Genesis Chapter 3 part 3

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome back to our study as we walk through Genesis chapter three together. In our last lesson, we watched the serpent work. We saw his strategy, three precise moves that he has, uh, giving doubt, misrepresenting the scripture, and the offer of freedom. He planted the seed, he and he watered it with a lie. And in this lesson, it bears fruit. That lie bears fruit. In Genesis chapter 3, verses 6 and 7, it's the hinge point of all of human history. Everything before these two verses is paradise. And everything after them is broken. These are the most consequential two verses in the entire Old Testament because what happens here doesn't stay in the garden, it comes with us. Every person born since that moment has entered a world shaped by what it means, what happened in those two verses. And so we're going to slowly walk through this because every word in these passages matter. There is more pact into these two verses than most people realize in a lifetime of reading, though. So let's read this together. In Genesis chapter 3, verses 6 and 7, it says, Let me grab my Bible here. It says, And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate. And she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were open, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loan coverings. Two verses, 43 words in the English translation, and the world is never the same again. First, I want you to notice the three desires here in the beginning of verse six. I want you to notice something before we look at the individual words. Moses, who wrote this, does not describe the fall as a dramatic moment. There's no lightning strike, no thunderclap, no vision of doom. It almost reads quietly. Three verbs, simple past tense, very matter of fact. And that's exactly the point. That sin rarely announces itself with drama. It usually arrives through three ordinary human experiences. Something looks appealing, the desire grows, and then a decision is made. Moses is describing every sin that has ever been committed, including yours and mine. The first thing Eve sees is that the tree is good for food. Now stop right there. The tree is good for food. Every tree in the garden was good for food. Genesis chapter 2, verse 9 tells us that God made every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food. So Eve was not starving. She was not lacking. There was no shortage. But the serpent had shifted her gaze away from that truth. And what was once just another tree in an abundant garden was now most the most compelling object in her entire world. This is one of the oldest tricks in the enemy's playbook. He does not create new desires. He simply redesigned, redirects existing ones. The desire for food is not evil either. God designed it. But desire aimed at what God has said no to becomes the door to our destruction. James describes this exact process in James chapter 1, verses 14 through 15, when he says, Each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin. And when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death. So you have desire, enticement, conception, birth, death. It's almost like James is writing a commentary on Genesis chapter 3. The second thing Eve notices is the tree was a delight to the eyes. Again, every tree in the garden was pleasing to the eye, according to Genesis chapter 2. But now this one tree has uniquely become beautiful, uniquely desirable. The gaze that she has has become, went from looking at it to a longing for it. The Hebrew word for delight carries the idea of something that captivates, that draws in the heart, that produces a craving. And here's something remarkable. The Apostle John, writing in 1 John chapter 2, in verse 16, identifies three categories of temptation. He said, For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. The lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. Compare that to Genesis chapter 3, verse 6. Good for food, it's the lust of the flesh, a delight to the eyes, lust of the eyes. Desirable to make one wise, the boastful pride of life. John is not inventing a new framework in 1 John chapter 2. He's reaching all the way back to Genesis chapter 3. The three categories of human temptation have been the same since the garden. And they are the same three temptations that the enemy used against Jesus in the wilderness. When he said, Turn stones into bread. That's the lust of the flesh. Throw yourself down, and the angels will attend to you. It's the pride of life. Look at all these kingdoms, they could all be yours, the lust of the eyes. The same strategy in the garden, in the wilderness, and in your life. The playbook from the enemy does not change. And here is the third and deepest desire that Eve faced. The tree was desirable to make one wise. This is not just appetite. This is not just beauty. This is a spiritual ambition, which we'll talk more about in just a little while. The serpent had told her, Eat this, and you will be like God. You will know what God knows. You will be complete without him. And that offer, wisdom, knowledge, being self-sufficient, it's the deepest pool of all to eat. And here's what I want you to see: the desire for wisdom is not evil. Proverbs chapter 4, verse 7 says, wisdom is the principal thing, and therefore get wisdom. God wants his people to be wise. But wisdom sought apart from God, wisdom that replaces relationship, is not wisdom, it's pride. The Hebrew word for wise is related to the root word that the serpent's craftiness was mentioned in verse 1. The serpent was offering Eve his kind of wisdom, cunning, calculating, self-serving, independent. Not the wisdom that comes from fearing God, but the wisdom that comes from trying to replace God. Proverbs 1:7 says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all knowledge or wisdom. But a fool defies wisdom and discipline. What the serpent was selling was the end of that fear and the end of that relationship. Now, take a look at verse 6 where Eve took and she ate. This was the moment of decision. After all, seeing and desiring and longing comes the shortest sentence with the longest consequences in human history. She took from its fruit and ate. We hear about the crucifixion of Jesus and the beating that he took, and we're just kind of numb to it. But this is the moment. In this verse, when human history pivots, this is when the very good world of Genesis 1 begins to fracture. Everything that God had declared good, every marriage, every birth, every friendship, every sunset, every moment of joy ever shadowed by grief traces back to this moment in just six words. The Hebrew word translated that we get our word took from is a common ordinary verb. It simply means to take or to grasp or to seize. But its placement is significant. In Hebrew narrative, the sequence of action reveals intention. She saw, she desired, she took, she ate. That means the taking is not accidental. This is not impulsive. It is the conclusion of a deliberate process. The seeing led to desiring, the desiring led to taking, and the taking led to eating. So sin does not usually ambush us. Instead, we walk right into it one small step at a time. There was an early church father that preached in Antioch and Constantinople that Rhodes' first mistake was not the taking. Her first mistake was actually the conversation with the serpent. She should have never engaged in that conversation to start with. And this is what he said. He said, when the enemy speaks, the wise person does not debate him, they simply flee. And this is exactly what Joseph did in Genesis chapter 39, when Potiphar's wife grabbed him and accused him of wrongdoing. He didn't stand there and debate. He didn't reason the pros and cons. He ran. And it's what Paul commands young Timothy to do in Timothy, 2 Timothy 2, verse 22. He says, Now flee, run from youthful lust and pursue righteousness. And the pattern goes all the way back to the garden. Now next we read this, and these are powerful words. Now we come to the line that most readers just rush past. She gave also to her husband with her and he ate. With her. Two words in English, one word in Hebrew. That means that Adam was standing right there. He'd been there the whole time. He heard the serpent's words. He watched his wife examine the fruit. He watched her take it and he watched her eat it. And then he stood there and she handed it to him and he ate. No argument, no protest, no words of warning, no defense against uh of God's command. He just stood there, he listened, he took, and he ate. So why did Adam remain silent? This is one of the most debated questions in the history of Genesis interpretation. And there are several serious positions that all have possibilities. Position one is that Adam was deceived along with Eve. Some early interpreters believed Adam was confused by the serpent's logic, just as Eve was. But this is kind of difficult to sustain. The Apostle Paul directly contradicts that in 1 Timothy 2, verse 14, when he says, And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived fell into transgression. Now it's very interesting that Paul calls her the woman. We'll talk about that when we get to Genesis chapter 3 in verse 16, 17, and 18. A very interesting study there. Paul says clearly that it was not Adam that was deceived, it was the woman. The position too is this, that Adam chose Eve over God. Many scholars throughout history, including John Milton in his work Paradise Lost, have suggested that Adam ate knowingly because he could not bear to be separated from his wife, that his love for her was disordered and misplaced, and it led him to follow her into sin. And this is a tragic, very tragic human reading. And it may contain truth, but it does not excuse the act. Love for another person, however real, can never override obedience to God. Position number three is that Adam simply gave up his God-given responsibility. And this is the position that I believe the broader witness of scripture supports most strongly. That Adam was given the command first before his wife was even there. He was told directly in Genesis chapter 2, verse 17, you shall not eat of this tree. And so Adam would have been the one who told Eve, we should not eat of that tree. And he was placed in the garden to cultivate it and keep it. And the Hebrew word means to guard and to protect and to watch over. He was the guardian of the garden. And so when the when the serpent came, the enemy, the intruder, Adam stood there and did nothing. He didn't guard it. He did not confront the serpent. He didn't speak the word of God. He didn't protect his wife. He just stood by in silence and then he ate. And this is why Paul in Romans chapter 5 places the weight of the fall, the entirety of the fall on Adam. When he says in verse 12, in Romans chapter 5, therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned, not through the woman, through the man. Because Adam was the covenant head, the representative, the one accountable before God for what happened on his watch. Irenaeus in the second century wrote that Adam's failure was a failure of leadership, that he had been given authority over creation and he surrendered it without a fight. So in reality, the first sin wasn't Eve's, it was Adam's. And that has echoed through every generation of every man since. And I pray that men everywhere will hear this and rise to the challenge of leading and protecting their families for the Lord. Now, let's take a minute and consider the ancient Near Eastern background. Why fruit? The ancient world was full of stories about humans eating forbidden or divine food. In the Adapa myth of ancient Mesopotamia, there's a sage who is summoned to the heavens by the God Anu, and Anu offers him the food and water of eternal life. And he and the man refuses, having been warned by his God not to eat it. He was tricked into refusing immortality. And so humanity was cut off from eternal life. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the hero seeks the plant of immortality at the bottom of the sea, and he finds it. But on the way home, the serpent steals it from him while he sleeps. So the serpent gains the ability to shed its skin and renew itself while humanity loses its chance at immortality. And so both stories reach for the same deep human question: why do we die? Why were we not given what the gods have? Why was something stolen from us? Genesis answered those questions, but completely different. In the pagan myths, humanity is the victim of divine politics. The gods withheld life from them. The gods tricked humanity. Humanity lost something that it should have had. But in Genesis, humanity was given everything. The garden was abundance. Access to God was open, and the tree of life was available. And so humanity lost everything, not because of what God withheld, but because what humanity chose. And the contrast is total. The pagan gods are jealous hoarders. The God of Genesis is a generous giver. And this matters enormously for Christian apologetics. When people say, why would a good God allow the fall? Genesis answers that question saying, He gave them everything. He gave them the freedom. And freedom is not a design flaw. It was the greatest gift of God who wants genuine love with his people. He doesn't want a program compliance. True love in the absence of choice cannot be true love. It's just compliance. The next verse 7 says this their eyes were open. The serpent promised to them, your eyes would be open, and he was right. Their eyes were open. But look at what they saw. The first thing they see, they knew that they were naked. This is a word I feel like I say with an extremely strong country accent. I could be worded, but wrong, I mean, but they knew they were naked. They knew they were naked. They didn't know anything different, no divine knowledge, not the power the serpent had promised them. They saw their vulnerability. They saw themselves. The serpent promised them they would they would be and see and know like God. But what they actually saw was how exposed they were without God. And this is one of the most elegant literary ironies in all of Scripture. The promise was you will gain. The reality was you lost everything. The phrase eyes were open in Hebrew is used in specific ways throughout the entirety of the Old Testament. When God opens eyes, it's always to see something true and glorious. In Genesis chapter 21, verse 19, Hagar's eyes are open and she sees a well of water. In 2 Kings chapter 6, verse 17, Elisha prays and his servants' eyes are open to see the armies of God. In Luke chapter 24, verse 31, the disciples' eyes are opened to recognize Jesus on the Emmaus road. When sin opens eyes, it's always to see something that's broken. Now, there's a world of difference between God opening someone's eyes and sin opening someone's eyes. The serpent said, Eat this and your eyes will be open. What he did not say was, What you will see will horrify you. Do you remember what Genesis chapter 2, verse 25 said? Said, and the man and his wife were both naked and they were not ashamed. That was the last verse of chapter 2, the final picture of humanity before the fall. Naked, unashamed, fully known, fully safe. Now look at the first thing sin produces in Genesis chapter 3, verse 7. They knew where they naked, they knew they were naked. The same nakedness, but now shame. So what changed? Nothing about their bodies changed. They were just as nude as they had always been. What changed was their relationship with God. And because that relationship broke, everything else broke with it. Before the fall, they were naked before God and before each other, and they felt no shame because there was nothing to hide, because they hadn't done anything that required hiding. After the fall, this becomes unbearable for them. Because now there's guilt, there's a there's a knowledge of wrong, there's something to conceal. And so shame is not just a feeling. This is a theological signal. It says something has gone wrong between me and God. The great German uh theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred by the Nazis in 1945, he wrote in his book on Genesis called Creation and Fall. He said, shame is the memory of the estrangement from the origin. It is grief over what has been lost. Bonhoeffer said that shame is not primarily about the body, it's about the soul's awareness that it's no longer where it was made to be. Every person who has ever felt that unexplainable sense of something not being right, something being off, that I'm not who I'm was made to be. That feeling is the echo in your soul from Genesis chapter 3, verse 7. Now, look at the fig leaves at the end of verse 7. And this could be called the first human solution to sin. It says they sin, they recognize that they're naked, and then they act. So they they sew fig leaves together and made themselves lowing coverings. This is the first human act after the fall, and it's deeply revealing about what was going on. Listen to this. They don't run to God, they don't start to confess their sin. They don't seek restoration, they cover themselves. The first human response to sin is to try to self-cover the attempt to manage their own shame, to fix the problem yourself, to hide what was wrong. And fig leaves? Why fig leaves? Because the fig tree was one of the most common and recognizable trees of the ancient Near East. Fig leaves are broad and they would make sense as a covering material, but there's also a symbolic dimension here. Fig leaves wilt very quickly. They dry out and they decay very quickly. And so the covering they made for themselves was going to be temporary. It could never last. It was never going to be enough covering. The fig leaf covering is the Bible's first picture of a human religion apart from God. And I say that carefully because I am not anti-religion, but there is a kind of religious behavior that is that is all fig leaves. It's the religious behavior that performing good works is something you should do to cover guilt. That you could be moral enough to feel accepted, that going to church enough will silence that inner shame. That if you look righteous enough on the outside, if you can fake it just enough on the outside while the inside remains unchanged, you'll be okay. That's fig leaves. The early church father Augustine wrote that fig leaves are the symbol of all human attempts at self justification, saying we reach for anything achievement, reputation, religion, morality, to cover up what only God can heal. And the tragedy is that the covering never works because the real problem is not the nakedness. The problem is a broken relationship with God that made nakedness feel like a problem. You cannot fix that with fig leaves. You cannot fix that with religion. You cannot fix that with psychology. You cannot fix that with self-improvement. And that's exactly why God acts in Genesis chapter 3, verse 21, which we'll get to in one of our last lessons on this chapter, where he replaces their fig leaves with something better, something that required blood. So what does the fall teach us about human nature? In Genesis chapter 3, verses 6 and 7, it's the foundational, most important yet misunderstood doctrines in all of Christianity. And it's called the doctrine of sin. Let me tell you what this doctrine does and does not say. The doctrine of sin does not say that humans, human beings are evil, are as evil as they could possibly be. It does not say that they're incapable of any good. It does not say that the physical body or sexuality is evil. It doesn't say that babies are guilty of Adam's specific sin. But what it does say is that every person is born into a broken relationship with God, that we inherit a nature bent towards self rather than God. And no one arrives on earth morally neutral. We are all tilted toward sin from birth. And what this does is it affects the effects of the fall reach every area of human life, the mind, the will, the emotions, and the body. The term for this in some forms are often called total depravity, but that's a widely misunderstood phrase. Total does not mean absolute, it means extensive. It means the fall touched everything. It was the great theologian Augustine who wrote more about original sin than perhaps any theologian in history. And he said that Adam's choice created in humanity a disordered love. We now love ourselves more than we love God. And he said that inversion of love is the root of all sin. And so here is something I want you to be able to say to the skeptic. The doctrine of original sin is one of the most empirically supported doctrines in all of the Bible. You do not have to teach children to be selfish. You do not have to teach children to tell a lie. They naturally do that. You have to teach them how to share and how to tell the truth and how not to throw temper tantrums. You have to teach human beings to pursue, uh, you never have to teach a human being to pursue their own interests at the expense of others. That comes naturally. You have to teach them to care about other people, as the Bible says. Every political system in history has had to account for the fact that power corrupts. Every civilization has needed laws because without constraint, humans exploit each other. Every century of human history is soaked in evidence that something is wrong with us. G.K. Chesterton, the brilliant Catholic writer of the early 20th century, once said, original sin is the only doctrine in Christianity that can be empirically verified by simply reading the newspaper. And he was right. The secular world has no good explanation for why people who are supposedly the product of millions of years of evolutionary progress are so consistently cruel to one another. Genesis, though, has the answer to that question because something went wrong in the garden. And when it went wrong in the garden, it went wrong in all of us. Now, just for a minute, I want you to consider, we're going to wrap up in just a second. I want you to consider Romans chapter 5 and the Adam Christ parallel. No passage in the New Testament engages Genesis chapter 3, verses 6 and 7 more directly than Paul in Romans chapter 5. Paul builds on one of the most important arguments in all of his letters on the reality of the fall. This is what he says in Romans 5, 18 and 19. He said, So then, as through one transgression, there resulted condemnation to all men. Even so, through the act of righteousness, there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, even so, through the obedience of the one man, many, the many will be made righteous. And so Paul draws a direct parallel. One man, Adam's sin, and all were made sinners. One man, Jesus, obeyed, and all can be made righteous. Adam's act in the garden is not just a story. For Paul, it's the theological foundation of the gospel. If there was no historical fall, if Adam was just a symbol, then what exactly did Jesus come to undo? The gospel only makes sense against the backdrop of Genesis chapter 3. And the cure requires a diagnosis. And the diagnosis is right here. She took and she ate. In Genesis chapter 3, verses 6 and 7, it's full of trees, the tree of knowledge, the tree in the middle of the garden, the fig tree. And the New Testament ends with a story with another tree. In Galatians chapter 3, verse 13, the Apostle Paul says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us, for it is written, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. The first tree brought a curse, the last tree bore it. In the garden, Adam took the fruit and plunged humanity into death. On the cross, Jesus took the curse and opened the door to life. In the garden, fig tree, fig leaves were not enough to cover shame. At the cross, the blood of Christ covered what no fig leaf could ever cover. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, said Jesus retraced every step of Adam's failure, only he got it right. Adam was tempted in the garden, Jesus prayed in the garden. Adam was surrounded by an abundance and he fell. Jesus was weakened by hunger and yet he stood. Adam disobeyed through a tree, Jesus obeyed on a tree. Adam brought death, Jesus brought life. And the story God is telling us runs from one tree to another, from the garden of loss to the garden of resurrection. From she took and she ate to Jesus on the cross, saying, It is finished. Let me bring this home. And the same freedom that was given, the same choice that was given in every sin that we commit. John's three categories in 1 John chapter 2, the lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life map exactly unto Eve's three desires. And we saw that Adam was present and silent and complicit in his, and he failed in his leadership. And the serpent's promise was real, but deceptive. Because their eyes were open, but open to shame. The fig leaves are the first picture of self-salvation, human religion. And that original sin is not a harsh doc harsh doctrine, it's an honest diagnosis that makes the gospel necessary. And so I want to close with this. There's a moment in everyone's life that looks like Genesis chapter 3, verse 6. You see something, you want that thing, you know that God said no, but you reach for it anyway. This moment is not unique to Eve. It's not unique to ancient history. This is Tuesday morning for most people. It's the screen that you reach for, the words that you said, the choice you made when no one was watching. The fall did not happen just once. It happens in every human heart, in every generation, every day. Which is why the gospel is not ancient history either. Is the answer to this day. The next week we'll dive into Genesis chapter 3, verses 8 through 13. When God comes walking in the garden and he asks the most haunting question in all of Scripture when he says, Where are you? I hope you join us next time. Have a great day.