Common Fall of Mankind: The notion of a common “fall” of all mankind is emphatically stated or subtly introduced in almost all the major confessions. This idea has shaped the language of theology for centuries, making Adam’s act the hinge upon which all history turns. But Scripture does not begin there. It begins with God: His decree, His purpose, His Christ. To start with Adam is to read the story backward, interpreting eternity through the lens of time. No decree of God ever depended upon man’s fidelity or rebellion. Election and reprobation stand apart from any supposed “fall” of man.
I recently heard a prominent “divinity” doctor of the calvinistic persuasion say that it was “unfortunate” that Adam fell. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. After years of study, after poring over the scriptures and mastering the fine art of theological hair-splitting; after collecting degrees, footnotes, and commendations from men, this doctor of “divinity” still imagines that the Almighty’s eternal counsel can be overturned by a piece of fruit? I suppose that’s what tuition buys these days, a degree in divine disappointment. One might almost pity such learning, for it has taught him everything about religion except God. To call Adam’s sin “unfortunate” is to imply that redemption itself was a contingency, and to lament the “fall” as tragic is to deny that God “worketh all things after the counsel of His own will.” How could the very event that magnified the mercy of God and revealed the glory of the Redeemer be deemed unfortunate? Such language betrays a gospel built on reaction, not revelation. If that were true, then the gospel itself would be a divine afterthought, a rescue plan hastily conceived, not the eternal purpose of divine love revealed in time. Yet Scripture teaches the opposite: Adam existed because of Christ, that in Him grace might reign through righteousness unto eternal life. To pity the fall is to pity the very platform upon which grace was ordained to shine, and to call it unfortunate is to misunderstand both sin and salvation.
Scripture roots both sin and salvation in the eternal counsel of God, not in historical accident or human rebellion. Before Adam ever transgressed, the purpose of God stood firm, to save some and condemn others. In that light, the term fall is misleading. The Word simply says that Adam and Eve sinned. Their descent was not a fall from divine control into uncertainty, but the measured outworking of the eternal decree of Him who “doeth according to His will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.” Daniel 4:35.
When the earth was cursed for man’s sake, it was not simply an act of vengeance, but a revelation of divine wisdom and benevolence. The curse served man’s ultimate good, forcing his eyes heavenward and preparing the way for the righteousness of Another. Without guilt there could be no grace; without the sentence of death, no resurrection life. Sin’s entrance and death’s dominion opened the channel through which the love of God would flow in Christ, and the curse the stage upon which divine justice and mercy would meet, the condemnation of sinners manifesting the justice of God, and the salvation of sinners unveiling the grace of God in Christ Jesus. “Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound, that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.” Romans 5:20-21. The eternal purpose of God, fixed before the foundation of the world, accounted for every transgression and every mercy that would follow. To imagine a common fall is to imagine a frustrated God, whose purpose depends on man’s faithfulness.
But Scripture reveals a God whose purpose stands before sin, before time, before Adam himself. The entrance of sin into the world was no interruption of His plan, but the appointed stage upon which grace would shine. Thus, Adam and Eve did not fall so much as they fulfilled the divine decree in which sin and redemption were both foreordained. What man calls a fall was, in truth, the unfolding of a mystery older than creation itself, the eternal design revealed in Christ, the foreordained Lamb of God.
The very use of the word “fall” betrays a theology that exalts man and diminishes God. It implies that sin derailed divine intention, that God was reacting to man’s failure rather than executing His decree. It presumes that Adam stood in moral perfection and somehow slipped into depravity, as though paradise was accidentally lost. But Scripture never grants Adam that kind of perfection; he was created of the dust, an earthy man, formed innocent but not incorruptible, natural, not spiritual; temporal, not eternal. The so-called “fall” was not a slip from perfection but the foreordained unveiling of man’s need for the Second Adam, the Lord from heaven. What theology calls tragedy, Scripture reveals as the appointed path to redemption.
In conclusion, Adam and Eve were never left to the self-determination of their wills, as if their wills were independent of God’s active control. Their actions were never suspended in moral neutrality, nor were they under a mere possibility of transgressing, dangling between obedience and disobedience as possibilities, but walking within the ordained plan of Him who “declares the end from the beginning.” The transgression was as certain as the cross that would redeem it, for both were bound up in one eternal purpose, to glorify God in His Son. “For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things,” Romans 11:36, and that divine purpose includes the first offence as surely as the final deliverance. MPJ