Genesis 03
THE FALL AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Chapter 3:1 – 6:8
With this chapter ends the period of which God said that it was very good. This is the end of Paradise and the end of the Sabbath, the rest in which God enjoyed His work. Here sin enters into the world and the result will be that God says that He is sorry he made man. "And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.' "[ 1 ]All this is hard to understand for us in the light of God's omniscience, but we will have to look at that later.
We are not introduced to the serpent that makes its appearance in this chapter. Only at the end of the Bible is he identified as Satan. In Revelations John says: "The great dragon was hurled down; that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him."[ 2 ] So it is Satan himself, who penetrates into the garden in an effort to get man over to his side.
It is probable that at this point he took possession of the body of an existing animal, that was under the jurisdiction of Adam. We will come back to this at a later point. So far the Scripture has revealed nothing to us about this existence of evil, either on the planet God created or outside it. The only hint, was the command to Adam and Eve not to eat from 'the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil ,' because it would bring about death. We are given pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, before we get the whole picture.
For people who have read the Bible, this does not present a problem. We can read Genesis 3 and understand what happened. But the question is, what did Adam and Eve know? They had the command of God, and that was all. It should have been sufficient. But how much did they understand? We could ask the question that was asked in connection with The Watergate Affaire: "What did the Adam know, and when did he know it?"
It seems that here the element of faith was introduced. God had told Adam what he needed to know and if Adam would have trusted God, which is what faith is, he would not have fallen into sin. God had presented man with life, in the form of "the Tree of Life ," and with a command, which he could obey or disobey. There is no indication that Adam or Eve knew who Satan was. It seems that God trusted man more than man trusted God.
If our hypothesis about the fall of Lucifer between Ch. 1 vs. 1 and vs. 2 is correct, and if the chaotic condition of the earth was the result of this fall, and the account of ch. 1:3-31 is the report of a restoration of a ruined creation, the creation of man may be of much greater importance in the cosmic scheme than only the appearance of a new species. We may presume that when God created Adam He had the Incarnation of Jesus Christ in mind. And so the role of Adam, which is described as being fruitful, to fill the earth and subdue it and to rule the fish and birds and every living creature, would include keeping the serpent under his dominion also.[ 3 ]
What I mean to say is, that part of Adam's job description may have been to protect the planet from the influence of Satan. This would have made man a formidable opponent to the devil and his strategy is to bring man over to his side before he has grown into the role that God had in mind for him. We are dealing with matters of cosmic and eternal proportions.
So in vs. 1 we are introduced to the serpent. We read: "Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made." There are two possibilities: the first one is that Satan had taken possession of one of the animals that God had created. The second would be that Satan disguised himself as a serpent. In view of the fact that God pronounces judgement on the serpent, which carries over to all the snakes on earth, it seems that the first was the case. Since Adam had been given the task to rule over all the animals, the snake could have run to Adam for protection, when Satan wanted to take possession of him. The fact that he did not do this, gives ground for the punishment that is pronounced over him in vs.14.
Most likely the serpent may have been one of the most intelligent animals even before Satan took possession of him. Otherwise his speaking to Eve would have startled her too much and this could have aroused suspicion. Initially, she would not have suspected that she was dealing with a supernatural phenomenon. Probably we are given a condensation of a prolonged dialogue between Eve and the serpent. It must have taken more time than our text allows to convince the woman and bring her to the point of eating the forbidden fruit.
It is hard to read this account without thinking of C. S. Lewis' masterpiece Perelandra, in which the green woman is tempted by Satan in the from of Dr. Weston. The dialogue there covers several chapters and ends in victory for the human race.
Here Satan sets out by twisting the truth and presenting it as truth with a question mark to Eve. He acts as if he wants to know and needs instruction. It is not without reason that the Bible says that the serpent was more crafty. He knew exactly that human beings love to teach and share their superior knowledge with those who do not possess it. "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden?' " The KJV says: "Yeah, hath God said...?"The misquote does not only ask for a correction, but in a very subtle way it throws doubt on anything else God might have said. The implication is, that if this is true, if God put man in a garden and condemns him to starve to death, what kind of a God are we dealing with.
The question puts Eve immediately on the defensive. Eve's answer is partly correct. She quotes the Word of God rather freely and, maybe at one, point incorrectly, but at least she answers with God's Word. What God had said literally in ch. 2:16,17 was: "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." There is in this text no mention of touching. But what seems to me the first sign of weakening of alertness in Eve, is the fact that she places the tree in the middle of the garden. In so doing she gives it a more prominent place than the Tree of Life . All of a sudden the Tree of Knowledge occupies the center of her attention.
Centuries later her Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ, would meet the same serpent. He shows us how to answer the devil. In Matthew's Gospel Jesus answers with: "It is written," quoting the Word of God literally. Of course Eve did not have a Bible and at this point in history there was no need for the art of writing. It is only because of death, which cuts the bridges between generations and because of man's failing memory, that writing has become a necessity. A Chinese proverb says: "The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory." Eve's incorrect quote is a foretaste of death. The presence of the Evil One has started to lure her away already from God, who is the source of life.
The next step in the temptation is the contradiction of the Word of God. With the first innocent- sounding question, Satan had left the door open for retreat, if that were necessary. But here the first lie on earth is born. That is why Jesus calls him, "the father of lies." He says of Satan: "He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies." [ 4 ]The "murderer from the beginning" starts to strangle the woman with the first lie ever spoken on earth. "You will surely not die." Having contradicted the Word of Truth, he proceeds to slander God.
At this point Satan must have known something of what God wanted man to become. He may not have had a full understanding of God's plan to share His glory with man and to make mankind the bride of His Son, filled with His glory. But he understood enough that if man became what God wanted him to be, it would mean the end of the kingdom of darkness. The real target of this temptation was Adam. But Satan must have feared that Adam would be too formidable a prey to swallow alive. He guessed correctly that it would be easier to trip Eve and to leave it to her to pass death on to her husband.
After the outright lie "you shall not die," the devil mixes a little bit of truth into his words, to make the argument sound more logical. He sheds, first of all, doubt on God's motives; and secondly, he tells Eve that she will have some essential point in common with God: the knowledge of good and evil. He says three things: her eyes will be opened, she will be like God, and she will know the difference between good and evil.
To start with the latter: Eve knew of the existence of evil, because of God's command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil . What the devil says is, "you will know," but what he means is, "you will experience." He does not explain that there is no need to experience in order to know. If you ask me if it is good to kill somebody, I will not answer: "I do not know, because I have never done it." I wish we would be able to stand back and let the horror of this moment in the history of our world fully penetrate to us. Satan is at the point of killing the most wonderful part of God's creations, and Eve just lets him do it. God Himself did not have the experience of evil. In that respect the devil's word was an outright lie. Eve did not become like God at this point. It would not be until centuries later that Satan's word would become true and God would experience evil when Jesus would take upon Himself the sin of the world and die on the cross. This was not because man had become like God but because God had become man. From our perspective we can see how twisted the lie was. Probably the devil himself did not completely understand what he was saying. "You will be like God." Nothing was farther from the truth. The image of God in man, which would have developed into a glorious likeness, would fade out almost completely with the act of sin. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."[ 5 ]
The irony was that God's plan was for man to become like Him. The Apostle John says: "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."[ 6 ]And in Revelations we read: "One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, 'Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.' And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God...."[ 7 ]
Here again, we do not know how much the devil could guess of God's plan for man. That fact that he insinuates that God would not want man to be like Himself but that Satan knew a way to get there anyhow, suggests that he had an inkling of God's plan with man. But the short-cut leads man away from his glorious destination and some never get there.
Maybe the worst lie is "your eyes will be opened." Sin makes man blind. What the devil does to Eve is best described by Paul when he says: "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God."[ 8 ] The devil always throws a veil over the eyes of men, which makes them move from reality to unreality. It is not until we stand in the presence of God that we see things as they really are. When sin opened the eyes of Adam and Eve, they saw their shame and nothing else. They knew they had been deceived. Vs.6 shows that when Eve starts paying attention to the words of the devil, the optical illusion begins immediately: "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." We should never lose sight of the fact that Eve is as yet under no compulsion to follow the devil's suggestions. Her will was still free. She could eat and she could refuse to eat. She bears full responsibility for her act. It is true that the temptation, carried out with so much cleverness, was hard to resist; but it was not impossible.
I believe that the main problem was that neither Adam nor Eve had ever consciously, by an act of the will, chosen God's side by eating from the Tree of Life. Sartre was right in saying that man only becomes fully man when he makes choices. He was wrong in believing that it did not matter what kind of choices were made. It is still true that we reach maturity by making the right choice.
The writer to the Hebrews defines maturity as the ability to distinguish between good and evil. "But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil."[ 9 ]The longer we postpone making the choice for good, the easier we will be lured into evil. Adam and Eve may have been innocent, but they were not mature. The consummation of the act of sin is the eating of the fruit. As long as she only looked and even as she started ascribing qualities to the fruit that were not there, she was only on the road but she could have returned. The illusion was the work of the devil, but the act of taking and eating was hers.
The act was also irreversible. From that moment on only God could save her from total destruction. Sin had entered her heart to stay, and now she had to die. Because only physical death could save her from eternal spiritual perdition. From that moment on she was no longer a free person. As Jesus says in John's Gospel: "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin... So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed."[ 10 ]
The pattern of temptation has remained the same throughout the ages. John talks about "the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life."[ 11 ] The devil has never excelled in being original. And in James we read: "But each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death."[ 12 ]
But this was not the condition Eve was in when she committed her first sin. She did not sin because she was prompted by a sinful nature. For both salvation and sinning the basis is hearing. What Paul says about the Gospel can be applied to temptation also. "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God."[ 13 ]The objection is often stated that there is no tangible basis for faith in God's Word. But the same can be said about sin and temptation. It was and is the word of Satan over against the Word of God. What Eve thought she saw "that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom" was an illusion. She had the Word of God for the truth and the word of Satan for the lie. After she sinned, she knew immediately that she was deceived, but her offspring still believes that what they think they see is the real thing and that the things of God are unreal. It is only when we believe the Word of God that we see reality. As was said before, sin blinds our eyes.
Then the verse says: "She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." It seems very unlikely that Adam would have been present from the beginning of Eve's encounter with the serpent, or even that he would have witnessed Eve's picking of the fruit. The RSV omits completely that Adam was with Eve. It says: "she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate." Some commentators read this to mean that Adam was "in the neighborhood," and others see in it an indication that they were living together, not necessarily that they were standing next to each other.
Adam's eating of the fruit calls up many more questions than Eve's. He is ultimately held responsible for what happened. The Bible gives no details, but it is obvious that Adam knew what he was doing, and was consequently guilty. The fact that Eve was tempted and lured into sin may be considered as extenuating circumstance. But Adam was not tempted directly by the devil. He appears to have acted of his own free will, only slightly influenced by his wife. The situation is far too serious to make flippant remarks about this. God had created man first in His image with the express purpose of ruling over His creation and protecting it against this kind of assault. But Adam gives up without a struggle. Eve must have told him what the fruit was. He also must have know that she had eaten first, and undoubtedly he must have seen a change for the worse in her. Yet he takes and eats. There has been much speculation about what would have happened if Eve had fallen and Adam had not. C. S. Lewis says in The Chronicles of Narnia: "We never know what would have happened."
The consequences are immediately apparent. We read in vs.7 "Then 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." It has been speculated that before the fall, man was clothed in divine radiance. But ch. 2:25 states specifically: "The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame." There is no doubt in my mind that a drastic change occurred, but it was probably not as simple as the taking away of a covering of parts of their body. Objectively, there is no reason to be ashamed of any part of the human body. The fact that people feel ashamed to expose their sexual organs to one another is an phenomenon that is difficult to explain, except for the story of the fall. Also the only humans present were they. If a man and wife are ashamed to expose themselves before one another that means that there is a lack of love. For love is naked.
The first result of the act of sin was a change in their affection for and attraction toward one another. But even worse, they were ashamed before God. They had felt perfectly comfortable in God's presence in their naked condition before, but sin had changed that completely. First they hid from one another by sewing fig leaves to cover themselves, and then they hid from God, fig leaves and all. They must have realized that what covered them before one another did not cover them before God. Most of all their feeling of shame had little or nothing to do with their physical appearance; it was a spiritual phenomenon. They felt naked, not because their body was uncovered, but because they had severed themselves from God by disobeying His Word.
It has been argued that their actual sin was not an act of eating of a fruit, but the act of sexual intercourse. This misconception is particularly persistent among the tribal people of Irian Jaya, Indonesia. But since God made man in His image and likeness as male and female, and ordered them to be fruitful and multiply, this could hardly be the case. Their sin was disobedience to the command of God, and there is no reason to believe that the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil should not be taken literally.
The devil was partly right in saying that their eyes would be opened; there was an immediate realization that they had sinned. They knew that God had been right and that they were dying. The warning in ch. 2:17 had been "when you eat of it you will surely die." Or as the KJV and the RSV put it: "for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." They did die that same day, although their body kept on existing for almost one thousand years. In ch. 5:5 we read: "Altogether, Adam lived 930 years, and then he died."This physical death was the last phase of his dying that started on the day he sinned. The Hebrew in 2:17 says literally "dying you shall die." Death started at the spiritual level and then penetrated the level of the soul and finally consumed the body.
On the basis of what Paul writes in I Thessalonians, we believe that man exists as a unity of spirit, soul and body.[ 14 ] It needs no explanation as to what is meant by the body. The soul must be the seat of man's intellect, emotions and will. And the spirit is the organ with which he is able to commune with God. The dying started immediately in the spirit. By disobeying man severed his communion with God. It is only through the regeneration by the Holy Spirit that this fellowship is restored. Jesus explains this to Nicodemus:"I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again… I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit."[ 15 ]Later in this same chapter we are told that this regeneration is the result of faith in the payment for our sins by Jesus when He died on the cross. "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, That everyone who believes in him may have eternal life."[ 16 ]The amazing part of the temptation is that the devil did not attack man's spirit, but his soul. It was through thoughts and emotions and ultimately through an act of the will that first Eve and then Adam died spiritually. This is the more reason to believe that Adam and Eve never fully developed their spiritual relationship with God by eating of the Tree of Life. Their spirit was alive, but it had not grown into maturity yet.
Vs.7 makes clear, as we said above, that the first result of sin is the breaking up of the relationship between husband and wife. Obviously, this was preceded by an inner breakdown in each of the individuals. The sequence of events must have been as follows: first the relationship with God was severed, secondly the band of the spirit, which tied soul and body together had snapped and so there was no inner harmony. Then finally there was a breakdown in interhuman relationships. It is important to understand this sequence because the healing process follows the same order. It is when we are born again by the Holy Spirit that fellowship with God is restored. This starts the sorting-out process in our inner man, which is part of our sanctification or inner healing. It will depend on how fast this process develops as to how well we will do in our inter-human relationships. The Bible ties loving God and loving fellow humans together. The following quotations are just a condensed selection:
- "Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."[ 17 ]
- "Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD."[ 18 ]And lest we think that this only pertains to one's own family, Leviticus adds:
- "The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God."[ 19 ]
- John settles it all by saying: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen." It is the experience to be loved by God that heals us inwardly and enables us to reflect love toward others. "We love because He first loved us."[ 20 ]
What follows in vs. 7 and 8 is both pathetic and moving. First Adam and Eve hide from each other. They cannot stand the idea of being naked before one another. They feel like the other one can see straight through them, and since they hate what they see in themselves, they are sure that they will hate that in the other also. So they put on masks. Sin and masks go together. We put on masks for our own benefit and for the benefit of one another. People who say they do not wear masks are the greatest pretenders. This does not mean we are all always phonies, but we act like we are. In his book Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis describes the character of the queen who decides that she is too ugly to look at herself; so she starts wearing a veil. She gets in trouble when she has to talk to a god, because the gods only talk to people face to face. And she asks herself "how can the gods talk to us till we have faces?" A very profound question!
The most amazing thing, as we shall see later, is not that God takes away our masks and exposes us as naked before Him and one another, but that He provides us with another cover, not of our own making. The skin of the animal that died in the place of man (see vs.21) covers them sufficiently to be able to live and to maintain a relationship with God and man in a broken world. The covering with fig leaves was bad and pathetic enough, but then comes the dreaded moment where God comes for the time of His daily visit on the planet and the hour of fellowship with man. Moses puts this visit "in the cool of the day." It is doubtful that days would have been hot and tiring in paradise, but the description gives us a clear image of rest and beauty such as we know it at sunset. We get the impression that God's visit was a daily reoccurring event. How this corresponds to a realization of God's omnipresence, I do not know. It is possible that Adam and Eve needed moments of being consciously in God's presence since they had never eaten of the Tree of Life yet.
Undoubtedly, this hour in the cool of the day was the highlight of their daily life. But this day, sin turned it into a moment of terror. They had just covered their nakedness with fig leaves before one another, but when they heard God approaching, they knew immediately that this mask would not do before their Creator. So they hid behind the trees. If the leaves were not enough, maybe the trees would do! How foolish sin makes a man. Sin always shows itself in irrational behavior. It seems that God plays their game of hide and seek, the oldest game in the world. In vs.8 He pretends as if He does not know where they are, and calls: "Where are you?" If Adam and Eve had believed that the omnipresent God would not always be with them and that the omniscient God would not know where they are, God goes along with them for a while. The question is, of course, not an effort for God to gain information, but to make Adam and Eve understand that they are hiding and that hiding for God is useless. The question: "Where am I?" as a sinful being in a sinful world could be the first step toward God and salvation. Before sin entered, the question did not have to be asked. After eating from the Tree of Knowledge Adam lost the answers to most questions. How knowing can you get?!
We have to realize how much Gospel there is in vs. 9. "But the LORD God called to the man, 'Where are you?' " Both the RSV and NIV use the phrase "But the LORD God ....." Adam and Eve are running away from God, but God seeks them. He does this by forcing them to realize where they are. God knows where Adam is, but Adam does not. God seeks man because He loves him. The essence of the Gospel is "not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."[ 21 ] And Paul writes in Romans: "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."[ 22 ]Sin may separate us from God, but it does not hide us from God.
Adam never considered the possibility of not answering. He must have known all the time that man cannot hide from God. The question from the omniscient God "Where are you?" makes him understand that he is not hiding from God but from himself. His answer is partly truthful: "I was afraid." This is a new word in his vocabulary. He had never been afraid in his life before, but in eating from the Tree of Knowledge , he acquired this new experience.
Fear comes from a feeling of inadequacy. We know that we are facing forces against which we are not equipped to defend ourselves. Thus far Adam had been on God's side, so a feeling of inadequacy was unknown to him. Now he has left the side of God, and he is afraid. The problem with sin is that it makes us lose our sense of direction. Adam is afraid of God. He should have been afraid of Satan and his temptation.
In ch. 2:25 we read: "The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame." A sense of nakedness is actually a sense of shame. Sin and shame fall into the same category. Shame is a rather complicated phenomenon. It has a moral connotation. It means that we are aware of the fact that we are not what we should be. It is a feeling of the conscience. Adam knew what he had done, and he was afraid of the consequences. He must have been amazed at God's reaction to his sin. First, that God seeks him and calls him. This is what John Newton called Amazing Grace.
God asks him two questions: "Who told you you were naked?" and "Have you eaten from the tree?" Again this is not an effort of God to gain information from Adam. God wants Adam to get a clear picture of what he has done and why he feels the way he does. It is because he has disobeyed God's command that he is afraid and feels ashamed.
This seems all rather simple to us, but it is amazing to see how much trouble men often go through analyze the root of their problems. When my brother-in-law was in the process of divorcing his first wife, and I tried to tell him that he needed a personal relationship with Jesus, he could not see what that had to do with it. There seems to be the general "blank spot" in the life of most people. Most marriages break up because God is not in the center, and most of our difficulties are due to the fact that He does not occupy the first place in our lives.
One wonders what would have happened if Adam would have made a clear and unreserved confession, taking the blame of what he had done. But Adam passes the buck to Eve, and Eve to the serpent. There is some truth in the excuses, but there is also a redeeming factor in taking the blame for our sins. It is hard to have our debts paid for us if we do not own up to owing. Hiding from the facts and putting the blame elsewhere seems to be a built-in feature of sin. In sinning we submit ourselves to the Father of Lies.
As a matter of fact there is a hint of blaming God in Adam's reply: "The woman you put here with me; she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." (vs.12) What Eve says is true, but there is no mention of personal guilt and responsibility in her words either. It is all the fault of the serpent.
Judgment starts with the serpent. In the verses 14 and 15 we read: "So the LORD God said to the serpent, 'Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.'" It seems that at first the words are addressed to the animal, but further on words are directed to the spiritual power that used the animal.
The fact that God actually punishes the snake implies that the animal bore responsibility; otherwise, judgment would be unfair. What this responsibility was, we are not told. It seems that Satan took possession of the serpent's body, but that somehow the animal could have refused, or could have run to Adam for help, because, as we mentioned before, all animals stood under Adam's protection. God takes away the legs of the snake. If I remember my biology correctly, there are rudimentary legs in each snake's skeleton, which testify to the truth of this punishment. The eating of dust is evidently a figure of speech. The dust is not the snake's nourishment, but his environment. The way the snake has learned to adept itself to it's new condition is one of the miracles of nature. We could call it an object lesson on how to live with sin and its consequences.
It is interesting to note that the serpent is still around when God calls the court to order. It is said that after a poisonous snake has bitten his prey, he can always be found in the neighborhood, waiting for the opportunity to swallow what his venom killed. This habit acquires spiritual significance here. The snake would have done better to make himself scarce.
Although we might read some ambiguity in the line "And I will put enmity between you and the woman," since it seems that women are particularly scared of snakes, (but they are so of mice also), the prophecy is clearly directed at Satan, the spiritual being and not at the reptile.
Genesis chapter 3 verse 15 is the first prophecy found in the Bible: "And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." It is addressed at the devil, but it even extends beyond the person of Satan himself because it speaks regarding the offspring of both the serpent and the woman. We have no problem of determining who is meant by Eve's offspring, even if the word has a plural connotation. Obviously, God has His Son Jesus Christ in mind. But who is the offspring of the serpent? As far as we know, angels do not have offspring. We conclude this from what Jesus says in Matthew: "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven."[ 23 ]In the parable of the weeds and the wheat, Jesus calls human beings "the sons of the evil one."[ 24 ]And: "The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one."[ 25 ] It seems though, that vs. 15 does not just speak about men who have decided to follow Satan instead of Christ. Probably both spiritual powers and human beings are included. This would make sense, particularly in connection with the coming of the antichrist.
The first prophecy introduces the Cross in the Bible. We need the New Testament perspective to understand this, but it is obvious that it was in dying at the cross that Jesus Christ crushed the head of the serpent. The image is of a man stepping on a poisonous snake. The snake bites his heel; which causes the man's death, but in dying the man crushes the head of the snake. The death of our Lord Jesus Christ means that Satan is dethroned and his authority is taken away. The fact that he behaves in our present age as if he still possess his full power, does not change this reality. Peter says: "Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour."[ 26 ] But there is no longer any legal ground for the lion to devour. All he can do is roar, which he does very well.
A good Old Testament illustration of Satan's attitude is found in the person of King Saul, who was dethroned by God, but who kept on sitting on the throne of Israel for a total of forty years. Samuel had said to Saul ".... You have rejected the word of the LORD, and the LORD has rejected you as king over Israel!"[ 27 ] In Tolkien's book Lord of the Rings we find another fine illustration in the person of Sariman, who tries to keep up his reign of terror even after the center of power in the person of Saron has been destroyed.
It is on the basis of this prophecy that later in the day the LORD God can provide Adam and Eve with covering for their nakedness, so they can continue to live in a world of sin, without being destroyed. The killing of the animal, who provided the skin expresses what Jesus would do in pouring out His blood in order to cover us with His righteousness.
We can hardly presume that it was an afterthought of God that the offspring of Eve would crush the serpent's head. It is from this prophecy that we take it that God had created man with the specific purpose of defeating the Satan and bringing planet earth back under God's control. Satan must have known that such was God's plan in the creation of Adam and Eve, and this must have been the reason why he went to such length to tempt man into sin. The fact that God's purpose for man was thwarted and ultimate victory over evil was postponed for centuries lends such depth to the tragedy of the fall.
How all this fits in with God's eternal purpose, we cannot understand. It is obvious that God did not plan sin. That would have been immoral to the highest degree. The possibility of the fall of Lucifer and man's wrong choice are implied in the moral freedom God granted to some of His creatures, such as angels and humans. But that is all we can say about this. It is also clear that the Incarnation is part of the "eternal covenant" about which the writer to the Hebrews speaks.[ 28 ] But although God knew about sin and made preparations in eternity to undo the damage, this does not make Him the author of sin. It was the calling of the first man to subdue the planet and see to it that God's "will would be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Maybe we can call the Incarnation God's plan B. Such a thought seems to be implied in Ezekiel's prophecy: "I looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found none," and Isaiah says: "I looked, but there was no one to help, I was appalled that no one gave support; so my own arm worked salvation for me, and my own wrath sustained me."[ 29 ]
The fact that man separated himself from God does not mean that he became friends with the enemy. It is part of man's salvation that God put enmity between Satan and man. Man did not become the devil's friend although he became God's enemy.
There is a wide gap between the curse upon the serpent in vs.15 and the punishment for man in the following verses. Nowhere does God pronounce a curse upon Adam or Eve. They suffer the consequences of their act, but that is all. In Adam's case the ground is cursed because of him, but not he. God could not have cursed His own image.
God turns first to Eve, since she was the first one to commit the sin. The punishment for both Eve and Adam has to do with that which would have been their greatest glory: for Eve the transmission of life, for Adam his reign over God's creation. Eve is still "the mother of all the living" (vs.20), but childbearing will henceforth be a painful experience. In trespassing, she had entered the domain of death but this would not prevent her from giving birth. Having children and passing on life would be part of the process of dying from now on. Some women actually do die in childbirth, like my paternal grandmother. Yet the birth of a child remains one of the most exhilarating experiences; at least it was for me in the birth of my children. And Jesus says: "A women, giving birth to a child has pain, because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets her anguish, because of her joy that a child is born into the world."[ 30 ]The joy of birth merges with the sorrow of death. The punishment hits Eve there where she is uniquely woman.
The second evidence of the entrance of death in Eve's life is in her relationship with her husband. The mutual love and openness, the unity of spirit, soul and body, is reduced to sexual desire. We can only guess what this relationship must have been before they decided that they were ashamed of themselves before one another because they were naked. There is, however, a redeeming feature in this desire also. It would keep the first couple from drifting completely apart, and it would ensure the procreation of their offspring. But all this was a far cry from the condition of exuberance, which is described in ch. 2:23-25.
There is also a significant shift in hierarchy. Adam had pre-eminence over Eve before the fall because he was created first, and because she was taken out of him. But their relationship must have been such that Adam was first among equals. We should always bear in mind that the dominance of a man over a woman is not part of God's original plan of creation. It is the result of sin. It must also be obvious that the tendency of a man to hang on to his position of dominance is a result of sin. This is humorously illustrated in the first chapter of the book of Esther. In Esther it is made into the law of Medes and Persians that the man should rule the household.[ 31 ]
The question arises of course that, if the present position of husband and wife is linked to the presence of sin in the world, what about couples who have their sins forgiven because of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? Where the Apostle Paul deals with this topic, it seems that the Gospel has not brought about any changes in the relationship of married couples. Paul states flatly, "The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man..."[ 32 ]And elsewhere he says the same thing.[ 33 ]On the other hand Paul abolishes all the differences in race, social status and sex for those who are in Jesus Christ. To the Galatians he writes: "For all of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you all are one in Christ Jesus."[ 34 ]Our identification with Christ has ended male supremacy which entered human relations with the fall. Where the New Testament states that in a marriage the husband is the head of the woman, it is to demonstrate that marriage is an emotional and physical expression of the spiritual relationship between Christ and the church, as in Ephesians,[ 35 ]or it is an admonition for Christians to maintain a testimony in a heathen world. A passage in First Corinthians, for instance, bears a stamps of the culture of its time.[ 36 ]As redeemed men and women, we live in a sinful world; and our position is highly ambiguous. If we insist on our rights, we could very well lose our testimony. A Christian marriage is to be a partnership of mutual respect and love and sacrifice. An mistreated wife is just as reprehensible as a hen-pecked husband. A woman should be able to lean on a man, and a man should be strong enough to be leaned on.
"To Adam He said ...." Adam bears the ultimate responsibility for what happened. Adam was not deceived by the serpent as Eve was. We are not told in full details what actually happened. We simply read in vs. 6[ b ]: "She gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." As we said before, it was not likely that Adam would have witnessed the whole scene of temptation. If he had, it would surely have added considerable weight to his responsibility. Eve had the choice between Satan's word and God's; Adam between God's Word and Eve's. There was no supernatural element in this choice. Adam chose for Eve against God. No clever demonic argument influenced him. It was a matter of God's Word against hers. He must have felt that she was right and God was wrong.
That is why God takes away his crown. He is no longer lord of the earth. From now on the whole of nature will be against him. Even the very ground that grows the food he and Eve eat will not be "user friendly" any more.
God does not mention the animal world here. Adam will have his livestock, but for the rest of the fauna disharmony will take over. One animal will prey on another and all will turn against man or keep their distance from him. The picture Isaiah paints of Christ's millenium gives us an idea of what the animal world must have been like before the fall.[ 37 ]
The Lord had given Adam the task to work in Eden and to take care of it, according to ch. 2:15. This was a joyous task. From ch. 2:19 we understand that this task covered the animal world as well as the flora. Not only the fauna, but the flora also, turns against man. From now on labor will mean "painful toil." This punishment goes much farther than physical pain as the result of agricultural labor. A large percentage of mankind does not make a living by farming. The ulcers of the insurance and real estate agents and factory workers and office clerks are included in this: "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food." Sweat stands here for any kind of effort and for the fear of not succeeding. It is because of this curse that Jesus addresses His words of comfort to us in Matthew: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or ''What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."[ 38 ]The sweat of the brow stands for the worry of life; what you will eat or drink, or what your body will wear.
Added to the fear that sin introduced in the life of man is the worry to stay alive. We should understand the origin of fear and worry. The Bible counsels against it at several places. In the Parable of the sower Jesus speaks of "the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth," which choke the Word of God in our hearts.[ 39 ]Paul says: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." And in Hebrews we read: "Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, 'Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.' " We conclude from this that it is not God who puts fear and anxiety in a man's heart. Man has brought this upon himself by listening to the devil and by cutting himself off from fellowship with God. God simply states the facts of Adam's changed position to him: fear, anxiety and death. Or rather is it a triple fear: fear of intimacy with God and man, fear for the struggle of life,[ 40 ]and fear of death.
The antidote to all of this is to have your sins forgiven in Jesus Christ. The realization of this forgiveness will start the healing process immediately.
The ultimate fear is the fear of death; that is physical death. Fear itself is a part of death because it is caused by sin. People who fear are dead. They are in the category Jesus had in mind when He said: "Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead."[ 41 ]
The devil manipulates this fear of death quite effectively in the lives of men. We read in Hebrews that Satan holds mankind in slavery by their fear of death.[ 42 ]In our short sightedness we believe that we can avoid death, or at least, postpone it by obeying the enemy. We do not realize that every sinful act we commit is born out of the death that is within us. Immoral acts do not postpone death, they only bring it closer. In a certain way though, people who fear death are more realistic than those who think it will go away when they ignore it? William Soroyan phoned a newspaper after he found out that he was terminally ill and he said: "I knew people died, but I always thought an exception would be made for me. What do I do now?"
In working the ground Adam knew he was looking at his grave. This truth was brought home even closer after the death of his son Abel. He saw what would happen to him. Unfortunately, we know much more now than Adam did.
"…Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned."[ 43 ]Adam never saw the abundance of the harvest of the single seed he sowed: worse than thorns and thistles.
But the psalmist says, "Our God is a God who saves; From the Sovereign LORD comes escape from death."[ 44 ]It is through His own death that our Lord Jesus Christ frees those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death."[ 45 ]
God told Adam: "Dust you are and to dust you will return." In ch. 2:7 we read: "And the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." The KJV says 'a living soul." The word for breath and spirit are the same in Hebrew. So 'the spirit of life' is an acceptable translation. When God pronounces man to be dust, He indicates that the spirit us dead. Man is no longer the tri-unity of spirit, soul and body God made him. Sin has reduced him to dust.
Yet we know that even sinful man is an eternal being. That is both our hope and despair. The promise of resurrection, however vague, runs through the whole Old Testament. The turning point is when the prophecy of David: "Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the grave (Sheol), nor will your Holy one see decay. You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence,"[ 46 ]was fulfilled in the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It is interesting, to say the least, to see how Adam reacts to this verdict. He finished the task that he had started before in ch. 2:19, where he gives names to all living creatures. At that point the woman had not been created yet. When she is introduced to Adam, he calls her ishshah, she-man, woman. It is not until after the fall that we read: "Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living." "Eve" means "life" in Hebrew. The LXX translates this verse: "And Adam called his wife's name life, because she was the mother of all the living."
At this point Adam did not speak from experience. He must have based his statement on the Word of God; the prophecy about the offspring of the woman. I believe that, from this statement of faith, we may conclude that Adam repented, and experienced salvation. He started his task of ruling God's creation by giving names to all the animals; after his crown is taken away he "rules" over Eve by naming her "life!" His kingdom has been greatly reduced, but his first decree is one of hope, and faith, and salvation. He, who was "a pattern of the one to come," as Paul calls him,[ 47 ]put his faith in the one to come. God has pronounced Adam dead, but Adam announces the first victory over death. God must have been pleased. Adam trusts the Word of God late, but not too late.
Verse 21 is one of the crucial verses in the Bible; one upon which most Gospel truth hinges. Whether God actually killed the animal and made the skin as a garment, or He showed Adam how to do it, is not the important point in this verse. Either way God takes the initiative.
A wide variety of truths springs from this verse. The first is that God takes man's feeling of shame seriously. Adam and Eve may have focused on the wrong aspect of their nakedness. Exposure of certain parts of the human anatomy does not make man naked; at the most, physical nakedness is an expression of a spiritual condition. Adam and Eve were naked inside. That is why they could not face each other or God. We may call this "conviction of sin." Immediately after committing the sinful act, Adam and Eve proceeded to cover themselves with fig leaves (vs.7). This cover-up amounts to some sort of denial. The amazing thing is that God does not come to expose them. The answer to denial is not exposure, but atonement. It was my personal experience at my conversion that God was not out to embarrass me. I understood at that point that God really loved me.
God loved Adam and Eve. There are places in the Bible where God threatens to expose nakedness, as in Ezekiel.[ 48 ]But in such a case there was no feeling of shame to start with.
What God does for Adam and Eve does not amount to a denial. God covers them on a legal basis, the death of an animal as a substitute for their own death. This legal action implies guilt. Pardon always implies guilt. When Richard Nixon received a pardon from President Ford in the Watergate affair, it meant that he was guilty.
We are not told what actually happened. We understand from the fact that skins are mentioned that an animal was killed. How much Adam and Eve understood, we do not know. They must have realized that they could continue to live with this. To what extent Adam consciously identified himself with the slain animal or even saw a connection with the prophecy about the coming offspring that would crush the serpent's head, can only be guessed. It is not very likely that he, or Eve, had much insight in God's plan of redemption. On the other hand, it is possible that our first parents had a lot of knowledge that was lost in later generations.
At this point started, what Paul calls the time of God's forbearance.[ 49 ]This was the extended period in which the sin of man was covered up by the blood of a sacrificed animal until the death of Christ on the cross.
This killing of the animal was the first death man witnessed. Never before had blood been poured out on earth. Millions upon millions of gallons would follow. Our planet has been soaked in blood, most of it as the result of useless spilling. We can hardly imagine the horror this must have produced in Adam (and in God!) to see a living creature die. I still remember my shock and anger as a little boy at seeing a chicken killed. Some of the deep darkness of physical death must have descended upon Adam. How easy it sounds: "…sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin..." Here stood that man, as he witnessed death. If ever he must have felt shame, it was here. When Paul continues to say in Romans: "...and in this way death came to all men, because all have sinned,"[ 50 ]he does not only tell us that we will all die but that we all share in Adam's guilt and shame. If it is horrible to see death, how much deeper shame should we feel if we realize that his death takes the place of ours. If Adam felt shame in front of an animal that had died instead of himself, how should we feel about the death of Jesus on the cross?!
And yet, as the skin of the animal covered the shame of the first humans, so are we covered by the righteousness of Christ. The deeper the shame, the greater the glory. We will never outlive this miracle. God's answer to our shame of sin is not punishment, but atonement.
The greatest miracle in all this is the reality that is expressed in this picture. It is one thing to understand that another living creature, in this case an animal, can take the place of guilty man; but it is beyond all description to discover that God Himself became like this animal to take the place of guilty man. We can only stand in awe, when we realize that "He who had always been God by nature, did not cling to His prerogatives as God, but stripped Himself of all privilege by consenting to become a slave by nature and being born as mortal man. And having become man, He humbled Himself by living a life of utter obedience, even to the extent of dying. And the death He died was the death of a common criminal."[ 51 ]The real issue here is not that an animal died but that this animal portrays "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world"[ 52 ]That is why this moment of deepest shame becomes our highest joy. It is through the forgiving of our sins that we acquire knowledge of salvation.[ 53 ]
The great difference between Adam and us is that his sins were covered and ours were taken away, washed in the blood of the Lamb.[ 54 ]
Some commentators believe that the statement "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil" (vs. 22) is an expression of divine sarcasm. I do not believe this. God had experienced evil when Lucifer decided to break with Him. It must have hurt Him more and deeper than any human will ever know. C. S. Lewis's beautiful illustration in the Narnia book The Magicians Nephew speaks about this. When the boy, Digory, asks Aslan to do something for his mother, he sees tears that are bigger than his own in the Lion's eyes and he hears Aslan say: "My son, my son, I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another." Adam had something in common with God now: the knowledge of good and evil. It was God's goodness that decreed that from now on the fruit of the Tree of Life would be beyond his reach.
Up to this point the Tree of Life was only mentioned once, but we were never told what would have happened if Adam and Eve had eaten from its fruit. The tree evidently had been God's pleasant surprise for man. God had forbidden Adam to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and warned him of the consequences, but there had been no invitation or explanation in connection with the Tree of Life . Obviously, Adam had known the name, as he knew the other. Now, as it is too late, Adam finds out what would have happened had he eaten. At this point, however, sin would have made immortality a disaster. For a man whose spirit is alive, immortality means eternal fellowship with God, loving God with all his heart, soul and strength for ever and ever. Eternal physical life for a man who is dead in sin, would be like a man who is dying with cancer, but who is never allowed to die. Death is not only the wages of sin, it is also man's only way to be delivered from sin.
At the end of the Bible Jesus gives the promise to the church in Ephesus: "To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from theTree of Life , which is in the paradise of God."[ 55 ]There the tree is a source of healing. Evidently, there, the tree has acquired a purely spiritual significance. That does not mean however, that in chapter 2 and 3 we are not looking at a tree as we know trees, with fruit that could be eaten. The fact that both the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge had spiritual significance and that the eating thereof had spiritual consequences, does not mean that they were not real trees but merely symbols of spiritual truths. If we let the trees evaporate into symbols only, there is no guarantee that the rest of paradise will hold. The whole of this biblical account would disintegrate to the point where we could not even be sure that the human race started with Adam and Eve and that sin and death entered the world through them. We know that sin and death are not only spiritual phenomena. We commit sin with our bodies, not only with our minds.
The question remains, what happened to the Tree of Life and the garden of Eden? The tree did not die since we find it alive and well at the end of time. Man died and the tree vanished from his view. The tree has stayed alive, even in the memory of man. The traditions of some tribes of Irian Jaya, Indonesia prove this. The Ekagi knew that eternal life had been taken away from them, but that one day "ajii"[ 56 ]would return. And they were right! In the victory of our Lord Jesus Christ over sin and death, we all have the right to eat from the Tree of Life, As Jesus says in John's Gospel: "I tell you the truth, (amen, amen), whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life."[ 57 ]
Adam learned that in trespassing and disobeying the word of God he had chosen a road of no return; a one-way street with a dead end. He could not undo what he had done. The process of dying had started, and there would be no letup till death would be complete, 930 years later. Painful toil produced enough food to keep him alive. Working the soil would give him all kind of thoughts regarding his origin and destiny.
So Adam was forcefully removed from the garden, and the presence of supernatural beings, cherubim, prevented him from returning. In primitive mythology, such as the Ekagi mentioned above, God removed Himself from the presence of man. The Bible says that it was the other way around; man was removed. Paradise was not taken away from man, man was driven out of the garden into a world that would become more and more hostile to him.
The issue was the Tree of Life . It turns out that this tree had been the most important feature of the garden of Eden. It always was, but man had paid no attention to it. As we said before, eating from the Tree of Life would have meant a conscious choice, an act of surrender to God. Adam and Eve had enjoyed Paradise, but they had never responded to the love of God. They were sinless, but not ripe. After the fall this surrender is no longer an option. God could not accept fallen man as he is. This would have compromised God's absolute holiness. It would have made God less God, which would have had disastrous consequences for all of heaven and earth. The only solution for man is death. Death was his only hope.
[ 1 ]
Ch. 6:6,7 (RSV).
[ 2 ]
Rev.12:9
[ 3 ]
See ch.1:28
[ 4 ]
John 8:44
[ 5 ]
Rom.3:23
[ 6 ]
I John 3:2
[ 7 ]
Rev.21:9-11
[ 8 ]
II Cor.4:4
[ 9 ]
Heb. 5:14
[ 10 ]
John 8:34,36
[ 11 ]
I John 2:16
[ 12 ]
James 1:14,15
[ 13 ]
Rom. 10:17 (KJV)
[ 14 ]
See I Thess. 5:23
[ 15 ]
John 3:3,5
[ 16 ]
John 3:14,15
[ 17 ]
Deut 6:5
[ 18 ]
Lev 19:18
[ 19 ]
Lev 19:34
[ 20 ]
I John 4:19
[ 21 ]
I John 4:10
[ 22 ]
Rom. 5:8
[ 23 ]
Matt.22:30
[ 24 ]
Matt.13:38
[ 25 ]
Matt. 13:38
[ 26 ]
I Pet.5:8
[ 27 ]
I Sam.15:26
[ 28 ]
Heb. 13:20
[ 29 ]
Isa. 63:5
[ 30 ]
John 16:21
[ 31 ]
See Esther 1:16-22
[ 32 ]
I Cor. 11:3
[ 33 ]
See Eph.5:22-32
[ 34 ]
Gal.3:27,28
[ 35 ]
Eph.5:22-32
[ 36 ]
I Cor.11:2-16
[ 37 ]
See Isa.11:6-9
[ 38 ]
Matt. 6:25-34
[ 39 ]
Matt. 13:22
[ 40 ]
"der Kampf ums Dasein"
[ 41 ]
Matt. 8:22
[ 42 ]
Heb. 2:14,15
[ 43 ]
Rom.5:12
[ 44 ]
Ps.68:20
[ 45 ]
Heb. 2:14,15
[ 46 ]
Ps. 16:9-11
[ 47 ]
See Rom. 5:14
[ 48 ]
See Ezek. 16:37
[ 49 ]
See Rom.3:25
[ 50 ]
Rom. 5:12
[ 51 ]
Phil.2:6-8 (J.B.Philips).
[ 52 ]
John 1:29
[ 53 ]
Luke 1:77
[ 54 ]
Rev.1:5
[ 55 ]
Rev.2:7
[ 56 ]
eternal life
[ 57 ]
John 5:24
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