Genesis 3 is an incredibly helpful chapter. It shows us the historical catastrophe that ruined our world; it records also the classic temptations, equipping us to see how Satan comes after us too. And it helps us understand one of the most challenging questions we are asked: how could a good God create a world like this?
Genesis 3 helps us explain. The world is in a mess because God gave us freedom; he loves us so much he gave us real liberty, made us able to reject his plans, and so ruin our world – and that’s just what we did.
It happened at the start of history; but generation after generation we’ve repeated the same far-reaching mistake. We’ve found it so hard to learn: independence of God doesn’t work; choosing to live without God means living without his power for goodness. Yet each of us re-enacts the Fall, saying to God from time to time, it’s my life, I’ll live it my way. Here in Genesis we watch this being worked out: how paradise was ruined, and the five-part satanic assault that led to our wrecked world today. The profound psychological realism of these ancient narratives is so striking; they show us the ways Satan works, and we need to take note, because we will probably meet them too.
In this chapter we have the first true human couple. One is the first true man, so he’s called Adam, which means Man; his partner likewise is called Eve, which means Mother of all living. God has placed them in a perfect environment, and given them just one command to enable them to express their love and trust in him; which was, not to eat one particular fruit. There seems to have been no explanation, and God does that elsewhere in the Bible & sometimes does it with us too; to give us a chance to show that we really love, trust, and obey Him.
But into that garden comes (3:1) a force of enormous evil, that chose to embody itself as a Serpent. From elsewhere in the Bible (eg Rev 12:9 or 20:2 – or v15 here) we know that this Serpent is Satan, a rebellious spirit-power of conscious and enormous evil, utterly opposed to God from before humans were created. (It’s interesting how important serpent-worship was for much ancient paganism.) But actually 3:1 is very encouraging: this is something that God `had made`, and it’s clever, but it’s not coexistent with God, nor independent of God; it’s something God made that has rebelled. That can make us confident, as we trust our Creator for victory over this same Serpent.
So let’s notice Satan’s fundamental first move in this crucial spiritual battle, because we will encounter it: `Did God really say?` This first move sets up the whole attack that follows: If we can’t be sure what God said, how can we know what He wants? Indeed, how can we be sure whether what we’re thinking of doing (or believing) is right or wrong?
We may well have heard that voice whispering in our own moral lives as individuals: Is it really so annoyingly clear what’s right in the particular issue I’m facing? And for the Church as a whole, it’s one of Satan’s most fundamental attacks, and always has been – to deny the Bible’s trustworthiness (and thereby its authority). Did God really say; is the Bible really his reliable word? This issue is very close to the heart of our being `evangelical’ in our faith and life, as distinct from `liberal Christianity’. When we say we are evangelicals rather than the alternative, it means we answer Yes to Did God really say? That is, by God’s enabling we will submit all our thinking, belief, preferences and actions 100% to his Word, on the basis that (quoting Augustine) what Scripture says, God says; and we will not `correct` God’s Word by any current fashion. The alternative is what we call `liberal theology`, which dares to correct God’s Word by what seems reasonable just now, by currently dominant cultural or academic points of view. There’s an unavoidable choice here; one or the other has to be final. Either you correct the Bible by the latest fashions, or the latest fashions by the Bible. But if we give in and start correcting the Bible by this decade’s opinions, we `lose the Word’, in the sense that we can never be sure what God is saying to us, because fashions of opinion change continually. And we’ll never have certainty or confidence in our faith-life.
So this is where Satan very shrewdly starts; and it’s an issue that will never go away. When Jesus relives this whole temptation in Matthew 4 (only for him it was in a desert, not a paradise), we notice that he answers each attack with: `It is written… It is written… It is written!` – that is, God really HAS said!, – and, `People don’t live by bread alone, but by every word from God!`
So this is where the spiritual battle starts. Let’s pray for God’s help to recognise that voice saying, Can we trust the Bible?, and turn it back like (and because) Jesus did: Did God say? Yes!- what Scripture says, God says, and by the power of His Spirit we’ll live by it, joyfully & absolutely! That’s the first vital step in spiritual warfare.
But is there a second issue in this verse? `Did God really say you mustn’t eat from any tree in the garden?` Does an Eternal God really care about such tiny things? Could something so small really be that important? Have we heard this voice? (`It’s only a small tax detail, and the taxman already takes enough.’ `It’s only a little lie, it doesn’t matter.` `We’ll only have sex this once.` `Yes we did fix the accounts, but only a little and for a good cause.`) Temptation is powerful when it pretends to be so – extremely – minor. (Again, it’s interesting that when Jesus repeats this whole struggle, the first temptation comes again in these apparently `minor’ terms of physical desires and food: `Turn these stones into bread.`) But as Jesus shows us elsewhere, holiness is about the detail of everyday existence, as well as the major struggles. The choice of holiness is a habit we develop (or not) in the small things (which can be also the place of temptation); it’s the person who can be trusted with a little who can be trusted with much, said Jesus (Luke 16:10). The Genesis tempter urges the improbable opposite: we can cheat on the small change, and somehow still hope to have the moral muscle to do what is right when the major issues come, and perhaps our job is on the line. It’s a lie. And it’s a second key part of Satan’s strategy.
Probably there’s another issue here too. The tempter’s `You must not eat from any tree in the garden’ caricatures the divine command as something stricter than it was. This, too, is a recognizable undermining of holiness: the lure of legalism which eventually can trigger the reaction of abandoning restraint altogether. Eve makes the correction as the narrative continues: `We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die‘ (v2). But from v6 it seems she lets herself focus on the temptation (`When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it`, v6), and that’s a mistake; many physical temptations are best fled (like with Potiphar’s wife), not faced down. The danger otherwise is that our heart gets filled with the temptation, and then it’s much harder to resist. But anyway in v4 comes satan’s fourth really classic strategy: `You will not surely die!` Again, it’s one to watch out for, because it’s so true to our experience of temptation: It’s alright; the sin’s not that serious; it won’t matter if I do this, God’s a God of grace, nothing bad will follow. But this was how the whole human race was ruined, and many of us individually since. And the same classic temptation often creeps into the Church as, God won’t judge! Sin’s not that serious! So it is that Satan undermines our holiness; and that’s why we sense our loving God spending so much time over & over again in the Bible, especially its earlier parts, telling us, take sin very seriously, sin does have consequences…
And then finally comes the most centrally important sentence in the story. Evil says, `God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil‘ (v5). The irony is, of course, that they already knew what was good and evil: God had told them what, in his love, he wanted them to do. But here is the central decision from which everything else will follow. To obey God, or to try to `be like God` myself; to try to have my `eyes opened’ in apartness from God, to seek to `know good and evil’ in apartness from God, decide my own right and wrong, my own morals, apart from God, rather than following God’s instructions; in the end, attempting to be `like God’, running my world by my rules, being independent, deciding my own way, running my own life; it’s MY life, this is MY world, I’ll do it MY way.
Here is the most crucial choice we can make in life. It’s there every time someone becomes a Christian. To `repent` is to say, I’m not the Lord, I’m not `like God`; I have sinned & above all in my independence, and now I turn around from doing things my way, & God You will be my Lord, Your ways are right and we’ll do life Your way. (If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, says Paul, you will be saved; and only then.) (Actually, even as a believer I can be trying to be God in my own life, so that God is a Sunday God and I hold on to the rest. But as in Eden, this leads to pain & disaster.) And God is saying to us, I’ve forgiven you, give me your life, bring it back where it belongs! This fundamental question ‑ Who is to run the world, to decide what is right and wrong?‑ who is to be the ultimate Lord reigning in my world: me, or God? – is the most crucial issue we can face. It turned paradise into catastrophe, turning the world into the mess we have; and ultimately it will determine the whole of life’s and eternity’s direction for each of us, and for our culture too.
The tragedy was that they lost the very thing they were trying to seize. The most vital thing in life, says apostle Paul, is to `live by faith’; so it’s not surprising that faith, trust, is the question here. The utter twistedness of Satan’s lie is so striking. Grab at being like God, says Satan; as if God is someone who holds on to the best for himself. The lie here is a false idea of God, and false ideas of God destroy; it’s, God doesn’t love us enough to give us the best. The first humans lacked this trust in God, and acted as if there was something better to be grabbed if they could run things themselves, do things their way. Oh yes, it feels so familiar… And because they chose to do that, in fact they lost paradise… And generation after generation we repeat the same idiotic choice, to do things our own stupid way, wrecking our world……
For the new testament shows us the twistedness of Satan’s lie, as it sets out the glory of what God really has in mind. The wonder of our loving God is he wants to share everything he is and has with us! His whole desire is to share all his glory with us, to live within us and transform us from the inside; until through all that happens we shall indeed `be like God`, and be made ultimately, unimaginably, just `like Jesus` (see Romans 8:29, among many other passages: 1 John 3:1-2, Galatians 4:19, 2 Corinthians 3:18, 2 Thessalonians 2:14, Revelation 21:11; and the end point is Revelation 3:21, that in our ultimate unity with God we will `share his throne’!) – so that all his love, joy, peace, gentleness, beauty, power for good will stream out through us as they did through Christ… But it is through that loving process of his Spirit transforming us that we’ll grow to `be like God’; not by snatching pitifully, like Adam and Eve, at control of our own world. Yet we all do it. And independence doesn’t work now any more than it did when it wrecked our world; only where Jesus is King will his kingdom power put things right. So on this choice all human history turned, turning the world into the mess we have; and on these choices – obedience or independence? – the value, and joy, of my own life will depend. We will each make the same vital decision; and in the end it will send us and every one we know to either heaven or hell.
Well, we know what happened next. It’s striking how these first humans’ choice for self-rule, rather than God’s rule, ties in with prioritizing physical gratification. It often does: it’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it. So Eve takes the fruit and eats it, and life and the world will never be the same. A total change of consciousness indeed followed. `When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it’ (v6). (Knowing full well what he was doing, Paul seems to tell us (1 Tim 2:14); Adam was putting his relationship with Eve above his relation with God. So easy to do, and so attractive; yet who knows what mercy might have come if Adam had trustingly put God first? Putting Eve first might seem, but wasn’t, the most loving thing to do; it is actually this step (see v17) that ruins them both. The most loving thing to do would have been to put God first. ) ` Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked…‘ And then come these deeply tragic words in v8: ‘Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day — and they hid from the Lord God among the trees…‘
Immeasurable loss. Throughout the millennia that have followed, saints, sages, mystics and outright weirdos have done almost everything imaginable in quest of recovered communion with the Eternal One. And here, in the dawn of human history, God has taken on human form and was walking in the evening coolness to meet the people he loved. God made us for himself and loves our company. But they knew that that central relationship had irrevocably altered: they hid.
Hid among the trees: God’s gifts, `pleasant to the eye and good for food’ (2:9). Maybe we’ve been doing it ever since; hiding from the loss of ultimate fulfilment among all kinds of inadequate, substitute, alternative desires. (Paul talks about how we seek to `suppress’ the sense of God (Rom 1:18), describing the result as a tendency to `worship and serve created things rather than the Creator’ (v25). 2 Peter (3:5) talks about our `deliberately forgetting`. That’s why, although the Bible says make sure we can give good reasons for the hope we have, still we can never argue anyone into heaven; because the deepest problems we have aren’t intellectual ones, but that we really don’t want to `retain the knowledge of God` (Rom 1:28).) Hiding too from that disturbing voice among the gifts God has given us, among so many of the things we saw in Genesis 2 that are basic to our humanness; hiding from silence and our aching sense of emptiness with the smartphone or walkman or television, the packed schedule, ambitions, achievement, buying and spending, plans for our home; running frantically from one thing to another, to avoid facing up to the black hole at the centre, where the presence of God should be. Deep down we know there’s a God who made us, owns us, loves us; but we don’t want to listen, we suppress that awareness. We hide from it: we even get angry. And we miss out on life and we miss out on heaven…
Oh yes: we so much need to stop hiding and listen to God. Because God still says, Seek and you will find; stop running; open up to God’s love and grace; say `show me`, and he will. Because if we don’t, if we keep on hiding, pushing God away, refusing to say Your will be done, there comes a time when God finally says, Well, your will be done. We’ve kept him out, and that becomes our destiny forever. Excluding God not only means excluding his power to put things right now, it means staying on a journey that one day takes us where we’re cut off from all that’s sourced from God, where there’s no love, no joy, no peace, no hope. The Bible calls that hell. That’s what independence of God and keeping ourselves cut off from him finally means.
But anyway the Voice comes to the Man (v9): `Where are you?‘
Not, of course, because God didn’t know. A Being that a human writer could call God would not need to wonder where they were. It’s so moving because it’s so loving. But for the humans, it was the question he knew they needed to face. So too, perhaps, for us? We are hiding; we are alienated; we are deeply, deeply unsatisfied? Time to stop hiding and respond to God? Where are we? Why are we in this desperately unsatisfying position?
`Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?’ The Man is faced with another crucial choice. Confessing their folly, repentance, was possible. Again, who knows what mercy might have followed? But Adam doesn’t admit it; what we read is again familiar and realistic, the rapid passing of the buck… `The Man said, “The woman you put here with me…”‘ (it’s God’s fault, my environment’s, other people’s, the woman’s, the way you made me; anyone’s but mine; so easy but so hopeless too, because it’s saying I can’t be changed). So it’s not, Forgive me, help me, but, Look at this woman YOU put here with me, it’s her fault, `The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it` (v12). (And Eve in turn tries to pass the buck onward, instead of confession: It wasn’t me, it was the Snake (v13).) Once the human/God relationship breaks, the man/woman relationship too easily follows: instead of protecting his wife, Adam tries to saddle her with the blame. And by v16 we will see how male/female loving, and cherishing, start to be replaced by a turmoil of desire and domination.
This is so important for us to grasp. Once the central relationship with God is lost, the others start to follow; we’re disconnected from the power-source of love that makes our other relationships work, like a heater disconnected from the mains, still glowing, but slowly turning cold. And v17 will show us a step further as the human/nature relationship follows. (Global warming, poisoned oceans, millions of species dying, the rainforests plundered & destroyed.) Then at the start of chapter 4 we will face the first murder. There’s a spreading breakdown leading into our world of broken relationships today. And it’s all because of their insistence on independence: the central, empowering relationship with God is not there, because they’re trying to be gods themselves. Paradise lost; and generation after generation we repeat the same idiotic choices to try to do things our way, wrecking our world……
And yet: if Satan’s words back in 3:5 about trying to be like God ourselves are the most centrally important words here for us to grasp, God’s in 3:15 are the most bizarre. The woman’s offspring, he says, will crush Satan’s head, even as Satan strikes his heel. But this is quite extraordinary…. Who is this `offspring`? Evidently Jesus, God born of a virgin, `woman’s offspring` like no one else. The serpent would strike his heel, & it would be hugely painful. Like all the old testament sacrifices, this points to Jesus dying, in agony to end our agony.
But isn’t this quite incredible? What would you do if you were God? Wouldn’t you just leave this rebellious little race to the results of their idiocy? Instead he does something unimaginable. This is God’s huge love for the lost. Satan’s defeat is clearest here; God’s good plan for us WILL be fulfilled. God’s creation, the woman’s seed, WILL triumph! There will be a vast struggle, a huge price – and he himself will pay it. He will come down fully into our mess, to suffer as Genesis says, enormously, so that evil would finally be broken.
What clearer picture could there be of the unsearchable love of the God we worship? At precisely the moment of treachery and ruin, he guarantees to identify completely with this deceived, ruined rabble, becoming human(!); to the point where he himself, God in Christ, will hang on a cross to solve our problem, crying out in anguish and horror as he in his turn, utterly undeservedly, is cut off from God: `My God, my God…` And so sin is paid for, and my relationship with God can be restored, and the way back to paradise is reopened…
Hallelujah! That is forgiveness. That is amazing grace! That is astounding love…
(For more of these resources please click on https://petelowmanresources.com/category/bible-introductions-1/genesis/ )
