Beginnings # 3: “The Fall”
Genesis 3:1-24
Opening Prayer:
Heavenly Father, we have snatched at the Tree of Knowledge and are now helpless to take from the Tree of Life; take us now, through your Son, into the depth of our rebellion against you and lead us into repentance and faith in Him, that we might receive life through your Spirit and be remade into your image for the glory of your name. Amen.
Introduction
A good friend told me an interesting story about his little granddaughter when she was about a year old. Now this little girl was surely one of the most beautiful and sweet babies ever created – especially from the perspective of her grandfather! But even at her early age, she displayed characteristics that link her with the rest of the human race. Apparently her grandmother and parents had told her that she was not to touch a particular plant. “No” they said. Immediately after being told what not to do – she reached out her hand and touched the plant, saying both coyly and defiantly – “No!” Innocent as she appeared to be, she seemed to be following all the rest of us in our in-born sense of defiance. This story is not unique!
Where does this come from? Why have we humans, so beautifully created, become capable of some of the most cruel and selfish actions? Chapter 3 of Genesis contains the answer. As I explained last week, this story is factual – it happened in history – but it is told using symbolic language – like a dream. But this story is also repeated and ratified in each of our lives. Genesis 3 tells us what happened then and what happens now. It is a sad tale – but there is hope at the end. In this final sermon in our mini-series in the book of Genesis – “Beginnings” – we will look at the Choice, the Temptation and Fall, the Results, and finally, the Restoration.
The Choice
The story begins where we left off last week – with the choice. In order for love to exist, there must be freedom – we choose to love. This is why God set up a prohibition: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will certainly die” (Genesis 2:16-17). But the prohibition which allowed for love to exist also allowed for the repudiation of that love. Now, testing and temptation are two sides of the same coin. A situation can be opportunity for testing, to be used by God to draw closer to him; or it can be used by the devil as a temptation to make us fall. This is the situation in the garden.
But what about the choice itself? What does this Tree of Knowledge of good and evil represent? Good and evil here is not just factual knowledge, but God’s perspective on how and why things work, their meaning and purpose. So, doesn’t God want us to know good and evil? Is it wrong to search for our meaning and purpose? No, but it is the way we go about it that is wrong. We try to find this knowledge independently, looking only to ourselves. But when we look within, we are limited and restricted; we are not our own gods. We only achieve this knowledge when we look to God. Charles Coulson says, “We discover meaning and purpose not in the search for self, but in the surrender of self, in obedience to Christ.”[1]
This is how we were supposed to come to the knowledge of good and evil – out of loving submission to God. Didn’t Jesus know good and evil? Yes, but Jesus came to know good and evil by knowing the good, without taking the short-cut of disobedience as he was tempted to do in the forty days in the wilderness. We, on the other hand, came – and come – to know good and evil by knowing the evil, separation from God. This is what happens in chapter 3. It is like the knowledge gained by a sick person’s aching awareness of a disease compared to the doctor’s insight and knowledge of the malady.[2] Knowledge itself is not bad, but it is how we come about it that is the issue.
The Temptation and Fall
This is precisely what is related in the story of the Temptation and Fall. The serpent’s lead-in is as follows, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat …?’” (verse 1). This is the first stage of temptation – to doubt what God commands: “Surely he couldn’t have said that could he?” It was sowing the seeds of mistrust: “God doesn’t know what he is doing – you know better.” It is to doubt the Father’s love: “God doesn’t have your best interests at heart – He is keeping something back from you.” The prohibition which seemed a given is now treated as an option. “You know better.”
What’s more, God is referred to in the third person – it is talk about God rather than conversation with God. Theology is replacing obedience! The serpent misrepresents God by playing back just enough of God’s speech to open up the possibility of an alternative route to God. Obedience is being replaced by analysis and calculation, leading to a direct refutation of what God said, “You will not surely die” (verse 4). This is how we are tempted today. “Does God really say sex outside marriage is wrong?” “This isn’t stealing; God knows you are taking what they owe you anyway.” “You have to push a few people down in order to get ahead – that’s just how life is.”
And what comes next lies at the heart of all temptation: “When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (verse 5). Here is the real meaning of the Fall: it is our rebellion against God – our wanting to be our own god – to control our own lives independently of him. You see, sin is not disbelief in God – 72% of Canadians[3] and 78% of Americans[4] “believe” in God! Neither is sin primarily a whole lot of misdemeanours or specific wrong actions. Sin is putting God aside and not allowing him his rightful place in our lives. This is sin with a capital S. This is the condition we are born in and the pattern we ratify in our own lives. No wonder Paul declared “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
The final stage of the temptation is to rationalize: “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” (verse 6). We look at what good results we can gain through the wrong action and we think that justifies our deeds. Sin is not wanting bad things to happen to us but grasping at good things in the wrong way.
Doubting God’s love, removing ourselves from conversation with him, outright rebellion, rationalization, final action – this is the pattern of the Temptation and Fall in Genesis 3 and the story of each of us.
The Results
The results are catastrophic. The death decreed now comes – not in a sudden annihilation of being, but as a steady decay of the wholeness of life as God had set it up – alienation in all areas of our lives, spiritual, psychological, social and physical. In the past two sermons we have seen that two key components of our being in the image of God are dominion and relationship. Here we see the image of God become marred and twisted – there are disastrous results in both the areas of dominion and relationship with respect to God, ourselves and others. There is also a huge affect on nature, but we do not have time to go into that today.
- a. God: The first indication that something is wrong in our relationship with God is that the man and woman hide from him. “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 of the garden” (verse 8). They – we – can not bear to look upon the one we have rejected. His holiness and specialness are now no longer something to be enjoyed but to be feared. The love offered is rejected. Humans now have an ache for God but can not bear to have God see the real them. They are so ashamed of what they have done that they hide from him. The One who can help and heal us we flee from in terror. Are you hiding from God today in any area of your life?
Second, our cutting ourselves off from the source of life now has eternal implications: “And the LORD God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever’” (verse 22). When we choose to be independent beings, we begin to set up our own little kingdoms and challenge God for his primacy in the universe – “me first.” This can not happen, so we are expelled from the Garden and prevented from taking of the Tree of Life. There just can not be billions of little immortal “gods” running around. And so we experience two alienations from God: from within ourselves – we fear to draw near; and from without – we can not exist apart from him. This is death – separation from God, alienation from our Creator – the ultimate agony of humankind.
- b. Ourselves: The results within ourselves are immediate. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (verse 7). This is not only a hiding from one another – the differing sexuality which was a delight now becomes a source of self-consciousness – this is also a hiding from ourselves. We see this when God questions them and all they can do is shift the blame. “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it…”, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (verses 12, 13). They deny the truth about themselves and pass responsibility on to another – God, woman or serpent.
It is ironic that when we repudiate our dependence upon God and try to strike out on our own we no longer want to take responsibility for our actions. We have become naked, alone, vulnerable; all we are left with is ourselves and that we can not bear to see. We are no longer whole, but broken, disjointed, with the rightful centre of our lives – God – cast out and nothing to replace it. We have lost meaning and purpose, “the destiny of our beings”[5] – which was ultimately to be like God, but in his way – and so have ceased to be truly human. Now we seek to recover the divine image through our own efforts. We must “live without the ability to live”[6] said Bonhoeffer. We have death inside.
- c. Others: All this is somewhat hidden – but it works its way out soon enough in our relationships with one another. Here is one of the clearest, most easily-seen results of the Fall – our separation from one another, especially the opposite sex. I have highly appreciated Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen’s insights on this passage in her book “Gender and Grace.”[7] She points out that both the man and the woman overstepped the bounds God had set, but each in a different component of their being in the image of God. The woman abused her dominion by eating, going against the provisions given; the man abused his relationship by accepting the fruit from his wife, allowing their unity to supercede his loyalty to God.
As a result, the man blames first God for giving him the woman and then the woman – it was her fault (verse 12); the woman passes the buck to the serpent (verse 13), bypassing and denying her influence on her husband. Phyllis Tribble says, “By betraying the woman before God the man opposes himself to her; by ignoring him in her reply to God the woman separates herself from the man…split apart, one flesh awaits the outcome.”[8]
What follows is the promise of painful labour in both the reproduction of the race and the feeding of the race and banishment from Eden.
To the woman he said, ”I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
To Adam he said, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground. (verses 16-19)
Both curses touch on the ability to bring forth life – the woman from her womb and the man from the ground. But what is interesting is that there is punishment in the opposite area of the image in which each sinned. For the man, having put relationship ahead of obedience, his ability to exercise dominion is compromised. His God-given vocation now involves “painful toil” and hardship. What’s more, his dominion turns into domination – to “rule over” his wife. This now congenital flaw makes it easy for men to assume they have a right to dominate women and they exercise dominion without regard for God’s original plan for male/female relationships.
The woman, on the other hand, having abused her accountable dominion, is compromised in the area of relationship. Her “desire is to be for her husband” (verse 16). Her sociability has become social enmeshment. Books such as Women Who Love Too Much,[9] Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them,[10] testify to the reality that women will even sacrifice their well-being in order to remain in a relationship. Woman now uses “the preservation of the male/female relationship as an excuse not to exercise accountable dominion in the first place”[11] – that is, she avoids taking risks that might upset relationships – peace at any price.
Now, it is crucial to see that these are curses, not the way things should be. It is sad that men have often seen no problem in attempting to reverse the curse on the ground through weed killers and combine harvesters, but have soundly affirmed that women’s domination by men is Biblical and right and even denied medical help to ease the pain of childbirth! The curses are a result of the Fall and it is to the hope of reversal of these through Christ that we now turn.
The Restoration
The story ends on a dismal note with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden (verses 23-24). But there is hope all through. First, there is God’s care. In verse 9, God comes looking for his fallen creatures: “The LORD God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’” God comes looking for us, even though we hide ourselves in shame. The rest of Scripture is one long story of God’s searching after us to rescue us from our predicament and restore us to life in Him. Then, in verse 21, “The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” I see in this not just a physical covering, but a provision of psychological and spiritual covering as well – God does not allow us to see how far we have fallen until we are able to accept it and let him deal with it. God protects us. Also, the fact that there had to be a sacrifice of life to provide the covering points to the key component of his rescue plan.
This restoration plan is seen in the curse upon the serpent: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (verse 15). This will be God’s coming to earth himself as Jesus – the new Adam who does not sin, but suffers death in order that the curse of death be removed from us. “As man can no longer be like the image of God, God must become like the image of man.”[12] Jesus is the one who crushes the head of the serpent while he bruises his heel which portrayed so dramatically by Mel Gibson in “The Passion of the Christ” where he inserts Satan as the serpent in the garden of Gethsemane. It is on the cross that we see God taking the responsibility for the evil he has allowed to exist when he offered freedom to the creatures made in his image. He bears it himself on the cross – the ultimate in self-giving love.
Conclusion
In Eden, we had a multitude of choices to do right and only one to do wrong. Now, we have a multitude of choices to do wrong, and only one to do right: that is, to submit our lives back to God, through his Son. This occurs when we leave our rebellion and its punishment at the foot of the cross and joyfully trust ourselves to him and submit to his Lordship. Then we can take freely of the Tree of Life, now offered to us through His Spirit. This ends our rebellion and we begin our long road of rehabilitation and healing, allowing God to reverse the effects of the Fall and be remade in the image of his Son.
But the ultimate picture of the restoration is seen at the end of the Bible and the last chapters of the Book of Revelation. The Bible begins in a garden, it ends in a city. The very thing that can often be the embodiment of human rebellion – the city – becomes transformed by God and is used as a picture of the new heaven and the new earth. God will again walk in the midst of his people and the Tree of Life will be available for the healing of all nations – “No longer will there be an
[1] Charles Coulson, Who Speaks for God. (Wheaton, Il: Tyndale House, 1994) pg. 36.
[2] Derek Kidner, Genesis. (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 1967), pg. 69.
[3] http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/434725
[4] http://www.gallup.com/poll/109108/belief-god-far-lower-western-us.aspx
[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship. 2nd. Ed. (New York: McMillan: 1967), pg. 229.
[6] Ibid..
[7] Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Gender and Grace. ( Downers Grove, Il: Inter-Varsity Press, 1990).
[8] Quoted by Van Leeuwen, ibid., pg. 43.
[9] Robin Norwood, Women Who Love Too Much. (New York: Pocket books, 1985)
[10] Susan Forward and Joan Torres Men Who hate Women and the Women Who Love Them. (New York: Bantam Books, 1986)
[11] Van Leeuwen, ibid., pg. 46.
[12] Bonhoeffer, ibid., pg. 229.
