Paradise Lost | Genesis 3:1-7
Brian Hedges | June 5, 2016
This morning we’re going to be in Genesis 3:1-7. This is the seventh message, I believe, in our ongoing study of the book of Genesis. We’re taking about ten weeks right now to work through these first three chapters.
And today we come to the story of the fall, where paradise was lost, as Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, having been tempted by the serpent in the garden. So let’s read the passage. Genesis chapter 3, beginning at verse 1:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 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.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
This is God’s Word.
This is just the beginning of Genesis chapter 3, a very important and powerful chapter that we’re going to spend several weeks expounding together.
This morning I want to focus on these first seven verses as we look at this moment of seduction, and then the first sin. This is really the beginning of sin in the world. And I want to do it by looking at four very evocative images in the passage that, I think, teach us a lot.
These images are:
The garden,
The serpent,
The tree, and
The fig leaves.
As we work through these potent pictures, we’re going to learn something about God’s goodness, temptation, the nature of sin itself, and then something about salvation.
So let’s take these one at a time.
I. The Garden – Gen. 3:1; Gen. 2
In this first point I’ll be brief, because we’ve already covered the material in Genesis 2. You’ll remember what we learned about the garden in Genesis 2 a couple of weeks ago. The garden, as we saw in Scripture from the book of Ezekiel, is called, “The garden of God,” and when we read Genesis 2 in the light of rest of Scripture, it suggests several things to us about the garden.
(1) The garden was something like a temple sanctuary. If the world was created to be this cosmic temple of God, the garden of Eden was the sanctuary; it was the dwelling place of God. And as we saw, there are all kinds of resonances between the imagery describing the garden of Eden—from the cherubim and the tree of life, to the jewels and the gold and the fruit of the trees—everything. There are lots of resonances between that and the tabernacle in the book of Exodus, and the descriptions of the Temple in the book of Ezekiel. And all of this is just to show that the garden was the place of connection, the intersecting point between heaven and earth, the place where God met with man. It was a temple sanctuary. But it was not only that . . .
(2) The garden was a source of unparalleled life, joy, and delight. In fact, the word Eden is closely related to the Hebrew word for delight, and as one commentator said, the garden was a place of bounty and of beauty. We see this especially in the very trees of the garden, the river running through the garden, and especially the Tree of Life itself standing in the midst of the garden.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, Creation and Fall, makes the interesting observation that the only thing said about the tree of life in Genesis 2 is that it was in the middle of the garden. And then he says, “In the middle of the world which is at Adam’s disposal and over which he has been given dominion is not Adam himself but the tree of divine life.” (Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall; Temptation: Two Biblical Studies, Simon & Schuster, 1959, p. 55)
Life was in the middle of this world in which God had placed Adam. Eden was a place of joy and of great life and delight.
(3) And then the third thing we saw is that the garden was a beachhead, a colony, or even the capital, of God’s kingdom on earth. It was the place where God, through the human beings, would reign, and then extend His reign out into the wilderness of the world, as man turned the wilderness into a garden.
So the garden was all of these things: God’s dwelling place, the center of His reign, and the place of beauty, bounty, and blessing. It was a garden of delights. It was really a paradise. It was heaven on earth. And the reason to emphasize this is just to remind us of the goodness of God. God had been so good to Adam and Eve, to the first humans, in giving them this lavish, wonderful place; a blessing in which to live.
St. Augustine in his magnum opus, The City of God, sketched a compelling portrait of life in the garden: “In Paradise, then, man lived as he desired so long as he desired what God commanded. He lived in the enjoyment of God, and was good by God’s goodness, he lived without any want, and had it in his power so to live eternally. He had food that he might not hunger, drink that he might not thirst, the tree of life that old age might not waste him. There was in his body no corruption, nor seed of corruption, which could produce in him any unpleasant sensation. He feared no inward disease, no outward accident. Soundest health blessed his body, absolute tranquility his soul. As in Paradise there was no excessive heat or cold, so its inhabitants were exempt from the vicissitudes of fear and desire. No sadness of any kind was there, nor any foolish joy; true gladness ceaselessly flowed from the presence of God . . . Body and spirit worked harmoniously together, and the commandment was kept without labor. No languor made their leisure wearisome; no sleepiness interrupted their desire to labor. . . Their love to God was unclouded, their mutual affection was that of faithful and sincere marriage; and from this love flowed a wonderful delight, because they always enjoyed what was loved.”
That’s just a beautiful portrait of heaven on earth, of paradise. It shows us the goodness of God. In Eden, nothing was lacking in God’s provision, nothing was missing from the garden. There was fullness of life, there was fellowship with God. There was unhindered, uncorrupted, unbroken communion between God and man, between the man and his wife; and then a complete harmony between the created beings and the created world in which they lived.
They had everything they possible could have wanted or needed or desired. They only had one limitation: they couldn’t be God. That was the limitation. They could not be God. They could not set the terms of their existence for themselves. They could not decide for themselves the nature of right and wrong. But with that one limitation, if they lived under God’s reign, they would live under God’s blessing with the fullness of life and joy and everything that God had to offer them.
So those were the circumstances of the garden. And that’s the first we have to understand as we then look at the temptation scene. That leads to the second thing, which is the serpent.
II. The Serpent – Gen. 3:1-5
Verse 1 tells us that “the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.” The word crafty here is the word that means shrewd, or cunning. It’s the word that’s often translated in the book of Proverbs as prudence.
And it’s interesting here--it’s kind of a mystery about the serpent. The text doesn’t identify who this serpent is, or what the serpent is. The text is much more interested in the serpent’s words than the serpent’s identity.
Now I think we’re on safe grounds in Scripture to say that this serpent is ultimately identified with our ancient foe, Satan, the adversary, the devil, the accuser of the brothers. We already read the passage in Revelation 12:9 this morning, which describes the great dragon, the ancient serpent who’s called the devil, Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.
And so, in light of the rest of Scripture, that’s who this is. But the focus of the passage isn’t on his identity, but on his seduction of the man and woman—on the temptation.
Let’s analyze the serpent’s twisted, tempting words. In verse 1 he said to the woman, “did God actually say...” stop right there. [Derek] Kidner comments that this is “both disturbing and flattering: it smuggles in the assumption that God’s word is subject to our judgment.” (Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentary, InterVarsity Press, 1967, p. 67)
That’s the first step. He’s questioning, he’s smuggling in the question of God’s word. “Did God actually say…?” And then notice how he distorts and misrepresents and twists what God had said: “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden…” (v. 1)
What’s he doing there? That’s a complete distortion. That is not what God said. God did not say, “you shall not eat of any tree in the garden.” In fact, what God said is, “you shall surely eat of every tree of the garden, except for the one.” And so, right here the devil is twisting the word of God. And he’s very subtly maligning the goodness of God. He’s bringing into question God’s character. He’s saying, in effect, “is God really on your side? Is God really good? Is he really for you?”
And then Eve reponds, “And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said,” and again, she misquotes, “‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden.’” Notice that there’s no mention of the tree of life, which was also in the midst of the garden. “‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”
What does she do? She over-corrects. This isn’t what God said. God did not say, “You shall not touch it,” he said, “You shall not eat of it.” And so she’s magnifying the severity of God as she understands it. God seems overly strict, overly severe.
And then the serpent flatly contradicts God’s word in verses 4-5: “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die.’” Direct contradiction to what God had said. Verse 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.”
Here is another maligning of the character of God. He imputes to God a false motive. “God’s a jealous God, he’s holding something back. He doesn’t want you to have this.”
Once more, Derek Kidner is helpful: “It is the serpent’s word against God’s, and the first doctrine to be denied is judgment . . . the tempter pits his bare assertion against the word and works of God, presenting divine love as envy, service as servility, and a suicidal plunge as a leap into life…” (Kidner, p. 68)
Now this is teaching us something about how temptation works. And it always works like this. Temptation is always presenting to us something forbidden as something that will bring us joy, happiness, and life. The subtle assumption behind every temptation is that God is not good. God’s holding something back. You can’t really trust him.
Here’s a helpful summary from Gordon Wenham: "The serpent begins by overemphasizing the strictness of the law (God had put only one tree out of bounds) and questioning God’s good will toward human beings (something the narrative in chapter 2 had put beyond doubt)… The serpent then called into question God’s judgment by claiming, ‘You will not surely die,’ and promised instead sophistication (that their eyes will be opened) and spiritual advancement (that they will be like God)." (Wenham, “Genesis,” New Bible Commentary, IVP, p. 63)
And so they ate, they took the fruit and they ate. Eve was seduced. You ask, what was Adam doing? Well, the text tells us he was right there with her. He was with her, and he succumbed. She gave him the fruit, and he ate.
I think before moving on, the obvious thing to do here is to do a little bit of self-diagnosis, and to ask, do we also respond to temptation this way? Because so often, we do, don’t we?
Let me as you some questions. How do you know that you’re being seduced? The problem with seduction is that it happens so subltly. We don’t really recognize it while it’s happening. So we’ve got to sit back and ask ourselves questions with what’s going on in our mind.
Do you ever find yourself frequently thinking about something sinful or forbidden? Is your imagination possessed by some sinful object, attraction, or desire? Remember that Eve was enticed to sin because of what she first saw. She saw that the tree was good for food and desired to make one wise. Do you ever dwell on sin with private pleasure? When you think about some temptation to sin, do you taste its sweetness with the tongue of your soul? You’re kind of rolling it around inside. What would that be like? Do you ever rationalize? Do you find yourself arguing against conviction, or against the clarity of Scripture? Here’s some of our rationalizations:
“It’s just a little sin.”
“No one is perfect.”
“God will forgive me.”
“I won’t go too far.”
“I’ll give this up soon.”
Just this one time!
All of those are the kinds of lies we tell ourselves when we fall to the seduction of sin.
Well, Adam and Eve fell, and so have you and I, thousands of times over. What did they do? They ate the fruit of the tree. And that leads us to the third image of the passage—the tree itself.
III. The Tree – Gen. 3:6
If the garden teaches us something about the goodness of God, and the serpent’s shrewd words reveal the seductiveness of temptation, the tree teaches us something about sin.
The key verse here is verse 6: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”
Just notice several things here:
(1) First of all, the appeal of the tree. The tree was “good for food”. The woman saw that the tree was good for food. There was an appeal to it, and that’s how sin works. Sin appeals to our desire for something good. It appeals to our desire for happiness.
There’s an old Puritan named Thomas Brooks who wrote perhaps one of the most helpful manuals on spritiual warfare ever written. It was called, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. Brooks just unfolds strategy after strategy that Satan uses to seduce us into sin, and here is the first one: he presents the bait and he hides the hook. (Precious Remedies, p. 29)
That’s what’s going on here. This is how we’re seduced into sin. We see the appearance. It looks good, while the consequences of the sin are hidden from us. In other words, evil almost always comes to us in disguise. It appeals to something in us, the desire for good, and it appears as something which is not.
Sin looks like life, but it’s really death. Sin is misery masquerading as mirth. Sin is an interstate to hell, but the sign on the road says, “Highway to Happiness. This is the path to life.”
(2) And then consider for a moment the significance of the tree. What is this tree? What does it represent? We saw this a few weeks ago. You may remember that we ruled out some things. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil doesn’t represent sexual desire, or sexual experience. It’s not omniscient knowledge. We ruled out those things.
The tree represented, rather, moral autonomy. That’s the nature of sin. Moral autonomy is independence from God; the desire to call the shots for myself; to decide for myself what constitutes right and wrong. The clue in the passage that shows us this is in verse 6, when the woman saw that the tree was good, desired, to make one wise. A number of scholars have shown the link to wisdom literature and how in Hebrew wisdom literature, wisdom is always the product of the fear of the Lord. Remember how the Proverb says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” But here, the woman wants wisdom without the fear of the Lord. She wants wisdom on her own terms. She sees the tree has the ability to make her wise. She wants this knowledge for herself. She wants the capacity to decide for herself, irregardless of God, what’s right and wrong in her life. And so she abandons the fear of the Lord in the pursuit of wisdom. It’s moral autonomy; independence from God. And that’s the very heart of sin. It’s the very nature of sin—the desire to live independently of God. Or another way to put it, the desire to be God. “I want to do what I want to do,” that’s the heart of sin.
(3) And why did they eat? That is what they desired, but what is the root beneath the sin? This, again, comes back to the first point: the garden showed the lavish goodness of God. In the second point, the serpent undermined the goodness of God, he cast doubts on the goodness of God, and then when they ate the fruit, the root of the sin, the root of the disobedinece, was distrust of the goodness of God.
The root of every sin is unbelief. That’s really what it is. The root of every sin is unbelief. It’s not believing the goodness of God. It’s not trusting God. That’s true no matter what kind of sin it is.
Sinclair Ferguson released a new book a few months ago called The Whole Christ, and it’s a book that is about the sins of both legalism and antinomianism. Antinomiansim is basically turning grace into a license for sin and saying that we don’t in any repsect have to obey God. So, legalism is trying to earn salvation by our works, and antinomiansim is saying, well I’m saved by grace, so I can live however I want.
Ferguson, in that book, made this really insightful observation. He said that both of these things, legalism and antinomianism, are not so much opposite errors as they are "non-identical twins" born from the same womb. And that womb is distrusting of the goodness of God.
The legalist tries to use the law as the means of gaining favor with God, but fundamental to it is this suspicion that God’s not really good, that’s he’s not really gracious, that I’ve got to earn this.
The antinomian ignores everything that God says and tries to live on his own terms under the umbrella of grace but, again, distrusting the goodness of God, the goodness of what God has said is good for us. Right at the heart of both is a distrust of God. And everytime you sin, every time I sin, the reason we do it is because in that moment we’re so consumed with the emotion that we feel, or the desire that we have, that in that moment, that desire is everything. God is out of the picture, and we fundamentally don’t believe that what God says is best. And so, the human race was plunged into sin, and we’ve been repeating this sin over and over again ever since.
IV. The Fig Leaves – Gen. 3:7
Finally we come to the result in verse 7, and this is the fourth image in the passage: the fig leaves. Look at verse 7: “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”
It’s interesting to contrast between Gen. 2:25 and Gen. 3:7. In 2:25, the man and the woman were naked and were not ashamed, and in 3:7, we see the first blush of shame on a human face, the first pang of guilt in the human conscience, the first impulse to run and hide in the human soul.
They realized they were naked, and it’s not just they realized their physical nakedness, they realized the vulnerability of their spirits and souls. They recognized that they had transgressed, they had stepped over a line. They had crossed a point of no return. And so what do they do? They try to cover themselves with the fig leaves.
Now if the garden shows us the bounty and beauty of God’s goodness, the serpent shows us the seductive subtlety of temptation, and the tree shows us the essential nature of sin, the fig leaves reveal to us the absolute futility of all our self-salvation projects. And it shows us the real need we have for a divine provision—salvation.
They try to cover themselves, but it’s futile. They’re not really covering themselves. They sew the fig leaves together, but it’s inadequate covering. But their response shows us what we all do when faced with our sin. What do we do? Our innate response is to run and hide, to try to cover, to shift the blame, to put it on someone else, or to live in denial. And so we try to deal with our sin and guilt and our shame in myriads of ways—we try to deal with it through education, hedonistic pursuits of pleasure, we basically live in denial and escape. We try to deal with it through psychology. We even use religion, don’t we? We try to hide our shame and our guilt.
Sometimes we’re like The Emperor with No Clothes. Remember that old story? We live in denial. We act like we’re dressed, but everybody around can see that there’s a problem. Most of the time, we spend our time, resources, and energy trying to fix our problems, hide them, to dress them up to make them look less terrible than they are.
But all of these self-salvation projects are futile. They’re just fig leaves. So what is it that we need?
When I do these teaching and training times with teachers and developing preachers in our church, one of the things we do is teach people to ask a series of questions, two of which are: what is the fallen condition, and what is the gospel solution?
This whole sermon has been fallen condition. It’s what we’ve been looking at. And the rest of the Bible gives us the gospel solution, but it all begins right here. If Genesis 3 show us the fall and the condition we’re now in, Genesis 3 also contains little hints that develop into the broad storyline of Scripture showing us God’s solution to the problem of human sin. You see it in verse 15, where God makes this promise to Adam and Eve and says: (he’s speaking here to the serpent)
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.
It’s the promise of a seed, of a descendent, of a child that will come and crush the head of the serpent. And of cousre that descendent was Jesus.
Do you remember the scene in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ? There’s a lot in the movie that I don’t like, but there’s a wonderful scene when Jim Caviezel playing Jesus is in the garden of Gethsemane, and he’s wrestling—this struggle with the will of God. He comes to the point of “Not my will but yours be done,” and stands up, and there’s a snake slithering in the garden, and he stomps on the serpent’s head!
The scene itself is fictional; I don’t think that really happened in the garden of Gethsamene, but it’s the perfect picture of what Jesus did on the cross. He defeated our enemies of Satan and sin.
But he not only did that, he also took our place. You see, when Jesus was on the cross—most of you probably know this—Jesus was stripped. The picture’s always domesticated a little bit to make it a little cleaner, a little more appropriate. But in reality he was crucified naked, and in that moment he was taking our shame so that we could be clothed in his glorious righteousness. He secured the blessing for us by taking the dreadful curse of God’s judgment and wrath in our place, so that through his self-sacrifice—through his death on our behalf—he rescues us, restores us, and brings us back to the tree of life.
As we come to the table this morning, I want to end with this little comment in Derek Kidner’s short little commentary on Genesis 3:6, where Eve took of the fruit and ate it. Kidner says, "She took . . . and ate: so simple the act, so hard its undoing. God will taste poverty and death before ‘take and eat’ become verbs of salvation." (Kidner, p. 68)
You see, Adam and Eve took and ate the fruit and plunged themselves and their entire posterity into death. But Jesus came onto the scene as the new Adam, taking our nakedness, our guilt, our shame, dying our death, so that he can now say to us, “Take and eat, take and eat. Come to my table. I invite you back into my fellowship. Receive from me, not death, but the fullness of life itself.”
Let’s pray.
Oh how shall we, your goodness tell, O God, which you to us have shown, that we, the children of death and hell, should be called the children of God? It is an amazing, beautiful, glorious thing that you have done, that you have sent your Son to undo the curse of Adam.
We thank you for this morning, and as we consider ourselves in the light of this passage, every one of us has to acknowledge that we have repeated the transgression dozens and really hundreds of thousands of times over. We’ve succumbed to the seduction of temptation and sin, and we confess that in so doing, fundamentally in our heart of hearts, what we’ve really been saying is, “God you’re not good, and you’re not worthy to be trusted.” But in the cross, you’ve shown us once and for all that you are good, that you’re so good and so loving, that in the person of the Son you would take death itself in our place; that you would take hell itself in our place, in order to restore us, to reconcile us, to renew us, to recreate us, to redeem us, to bring us back.
So Father, this morning we thank you for the gospel. We thank you for Christ and what he has done. We ask you to forgive us the many times we have sinned. We ask you to make us alert and watchful to the seductive words of the enemy who would lead us away from you. We ask especially that you would give us an undying confidence that you really are good, that you can be trusted, that you would help us to trust your word; and to submit ourselves to you.
Brian G. Hedges
