planet? It’s all going to burn. Or so the thinking goes.

I see something similar in the context of abortion all too often. The essential argument goes like this. Since babies who die go to heaven, maybe abortion isn’t such a big deal after all. Maybe these children are better off dying in the womb than being born to risk the judgment of God. Though few would frame the argument so crudely or bluntly, I suspect this is the practical position of most Christians in America. Especially those of an evangelical bent—which I am. We’ve got bigger fish to fry; souls are what we should be saving. But this fundamentally misunderstands who Jesus was and what he came to do. One of the earliest and most explicit messianic prophecies can be found in Isaiah 42, which Matthew quoted in the twelfth chapter of his gospel. He referenced it to explain why Jesus told his followers not to evangelize. Here is the prophecy as it’s rendered in Isaiah:

Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be discouraged
till he has established justice in the earth.

When we think of Jesus as savior, we think almost exclusively of his dying on the cross to pay for our sins—so that we can go to heaven when we die. But Isaiah reminds us that there’s a whole lot more to it than that. Jesus came, not to cry aloud in the street, but to comfort the afflicted and establish justice in the earth. I wonder today if we little Christs have put too much emphasis on “good preaching” and too little on good living. Specifically, acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God. The human race, let's remember, was tasked with two things in Genesis one. You could summarize them like this: Have babies; steward creation. This same charge was repeated to Noah after the flood. With one addition. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” 

Don’t miss the significance of that statement. The shedding of innocent blood is a crime so inexcusable that it is deserving of death. And while God took it upon himself to punish our collective bloodguilt through the flood, he delegated that duty after the flood. “For rulers are not a terror to good conduct,” Paul wrote to the Roman church, “but if you do wrong, be afraid, for [the one in authority] does not bear the sword in vain.” He is ”an avenger,” who “carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” It’s easy to blame the world for our culture of disposability, where nothing lasts and even unborn children are sent to the incinerator, but there is plenty of guilt to go around. Much of it is in the mirror. 

It’s no surprise that those who reject the mandates of their Creator would treat his people and planet with contempt, but the same should not be true of us. The proper response to the curse is not to throw our hands up and let sin do its damndest—as we blithely sing hymns and wait for God to rescue us. The proper response is laid out in Genesis 3. For men, it begins with doing the hard work necessary to provide for his family. For women, it entails bearing the pain of childbirth and yielding her autonomy to a husband who will not always appreciate her as he should. Make no mistake. This is how we hold the line against the ravaging chaos unleashed by the fall. Families are the first defense. And once our family is sufficiently provided for, we move onto the needs of our brothers and sisters in the church, and then onto the community, nation, and world insomuch as we are able. Concentric circles, which is the model John Piper recommends we use in prayer as well.

Could it be that the reason so many churches and ministries go off the rails is because they’re led by men who have gotten the order backwards? Men who, in their eagerness to save the world, go too far and too fast. Instead of meeting the physical and spiritual needs of their own families first, they sacrifice wives and children upon the altar of “ministry.” The very ones who should be first to the table are left fighting for the scraps. It’s no wonder pastors’ kids have such a bad reputation. My brothers, this should not be.

Last Tuesday night, my sons and I spent a raccous evening at the Charleston Music Hall. We were there to see the greatest band in the world. That would be Switchfoot, of course, and they did not disappoint. But it’s a lyric from one of their earlier albums I’ve been pondering of late. “What's worth defending if everything's ending?” I can’t say exactly what Jon Foreman had in view with this question, but here’s how I understand it. If you see the world as merely something that is passing away, you won’t bother trying to make it a better place. But that misses the bigger picture. Consider Revelation 21. At some level, yes, the earth is passing away. But God is preparing a new heaven and a new earth where, behold, the old will be made new. And being made new, I’ll point out, is not the same as being replaced. This is how Peter put it:

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

What happens when this world passes away? The earth and the works done on it will be exposed. Said differently, from I Corinthians 3, “each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.” All that is good will survive. All that is not will be burned. Which means that nothing worth defending is actually ending. So don’t buy into the shallow notion that making the world a better place is like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. The lesson here is not one of resignation or abandonment. It’s the opposite. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, abound in holiness and godliness. Because all of those efforts will carry over into the new heavens and the new earth, a place—like the Garden of Eden—where the realms of God and man overlap. All that is righteous and good will survive into the new world so that none of our labors will have been in vain. As much as I’d like to solve the myriad riddles we find in Scripture, I repeatedly come back to the same conviction. That which we need to know, we do know. That doesn't mean we can't speculate about the rest, so long as we remember that there's a difference between what might be true and what we know to be true.