Genesis 3

They hear the LORD God’s voice walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hide among the trees. The Giver they distrusted now sounds like a threat. Fellowship has become flight.

Both camps agree: God seeks the hiding pair. The coming is not yet the sword. Mercy is already in the footfall; they remain responsible for the hiding. Those in Wesley’s line hear an approach that can still be answered rather than evaded.

The LORD God is present in His garden at the day’s breeze, and the man and his wife hide from His presence. Sin’s first social move toward God is concealment.

They hide, but He comes. Providence has not abandoned the scene. The sound that once meant communion now exposes them—yet it is still His garden, and He still walks it. Shared ground: shame followed sin, and God did not leave them to their leaves.

“Where are you?” is not a lost Creator hunting coordinates. It is a call that makes space for confession. The question treats Adam as a person who can still answer.

Seeking grace addresses the will. God does not begin with annihilation; He begins with a word that can be received or evaded. The hiding man is summoned to come out.

The LORD God called to the man. The question locates a rebel, not a gap in omniscience. Holy interrogation is already mercy.

God takes the first step after the fall. The seeker is the Judge. “Where are you?” unmasks the new distance without pretending Adam could repair it alone. God seeks; they do not find Him first.

Adam names fear, nakedness, and hiding. He tells a partial truth: he did hear, he was afraid, he was naked. He does not yet say, “I ate.”

Shame talks. Fear of God after sin is not yet repentance. Do not over-systematize the psychology; the pair still have a chance to tell the whole story, and the next verses will show they prefer a smaller one.

Fear and hiding are the psychology of guilt, not a new revelation. He heard the sound “your voice” and fled because he was naked—naked in a way 2:25 had not been.

The sinner’s first theology of God is dread without trust. The confession is authentic as far as it goes and still evades the command he broke. Shared ground: opened eyes taught them to hide, not to come.

Two questions press him: Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree I commanded you not to eat? God ties shame to the specific word they were given.

Arminian interpreters hear an opening to confess. The command is cited as still binding. Grace that seeks also names the sin; Adam can still tell the truth rather than hide behind the gift of the woman.

The LORD will not let nakedness be a vague mood. He connects it to the forbidden tree and His own command. Knowledge of shame has a moral cause.

God prosecutes by His word. The issue is not information they lacked; it is the eating He forbade. The Judge already knows; the questions are for Adam’s mouth. Shared ground: the command was clear.

The man blames “the woman whom you gave to be with me.” He implicates both the gift and the Giver, then admits, “I ate.” Agency is confessed at the end, after it has been relocated.

Do not over-systematize. This is familiar self-exoneration. Grace is already being resisted in the courtroom of the garden; he will not simply own the choice he made.

Federal head and husband though he is, Adam speaks like a victim of providence: the woman You gave me. Gift is recast as God’s fault.

Fallen reason still talks, and it talks to justify. The “I ate” is true and too late in the sentence. Blame-shifting is original sin’s rhetoric, not a puzzle about decrees. Shared ground: neither camp needs a theory to hear the dodge.

The LORD asks the woman what she has done. She answers, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Deception is not in doubt—Paul will say so (1 Tim. 2:14)—and so is her eating.

Name the deceit without woman-bashing, and name her act without pretending she was a puppet. Both ate; both must answer. The serpent’s lie does not erase her choice.

God addresses the woman next, still in words. She tells the truth about deceit and about eating, while the serpent becomes the remaining shield.

1 Timothy 2:14 can be noted without contempt for Eve. Adam was not deceived as she was; she was deceived and still guilty. The chain of blame is almost complete; God will now speak to the serpent. Shared ground: shifting blame is not repentance.

The LORD God curses the serpent above livestock and beasts: belly and dust all his days. Humiliation fits the craft. Judgment begins with the deceiver, not with a shrug.

Both camps agree the serpent is Satan’s instrument (cf. Rev. 12:9; Rom. 16:20). This curse is just answer to a deed—“because you have done this”—not a show trial. The liar is not excused as a necessary cog.

Speech turns to sentence. The serpent is cursed; crawling and dust picture ongoing defeat and shame. God does not negotiate with the liar.

The enemy is a creature under curse. Even this judgment is measured, and it prepares the promise of the next verse. God is not the author of the serpent’s speech, and He is Lord over the serpent’s end.

Enmity is God’s gift: He will put it between the serpent and the woman, between offspring and offspring. “He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.” Wesley and Arminius hear Christ specifically as the Seed—incarnation, suffering, and victory—and justification by faith in this promise already for our first parents.

Arminians take this as the first gospel sincerely offered and received. The holy fathers were not destitute of grace; they believed the promise concerning the Seed of the woman. The heel is pain; the head-wound is deliverance, held out to be trusted.

Calvin will not leap to a merely singular “seed” at the first word: the woman’s posterity generally is in view. Yet because not all of Adam’s sons conquer the devil, we must come to one Head to whom the victory belongs—and then the church under that Head (cf. Rom. 16:20).

This is protoevangelium, gospel for the church under Christ. God ordains the enmity and the bruising. Fairness to Calvin matters: he does land on Christ, not by treating “seed” as a lone individual from the first syllable, but by necessity of the victory. The cross will look like a heel-wound and be a crushed skull.