The Dialogue
Last week, we began studying Genesis chapter 3. This chapter tells us how the world went from “very good” to “very broken.”
In verses 1-5, we saw the dialogue between the serpent and the woman. The serpent’s goal in the conversation was simple: to undermine God’s word. His first words were, “Did God actually say?” With this question he gave the first humans a new category to think in, namely, that God’s word could be subject to human judgment.
The serpent’s first question was an assault on God’s generosity (v. 1b). He’s trying to make God look like a greedy and strict miser. He wanted the first humans to think that God was not good.
Eve responded by revising God’s word, adding and subtracting words from God’s original command (vv. 2-3). She minimized God’s generosity, magnified his strictness, and removed the certainty of his judgment. Her mishandling of God’s word changed the world forever.
In verses 4-5, Satan again leads Eve to question God’s goodness. This half-truth is his way of telling her that God is holding out on her. He wants her to think that God is using the threat of death as a scare tactic to keep them in their place, that God is repressive and doesn’t want them to know too much or have too much, that God is against them, not for them.
This is an absurd assault on God’s character in the middle of a garden that screams of his goodness. Eve is standing in the middle of paradise, surrounded by a thousand good things that God created for her. And yet she went along with Satan and doubted God’s goodness.
An Intoxicating Promise
The power in Satan’s lie was that it carried the lure of divinity (v. 5). He was saying to her, “Do this and you will be like God.” The irony here is that they already were like God because they were created in his image (1:26). He was offering them something they already had.
Nonetheless, this promise was intoxicating to Eve. The serpent promised her a promotion, a God-like raise to another level of existence.
The way the serpent framed his promise was to cast God’s command as an option, not a given. The serpent relativized the rule of God. In this conversation, God is treated like a third person. The conversation isn’t with him or to him, but about him. The One who created the paradise they were standing in is completely ignored. Satan wants Eve to think that God can be minimized with no consequence, “You will not surely die” (v. 4). Divinity could be hers if she sidestepped everything she knew to be true. One theologian says, “The serpent is the first in the Bible…to practice theology in the place of obedience.”[1] The serpent’s scheme was to get Eve to doubt God’s character so that she would break God’s command.
A Dirge of Death
Isn’t this what we still battle every day? Obedience doesn’t seem like the thing that will bring us joy. So we come up with new versions of God, new ways of understanding what’s clear in his word to fit what we think will make us happy.
The allure of the serpent’s scheme was that it promised Eve moral autonomy. If she followed him instead of God, she’d become wise and, like God, be able to autonomously decide what was right and wrong. The allure was that God would no longer tell her what to do. She would make the rules. She could do things her way.
This remains an intoxicating promise. Frank Sinatra’s 1969 song, “My Way” is ironically a favorite song played at funerals. It goes like this:
And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain
I’ve lived a life that’s full
I traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way
Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption
I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way
Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all, when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all, and I stood tall
And did it my way
I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried
I’ve had my fill, my share of losing
And now, as tears subside
I find it all so amusing
To think I did all that
And may I say, not in a shy way
Oh, no, oh, no, not me
I did it my way
For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way
Yes, it was my way
These are the lyrics of autonomy, about doing everything our way. This could easily summarize how our entire culture views life, a modern mythology of sorts, the unquestioned assumption that we can do things our way with no consequences.
Celebrating this idea at a funeral is actually quite fitting. Sinatra’s song is a dirge of death. The reason any of us die in the first place is because our first parents did it their way, not God’s way, and we follow them. Ironically, funerals that use this song celebrate the satanic spell that’s killing us.
The Descent
In verses 6-7, we see the result of the dialogue between the serpent and Eve, the descent into sin. Satan leaves the scene. The temptation had come. Now Eve has a decision to make. She’s standing on the edge of the abyss, looking over the chasm to what appears to be a life of freedom from rule and restraint. The serpent told her that if she steps toward that life, she won’t fall into the abyss of death but will make it over the chasm unscathed.
Verse 6 tells us what’s going on in Eve’s mind the moment before she steps. It says that she “saw that the tree was good for food,” meaning that it was physically appealing, that it was “a delight to the eyes,” meaning that it was aesthetically appealing, and that it was “to be desired to make one wise” – perhaps the greatest enticement, meaning that it was spiritually appealing. The idea that she could have wisdom apart from God’s word was just too attractive to pass by. So “she took of its fruit and ate.”
Moses expresses no shock here. He tells us plainly what happened, “she took of its fruit and ate.” He describes this horrific event as simply and unsensationally as possible. It reminds us how the Gospel writers describe the death of Jesus, “and they crucified him.” The Bible stands apart from other religious books as a book with no desire to be sensational. Rather, over and over again, it simply tells us what happened.
But make no mistake, what Eve did sent shockwaves through the universe. It changed everything everywhere. Her sin, like ours, effected more than herself. It brought with it collateral damage that she couldn’t have imagined. In Romans 8, Paul says that creation “was subjected to futility,” is in “bondage to corruption,” and “has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (vv. 20-22). And, he continues, “not only the creation, but we ourselves…groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (v. 23).
Thinking of Romans 8, John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost: “Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat, sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe, that all was lost.” The world and our bodies are collectively groaning because of what Eve did. Earth feels its wound and sighs and shows us signs of its injury everywhere we look.
Kindness for Hurting People
This is why you and everyone you know is hurting, is reeling from a wound we struggle to find words for. Is all hope lost? Are we to just grit our teeth and push through? No, kindness is the way to healing. It’s God’s kindness that leads us to repentance (Rom. 2:4). And it’s our kindness that can help someone find their way toward healing.
Kindness means we stop talking long enough to try to understand people’s stories. It means that we’re curious about our own stories. The approach of many is to ignore, minimize, push down, and make excuses for their pain, or to say things like, “I’ve already dealt with this stuff,” when their bodies and their stress levels suggest otherwise. Or to say, “What’s past is past, there’s nothing I can do about it now.” But King David believed that it was possible to “look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Ps. 27:13). And Jesus said that he came to bring freedom to captives (Lk. 4:18).
The effects of the Fall will never totally leave us, but the resurrection of Jesus means that sad things can be undone, that healing and life are possible. But this healing and life come when we get honest enough to say what’s true and then press into Christ for his healing touch.
The Failure of Adam
Speaking of honesty, I love that the Bible includes the detail at the end of verse 6. Adam was there with Eve. In verses 1-5, when Satan is tempting Eve, he addresses her in the plural every time. “You (plural) will not surely die.” Adam was there listening and watching and doing nothing the entire time.
Adam stood passively by as his wife was lured away by Satan. The apostle Paul refers to this moment in 1 Timothy 2:11-14 in order to make a point about roles of men and women in the church. His point is that Eve reversed the order of creation by leading her husband. He’s drawing a parallel between Eve and the women in the church at Ephesus who were seeking to lead, rather than follow, the men in the church. His point is that the sin in the Garden of Eden is repeated when men and women don’t live out their God-given roles.
Adam abandoned his God-given responsibility to lead his wife spiritually. This was the first instance of a husband and wife forgetting their roles. Eve led; Adam followed. Ray Ortlund, in his chapter on this text in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, writes, “Both were wrong and together they pulled the human race down into sin and death.”[2] Ortlund also notes, “Isn’t it striking that we fell upon an occasion of sex role reversal?”[3] Oh how much has gone wrong because men and women haven’t been what they were supposed to be!
The order of creation goes like this: God, man, woman, and the beasts (including the serpent). What’s happening in Genesis 3 is a tragic reversal of the order of creation, when “the woman listened to the serpent, the man listened to the woman – and no one listened to God.”[4] Everything was upside-down, and everything broke as a result.
In 1 Timothy 2:14, when Paul points out that it was Eve who was deceived, not Adam, he’s making a really important point. He’s saying that Adam sinned willfully, that he knew exactly what he was doing, that he sinned with his eyes wide-open.
God had honed Adam’s powers of reasoning by having him name the animals – a vigorous intellectual exercise. Augustine said that Adam’s mental powers surpassed the great philosophers as much as the speed of a bird surpasses a tortoise.[5] Yet here he is watching in fascination as his wife eats the forbidden fruit, wondering if she’ll die. He lets his wife take the first step into the abyss to see what’ll happen to her. Then, when it appears that nothing happened to her, he also took and ate. What a loving man!
The most brilliant man to ever live reasoned that breaking God’s command could be done without consequence, and then thought it a good idea to let his wife go first. Oh the folly that Satan leads us into! Eve follows the snake, Adam follows Eve, and no one follows God. And everyone is still paying for this folly.
Open Eyes, Naked Bodies, and Man-Made Coverings
Verse 7 tells us what the initial result of their foolishness was. What Satan told them was half true. They did not die that day. Adam would live 930 years. Yet Adam and Eve did die that day in the sense that their communion with God and each other died.
Their eyes were opened, and they received the knowledge they sought. They suddenly saw their nakedness as shameful and sought to cover themselves. Their innocence was gone. Now, instead of love, it was fear and guilt and shame that gripped their hearts. Loving God or each other would no longer be easy.
The shame was so overpowering that they felt the need to cover their bodies for the first time: “They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.” This is the standard way we try to get rid of shame: concealment.
We do this by looking at the outside of things instead of what’s within. We compare ourselves with others, using these superficial comparisons to cover up who we really are.
We conceal sin by focusing on corporate sin rather than individual sin. There are no doubt societal and structural things that are sinful. But structures haven’t emerged apart from individuals. Every structure or institution or government or business is a projection of what we are. They’re all broken because we’re all broken. Sin starts in our hearts, not at the office or the halls of congress.
Another way we try to conceal our shame is the safety in numbers approach. We think that, because everyone has done what we’ve done, our evil is excusable. Our logic is that, since everyone has failed the exam, the exam was too hard, and the teacher will excuse our grades. But this isn’t the way God grades us.
We also assume that time will conceal our sin and cover our guilt. James Montgomery Boice’s words are too good to not share with you:
“We see this in the way we talk about some wrong done in childhood or some nearly equally distant period in our past. We act as if this is of no present concern. At times we even laugh about it. Is God laughing? Is God unconcerned? One of our problems is that we are creatures of time, who possess highly selective memories. Thus, although we may remember the wrong itself, we tend to forget the hurt it caused other people. God is not a creature of time. Everything, including the wrong that we so easily dismiss, is present to him and is an abomination to him. Time does not eradicate it. The only thing that does is the blood of Christ, which ‘purifies us from all sin’ (1 Jn. 1:7).”[6]
What wrongs done by you or to you from your distant past have you filed away as “not relevant anymore”? What ways have you hurt people or been hurt by people that you haven’t dealt honestly with? What sins in your family history have yet to be named? Why do you assume that the passing of time has made them any less relevant to your life, much less to God? As novelist William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” Meaning that the things driving your present are rooted in your past. The fig leaves of time don’t cover the truth. Name what is true and let Christ come in and cover it up with his redemptive power. Let him heal the things you’ve been stuffing down for years.
All our attempts to conceal our shame are as ineffective as Adam and Eve’s. Eventually, we have to face reality. Eventually, we have to tell the truth. Eventually, we have to stare our painful past in the face. Eventually, we have to be honest about our nakedness before God.
The Ultimate Downer
The serpent wants us to live under the weight of shame we carry from our past and into our present. He wants shame to paralyze us so that we’re unable or unwilling to serve the Lord or help others.
Shame is the ultimate downer. It leads us to think that giving up is really the best option. It makes us want to hide, to curl up in a ball and die, to not take risks for God, to not take risks for the sake of love. Shame devours our souls from the inside out. How much of our suicidal ideation is fueled by satanically induced shame?
Can anything heal our sickness of shame? Listen to Psalm 69:19, 20, 29, 32-33, “You know my reproach, and my shame and my dishonor…Reproaches have broken my heart, so that I am in despair…I am afflicted and in pain; let your salvation, O God, set me on high!…You who seek God, let your hearts revive. For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own people who are prisoners.”
The Lord knows our shame, our broken hearts, our despair, our pain, and he hears us and does not despise us for being prisoners to shame. He wants our hearts to be free and alive.
If shame is paralyzing you, please listen to the voice of Jesus. Through faith alone, you are his. You wear his garments of purity. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, you’re his child no matter what.
The only way our shame will ever be truly covered is if God covers it. This is what he did for Adam and Eve in the Garden (v. 21). Blood had to be spilt in order for their shame to be sufficiently covered. God had to make the garments that would actually cover them.
Man-made attempts at concealment never work. God sees through them. But those who wear the righteous robes of Christ’s righteousness have nothing to hide, all their ugliness is covered. They’ve descended with Christ into death and been raised to a new life. Does this describe you?
[1]Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 48.
[2]Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr., “Male-Female Equality and Male Headship,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, eds. John Piper and Wayne Grudem, rev. ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 107.
[3]Ibid.
[4]R. Kent Hughes, “Satan in the Garden,” in Our Ancient Foe: Satan’s History, Activity, and Ultimate Demise, ed. Ronald L. Kohl (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2019), 2.
[5]Ibid., 9.
[6]Ibid., 182.