(with Genesis 3:22-24)
I. Our first parents are discovered in a state of innocence, beauty, and blessedness, which is broken up utterly by the transgression of the Divine command. (1) To Eden, as the first condition of human existence, all hearts bear witness. Two hymns are babbled by the echoes of the ages "the good days of old," "the good days to come." They are the work-songs of humanity; the memory of a better, and the hope of a better, nerve and cheer mankind. That memory, Genesis explains; that hope, the Apocalypse assures. (2) We shall err greatly if we treat Adam's history in Eden as nothing more than a fabled picture of the experience of man; rather is it the root out of which your experience and mine has grown, and in virtue of which they are other than they would have been had they come fresh from the hand of God. We recognise the law of headship which God has established in humanity, whereby Adam, by his own act, has placed his race in new and sadder relations to Nature and to the Lord. (3) The origin of evil may still remain a mystery, but this history of Eden stands between it and God. Eden is God's work, the image of His thought; and man's spirit joyfully accepts the history, and uses it as a weapon against haunting doubts about the origin of evil. (4) The sin of Adam is substantially the history of every attempt of self-will to counterwork the will of God. Every sin is a seeking for a good outside the region which, in the light of God, we know to be given us as our own.
II. This narrative presents to us the Father seeking the sinful child with blended righteousness and tenderness, assuring him of help to bear the burden which righteousness had imposed on transgression, and of redemption out of the spiritual death, which was the fruit of sin.
III. God not only, fatherlike, made wise disposition for the correction of His child, but He cast in with His child's lot of toil and suffering, His own sympathy and hope; He made Himself a partaker in man's new experience of pain, and, that He might destroy sin, linked the sufferer by a great promise to Himself.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Divine Life in Man,p. 1.