24. Adam and Eve's sin damaged the environment.
To Adam, God said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.” {Genesis 3:17}
Adam and Eve’s sin didn’t just have relational consequences, but environmental ones as well. If something as simple as eating a bite from a piece of fruit had the power to so unravel the spiritual realities of relationships, surely the realities of God’s physical creation would not escape unscathed. For starters, God told Eve she would experience more pain in childbearing, and He told Adam that the ground wouldn’t be the same. Though human beings would still have dominion over the land and cultivate it, there would now be a foreign, alien element. It would produce thorns and thistles, and it would be much harder to work with.
We can only imagine that this was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to the consequences for the environment. And thousands of years later, the apostle Paul wrote that it’s as if the entire creation is groaning, yearning to be released from the burden of sin, waiting to be restored. All of God’s creation is toiling under the weight of the disastrous consequences unleashed by Adam and Eve’s sin.
If you want to dig deeper—
Genesis 3:16-19
Romans 5:12