The Watchmans Study

We live in a world that is not only living in a fallen state but the deception and Distortion are looming in plain site but unseen. The churches of today rely on self interpretation over common biblical sense. The churches make their “Own Truth” in their preaching and guidance. This could be one reason why the faithful are leaving the pews?

Romans 1 and Genesis 3

> Please explain the the ties of Romans 1:20-25 to Gen 3, the deception and fall

Romans 1:20–25 portrays humanity as suppressing knowledge of God’s eternal power and divine nature—knowledge available through creation—and consequently failing to honor God or offer gratitude, resulting in darkened thinking and foolish hearts. This passage echoes the fundamental dynamics of Genesis 3 in striking ways.

The core parallel centers on misplaced autonomy and the rejection of divine authority. In Genesis 3, the serpent orchestrates a shift in moral orientation where God’s word ceases to be the reference point for truth and goodness, instead positioning Adam and Eve as arbiters of truth in God’s place.[1] Romans 1 describes an analogous rebellion: people who knew God failed to honor Him, exchanged His glory for idolatrous images, and ultimately “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” Both passages depict humanity choosing self-determination over submission to God’s word.

Deception operates as the mechanism in both accounts. The serpent in Genesis deceives Eve by denying God’s warning and promising that eating the fruit will make her “like God, knowing good and evil,” (Gen 3:1–7) while Romans 1 identifies religious idolatry as exchanging God’s authority for fallible human thought that corrupts innate knowledge of God, transforming religion into godlessness.[1] In both cases, humanity exchanges divine truth for a lie—whether the serpent’s promise of godhood or the modern substitution of creature-worship for Creator-worship.

The specific act of exchanging “the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals” (Rom 1:20–25) reflects humanity’s post-Fall trajectory: having lost the proper understanding of being made in God’s image, people now fashion false images and worship them instead. The Fall initiates this pattern of spiritual blindness; Romans 1 diagnoses its ongoing manifestation across human history.

[1] Graeme Goldsworthy, 1 and 2 Chronicles: The Lion of the Tribe of Judah, ed. Paul Barnett, Tracey Mayo, and Cassandra Cassis, Reading the Bible Today Series (Sydney, South NSW: Aquila Press, 2021), 264.

> so this becomes a lack of trust issue from the heart or the mind?

It’s fundamentally both—but the search results suggest the breakdown flows from mind through heart into behavior, making the trust deficit the deeper issue.

The Fall didn’t originate in external action but began in the mind and progressed into the heart, where corrupted beliefs and motives then produced sinful behavior.[1] Eve’s trajectory illustrates this: she began with a faulty belief about God’s command (adding a prohibition God never made), and this corrupted thinking created the opening for Satan’s temptation.[1] No longer trusting God’s warning, she believed she would not die.[1]

Yet the root issue transcends mere intellectual error. Eve’s sin flowed from a lack of trust in both mind and heart.[1] More broadly, the mind serves the fallen heart’s purposes, and at its core, sin is a refusal to trust and love the Creator God for well-being.[1] The serpent’s temptation centered on God’s trustworthiness—the existential question Eve faced was whether God had her best interests at heart, a fundamental question all people confront.[2]

The search results emphasize that this trust-failure operates as a unified whole. The mind is not neutral but takes direction from the heart, and since the whole person is fallen, the mind is fallen too.[3] In Romans 1, people suppress truth by their wickedness—they know but do not want to know.[3] The distortion isn’t purely intellectual or purely volitional; it’s a corruption of the entire person’s orientation toward God. Adam and Eve rejected God because they believed a lie about him, thinking he was holding them back.[4] That lie embedded itself in both cognition and affection, producing the fundamental posture of distrust that characterizes all subsequent human rebellion.

[1] Steven Hein, The Christian Life: Cross or Glory?, ed. Rick Ritchie (Irvine, CA: 1517 Publishing, 2015), 62–63.
[2] Brian D. Russell, (re)Aligning with God: Reading Scripture for Church and World (New York, NY: Cascade Books, 2015). [See here, here.]
[3] Daniel Doriani, “Original Sin in Pastoral Theology,” in Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin: Theological, Biblical, and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Hans Madueme and Michael Reeves (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 265.
[4] Barry Cooper, Life Explored: What’s the Best Gift God Could Give You?, ed. Alison Mitchell (Surrey, KT: The Good Book Company, 2016), 44–45.

> why didn’t Adam step in and defend Eve?

Adam’s silence during the serpent’s temptation of Eve represents a fundamental failure of leadership responsibility. Though present during the exchange, Adam neither intervened to protect his wife from deception nor spoke up to contradict or challenge what was happening—he simply remained passive and abandoned his God-given charge to care for Eve.[1]

This passivity was particularly consequential because Adam held a specific role. Adam was established as a leader and given the moral mandate to work and keep the Garden, along with the command about which tree to avoid.[2] As the designated teacher in the first human relationship, Adam bore responsibility for communicating this foundational instruction to his wife.[3] His silence meant Eve faced the serpent’s deception without the spiritual grounding and protective guidance Adam should have provided.

The tragedy deepens when considering what Adam knew. Eve was deceived by Satan’s lies, whereas Adam disobeyed knowingly and willingly—he understood the command and its consequences but chose inaction anyway.[1] In that critical moment, Adam’s apathy revealed a deeper problem: he gave in to the sin of laziness and pride.[3] Rather than stepping into his role as protector and teacher, he abdicated responsibility.

God’s response makes clear who bore primary accountability. Adam was held primarily responsible; as the head of the home, he should have protected his wife from the enemy’s attack and provided corrective guidance when she was misunderstanding God’s word.[2] At the crucial moment, Adam flinched and went missing in action, abdicating his responsibility to lead when the serpent bypassed him and approached Eve first.[2]

[1] Bill Peel, What God Does When Men Lead: The Power and Potential of Regular Guys (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2012). [See here, here.]
[2] Owen Strachan and Gavin Peacock, The Grand Design: Male and Female He Made Them (Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus; The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, 2016), 46–47.
[3] Jeremy Howard, You’re the Husband: A Blueprint for Leading in Marriage (Greenville, SC: Ambassador International, 2017). [See here, here, here.]

> so is this why God told Adam that she would want to Lord over him?

Not exactly. God’s statement that “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Gen 3:16) is better understood as a consequence of the Fall rather than a direct response to Adam’s passivity.

The search results reveal significant interpretive disagreement here. God’s pronouncement describes the corrupted state of their relationship—the husband’s rule over the wife resulted from their joint disobedience and was not what God had originally determined, being a consequence rather than a prescription of their sin.[1] The second interpretation suggests the focus is on the frustration experienced as they attempt to fulfill their original responsibilities.[2]

More specifically, comparing Genesis 3:16 to Genesis 4:7 reveals identical Hebrew construction: just as sin’s desire is to control Cain but he must master it, the woman’s desire will be to control her husband but he must struggle to rule—describing a battle between them rather than a simple hierarchy.[3] The woman’s willing submission is replaced by a desire to control her husband, forcing him to fight for his headship; sin has corrupted the marital relationship into struggle, tyranny, and manipulation.[3]

So the judgment addresses both partners’ corruption. Adam’s failure to lead didn’t cause the rule-structure; rather, both their disobedience shattered the original mutuality and equality they shared, introducing conflict where there had been harmony. In God’s garden as He willed it, there is mutuality and equality; now permeated by distrust, there is control and distortion.[1]

[1] Diana R. Garland, Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 375.
[2] Elyse Fitzpatrick and Eric Schumacher, Worthy: Celebrating the Value of Women (Grand Rapids, MI: Bethany House, 2020), 49.
[3] Kristen E. Kvam, Linda Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, Eve & Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2024), 393–394.

> so distortion along with deception has all of humanity reeling back and forth

Yes, precisely. Humanity experiences an internal tension between desire for goodness and inclination toward evil[1], creating the oscillation you’re describing—a perpetual conflict between what we were made to be and what we’ve become through deception and distortion.

Humans were originally created as beings of love, goodness, trustworthiness, rationality, and righteousness, yet people are no longer completely lovely, good, responsible, rational, or righteous.[1] The Fall introduced a fundamental fracture: the image of God was corrupted in all of its aspects[1], yet the image has not been destroyed—a “residue” of the image continued to exist in humanity after the Fall, with “some sparks still gleam” in the “degenerate nature.”[1]

This creates the relentless back-and-forth. Fallen individuals cannot realize their own predicament because of the deceptiveness of human nature, and the most delusive part of humanity’s situation is its ignorance of its ignorance regarding its true condition.[1] We’re caught between residual capacity for good and active propensity toward evil, between the memory of what we were meant to be and the reality of what we’ve become. Humanity’s natural tendency is to put itself in the place of God and rebel against the laws of the universe, with its goal being autonomy—yet this rebellion and desire to be its own god are the source of its destruction.[1]

The deception compounds this: we’re not simply struggling against external evil but are deceived about our own nature and condition, making the internal conflict all the more disorienting and intractable without external redemption.

[1] George R. Knight, Philosophy & Education: An Introduction in Christian Perspective (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 2006), 205–206.