The passage in the Bible that we will focus on is Genesis 3. I said at the end of the last chapter that Genesis 1–2 set the stage for what goes wrong. In general terms, that is correct. What I neglected to say, however, is that there is a particular element in Genesis 2 that sets the stage for Genesis 3—namely, Genesis 2:17 records one prohibition that God gives to Adam and Eve: “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.” They are to work the garden and enjoy it in all its fruitfulness. It is a perfect delight. But there is a prohibition: they are not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And if they do eat of it, they will die.
We shall consider in due course why God issued the prohibition. Wasn’t this sort of setting them up for failure? In any case, without noting that prohibition, we cannot possibly understand Genesis 3.
In this chapter we shall follow the biblical text so closely that it is worth laying it out here. I shall then offer a couple of introductory comments, then unpack Genesis 3 in four steps before showing how this material from the first book of the Bible is absolutely essential to any fair understanding of the whole Bible—and why that is important to you and me.
1Now 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’?”
2The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3but 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.’”
4“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6When 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. 7Then 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.
8Then 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. 9But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
“Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15And 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.”
16To 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.”
17To 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.
18It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19By 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.”
20Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
21The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22And 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.” 23So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24After he drove them 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.
Genesis 3
Understanding Genesis 3
How shall we understand this chapter? In another part of the Bible—one that we’re not going to have time to explore in detail—the account is told of King David seducing a woman next door, and when he is caught, he arranges to have her husband killed (see 2 Samuel 11). So you have a powerful man (David), a weak man (the woman’s husband), and something that is desired (the woman).
Nathan the prophet is sent by God to confront King David about his cleverly concealed adultery and murder (see 2 Samuel 12). Because the king is an autocrat, the prophet approaches with a certain amount of care, and so he begins with a parable. “Your majesty,” he says, “something rather sad has taken place out in the country. There is a very rich farmer with herds and cattle, with flocks you wouldn’t believe. Next door is a dirt farmer with just one little lamb—and he doesn’t even have that anymore. Some people came by to see the rich man, and to prepare a feast for the visitors the rich farmer went and swiped the one poor little lamb from the dirt farmer.” So here we have a very powerful man (the rich farmer), a weak man (the dirt farmer), and something that’s desired (the dirt farmer’s only lamb): the parable is meant to mirror David’s treachery. Initially David does not see the connection, but eventually he does. He is exposed and crushed by his own idolatrous corruption.
It is easy to see why Nathan tells the parable, to figure out what the parable is supposed to do: it is setting up an analogous situation by telling something similar to what took place, something with the same essential ingredients: a rich man, a weak man, and something that is desired. Yet if you compare the stories closely, you also see differences. What is desired in the first instance is a woman; what is desired in the second instance is a lamb. In the first instance, the weak man is killed so that David can hide his sin, but in the second instance, what is desired is killed (the lamb itself). The stories are not exactly parallel. If they were exactly the same, it would not be an analogy or a parable. In other words, sometimes stories get the gist of the thing right, but they are sufficiently symbol laden that you have to work your way through the details to understand the point.
So in Genesis 3. This serpent may be the embodiment of Satan, or he may be the symbol for Satan, and the Bible doesn’t really care to explain which. What it does say about Satan can be drawn out pretty precisely, but we cannot understand exactly what the communication arrangements were in Eden, and they do not adversely affect the main points of the narrative.
With that introduction, let me suggest four things that emerge unmistakably from Genesis 3.
1. The Deceitful Repulsiveness of That First Rebellion (Gen. 3:1–6)
We are introduced to the serpent. According the last book of the Bible, Satan himself stands behind this serpent in some sense (see Rev. 12). Moreover, his smooth talk aligns him with another description of Satan where we are told that he masquerades as an angel of light (see 2 Cor. 11:14), deceiving, if it were possible, the very chosen ones of God (see Matt. 24:24): he is a smart-mouth.
Here we are also told that he was made by God: “the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made” (Gen. 3:1). In other words, the Bible does not set Satan or the serpent up as a kind of anti-God who stands over against God as his equal but polar opposite, like matter and antimatter, with exactly the same power, such that if they were to collide they would explode in a fireball of released energy that leaves nothing else behind. In the Bible there is no picture of God matched by an equivalent anti-God, a bit like the light side and the dark side in the Force, where the individual human being leans one way or the other to determine which side of the Force wins. This is not the picture. The picture painted by the first sentence of this chapter is that even Satan himself is a dependent being, a created being. This passage does not tell us how or when he fell. Elsewhere he is portrayed as part of the angelic number who rebelled against God. But none of that is described here. He just shows up.
We are told, according to our English versions, that he was the most crafty of the wild animals that God had made. In many sectors of the English-speaking world, the word crafty suggests surreptitiousness, sneakiness. Does it have such negative overtones to you? It certainly does to me. But the word that is used here in Hebrew can be either positive or negative, depending on the context. In many places it is rendered something like “prudence.” For example, “A prudent man keeps his knowledge to himself” (Prov. 12:23 NIV). This passage does not refer to a crafty man, a sneaky little blighter who keeps his knowledge to himself; it conjures up, rather, someone who is wise and prudent. Or again, “The prudent are crowned with knowledge” (Prov. 14:18). This does not mean the crafty are crowned with knowledge. Similarly in the first verse of Genesis 3: I suspect that what is being said is that the serpent, Satan, was crowned with more prudence than all the other creatures, but in his rebelling the prudence became craftiness; the very same virtue that was such a strength became twisted into a vice. One recalls the observation of Sherlock Holmes: “Ah, me! it’s a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all.”[1]
The serpent approaches the woman (what the modes of communication were, I have no idea) and avoids offering her a straight denial or a direct temptation. He begins instead with a question: “Did God really say that? Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” Notice what he is doing. He expresses just the right amount of skepticism, a slightly incredulous “Can you really believe that God would say that?”—like an employee asking, “Can you believe what the boss has done this time?” The difference is that the person whose word is being questioned is the maker, the designer, God the sovereign. In some ways the question is both disturbing and flattering. It smuggles in the assumption that we have the ability, even the right, to stand in judgment of what God has said.
Then the devil offers exaggeration. God did forbid one fruit, but the way the serpent frames his question—“Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”—casts God as the cosmic party pooper: “God basically exists to spoil my fun. I might want a snack, but God says, ‘No.’ I want to do something, but God says, ‘No, no, no.’ He is just the cosmic killjoy. Can you believe that God said that?!”
The woman replies with a certain amount of insight, wisdom, and grace—at least initially. She corrects him on his facts, on his exaggeration: “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,” she insists (3:2). Then she adds, still correctly, “But God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden’” (3:3, referring back to 2:17). His exaggeration is neatly set aside. But then she adds her own exaggeration. She adds, “and you must not touch it, or you will die” (3:3, emphasis added). God had not said anything about not touching it. It is almost as if the prohibition to eat has got under her skin, making her sufficiently riled up that she has to establish the meanness of the prohibition. The first sin is a sin against the goodness of God.
We gain a little insight into the terrible slippage going on in the woman’s mind if we conjure up what she should have said. Perhaps something like this: “Are you out of your skull? Look around! This is Eden; this is paradise! God knows exactly what he is doing. He made everything; he even made me. My husband loves me and I love him—and we are both intoxicated with the joy and holiness of our beloved Maker. My very being resonates with the desire to reflect something of his spectacular glory back to him. How could I possibly question his wisdom and love? He knows, in a way I never can, exactly what is best—and I trust him absolutely. And you want me to doubt him or question the purity of his motives and character? How idiotic is that? Besides, what possible good can come of a creature defying his Creator and Sovereign? Are you out of your skull?”
Instead, the woman flirts with the possibility that God is nothing more than a cosmic party pooper, bent on limiting the pleasure of his creatures.
Then comes the first overt contradiction of God. The serpent declares, “You will not certainly die” (3:4). The first doctrine to be denied, according to the Bible, is the doctrine of judgment. In many disputes about God and religion, this pattern often repeats itself, because if you can get rid of that one teaching, then rebellion has no adverse consequences, and so you are free to do anything.
Far from recognizing the threat of judgment, the serpent holds out that rebellion offers special insight, even divine insight: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:5). Here is the big ploy, the total temptation. The heart of the vicious deceitfulness central to what the serpent promises is that what he says is partly true and totally false. It is true, after all: her eyes will be opened, and in some sense she will see the difference between good and evil. She will determine it for herself. God himself says so at the end of the chapter: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (3:22).
And yet this is an entirely subversive promise. God knows good and evil with the knowledge of omniscience: he knows all that has been, all that is, all that will be, all that might be under different circumstances—he knows it all, including what evil is. But the woman is going to learn about evil by personal experience; she is going to learn about it by becoming evil.
An illustration may help. My wife is a cancer survivor. She is a fairly high-risk survivor, and so the doctors still watch her very closely. The oncologists know a great deal about the disease—from the outside. She knows cancer from the inside. God knows all there is to know about sin, but not by becoming a sinner. The woman will find out about the knowledge of good and evil from the inside. In that sense, what the serpent promises is a total lie.
Indeed, the expression in Hebrew, “the knowledge of good and evil,” is often used in places where to have the knowledge of good and evil is to have the ability to pronounce what is good and pronounce what is evil. That’s what God had done, if you recall. He had made something and declared that “it was good” (1:10). He made something else, and “it was good” (1:12, 18, 21, 25). He finished his work of creation, and “it was very good” (1:31). For God has this sovereign, grounded-in-infinite-knowledge ability to pronounce what is good. Now this woman wants this God-like function. God says, in effect, “It is not good to eat that particular fruit. You will die.” But if she does, instead of delighting in the wisdom of her Maker, she is pronouncing, independently, her own choices as to what is good and evil. She is becoming “like God,” claiming the sort of independence that belongs only to God, the self-existence that belongs only to God, the moral absoluteness that belongs only to God.
To be like God, to achieve this by defying him, perhaps even outwitting him—this is an intoxicating program. This means that God himself must from now on be regarded, consciously or not, as at least a rival and maybe an enemy: “I pronounce my own good, thank you very much, and I do not need you to tell me what I may or may not do.”
Doubtless here is where we need to think a little more about this tree. What was the fruit? There is no biblical text that says it was an apple, as if God really hates apples but is rather partial to pineapples and pears. It is not necessary to suppose that the fruit is magical, such that by ingesting it—whatever it is—a switch suddenly goes on in the brain, the chemistry changes, and now you suddenly start pronouncing good and evil. That is not quite the point. Regardless of what this fruit is, it is an inevitable test. If God makes image-bearers and pronounces what is good and what is evil, if he orders the whole system, then to come along at any point and say, “No, I will declare my own good. What you declare to be evil, I will declare to be good. What you say is good, I will declare to be evil”—this is why the tree bearing this fruit is said to be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What is crucial is not the tree but the rebellion. What is so wretchedly tragic is God’s image-bearer standing over against God. This is the de-god-ing of God so that I can be my own god. This, in short, is idolatry.
Throughout the history of the Christian church, some Christians have argued that the tree is a symbol for sex. But that suggests there is something intrinsically evil about sex. That sort of inference flies in the face of what the Bible says. When God brings the man and woman together in this first marriage, he himself is establishing the union, he himself is declaring it very good. Much later in the Bible, one of the writers says, “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure” (Heb. 13:4). Nothing in the Bible says that sex is intrinsically evil, though like all of God’s good gifts it can be abused, distorted, twisted, and perverted.
We should not think that the serpent’s temptation is nothing more than an invitation to break a rule, arbitrary or otherwise. That is what a lot of people think that “sin” is: just breaking a rule. What is at stake here is something deeper, bigger, sadder, uglier, more heinous. It is a revolution. It makes me god and thus de-gods God.
“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”—that is, physically appealing, aesthetically pleasing, transforming in the domain of wisdom—“ she took some and ate it” (Gen. 3:6). For those of you who know the language “take and eat,” which Christians recite at the Lord’s Supper, it is impossible not to recall the later use of this pair of verbs. “She took . . . and ate.” “So simple the act and so hard the undoing,” someone has said. “God will taste poverty and death before ‘take and eat’ become verbs of salvation.”[2]
“She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it” (3:6). Apparently, he was with her in all of this, entirely complicit, no less guilty than she in the deceit and repulsiveness of the slide to self-destruction.
2. The Initial Consequences That Erupted from This First Rebellion (Gen. 3:7–13)
Above all, there is a massive inversion: God creates the man who loves his wife, who comes from him, and together they are to be vice-regents over the created order. Now instead one of the creation order, the serpent, seduces the woman, who hauls in the man, and together they defy God—the order of creation is turned on its head. And, of course, there is death. This should not be surprising. If God is the Creator and gives life, then if you detach yourself from this God, if you defy this God, what is there but death? He is the one who gave life in the first place. He did not bring the universe and his own image-bearers into existence so that they might be completely autonomous from him, somehow achieving the self-existence that belongs only to God. So if one walks away from him, what is there but death? If you pronounce your own good and evil and decide you want to be a god yourself, thus detaching yourself from the living God who made you and who alone gives life, there is nothing but death.
What kind of death? Christians have wrestled with this question. In the fourth century, a Christian thinker by the name of Augustine wrote, “If it be asked what death God threatened them with, whether bodily or spiritual or that second death [this language is used for hell itself], we answer, It was all. . . . [God] comprehends therein, not only the first part of the first death, wheresoever the soul loses God [that is, we die spiritually; we hide from God and become dead to God], nor the latter only, wherein the soul leaves the body, . . . but also . . . the second which is the last of deaths, eternal, and following after all.”[3] You cannot cut yourself off from the God of the Bible without consequences. God himself has ordained that the attempt to displace God brings with it the punishment of death.
But note the results that are immediately emphasized by the text. The eyes of the man and the woman are opened; they know they are naked. In consequence they sew fig leaves together for a covering (see Gen. 3:7). At one level the serpent had kept his promise, but this new consciousness of good and evil is not a happy result. There is no pleasure here, but there is the loss of the knowledge of God and, finally, little but shame and guilt. Now they have something to hide, so they sew fig leaves, which is meant to be a bit silly. You cannot hide moral shame with fig leaves.
But this is also a way of saying that there is no way back to Eden. You cannot undo the loss of innocence. If you commit a theft, you can return what you have stolen. In that case you can undo the wrong. Even in that case, however, the stain in your own being cannot be undone. If you commit adultery, you cannot undo it at all. And if you or I defy God, we cannot undo the defiance. It cannot be undone. We cover ourselves in shame. There is no way back to innocence. In the Bible, there is only a way forward—to the cross.
One of the results of this guilt is broken fellowship with God (see Gen. 3:8–10). However spectacularly wonderful the pleasure of enjoying intimacy with God, captured in the picture of walking with God in the cool of the day (3:8), now it is gone. We can catch some small glimpse of this wretched slide through human analogies. If you have been married for ten years in a really good marriage characterized by genuine intimacy and not a little joy, and then for some abysmal reason you slip up and sleep with someone you should not be sleeping with, and you know it and your spouse knows it, the old easy intimacy is shattered. You cannot look each other in the eye anymore. Shame engulfs you. You hide. Even if good efforts are made to heal the breach, there are certain things you cannot talk about anymore. That is why throughout the Bible human sin before God is sometimes described as analogous to sexual betrayal. One Old Testament writer, the prophet Hosea, looks at the ways in which God’s people have betrayed him, and actually pictures God—this is hard to believe—as the Almighty cuckold, the ultimate betrayed husband. After all, God’s own people abandon him and chase other gods even though he has given them life and intimate fellowship.
This sin results not only in a broken relationship with God but in broken human relationships too. The account is almost funny in a sad, pathetic sort of way. God asks, “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” (Gen. 3:11). “The woman you put here with me,” Adam says—it’s her fault (3:12). This is not the last time a man has blamed his wife. But she is no better: “It’s not my fault, God. That serpent really fooled me.” One of the things that commonly occurs in the wake of defying God is this: we deny that we have any responsibility for what happened. Everything we do that’s wrong is someone else’s fault.
To put this another way: one of the inevitable results of guilt and shame is self-justification. Adam justifies himself by blaming Eve; Eve justifies herself by blaming the serpent. Our only hope of being reconciled to God, however, is for God to justify us, for God to vindicate us. Self-justification cannot cut it, for we are guilty; in fact, self-justification is merely one more evidence of idolatry—the idolatry of thinking we have the resources to save ourselves, the idolatry that is still so impressed by self that it cannot readily admit guilt. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the editors of the Times of London asked several eminent writers to contribute pieces under the theme “What’s wrong with the world,” G. K. Chesterton replied,
Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton
That reflects a profoundly Christian perspective—but the man and the woman in Genesis 3 are nowhere near recognizing it.
And these are but the initial results that erupt in the wake of this rebellion.
3. The Explicit Curses That God Pronounces (Gen. 3:14–19)
In the wake of this rebellion, God pronounces three curses.
THE FIRSTCURSE: TO THE SERPENT
God says to the serpent,
14Because you have done this,
Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15And 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.
Genesis 3:14–15
Some people think that this is a kind of fairy tale, an origins myth, a just-so story about how the serpent lost its legs. “Once upon a time, snakes all had legs, and this is how they lost their legs.” Is that what this is about?
I do know this: sometimes God picks up something that is already there and uses it in a new symbol-laden way. In the next chapter of this book, we shall be introduced to a man called Abraham, who is told, among other things, to establish the practice of circumcision for all the men in his family and household. What you must understand is that circumcision was not invented by God or by Abraham; circumcision was widely practiced throughout the ancient Near East of Abraham’s day. It was not an unknown rite. But when God imposed it, as we shall see, he gave it a new, special symbol-ladenness in the context of his relationship with Abraham. Circumcision itself was not a brand-new phenomenon, but it gained a new symbol-relationship to reality. So also here: this snake may well have been squirreling and slithering along the ground, but now its mode of transport becomes a deeply symbol-laden thing. The devil himself is cast out and is rejected, a slimy thing running along the ground.
Later symbolism in the Bible runs along these same lines. The prophet Isaiah (late eighth century BC), for example, describes a day coming when “The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent’s food” (Isa. 65:25). This is not because serpents are somehow less moral than lions, but in the symbolism of the day, the serpent was connected with the devil and all that was slimy, low down, and disgusting.
When God says, “I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and hers” (3:15), this does not mean that all women will hate snakes. I know some who do, including my wife. My wife, whatever her many gifts and graces, was not called to be a herpetologist. But there are some women herpetologists. The curse reported here in Genesis 3 probes at a level much beyond mere women and snakes. In fact, the text immediately goes on to name not only the woman but the offspring: there will be enmity “between your offspring and hers.” But if this expression means “all the offspring of the woman and all the offspring of snakes,” then the enmity pronounced is between all human beings and all snakes, and we would not have any herpetologists at all! That is simply not the point.
From the woman, from the human race, will ultimately come the seed that will crush the serpent’s head. Did you see Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ? Whatever the film’s strengths and weaknesses, the opening scene where Jesus is in agony as he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane is truly memorable. As Jesus is praying, a snake starts crawling over one of his limbs. Jesus stands up and suddenly slams his foot down on the snake’s head. The symbolism is right out of Genesis 3. By going to the cross, Jesus will ultimately destroy this serpent, this devil, who holds people captive under sin, shame, and guilt. He will crush the serpent’s head by taking their guilt and shame on himself.
Genesis 3:15 is sometimes called in Christian circles the “protevangelium,” that is, the first announcement of the gospel, the first announcement of good news. This side of the fall, the picture is dark with threat of doom, but now there is promise that from the woman’s seed—from the human race—will arise one who will crush the serpent’s head. In fact, that promise is extended in the New Testament, the last third of the Bible, beyond Christ to Christians. In a letter written in about the middle of the first century to Christians in Rome, the apostle Paul writes, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Rom. 16:20). There is a sense in which Christians, by living under the gospel and being reconciled to God because of the gospel, are destroying the devil and his work.
THE SECOND CURSE: TO THE WOMAN
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.”
Genesis 3:16
The first categorical command that God gave the man and woman was “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). But now, this side of the fall, even this most fundamental of rights and privileges—part of their very being—now becomes a pain-filled thing. The whole created order is out of whack. Even introducing new life is bound up with loss.
“Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (3:16). As you can imagine, this passage has been interpreted many different ways. It is worth reflecting on the fact that the two verbs that are used together here occur as a pair in only one other place within the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), namely, in the next chapter. So if a first reader were reading along in Genesis 3 and thinking, “I really do not have a clue what this means,” that reader would have to press on for only a few more verses before stumbling across the same pair of verbs again, this time in a passage that is clearer. That might prompt the reader to say, “Aha, that makes sense”—and then apply the same meaning in Genesis 3:16.
The second passage is found in Genesis 4. Here we learn that one of the sons of Adam and Eve, Cain, wants to kill the other son, Abel. The chapter portrays the first homicide. When God explains to Cain why he, God, is angry with Cain, he says, “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it [i.e., sin] desires to have you [i.e., to control you, to manipulate you, to boss you around], but you must rule over it” (Gen. 4:7, emphasis added). So also here in the wake of the fall: the woman desires to have her husband to control him, and he rules over her with a certain kind of brutal force. There is sin on both sides: she wants to control, and he, being physically stronger than she is, beats up on her. What we have here in Genesis 3:16 is the destruction of the marriage relationship. The tentacles of rebellion against God corrode all relationships.
When you read on through the following chapters you plow your way through the first homicide to double murders, polygamy, genocide, rape—on and on—all because at the beginning someone said, “I will be God.”
THE THIRD CURSE: TO ADAM
17To 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.
18It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19By 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.”
Genesis 3:17–19
“Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you” (3:17). Adam listened to the woman instead of to God. At the end of the day, prime allegiance must be to God himself, to God alone.
“Cursed is the ground because of you” (3:17). The whole created order of which we are a part is now not working properly. It is under a curse, subjected by God himself to death and decay.
We could press on to develop this theme, but we must take the last step in this chapter.
4. The Long-Term Effects That Flow from This Rebellion (Gen. 3:20–24)
“The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them” (Gen. 3:21). They had used fig leaves. If God uses garments of skin, then blood has been shed—a sacrificial animal. At this stage in the Bible’s storyline there is no system of sacrifice; that comes later—a priestly system with prescribed sacrifices and ritual. But God knows that they need to be covered. They have so much shame to hide. He does not say to them, “Take off those stupid fig leaves. If you just expose yourselves and be honest with one another, we can all get back together again and live happily ever after.” There is no way back. He covers them with something more durable, but at the price of an animal that sheds its blood.
This is the first sacrifice in the long trajectory of bloody sacrifices that reaches all the way down to the coming of Jesus. When he appears, he is declared to be “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). By his bloody sacrifice—by his death—we are covered over. Our shame and our guilt are addressed because he dies in our place. A lamb cannot do that. Here in Genesis 3 the death of an animal to cover the man and the woman is a picture of what is to come, the first step of an entire institution of sacrifices that points us finally to the supreme sacrifice and what Jesus did to take away our sin and cover up our shame.
Conclusion
I want to reflect on how this chapter fits into the Bible and into our lives.
The first important point is that Genesis 3 describes willful rebellion. Some of the hard questions that a strictly materialistic Darwinism must face are “Where do morals come from? Where does meaning come from? Where do notions of right and wrong come from?”
During the last two or three decades, a field of scientific philosophical endeavor has arisen that is now commonly labeled sociobiology. One writer has entitled his book The Selfish Gene, in which he argues that because of the way we have developed along evolutionary lines, we have genes that protect us. Those genes that move us toward certain behavior that keeps us alive and reproducing are going to strengthen those people whose behavior is most advantageous. Those who do not develop this advantageous behavior will drop away, and therefore, statistically you will get a higher and higher percentage of human beings who boast the kinds of genes that are nicely adapted to generating the advantageous behavior. Even a very selfish gene might learn somewhere along the line that cooperation with other people with similar genes is better than merely going it alone, so even this is a kind of expanded selfishness. Now you have a genetic predisposition towards working cooperatively and sharing, which might not fit some individualistic view of the survival of the fittest, but at the corporate level—a sociobiology level—this view of the function of the selfish gene makes a lot of sense. In other words, people can develop a bias toward certain behavior that is then called good or evil but which is nothing more than happy selections of genes that equip you, across the generations, with advantageous behavior. In short, sociobiology has become a systematic attempt to explain notions of right and wrong not at some moral level but purely at the naturalistic genetic level.
I would be the last person to want to argue that there is no connection between our morals and our bodies, between our wills and spirits and our heritage and background, including our genetic makeup. We are whole beings; all parts interact together. But it is very difficult to imagine people volunteering to sacrifice their lives for the sake of others, taking pain in their place, in order to improve the race. For instance, a person in Auschwitz concentration camp who pretends that he or she did some forbidden deed in order to be hanged so that some other inmate could go free is not readily explained by sociobiology. So nowadays books and essays have begun to respond to the pretensions of sociobiology, arguing that this discipline cannot possibly explain certain kinds of conduct.
Pete Lowman has written a book with the title A Long Way East of Eden. (Recall how when they left the garden Adam and Eve went east of Eden.) Lowman’s purpose is to show that the account of the fall makes much more sense of the moral dilemmas and twisted living in the world than any other explanation. The sociologist Christian Smith makes much the same case in his Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture.
A second point of note is that Genesis 3 does not think of evil primarily in horizontal terms but in vertical terms. When we do think of evil, we tend to think of evil at the horizontal level. Probably none of us would want to deny that Auschwitz was evil. Probably we do not want to deny that raping a little child is evil. Probably we do not want to deny that operating a huge Ponzi scheme that rips off billions of dollars from people is evil. Certainly the Bible says many condemning things about horizontal evils, that is, evils we perpetrate among ourselves. But what the Bible most frequently says makes God angry is idolatry. This is evil’s vertical dimension. The person who is most offended in this chapter is God. The chief problem is not that Eve is really ticked because Adam has blamed her. The primary guilt is guilt before God. Yes, you could read passages from the prophet Isaiah, who condemns horizontal evils such as vicious money-grabbing owners who will not pay fair wages, but pages and pages of the biblical text are devoted to idolatry. That is the supreme evil.
Third, seen in this light, Genesis 3 shows what we most need. If you are a Marxist, what you need are revolutionaries and decent economists. If you are a psychologist, what you need is an army of counselors. If you think that the root of all breakdown and disorder is medical, what you really need is large numbers of Mayo Clinics. But if our first and most serious need is to be reconciled to God—a God who now stands over against us and pronounces death upon us because of our willfully chosen rebellion—then what we need the most, though we may have all of these other derivative needs, is to be reconciled to him. We need someone to save us.
You cannot make sense of the Bible until you come to agreement with what the Bible says our problem is. If you do not see what the Bible’s analysis of the problem is, you cannot come to grips with the Bible’s analysis of the solution. The ultimate problem is our alienation from God, our attempt to identify ourselves merely with reference to ourselves, this idolatry that de-gods God; and what we must have is reconciliation back to this God, or we have nothing. It is in the light of this analysis that this chapter, Genesis 3, looks forward to the coming of the woman’s seed.
Not long ago I attended a funeral. On the card that was handed out at the door, my wife and I found these words from this neighbor: “May those that love us love us, and those that don’t love us, may God turn their hearts, and if he doesn’t turn their hearts, may he turn their ankle and we shall know them by their limping.” Cute. I couldn’t help thinking how tragic this was. The man had just gone to meet his Maker, and his last words for us at the funeral were scoring points on people who did not like him—still thinking on a horizontal level.
In the seventeenth century, the great thinker Blaise Pascal wrote, “What sort of freak then is man? How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious, judge of all things, feeble earth worm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe.”[4] He understood Genesis 1, 2, and 3.
Or in the words of a contemporary thinker and writer, Daniel L. Migliore:
We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler, Mozart and Stalin, Antigone and Lady Macbeth, Ruth and Jezebel. “What a work of art,” says Shakespeare of humanity. “We are very dangerous,” says Arthur Miller in After the Fall. “We meet . . . not in some garden of wax fruit and painted leaves that lies East of Eden, but after the Fall, after many, many deaths.”[5]
Now you begin to understand the plotline of the whole Bible: who will fix that?