Genesis 3:1-13 Sunday, November 30, 2003

The Roots of the Kingdom: ‘The Great Seduction’

Shortly after our arrival here we discovered that an important part of our electricity metre was missing, rendering it highly dangerous.

I called the electricity board and they wanted me to define precisely the nature of the problem before sending someone out to fix it. They wanted me to describe in detail what was, and what was not, there. They wanted to know whether this was their problem or not, whether they needed to send out an engineer or not,  and what kind of work would be necessary if they did.

In order to decide what work needed to be done, the problem needed to be understood properly first.

Part of the purpose of Genesis 3 is to give us better understanding of the great problem under which human beings are labouring, the problem of sin. Unless and until we fully appreciate the reality and all pervasive power of sin, we will not know what must be done in answer to our predicament. The story of the Fall of Adam is really there to lay the basis for the story of redemption and rescue in Jesus Christ.

The story of creation and the fall in Genesis 1-3 is the introduction, the prologue, to the story of redemption and restoration in the rest of Holy Scripture.

And that means of course that we will never properly make sense of what we have gained in Christ if we do not first appreciate what we have lost in Adam.

In fact Genesis 1-3 teaches us about so much that will fill out for us a biblical world view. It will help us make sense, not only of redemption, but of the presence and power of evil in God’s world. It will help us to see the true malignancy of sin. It will help us to understand the alienation we experience from God and from each other.

Now the way that Genesis 3 does that is to show us the reality of Satan, and the nature and consequences of Sin. We are introduced first the great Seducer, the Serpent. Then we see the Seduction itself, the temptation to Sin. Then there comes the Sin, with all its destructive results. And I simply want us to look at these in turn.

So first we meet the Seducer, the Serpent.

Look at verse 1, “Now the Serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.”

It is one of the features of Hebrew story telling that very rarely do we come across direct characterisation. We are rarely told things about a character. Usually we get all the information we need about them from the way they act and the things they say in the story itself. So when the Old Testament does characterise someone it is usually highly significant. It serves to fix our attention on what is being said about the person.

Now the very first thing we have in this next scene in the Garden of Eden is direct characterisation of this Serpent. He was ‘more crafty’ than any of the other animals. There was something about this serpent that meant it was set apart from the rest of the creatures God had brought to Adam for naming.

And this word ‘crafty’ instantly points us to the unusual nature of this snake. This is not an ordinary snake. It is a real creature of God but there is something else there also. The Snake is the vehicle for something that can be devious. Snakes are not naturally shifty, devious or crafty. They are just snakes.

We are being led to realise that there is more than the snake about this creature.

And that’s an impression that is immediately confirmed when the snake suddenly speaks, “He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say…?’” Snakes are not devious and snakes definitely don’t talk! And yet here is this crafty serpent that talks! Moses wants us not to take the snakes words at face value. He is crafty, plotting and cunning. His words are sugar coated poison!

The hairs on the back of our necks ought to be standing up with a sense of the eerie and the paranormal as we read about this snake, suddenly sliding through the trees towards Eve. Then it rears up and fixes her with one dead eye, and begins talking! We can almost hear its sibilant tones.  It is an unsettling story!

Now what’s going on here? Well, we need to understand that in the ancient eastern world the serpent was frequently an image of evil, chaos and destruction. In the Mesopotamian creation myths chaos was personified as the dragon-serpent, Tiamat. Even in the Bible God designates snakes as archetypaly unclean creatures for Israel. They are perfect anti-God symbols.

And in the rest of the Bible the snake or the dragon is used again and again to speak about evil. In Isaiah 27:1 we read of the victory of the Lord over the serpent, bringing the deliverance of Israel. “In that day the lord will punish with his sword…Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea.”

In Revelation 12:9 we have this Serpent identified. He is, “The great dragon…that ancient Serpent called the devil, or Satan who leads the whole world astray”. Pagan nations worshipped the dragon as the chaos monster of the sea, the god Tiamat. Israel saw the serpent as the great image of satanic evil, Leviathan. Revelation pictures the Devil as a great serpent, defeated by the Lord God in Jesus Christ.

So this snake in Genesis 3 is none other than the Great Dragon. He is Leviathan. The Serpent is Satan, the Devil Himself.

Now let’s pause here for a moment to recognise what this is saying to us. There is a real, personal, and powerful being, which embodies rebellion against God. He is cunning and sly and devious and he seeks the destruction of your soul.

Let us not become so self-aware, that we forget the reality of the spiritual warfare in which we are engaged. As believers in the Lord Jesus we are locked in a daily struggle with a very real spiritual foe. There is a war on! And how sobering that thought ought to be for us.

Ask your self, ‘do I conduct myself as though I were a soldier engaged at the front line, in mortal combat?’ There is no room for flippancy and self indulgence. There is no place at the front line for lazy, cowardly, bored Christians who think God’s job is to minister to their comforts.

And sometimes I rather fear that we think that having believed on Christ, we need not wrestle against principalities and powers, against spiritual forces of darkness in heavenly places. But the Lord has ordained that the pathway of Christian perseverance is travelled only by waging war against Satan and his allies, the flesh and the world. So called Christians who do not fight simply will not survive the enemy’s onslaughts.

Are you at war? Or are you dozing in self satisfied slumber, unaware of the war that rages all around you? Don’t you realise that your enemy is deadly?

 Let’s learn with Paul in Ephesians 6 to,  “ Put on the full armour of God so that we can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.”

So there is the Seducer, Satan.

Then look at the Seduction itself. Look at how Satan tempts, in verses 1-5.

When the police arrested John Allen Muhamed, and Lee Boyd Malvo for a series of sniper attacks that resulted in ten murders in Washington recently, they found a lap top in the car the pair used for their attacks, which mapped out the sites of future shootings with carefully calculated precision.

Now in the verses before us Satan is pictured, like a cold blooded murderer, choosing his victims with all the precision of a trained marksman.

He selects Eve as his primary target. He makes her the object of his persuasion.

He chooses his camouflage. He appears as a serpent, one of the beasts that Adam has named.

Everything looks so normal and so safe, but Satan’s objective is the undermining and reversal of the order that God has ordained.  Satan seeks the destruction of Eden, and of God’s plans for Adam and Eve. And so he carefully inverts the pattern of authority and obligations that God had established in his covenant with Adam and his wife.

Instead of going to Adam, the one God had appointed as the covenant head, he turns to Eve. He poses a series of questions that are designed to put Eve into the position of leadership. She is pushed to decide whether to eat, and it is she that takes the fruit of the forbidden tree to Adam and induces him to eat.

You notice that at the end of vs.6, when Eve gives the forbidden fruit to Adam, he was with her.  Adam was right there. As Eve made her decision to rebel, there he was, standing there, saying nothing in response. And when she turned to involve him in her sin, he glibly took the fruit from her hand without protest and ate! What a travesty of the original plan! The devil undermines and perverts the established pattern for human relationships.

Now let me suggest that it is precisely here that we are very often most vulnerable. In the area of Christian relationships, both within the marriage bond and more generally, we are vulnerable to Satan’s snares. Satan got at both Adam and Eve by subverting the God ordained order of headship and submission He had instituted within the marriage bond.  When we overthrow the biblical patterns for our relationships there is little wonder that sin and compromise is the invariable result

Oh, let us study to conform our home life to the Biblical picture. Let’s not give any scope to the Devil for causing us to stumble!

So Satan proposes alternative Covenant relationships.

But he also proposes an alternative covenant Lord.

Remember he comes as a snake, talking. Here is a wild animal God had made, we are told.

But it begins to do what only Adam and God have done before now. He begins to talk! “Do not think of me as one of the other creatures over which you exercise your authority, Eve, think of me as your equal, indeed as you advisor, one who can talk with you, your superior in wisdom, who has only your best interests at heart.”

But that was God’s unique role! It was God who came to walk with Adam in the garden in the cool of the day (vs. 8). It was God who advised Adam of His law in 2:16. And so, very subtly and deviously, Satan entices Eve to view a mere creature, a snake, over which God had given them dominion, as readily fulfilling a role parallel to that of almighty God Himself.

Satan was proposing an alternative Covenant Lord, other than the Lord God who had made them.

And then he goes on to propose an alternative Covenant Law. 

He begins by planting doubt in the mind of Eve. Vs. 1 “Did God really say, ‘you must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

‘God is surely a little unjust isn’t He Eve? He has prohibited eating from any tree in this garden!’

Now Eve knows that God had not prohibited eating from all the trees of the garden, only one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But Satan had hidden the seeds of doubt in the obviously false suggestion that God had made a prohibition of all the trees.

Look at how he did it. First of all he changed the name of God. We noted two weeks ago that in Genesis 2 the special covenant name of God, YHWH is used in conjunction with his general creation title, Elohim, to give us the name translated in our Bibles, ‘the LORD God’ ‘YHWH Elohim’. The God of Creation is also the Lord who makes a Covenant with them.

But Satan omits the name, YHWH,  LORD. He is just God, the creator. The covenantal relationship with its laws and obligations is conveniently forgotten and passed over.

And the suggestion that God’s covenant law is rather less than satisfactory was not lost on Eve. When she responds to the serpent, it looks at first as though she has successfully resisted his attack, but perhaps unwittingly she shows that the seed of rebellion Satan had planted was taking root. She too omits the covenant name for God. ‘God did say’ (vs. 3). The covenant relationship to God has been overlooked only this time by His covenant partner.

And the veiled suggestion that God is rather too severe is not lost on Eve either. In her zeal to correct this talking snake, Eve herself adds a distortion of her own to God’s word. Look at verse 3, ‘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.”’

We are not only barred from eating it, we can’t even touch it! We are, I think, to see a look of distaste on Eve’s face, and hear a note of dissatisfaction in Eve’s voice here. 

But God said no such thing! Eve has joined Satan all unawares in making God’s covenant law appear harsher than it was.

The great prelude to spiritual defection and sin comes when we begin to harbour resentment for the loving parameters God has set within which we are to live and serve Him.

 When we begin to think that His law is too hard, and His commands too burdensome, when we begin to join Satan in asking, ‘did God really say?’ and when we conveniently overlook the covenantal obligations behind our relationship to God, we are already well down the road to sin, we are already caught in the trap of Satanic deception.

Search your hearts. Have you begun to follow his suggestions that God’s law is no longer binding on you, that the rigour of the law in not for the Christian?  What you are really saying is that you think God is too scrupulous. God is too demanding. You don’t like His law and it is convenient to leave it in the Old Testament.

You have been listening to the whisperings of the Serpent. You are already caught on the rocks of unbelief and unless you repent and turn to God in Jesus Christ you will find that Satan will make shipwreck of your soul.

Well, having laid the foundation carefully, Satan now moves on to propose an alternative Covenant blessing.

Look at verses 4 &5.“You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Look at what the serpent says!

I. God is wrong at best, and a liar at worst. You won’t die at all!

II. God is insecure. He doesn’t want you to become His equals which is what will really happen.

III. Instead of death, enlightenment, the opening of your eyes will be the result and you will know good and evil.

We can picture the Serpent, turning to look at the tree and its ripe luscious fruit as he speaks. Eve follows his gaze. And, the suggestion planted, Eve begins to entertain some deadly ‘what if’s’ verse 6.

What if this snake is right? What if God is insecure and overly restrictive of our freedom? What if I did eat? Wouldn’t I become wise? What if I gave some to Adam?

Go on Eve; imagine what it would be like! See, it is fruit good for food, pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom.

So Satan offered an alternative covenant pattern for relationships, he proposed an alternative covenant Lord, the created thing instead of the creator. He offered an alternative covenant law, and held out alternative covenant blessings. Satan offers an alternative covenant.

Now here is the sad reality. God has constituted human beings accountable to Him. He has shut us all up in a covenant bond. We are to keep his law perfectly and perpetually. That was the original arrangement with Adam and it still stands as our obligation. Our problem is that though we must keep God’s law, ever since Adam’s disobedience, we were, ‘born and conceived in sin’ (Psalm 51:5) We can’t obey even though we must.

And it is to keep us from realising the horror and desperate danger of our predicament, that the great Satanic deception of Adam and Eve, is repeated for every one of us. By nature we rather believe his lie than the truth.

We prefer the satanic covenant, than the covenant of God.

We prefer the covenant of the snake that says we can remodel relationships however we please. We prefer the serpent’s revised covenant law that says I decide what is good for me and right for me. We rather worship the snakes alternative covenant god, the mere created thing, than bend the knee to the only true and living God.

We have exchanged the truth of God for a lie.

And it is the role of God’s word, illuminated by His Spirit, to shatter that delusion, to alert us to the reality of our situation. We may prefer the covenant the snake offers us, but we are in covenant with God, and we are covenant breakers, every one of us! Because we listen to the serpent, the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men, says Paul in Romans 1.

May God shatter the darkness that clouds your reason and keeps you listening to the whispering insinuations of the Devil. You are not your own master! You are not free to adopt alternative relationship models than God prescribes in His Word. You are God’s creature! You are accountable to Him! You are breaking His covenant Law!

And only if you recognise the horror of your situation will you realise that you must run to God as He is revealed in Jesus Christ, the Last Addam, and beg for saving mercy.

Then finally notice their Sin and its consequences, in verses 6-13

First, they both eat the fruit they had been forbidden. It seems such a small thing. And we might be tempted to question the severity of God’s response to so minor an act. One bite each of a piece of fruit and God curses them and all creation with them!

But that really is to miss the point. What was at stake was the prerogatives of the Lord in the hearts of his covenant children. That one bite, was infinite in its wickedness and consequences. God was dethroned and self enthroned in their hearts. They rejected their covenant King!

Then notice the results of their sin, verse 7. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”

Satan had promised them that their eyes would be opened in vs.5. But they thought he meant that it would be a positive experience! They sought wisdom, (Eve saw that the fruit was good for gaining wisdom, vs. 6) but all they got was shame! The first thing they saw with the new wisdom they gained was their nakedness.

Remember that at the end of Chapter 2 we read, “The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame”. The image is of unashamed innocence and complete intimacy. Before there was sin, the original condition of man and woman lacked nothing. They were made naked and they were perfectly content.

Now they had sinned and they knew shame. They felt a terrible lack in their condition. They were exposed for the first time to the holy gaze of God who would surely condemn them.

Adam and Eve felt their nakedness, and they tried to cover up. They tried to undo this feeling of exposure and shame. They made covering of fig leaves.

Now isn’t that precisely our response to our sin? We are gathered here in the sight of God and we know we are sinners. There is not one of us who is guiltless in His sight. We too have a taste of Adam and Eve’s shame, and like them, we all too often try to cover our shame. We try to undo sin’s effects. We attempt to remove our exposure before God by our own efforts.

And like Adam and Eve in verse 8, when God comes among us, isn’t it our natural instinct is to run and hide? To escape His penetrating eyes, that leaves nothing hidden? He knows the depths of our depravity. And it is more than we can bear. We are alienated from God because of sin.

You will also have noticed the deep division that now exists between the man and the woman. Alienation from each other as well as from God is the result of sin.

When God asks Adam if he has eaten the forbidden fruit (and you note that God goes first to the covenant head of this family as the responsible one) in vs.11, Adam replies by saying in effect, “it was the woman’s fault, not mine”. He avoids taking responsibility and places the blame on his wife. Then, when God turns to the woman, she does the same, placing the blame on the Serpent. Now, their answers are all truthful. They do not lie to God. But they do point the finger at others apart from themselves.

Not only do we try to hide from God, not only do we attempt to cover up our shame and guilt, we try to justify and excuse ourselves in His sight. It’s always someone else’s fault. Sometimes it’s even Satan’s fault. It’s never my fault.

But God the Lord knows better. Where Adam and Eve try to hide, God seeks them out by his word, “Where are you?” he calls.

Try and hide as we might, the voice of God will always lay us bare and strip us of our hiding places. God’s word leaves us no excuses and no refuge before His holiness.

So sin alienates us from each other and alienates us from God.

But there is also a slight intimation of God’s redemptive intentions here. When God comes for His regular time of communion with his children in the cool of the day, we read the covenant name of God again. Now at one level that is quite surprising. On the lips of Adam and Eve, following the Serpent’s lead, God was no longer covenant Lord. They had rejected his covenant rule.

But clearly God has not rejected His covenant children. He comes to act as covenant judge, and execute the curse of the covenant upon his children for their disobedience. But as we shall see next week the Covenant Judge has a plan to satisfy his covenant law and undo the curses of Adam’s covenant breaking.

One will come who will bear the full force of the covenant curses, and who will keep the full demands of the covenant law, in order that through faith in Him, covenant breakers like Adam and Eve, and you and me, can once more be embraced by God as covenant heirs, and God the Covenant Judge can once again become our Covenant Lord.

That One, we know, came in the Lord Jesus Christ, who bore the curse in his body on Calvary’s tree, and rose victorious over sin and death and hell as our Last Adam, to give eternal life to all who believe in Him.

Sin alienates us from God, and from one another. But in Christ, the Covenant Lord restores the bond of love, long broken, and reconciles us to Himself, and to one another, in the fellowship of the Church.

That means of course that the only real hiding place for sinners, as we will see, is not among the trees of the garden, but Christ Jesus. Only in Him are we safe from the relentless stare of Gods’ justice.

Oh, let us all flee afresh to Christ, hide in Christ, and take Christ as our Last Adam, to undo the curse, and restore a covenant relationship with our God.

Amen