The first sacrifice for sin is made by God in today's passage.
"The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them." (Genesis 3:21) Man can do nothing to cover his sin or cleanse himself of sin. God does the covering and the cleansing. God made the first sacrifice for sin here in the Garden of Eden, and God made the final and perfect sacrifice for sin when God the Son died on the cross. Both of these sacrifices are substitutionary. God could have killed Adam and Eve right where they stood as punishment for their sin, but that would have been the end of the human race. God didn't want to put an end to the creatures He created in His own image, so He provided a substitute. The Bible doesn't tell us what type of animal the Lord used to provide coverings for Adam and Eve, but I wouldn't be surprised to know it was a lamb. A lamb would later become the Passover sacrifice. The lamb was the required sacrifice for many types of sin offerings under the Mosaic law. And, last but not least, when John the Baptist announced the identity of Jesus of Nazareth to the crowd gathered at the Jordan River, he exclaimed, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29)
The entire creation is now involved in the fall of man, but not by its own will. Man's sin affected everything. The animal kingdom became collateral damage in the battle that Adam and Eve lost in the garden. The Apostle Paul, the author of the book of Romans, reminds us that it was man's sin that brought suffering and death upon the animal kingdom and upon the entire natural world: "For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice." (Romans 8:20a) The creation experiences the effects of our sin even though the creation itself never fell from grace. The creatures inhabit this world with us, and the pollution of sin has taken its toll on these creatures. But thanks be to God, it won't always be this way, for when Christ returns as King of kings and Lord of lords, everything in this world will be transformed. "The creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God." (Romans 8:21)
Next the Lord speaks to what I believe are the other two persons of the Holy Trinity: God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. He may also have been speaking to the angelic hosts of heaven. "And the Lord God said, 'The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.'" (Genesis 3:22)
What's worse than a sinful human being? A sinful human being who lives forever. We who have trusted in Christ will someday live forever in perfect, immortal bodies like His, but we are not going to live forever in these bodies made of dust. We are going to be transformed, as the Apostle Paul says when describing the resurrection: "The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power...For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality." (1 Corinthians 15:42b-43, 53)
"So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After He drove the man out, He placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life." (Genesis 3:23-24) Does this mean that the tree of life still exists somewhere in the world? It would seem so, but the Lord is not going to allow anyone to have access to it, not at this time. But in the book of Revelation, when the Lord reigns over the earth and makes all things new, we find the redeemed having access to the tree of life forever. (See Revelation 22.) In those days there will be no danger of anyone falling into sin. Sin will be no more. There will be no reason to restrict our access to the tree of life because we will be inhabiting eternal, sinless, perfect bodies that are just like the resurrected body of our Lord.
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