Genesis 3:9-24

Usually on Wednesday nights, some in our community get together to share prayer requests, we pray together, and I bring a Bible lesson for them. Last week, we covered Genesis 3:1-8, so I will pick up today where we left off. First I’d like to talk about prayer requests. Online communication being what it is, I would rather not get into specific requests in this space, and will leave that for the more intimate communications that the church has with each other. But I do want to remember a few general prayer requests: -our government, those making decisions on our behalf -those in the medical community -those in food service, grocery stores, and other essential businesses -teachers and students still figuring out what the closures of schools means for them -prisoners and prison guards -first responders

-those whose life and income has been disrupted by the current crisis. I also want to remember all of those suffering from Covid-19 and the communities that it is affecting, including our own. Take a moment to pray for these folks now before we begin. Now I hope you will turn in your Bible to Genesis 3:9-24 Last Time, on Bible Study… Adam and Eve did the one thing God told them not to do. They ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and immediately began to see the consequences. The first thing they noticed was that they were naked, and they decided to hide their nakedness. I interpret this as a break in the intimacy between the man and the woman. It leads to all sorts of problems for them, but it is quickly followed by a break in their intimacy with God. When God comes into the garden to walk with them, the man and the woman hide. And that brings us to the ninth verse. Genesis 3:9-10 - The Question God doesn’t quite follow our ideas of how God should work in this passage. If we follow some more dominant theologies of our time, we would expect God to appear as an all knowing, all powerful, angry Being, who just shows up above the garden and sends a storm to punish the man and the woman. But God comes right down to their level and at least pretends ignorance. He asks “Where are you?” In the next chapter, we will see another example of God asking questions to which God should know the answer, and in fact we learn that God does (Genesis 4:9-10). What I think God is doing here is giving the people an opportunity to come clean, to confess what they have done. One summer day when I was in middle school, my dad left me some chores to do and then went about his business; after I finished, I was allowed to get a ride from my Granny to church to go to a water park. In the process of doing the things on my list, I ran his truck into his car and left a pretty big dent in the side of it right above the wheel. Well, I wanted to go to the water park, and it’s not like I had any way of getting in touch with him anyway, so I just finished my work and went on to the water park. The next day on the way to church, Dad’s car started making a funny noise. What I hadn’t realized was that the wheel well of the car dropped over the wheel a bit, and I had pushed the metal exterior into the tire. Dad was furious that someone had hit his car and not told him, and before he began thinking about what parking lots he had recently been to I knew I had to say something. Given the opportunity to confess, I didn’t lie and instead came clean about hitting the car. The big surprise was that the consequences of telling the truth about my mishap were substantially better than the agony I had felt in secrecy. The consequences would have been much worse for me if I hadn’t confessed when given the opportunity. Here in Genesis 3, so much hinges on Adam’s response. I think of the possibilities that must have run through his mind: he could just be quiet, or yell “I’ll be out in a minute!” or perhaps he even could have stripped naked and pretended like nothing is wrong. But Adam is honest. “I heard you walking in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” The stakes are clear in Adam’s response. I think every parent has a moment when they realize that their child is no longer comfortable sharing everything with them and they begin to have secrets, shame, and discomfort in front of their parents. It is different with every child, but it is an important stage of development. Some people see this moment as Adam’s “coming of age.” And in a way it is. Adam is now an individual, with all the blessings that entails. He is “his own person” and he is “free.” But what sort of freedom is this that first shows itself as insecurity? Genesis 3:11-13 - The Blame Game God responds to Adam’s self-conscious answer: “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I told you not to eat?” Again, I think these questions are rhetorical. God is entering into a human discussion to give Adam a chance to reveal who he is. And Adam could have just said, “yes.” It would be the mature answer. It is a simple answer. Just one syllable. Effectively Adam would be saying: “I am an adult capable of making my own decisions, and I was offered some of the Forbidden Fruit, and I took it, and I ate it, and it’s done. So help me.” But instead, Adam offers up the first excuse for the first sin. “The woman . . . gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” First things first, Adam is glossing over a lot. As we saw in verse 6, he was a silent party to Eve’s conversation with the serpent. He stood by and did nothing until it was time to eat. But Adam still blames Eve. “Well she put me up to it.” But on closer inspection you’ll notice that I left something out of the verse here. Adam actually begins “The woman, whom you gave to be with me. . . .” So you see, Adam doesn’t just blame the woman! Adam blames God. “This woman you gave me is defective, Lord. She led me straight into sin.” Have you ever read one-star reviews on Amazon or some other website? A lot of times before I order a new item I try to read some of the best and worst reviews. I once heard of a review of a moving company on Yelp! that complained that one of the movers didn’t look big and strong enough to move the person’s furniture. Reading the review it was clear that things got moved and the job got done, but because one aspect didn’t match the reviewer’s expectations, they gave a low score. Adam does that here. He just can’t accept that he is at fault, so he is reaching for anyone to blame, starting with his wife and then moving to her Maker, the one who also made Adam. God leaves the man’s responsibility alone for a moment. Perhaps the woman will take responsibility. Nope. The woman very simply says that the serpent tricked her and she ate. So we have a very simple chain of blame: Man blames the Woman (by way of God, but that dog won’t hunt) who blames the Serpent Man -> Woman -> Serpent In the rest of the chapter, God gives out the consequences in the opposite order. Genesis 3:14-15 - What a Snake In stories about the beginning of things, it’s a common trope to explain why something is the way it is. On a surface level, that’s the way a lot of the curses in Genesis 3 work. So in verse 14, the curse explains why snakes have to crawl along the ground. But in verse 15 things get personal. There are very few creatures as almost universally despised or feared as snakes. Some scientists tell us that the human eye and brain are connected in such a way that they make us notice snakes more easily than any other animal, that often we “see” snakes before we are even consciously aware of anything else we are looking at. It’s called “snake detection theory,” and it’s certainly been true for me anecdotally. I am a person who notices very little, but I can’t tell you the number of times I have jumped up in the air and backwards, and looked down after that to realize I was about to step on a big snake. So on one level this story is an explanation for why we feel the way we do about these creepy crawly monsters that my Granny always warned me about. But early on in church history, Christians began interpreting this text “typologically,”which is a fancy word meaning looking for a deeper meaning in a story. They began to see the serpent as a “type” or representative of the devil. So when it talks about the “enmity” between the offspring of the serpent and the woman, and how the woman’s offspring would trample the snake’s head and the snake would bite the offspring’s heel, they saw this as a reference to Jesus’s Passion. Simply put, the Passion story and the Easter story after it is parallel to the story of the serpent’s curse. According to this way of looking at the Genesis story, Jesus draws the devil out by giving him an easy target, but even as he strikes, Jesus uses the opportunity to defeat Satan once and for all. This is a different way of interpreting the story than many of us are used to perhaps, but it provides an interesting and helpful way of understanding what Jesus did on the cross. Genesis 3:16 - The Woman Next up, God turns to the woman. Her punishment also has two parts. First God makes birth painful. I don’t and can’t have much experience with this, so I’ll just say that everything I know about human birth seems to be unpleasant. Until the end, of course, when you get to hold the baby. But the getting there is a screaming, messy, anxiety inducing ordeal. We have our first parents to thank for that. The second punishment is that the woman’s relationship with the man is deeply broken. This curse provides an explanation for why many societies are structured the way they are, with men traditionally assuming roles of authority over women. I think it is useful here to distinguish between natural curses and social curses. We are living after the cross, in a world awaiting redemption. But I believe that Christ has uniquely redeemed our human relationships, so that men no longer rule over women as a consequence of sin. I believe that we can live in confident knowledge that our relationships can be restored by the reconciling work of Christ. This also points to the fact that we believe that the whole world will one day be reconciled, and the natural curses will be lifted in the redemption of all things. Genesis 3:17-19 - The Man The curse toward man likewise really affects everyone, as it is a curse upon the earth itself. No longer will the cultivation of the land be an easy process. The man’s work becomes toil and it will be so until the day of his death. Everyone knows the difference between work and toil. Work is producing something, it is a neutral term, and is often quite enjoyable. Toil is backbreaking, sweat inducing, unpleasant labor. Some days, the work of our hands is enjoyable, but some days it is toilsome. The problem is that we don’t often have the luxury of waiting for the good days. We have to do the work either way. Genesis 20-24 - Where Do We Go From Here? I’ve been calling the woman Eve, but it isn’t until now that she gets that name. Before this, she is created to be a helper (in Hebrew ezer, which is a term elsewhere applied to God), and Adam calls her “woman” (in Hebrew ishshah, which also translates to wife). But here Adam names her Eve, which in Hebrew is chawah, connecting her name to the word “living,” or chayah. The next thing that happens is that God gives Adam and Eve better clothes to cover their nakedness. Here we learn that God is not merely a punisher, but also a provider, even when human sin causes the need. The only reason they needed clothes was because of their sin, but God did not withhold from them. God provided. This is an act of grace to the man and woman. The final (for now) direct consequence of Adam and Eve’s rebellion is that they must be sent from the garden because they have chosen knowledge over life. One interesting piece of the story is that Adam being sent from the garden means that he will spend the rest of his days tilling “the ground from which he was taken.” This reminds us of Genesis 2:8 when God creates Adam outside the garden and then brings him into the garden. Then here in Genesis 3, Adam is forced to leave the garden. The whole story of God’s redemption starts here and continues: humans started outside the garden and God brought them into the garden. Then we were forced to leave because of sin. Now, God is working to bring us back. This is the Gospel. Conclusion Looking back to the beginning of Genesis 2, it was the purpose of humans to joyfully and gratefully accept the gifts of God. The sin of humans was wanting to understand more than God gave them to understand. The knowledge of good and evil gives humans the ability to decide why things are good or bad. The serpent tempted Eve and Adam with the promise that they would be like God. They would have understanding. In the Bible, we first encounter God as creator. Humanity’s reckless rebellion, in seeking to be like God, results in us becoming poor imitators of God in our feeble attempts to provide for ourselves. God sentences humanity to toilsome labor, giving our sweat to wring a bit of life and food from the earth. One of the key lenses I use to read the Old Testament is something I call the “Egypt mindset.” The book of Genesis makes many twists and turns before finally ending in Egypt. Exodus picks up 400 years later, and the people of Israel have been in Egypt that whole time. Egypt as an ancient empire was built around the home base of the Nile River. They had intricate systems of canals and had turned the arid fields around the Nile into fertile crop land by hard work. Being human, Egyptians took a lot of pride in their ability to provide for themselves, but they had forgotten that the Nile itself was a gift. When we forget the gifts that even make our labors possible, we give in to a very human idolatry—ingratitude. Sin begins to complete its work. Because life is hard, we take pride in overcoming, and we begin to think of ourselves as self-made people. We forget that even in this fallen world we are surrounded by grace. Everything we have comes from God’s hand. Once we realize this, we lose our pride and our ingratitude and become capable of honoring our true purpose: glorifying and enjoying God forever.