The Fall and the Fracturing of Desire

Today's Reading

Read Genesis 3:1-19, the account of the Fall: the serpent's deception, the choice to eat, the shame, the hiding, the blame, and the curses. Notice how every relationship — between God and humanity, between man and woman, between humanity and creation — is fractured.

Then read Romans 1:18-32, where Paul traces the downward spiral that begins when humanity exchanges the truth about God for a lie and worships created things rather than the Creator.

Reflection

If Day 1 was about the goodness of creation, Day 2 is about what went wrong. And what went wrong was not limited to one area of life. It was total.

The Fall in Genesis 3 does not merely introduce death and pain. It fractures every human relationship. The man and woman who were "naked and not ashamed" now hide from each other and from God. The intimacy of Genesis 2 gives way to blame, shame, and power struggles. The curse in Genesis 3:16 — "your desire shall be contrary to your husband, and he shall rule over you" — describes not God's design but sin's distortion: a war of desires and domination that has marked male-female relationships ever since.

Augustine, writing from his own experience of sexual addiction, understood this profoundly. His concept of concupiscence — disordered desire — was not limited to sexual lust. "The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder," he wrote in Confessions. For Augustine, the Fall meant that every human appetite — for food, for power, for approval, for sex, for comfort — was now bent away from God. We desire good things in wrong ways, wrong things in compelling ways, and the right things with distorted intensity.

This matters enormously for the sexuality debate. Romans 1:18-32 is perhaps the most contested passage in the discussion. Paul describes humanity exchanging the truth of God for a lie, and then describes same-sex sexual activity as one expression of this exchange. Progressive interpreters argue Paul is describing exploitative pagan practices, not loving committed relationships. Traditional interpreters argue Paul is describing a pattern rooted in creation, not merely in culture.

Tim Keller wrote that "what Paul is describing in Romans 1 is not just homosexual desire — it is the unraveling of all human desire when we exchange the Creator for created things." This is crucial. Romans 1 does not single out same-sex desire as uniquely fallen. The same passage lists greed, envy, murder, gossip, arrogance, and disobedience to parents. The point is that all of humanity is caught in a web of disordered desire. Every person reading this devotional has desires that feel natural but are not aligned with God's design.

The traditional church has too often treated same-sex attraction as a special category of depravity while ignoring the greed, pride, and heterosexual lust that pervade its own pews. The progressive church has too often treated desire itself as an infallible guide — as though what feels natural must therefore be good. Both positions fail to reckon with the depth of the Fall.

Going Deeper

The doctrine of the Fall is simultaneously humbling and liberating. It means that no one can stand in judgment over another's desires, because all of our desires are broken. And it means that the mere presence of a desire — however deep, however persistent — does not by itself tell us whether acting on it is right. How does this challenge your assumptions about your own desires?