THE STORY BEGAN IN A GARDEN WHEN A WOMAN TOOK A BITE FROM
a piece of fruit offered by a serpent (Genesis 3:6). How obviously evil her goal was, right? Well, not really. The mistake we make is thinking that Eve was motivated by the desire to do evil. Nothing could be further from the truth. What she really wanted was to avoid evil
and do good.
In short, she wanted to do what God does—choose on her own, having the ability to detect evil and maintain goodness.
MORALITY
TREE
Adam and Eve didn’t eat from a “tree of evil.” They ate from the tree of the knowledge
of good
and evil. Herein we see an important distinction. They weren’t pursuing sin as we normally think of it. They were pursuing a form of godliness. They made an attempt to be like God. The serpent successfully lured them, and the bait was godlikeness. Even today, this is seen as a worthy goal.
But God never intended for humanity to take upon itself the burden of developing and following a code of ethics. The fall in the garden was due to Satan’s cunning as he tempted the first humans to abandon God and choose human effort. Adam and Eve reconsidered their confidence in God’s way and opted for
morality instead. And desiring to fabricate their own system of right and wrong was their fatal mistake.
Adam and Eve
reconsidered
their confidence
in God’s way and
opted for morality
instead.
When we envision their taking a bite of the fruit, we’d like to ask Eve and Adam, “How could you do it? I mean, there was only one thing
you weren’t supposed to do, and you ruined it for all of us!” But what was their motive really? Although they were openly disobedient, we might say it was for a “right” reason. They wanted to be “right” and do “right.” They wanted to know right from wrong so they could choose right and avoid wrong.
How do we know they weren’t interested in evil? The serpent’s alluring statement was, “When you eat…your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5), and with that they were sunk. They admired God’s goodness and desired to generate and exude that same quality. They had no interest in overtly evil pursuits. Had they ever even seen sinful behavior before?
The original sin was not Adam and Eve’s thumbing their noses at the goodness of God. Instead, it was their wanting to author their own system of right and wrong so they could make sure
they did right and avoided wrong. Today, we can be deceived by the same offer. We may find ourselves pursuing the knowledge of good instead of listening to our heartfelt yearning for an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.
A DEATH-AND
-LIFE
ISSUE
Christianity
isn’t intended
to meet humanity’s
ill-perceived need
for religion.
Through the Eden story, we see our need for real life, not merely a set of instructions on how to live. But our need for life is not communicated through Genesis alone. It’s amazing how certain words in the Scriptures begin to stick out once we’re made aware
of their meaning. Words like life
and death
leap off the page as we begin to see that Christianity isn’t intended to meet humanity’s ill-perceived need for religion. The real thing meets our deepest need in restoring to us genuine spiritual life.
While some view Christianity as a behavior improvement program, the Eden story reveals that a desire for behavior improvement was the cause of spiritual death. Lack of moral laws isn’t our problem. A plethora of socially and morally acceptable behavior improvement programs abound across world religions and even in many nonreligious movements. We could benefit from many of them if our primary need was merely a code of ethics to guide life choices.
Radically, the Bible teaches that humanity’s main problem is not what we’re doing. Instead, it’s our lack of life
as we do it. Paul describes our main problem in these ways:
Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin,
and in this way death came to all people,
because all sinned—
ROMANS
5:12, italics added
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.
EPHESIANS
2:1
DIET FOR THE
DEAD
?
No amount
of education will
change the heart
of a spiritually
dead person.
Imagine encountering a man’s body lying by the side of the road. You decide to pull over to check the man’s condition. As your car comes to a stop, you jump out and run toward him. Reaching down to check his pulse, you realize he has none. He’s dead and
gone, perhaps due to a heart attack. What can you do? Based on his appearance, you deduce that the man may have suffered heart failure due to a lifetime of poor eating habits. Instantly, you leap to your feet, rush to the car, pull out a diet book, and begin screaming important information from its pages as you head back toward him: “Chapter 1: Eating for Health and Heart!”
Stop to examine the absurdity of this situation. No amount of information on eating habits is going to resurrect this man. He’s already dead. The only real solution would be for him to somehow obtain a new lease on life. In the same way, no amount of education will change the heart of a spiritually dead person. Life is the only solution to death:
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature [flesh], God made you alive
with Christ.
COLOSSIANS
2:13, italics added
Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive
with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.
EPHESIANS
2:4-5, italics added
God knew our real need. And through Christ he met that need by offering us life.
*
The law or any other system of morality could never offer us this life. Although some may think the law solves their problem, realistically it only brings more awareness of death. As we saw previously, the law isn’t an encourager. Instead, it’s a stern criticizer. The law makes one aware that there’s
a serious problem at our core. Even after our concerted efforts to constrain behavior, the law is always present to condemn in one way or another
.
The apostle Paul himself admits that he thought the law was the ultimate in spiritual experience. He was sorely disappointed to end up empty inside: “I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death” (Romans 7:10).
W
HY
DID
JESUS
DO
THAT
?
Why did Jesus seem to go out of his way to antagonize the Pharisees and other religious leaders? Why did he anger them throughout his ministry? He healed on the Sabbath, and they hated him for it. He turned over their money tables, and they despised him for it. He called them snakes, when doing so certainly didn’t help the relationship. But he did these things to show the difference between real life and the counterfeit technique of self-focused behavior modification.
The law only
breeds two things:
defeat if you’re honest
and hypocrisy
if you’re not.
What had centuries of life under law produced in Jewish society by the time Jesus arrived on the scene? A Pharisee-led agenda that was worlds apart from Jesus’ goal. While the Pharisees paraded through city streets condemning prostitutes and drunkards for their overtly sinful behavior, Jesus was befriending these same individuals. Jesus was gentle, merciful, and kind to sinners, while the Pharisees were harsh, judgmental, and rude to them.
It appears that the only people who angered Jesus were the religious rulers of his day. Why? Because the law teachers were not being honest with themselves or others.
First, after watering down the potency of the law so as to
concoct a palatable mixture, they painted the illusion of spiritual success under law. Second, they added in their own regulations and beat their chests as they touted themselves as the spiritually elite. Jesus hated hypocrisy, and the law only breeds two things: defeat if you’re honest and hypocrisy if you’re not.
Through his resurrection, Jesus would eventually offer his Jewish contemporaries genuine life. The religious zealots of his day were working against him as they pretended to already possess life.
The source of life himself saw right through their charades.