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 . . . (3:8). That was an awful moment in the history of the world - a moment we should remember if we would learn its lessons. We live in a perplexing world. Some years ago my eye was caught by a picture in The Times of a frail old lady being led out of her house by the French police. It was entitled ‘Grim end to thirty-eight years as a recluse’ and the article read like this: ‘Thirty-eight years of life as a recluse came to an end this week when anti-terrorist police, wearing gas masks against the stench of putrefaction, blasted their way into a house in the Auvergne and found asleep among the piles of filth and excrement, Esther Albouy, aged sixty-one, her brother Hubert, aged sixty-two, and the rotting corpse of another brother, Rény, who had been dead for more than three years.
‘Esther Albouy’s life as a recluse began at the time of the liberation, when she was accused by neighbours in her native village of Saint-Flour of having collaborated with the Germans. She was seized and, together with three other young women, had her head shaved in the central square while hundreds of people looked on and jeered. She was then twenty-two, and reputedly very pretty.
‘Her shocked parents, overcome with shame, took her home and locked her into her room, never to allow her to be seen in public again, although some said she was taken out occasionally at night, on the end of a leash.
‘When her parents finally died some twenty years later, she herself could no longer confront the world, and she continued to live her life as a recluse behind the shutters of her home, where her brother Rény was already living, and where Hubert was soon to join them.
‘The postman delivered Rény’s sickness benefit and picked up notes slipped under the door with orders for the baker who came once a week, and the grocer who delivered once a month. The food was left on the doorstep, or passed through the grilled windows to faceless hands.
‘The gas and water had long since been cut off, the bills never having been paid. Nor was the rent, and in 1975, the Carmelite nuns who owned the house successfully applied for a court order to evict the family. But they refused to go, and no more was done about it until a court ruling last December that the state pay compensation to the Carmelite sisters.
‘Some had nevertheless wondered at the scale of the police operation mounted: nineteen members of the elite GIGN anti-terrorist squad - the French equivalent of the SAS - armed with explosives, tear gas grenades and revolvers, and backed up by local gendarmes and a police helicopter. Esther and her brother, who were asleep on the same bed, offered no resistance, although an axe, a sawn-off shotgun and a Remington rifle were found by their side. They have been taken to a psychiatric hospital.
‘An autopsy is to be carried out on the desiccated remains of Rény, who was fifty-seven when he died. Rény had gone to the police in 1978 with complaints of having been terrorised and beaten up by his brother.’
The picture of that frail, tottering figure, once a beautiful, carefree girl, too free with her charms, being led to a psychiatric hospital spoke eloquently of the tragedy of human existence in this strange world we all inhabit, so full of joy and beauty and comfort and delight, so marred by pain and evil and grief. How can we forget how it all began?
You and I find ourselves in a world which keeps asking the question: “What went wrong?” So much beauty – yet so much pain; so much that is lovely, and yet so much that is heart-rending; so much human dignity, and so much human degradation. We have to be very blind, or very insensitive, not to get the message: “There is something radically wrong!” Even nursery rhymes reflect the true nature of the human predicament. Geoffrey Handley Taylor in ‘A selected bibliography of literature relating to nursery rhyme reform’ analysed two hundred traditional nursery rhymes. In them he found:
8 allusions to murder (unclassified)
2 cases of choking to death
1 case of death by devouring
1 case of cutting a human being in half
1 case of decapitation
1 case of death by squeezing
1 case of death by shrivelling
1 case of death by starvation
1 case of boiling to death
4 cases of killing domestic animals
1 case of body-snatching
1 case of the desire to have a limb severed
8 cases of whipping and lashing
1 allusion to undertakers
16 allusions to misery and sorrow
1 case of drunkenness
4 cases of cursing
1 allusion to marriage as a form of death
5 cases of quarrelling
4 cases of unlawful imprisonment
2 cases of racial discrimination.
‘Expressions of fear, weeping, moans of anguish, biting pain and evidence of supreme selfishness may be found on almost every other page’, Mr. Handley Taylor wrote sadly.
It all points back to how it all began when man first hid from his Creator.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (v. 1)
Notice the Bible speaks of creatures rebelling against their Creator, not of evil invading creation from outside. But the New Testament unmasks the figure of Satan behind the serpent – The great dragon was hurled down – that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. (Revelation 12:9)
And he began with the suggestion that God’s word is subject to our human judgement (verse 1) – “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’ ”
The woman said to the serpent, “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.’ ” “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. (vv 2-4) From (i) doubting God’s word – “Did God say . . .?”, the serpent moved swiftly to (ii) denying God’s judgement – “You will not surely die”, and then on to (iii) impugning God’s character – “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (v 5)
Do you see the process? Stage one – can we really trust what God has said? (And how widespread is that attitude among humankind! – ‘The things that your liable, to read in the Bible, they ain’t necessarily so.’) Stage two – surely God would not condemn anyone? ‘I cannot believe in the sort of God who sends people to hell!’ And then, stage three impugns the character of God – “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” implying that God is weak and tries to deceive in order to keep humanity in subjection. Here is a God made in man’s image. He behaves like us, and that’s where the process always ends. At the very best, a projection of enlightened human reason up into the sky.
It’s a threefold rebellion: against God’s word, against God’s judgement, and against God’s character (His otherness). And the woman found it a very appealing process – as we all do.
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. (v. 6). All the time those words would have been ringing in her ears: ‘Don’t you want to be like God?’
Haven’t we heard them? Not to rule the universe, or just the world – that is not actually the dimension of God that most of us covet. We do not want to be responsible for the whole show. But what about deciding what is right and what is wrong? Don’t we want to do that for ourselves? Haven’t we all done it? Making our own rules for our own behaviour, and deciding what is right and what is wrong?
There is the basis of all temptation: that I can rewrite for myself (for my own convenience) the moral framework of the universe. It is a temptation to which we all fall.
Instead of listening to the Creator, they listened to the creature and its seductive lie – if you eat you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
They did not actually have to do anything to be like God - they were already like Him. They were already His image. But up to now, there had been just one evil for them: to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now they had eaten that fruit and they were going to decide for themselves what was good and what was bad. They had become like God by usurping God’s right to decide between good and evil. Sin is not so much about being a law-breaker, as about being a law-maker. It is not just a matter of morality, but also of sovereignty. We humans know good and evil now because we have determined to decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. We’re the ones who know that now.
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. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. (vv 6-7) Their eyes were opened – yes – but what a grotesque anticlimax to the dream of enlightenment –
“Did God really say . . .?”
“You will not . . . die”
“You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
And that is why we are afraid to meet God – because in our own lives we have pretended to be God. We are like schoolchildren imitating the schoolteacher, when it suddenly turns out that the teacher was standing right behind us at the classroom door all the time.
So the cause is followed by:
2. The Confrontation (3:8-13)
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. (v. 8) What a lovely picture (from God’s side) of grace! But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” (v. 9) God’s first word to fallen man is a word of grace. It is the question that ever since has sounded out of eternity into time as the Creator seeks to draw men and women willingly back to Him.
But look at man’s response – it began with the shame of verse 7, and then the fear of verse 10. He answered, “I heard You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” In the year of my conversion, 1968, Dr. Edmund Leach, who was then Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, gave the Reith Lecture. He began: “Men have become like gods. Isn’t it about time that we better understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet, instead of rejoicing, we feel deeply afraid. Why should this be?”
Genesis 3 provides the answer. If you or I take God’s place, if we cast ourselves as the moral arbiters of the universe, and then we hear His voice, is it surprising that we are afraid – and that we try to hide from God as he gently, graciously calls out to us? So many times in history this same scene has been played out – Francis Thompson describes it in ‘The Hound of Heaven’:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Have you done that? I have. Here is man dodging from tree to tree. The non-Christian students in Cambridge do exactly this when they are faced with the gospel: you deal with one argument (“How can we trust the New Testament?”), you chop down that tree and they will skip to another (“Of course, there’s no evidence of Jesus actually being God.”).
And so the third response, after the shame of verse 7, and the fear of verse 10, is the evasion of verses 11 to 13.
And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, and the serpent did not have a leg to stand on.
Here are the two classic answers to the problem of the origin of evil (Where did evil come from?): one is to try to trace it back to God Himself – v.12 “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” Monism (which is the philosophy behind religions like Hinduism and Buddhism) finds good and evil in God.
The other classic answer to the problem of evil is Dualism which suggests that there is an alternative evil force in opposition to God in the universe – v.13. The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate it.” But God did not accept either excuse.
In fact, the Bible does not answer the question, ‘Where does evil come from?’. And maybe the origin of evil is left a mystery deliberately, so that we do not evade our own responsibility for it. Evil cannot be explained; it lies outside the realm of causality and logic. There is no valid reason for man’s sin. It is irrational.
The only valid response to sin is confession: I must take responsibility for my own sin. The buck stops with us. We can’t trace it back any further. I did it. I authenticate my own existence when I take responsibility for my own sin and then seek forgiveness for it from the One Who can forgive.
But Adam and Eve would not accept the blame. And God’s word, which had provided the moral framework for life in the garden, now pronounces the curses under which we have lived ever since.
3. The Curses (3:14-19)
So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 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.” (vv 14,15)
God’s sovereignty is reasserted and His order is restored. Notice God holds no conversation with the serpent at all. He just pronounces a curse. The woman should never have listened to the creature rather than the Creator. Now the relationship she had put above her relationship to God is turned into enmity. To the woman He said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” (v. 16) When mankind was first created in chapter 1, verse 28, they were to be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. Now that fruitfulness will be marred always by pain and danger – they say the most dangerous journey any of us ever travels is the seven inches between our mother’s womb and the open air. Pain in childbearing and disparity in relations between the sexes: ‘to love and to cherish’ becomes ‘to desire and to dominate’. And woman’s natural revulsion at this consequence of the Fall has led feminism into a battle for domination which is just as far from the will of God.
But God’s second creation ordinance in chapter 1 was to subdue the earth and rule over it. That too will now be a painful struggle.
To Adam He said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ 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, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” (vv 17-19)
In mercy the curse is on man’s realm and not on man himself. But nothing constructive is said to Adam. The promise of verse 5: “You will be like God” turns out to be pain, sweat and the dust of death.
The disturbance of human relations (v. 16) is matched by disturbance in the natural order – ecological balance will now constantly elude man.
Three kinds of disorder have been chronicled in the chapter – personal disorder, beginning with the first signs of mutual estrangement in verse 7, and leading on to the brutalising of sexual love in verse 16. Spiritual disorder as man flees from God (v. 8) and is then banished from Him (v. 24), and finds himself locked into a permanent struggle with evil (v. 15). And physical disorder, as man strives painfully to renew (v. 16) and sustain (v. 19) life’s basic processes.
It would seem from what is known of the pre-human world that there was a state of travail in nature from the first which man was empowered to subdue (1:28) (perhaps little by little as he spread abroad to fill the earth), but then he relapsed instead into disorder himself. His act of disobedience threw the whole created order into disarray.
If, at first, our task with the natural world was like subduing a duvet to our will in making a bed, now it has become more like a struggle with a poltergeist, as drought and famine and natural disaster claim human lives every day.
This whole marvelous, complex cosmos was to be like a vast spinning wheel, centred on just one point – the relationship between God and man. When that went awry, the hub was off-centre, and you know what happens to a wheel when that occurs. Think of clay on a potter’s wheel – if you do not have it properly centred, everybody gets splattered.
This is why the world we live in is as it is – full of inexplicable tragedy, pain, suffering and sorrow. When you get chickenpox you don’t ask yourself, “Why has this spot appeared here?” The virus is in the bloodstream. Spots may appear anywhere. So, when you and I encounter the awful tragedies of our world, there is no human answer available to: “Why here?” “Why now?” “Why this person and not some other?”
But it does all point in one direction. Since Adam, we have been locked into a world which keeps begging the question, “What went wrong?” “Why is there pain at all?”
In His kindness to us, God makes sure that this environment of ours keeps warning us, “There is something radically wrong!” So much beauty - and yet so much pain. So much that is lovely – and yet so much that is heart-rending. So much dignity in humanity – and yet so much degradation.
And we know that the solution does not lie in the environment itself – in husbanding fossil fuels, in recycling aluminium, and being nice to the ozone layer.
Christians reckon, as a rough rule of thumb, to give away about a tenth of their earnings. If the people of the developed world would do that – set aside about a tenth of their income – the problems of malnourishment and the major problems of disease on this planet could be solved in twelve months. And that is not a big thing, is it? None of us in the western world would be paupers if we parted with one tenth of our income.
You see it’s not a problem with the human environment. It is a problem with the human heart. The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. And this world that you and I live in is saying that to us every day. It is pointing us back to our ruptured relationship with God and pleading with us to mend it.. Not to go green, but to get converted – that’s the message of the Amazonian rainforest for the human race.
You and I are trapped in this strangely mixed environment. We are all born out of Eden now because the centre has fallen out, the hub.
In 2:17, God had said “When you eat of it you will surely die” – but is this death, these curses? Well, let’s read on:
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 for ever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After He drove the man out, He placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (3:22 - 24)
Adam’s death was a change of place (from within the garden to outside it) and a change of relationship to God (from fellowship to banishment). And all death can be understood in that way: the person continues but in a different place and in a different relationship to God. From our perspective, death faces us with the edge of our existence. But theologically death speaks of change. Adam and Eve died when God banished them from the garden and placed cherubim with a flaming sword between them and the tree of life. Their physical death was only an inevitable consequence to follow in its own time. And when Adam left the garden, he took all his children with him. We are all born East of Eden now. The centre has gone and the whole universe groans in bondage to decay.
But if this death sentence falls in one sense upon us all, there are also hints of the beginnings of rescue plan in the heart of God here.
4. The Cure (3:15, 20-24)
“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.” (v. 15)
Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 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 for ever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (vv 20 – 24)
God was not non-plussed by Adam and Eve’s rebellion. There is no hint of His sovereignty being jolted one tiny bit in the chapter. He takes it in His stride, you might say.
And even as He dealt with the serpent, the woman and the man in awful judgement, there is the first glimmer of the gospel – of a rescue plan already in God’s heart. Look at verse 15. “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.” – the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent’s head.
Here is the first hint of the incarnation – a representative man will be born who will tackle evil. Here is the first hint of the cross – it will be costly and painful as the serpent will strike His heel. Here is the first hint of the resurrection – for it will be a complete victory: He will crush the serpent’s head.
It is only a hint, a glimmer, but it heralds the dawning of the gospel day, as it pointed to Christ.
Now notice verse 20:
Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
Why does that come here? God has just finished pronouncing a fearful sentence on man – and what do we read?
Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
It was hardly an appropriate moment for a christening ceremony! More a time for Adam to fling himself on the ground and grovel in the dust. But no! Does it not suggest an act of faith? That Adam had understood and believed the promise of verse 15? That there will be offspring of the woman and among them one would arise who would crush the serpent’s head – and so, in faith, Adam names his wife the mother of all the living.
And when her first child is born at the beginning of the next chapter, Eve greets Cain’s birth with a joyous cry – here is the offspring of the woman who has come to save them! But no – it is the murderer, Cain. What a disappointment! It will be a long haul for the Saviour . . . but He will come. The dawn burns a little brighter.
Now perhaps you will understand the rather strange title I have given to Genesis, chapter 3 – In Search of the Crusher. At verse 15 of chapter 3 a search begins – a search that spans the whole Old Testament – the search for the One who will crush the serpent’s head. That is why there is such an obsession in the Old Testament with genealogy – all the time the story is seeking one person. Other lines and races are discarded. Just one thread is pursued. It’s like putting your video on fast forward as you search for one particular bit of a film. We are pursuing the genealogical line which will lead us eventually to a stable in Bethlehem.
Notice how God’s grace provides for their guilt and shame (v. 21):
The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
‘Those coats of skins are forerunners of the many measures of welfare, both moral and physical, which man’s sin makes necessary. Social action, now delegated to human hands (Romans 13:1-7, James 2:16), could not have had an earlier or more exalted inauguration.’ (Derek Kidner). It is now the state’s God-given task to provide practical remedies for the consequences of human sin.
And it is also God’s love that takes them out of the garden –
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 for ever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. (vv 22, 23)
God expels them from Eden lest they reach out their hand and take from the tree of life and live for ever, lest they be cemented up forever in this rebellious state. Instead God sets them in a world (our world) that is always reminding us of paradise lost, always prompting us to question Why? – Why we long for Utopia and cannot create it? Why we long for eternity and are bound by death?
And in that very death lies our hope of being free from sin. So God bars the way back to the tree of life.
After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (v. 24)
Man will not return to the tree of life without going through the death curse of God’s judgement. And that he cannot do for himself and survive. But One has borne that curse on your and my behalf.
Do you see those cherubim? Not cherubs, not the plump, rosy-cheeked babies with a propensity for match-making that appear on Valentine cards. These were the attendants of God’s throne, the statues over the Mercy Seat in the Tabernacle. They were also embroidered into the curtain that hung in the Temple, separating the holiest place of all, the Holy of Holies, symbolising God’s very Presence, from the rest of the world (Exodus 36:35).
When Jesus died on the cross, what happened to that curtain with its embroidered cherubim? It was torn, from top to bottom. God had Himself reopened the way into His presence, the way to the tree of life, through the cherubim, back to Eden.
You and I will never make sense of our life here on this earth, until we find our way back into Eden by means of the Crusher, by making Jesus our Lord and Saviour.