by Robert Reymond
1. Our first parents lost their legal/moral innocence and original righteousness and found themselves the subjects of real guilt and moral corruption.
This awareness of guilt first displayed itself as shame or embarrassment with respect to their own physical nakedness in the presence of each other. This shame, traced in the text to their physical nakedness in the presence of each other, was only the reflex of the inner nakedness of the guilty conscience before God working itself out in the sphere of the external.
2. The image of God, reflected originally both by Adam and Eve as individuals and by the human community which they comprised in terms of a true knowledge of God and concern for justice for one's neighbor, was immediately fractured and distorted.
Genesis 3:8 They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
Genesis 3:12 The man said, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate."
3. Fellowship between God and man was broken.
Real alienation now existed between God and man, God's alienation being holy and fully justified, man's alienation being unholy and unjustified. Real alienation from God's side is illustrated by his judicial sentencing of the pair to death and by his expulsion of them from the garden and away from himself (which in point of fact is the essence of death).
4. Man's environment was cursed, and nature's productivity accordingly became impaired by thorns and weeds.
Genesis 3:17–18 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it'; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. "Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field…
5. The man and the woman were judicially condemned and accordingly punished.
Eve was first sentenced. Her punishment consisted in suffering in childbearing and in the desire that would relentlessly work within her driving her to master her husband (see the similar expression in Gen. 4:7 for support for this view)…
6. By God's forensic imputation of Adam's first transgression to all those descending from him by ordinary generation, "all mankind lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and are so made liable to the miseries of this life, to death itself, and the pains of hell forever."
Romans 5:12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—
7. Man's greatest and most immediate need is now divine grace, which God declared he would provide in and by a Redeemer who would himself in and by his own mortal wounding finally destroy Satan's kingdom of evil.
Genesis 3:15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel."