Goodbye Garden of Eden, welcome to the Dust World.

I have never met anyone who truly believes that the world is like it should be. One thing all religion has in common is that it is not content with the way the world is. We know that we are imperfect. But where did an imperfect creature get the idea of perfection? If human beings have always been like they are, and if the world has always been like it is, then why do we have this idea that things are not like they should be? And yet it is there. We know intuitively that the whole human race is imperfect, and that we were not meant to be that way. The bible provides the simplest, most reasonable explanation for this. Genesis teaches that human beings were created perfect in God’s image, but fell into sin. That once perfect Image was tarnished, marred, twisted, by what we call the Fall. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, chose to disobey their creator and sin entered human nature. Genesis three shows us why we all sin, because we are all descended from Adam, not just physically, but spiritually as well. It is there to explain to us how the world got like it is. And to tell us how God set in motion His plan of salvation.

We see the perfect world of perfect relationships sketched for us in Genesis one and two. And God saw that it was very good. God said, “let us make man in our own image.” So God made man, male and female, in his image, that is, in the image of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Triune God. Like God, man was made a relational being. We were created for relationship. With God, with other humans, and with the natural world. The man and woman had perfect relationships with God, creation and each other. This perfect relationship is summed up in chapter two, which ends, “and the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” That is where chapter three starts. They were naked and not ashamed. Their relationship was one of total innocence and openness.

Then in verse one we are introduced to the serpent. In contrast to the innocent openness and naivete of the naked humans, we read,  “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the other wild animals the LORD God had made.”

Reality and symbol are not easy to distinguish here. Are we to picture an animal like a snake with the power of speech? Well, the serpent, whatever its exact form, was clearly one of God’s creatures in the Garden, and it does speak, to Eve, and to God. Is the serpent Satan himself? Or does Satan just use the serpent as his agent, like he used Judas to betray Jesus? If it is Satan himself, then Genesis three teaches that Satan was originally more like a highly intelligent animal than the purely angelic or spiritual being we normally think of. Unless of course it is a symbolic depiction of Satan. But we don't need to know for sure whether it's an animal agent of Satan, or Satan himself as a physical creature, or a symbolic depiction of the Devil. Let's stick to what IS clear: God created humanity perfect and good, and the original pressure to disobey came from outside human nature, from this creature called the serpent, who, if not the Devil himself, is at least an agent of the Devil.

Where did the serpent, or Satan behind the serpent, come from? That is a divine mystery. Nowhere does the bible give us a complete explanation for the origin of evil in the spiritual realm. But it does give a clear picture of the origin of human evil in the earthly realm. Here is what happens.

In verses one to five we see Satan’s first temptation of humanity. And it is interesting that Satan uses this same formula or recipe for temptation time and again throughout history. Satan never does anything original. He tempted Jesus in the same way he tempted Eve and Adam. It worked on them, but it didn’t work on Jesus. And whether it works on us will depend on whether we follow our old nature in Adam, or our new nature in Christ.

How does Satan operate? Verse one, “He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the Garden?”

Now what is behind this question? Well, it smuggles in a certain sneaky assumption. It assumes that we can be judges of God’s Word. This serpent is pretty tricky. Before she realises it, Eve gets sucked into a conversation that has as its basic assumption the idea that we may question what God says. It also implies that God may not have our best interest at heart. And it makes God out to be stricter than he was. Did you notice that? The serpent implies that God said they couldn’t eat from any tree. He draws Eve into a debate. She feels compelled to defend God - to set the serpent right on this. That was her first mistake, because it set in her mind the seed of doubt - the very idea that God could be the kind of God who would deny good things to his creatures. Satan still tries to tell you that today. He tries to tell you that God does not care for you and so you must take your own steps to secure happiness. You’ve all heard the saying, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” At the heart of sayings like that is the kind of pride that Satan introduced to the minds of the woman and her husband that day. The Word of God does not teach that the Lord helps those who help themselves, but those who wait for HIM to help them. It says to us in Isaiah 30:18: “…the LORD longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!” and in Isaiah 64 we read: “Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.”

Eve did not wait for God to act on behalf of them. Instead, she acts on behalf of God. Now when Eve answers, she gets it almost right. But she embellishes slightly what God actually said. God said, “you must not eat of the tree of the knowlege of good and evil, for in the day you eat of it you shall surely die.” But what does Eve say? “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.” Notice the subtle differences there? First, she has missed the spiritual significance of the tree. It is not the tree of the knowlege of good and evil, but merely the tree that is in the middle of the garden. It lessens the distinction between the other trees and that special tree. It also makes God’s prohibition of that tree seem a little arbitrary. And she makes it stricter than it was, by adding, “and you must not touch it,” which God didn’t say. At the same time, she softens what God said about the outcome, by removing the element of certainty. She turns “on the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die,” into merely “you will die.”

Now isn’t that just like a woman? They never get it right, do they? They always exaggerate, or get their facts muddled don’t they? Poor Adam - Eve gets mixed up, gets duped by the snake, takes the fruit home, and he, all unsuspecting, eats it. There’s always a woman behind every man’s fall, isn’t there? Isn’t that the way it happened?

Well, men, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but what I’ve just said is a bunch of male chauvinist baloney! Let’s look at the real facts here. We don’t know that Eve got it wrong. Eve did not exist when God gave Adam the regulations of the covenant of creation. Eve was created after that. Probably she relied on Adam to tell her what God had said. Maybe Adam got it wrong. Husbands have always been hopeless at conveying messages accurately! But even if it was Eve’s mistake, it’s still Adam’s responsibility. He was the first created, he was the head, he was supposed to care for his wife and nourish her. And if you read the account carefully, you will notice that he was there watching the whole encounter! In verse 6 it says, “she gave some also to her husband, WHO WAS WITH HER.” What a jerk! Why was Adam standing there the whole time, apathetically abnegating his responsibility and letting his wife do all the talking? Why did he not answer the serpent? Why did he not correct Eve’s mistakes? Why did he just go along with the whole thing? Eve was deceived, maybe partly because she was the second created. But Adam had no excuse, even though later he tries to blame Eve, and by implication, God who gave Eve to him. But the New Testament makes it plain the responsibility for sin entering the world rested squarely on the man, not the woman. Romans 5 does not say sin entered the world through one woman, Eve, but through one man, Adam. As head of the marriage unit, Adam was responsible for their joint decision to eat what God had said not to eat. If he had been doing his job as a husband, he would have stepped in and prevented his wife from making the fatal mistake. But he didn’t.

Why did they decide to eat? Why did they do what God said not to do? Because they listened to the lies of the serpent. After his first subtle question, which got them thinking along the track he wanted, he comes right out with his blatant lie. “You will not surely die.” Unlike Eve, he gets God’s wording right, adding the “surely,” but he makes it ironic - you will not surely die. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

In the New Testament, Jesus called Satan ‘a liar from the beginning,’ and ‘the Father of all lies.’ His nature is to lie. His nature is to accuse. Here he accuses God to man. In the book of Job we see him accusing man to God. His whole work centres on lies that wreck relationship. Here, in this primeval lie, we see the pattern for all of his later activity. He undermines our faith in God’s goodness, God’s judgement, and God’s Word. He represents God before our minds as the cosmic wowser, the killjoy who wants us to miss out on all the fun. He tells us God will not go through with his promise to punish rebellion. And he promises us what we can never have, and what is certainly not his to give - that we shall be like God. That is, that we can be autonomous, sovereign, the master of our fate and the captain of our soul.

This story is not mere myth or fiction. Adam and Eve were real people, the progenitors of the whole human race. Otherwise Romans 5 makes no sense. But, it is not entirely literal, either. There is symbolism involved. However, the symbols are real things. They are a bit like the bread and wine in communion. It is real bread and real wine, but it points beyond its physical reality to a spiritual reality. It is a physical means of a spiritual encounter with God. In the same way, in Genesis two and three, the tree of the knowlege of good and evil was a real tree in a real garden. But it is also a symbol. It is not something about the physical nature of the tree that makes it what it was, as though some chemical in the fruit produced a mind-altering effect on the human brain, and suddenly they knew good and evil. No, it was a physical symbol of a spiritual reality. A symbol of God’s sovereignty and right to rule over them. A symbol of right relationship between God, humanity, and creation. God could just as easily have said, “don’t go up on that mountain,” or “don’t swim in that river.” The physical tree is a symbol. The reality is spiritual. The reality is the right relationship between God and Man in the Covenant of Creation. The significance of the act of eating the forbidden fruit lies in the fact that by doing so, Eve and Adam were disobeying God and breaking their perfect relationship with Him.

God is God, and humans are his creatures, and He has the right to be our Lord. The lie of Satan was that we could run our lives our way without reference to God.

Well, Eve took and ate, and she gave to Adam, and he took and ate. Here the creation order is set upside down. The man was meant to live under God’s will. The woman was meant to live under the Man as her family head. That is not a sexist concept, and does not imply that one is superior to the other. But the man was supposed to lead the woman, and man and woman together, as humanity in the image of God, were to rule over the other creatures. But here the order is reversed. The will of the creature, the serpent, is paramount. He leads Eve, Eve leads Adam. Serpent’s will on top, Eve’s will next, then Adam’s will, then the will of God at the bottom, disregarded by all.

And so we see the entry of sin, followed by the entry of death. Sin causes breakdown of relationships, between God and Man, Man and Man, Man and Creation, God and Creation. Creation is estranged from God because Man is its head. Paul tells us in Romans that Creation groans, awaiting the salvation of humanity in Jesus Christ, when all things will be made new again.

To finish I want to draw your attention to some practical implications of Genesis Three. You must work hard to understand it yourself. I have only scratched the surface. If you don’t understand the message of this chapter, you won’t understand your own human nature, and you will make yourself easy prey for the devil and his agents. Most of all we must realise that we can no longer act as if we were still living in the Garden. We must act as creatures who know they are sinners, living in the Dust World, under sentence of Death, and in need of God’s solution to the problem. We must acknowlege the truth of the doctrine of original sin. That is, that when Adam fell, we all fell in him, and the nature of humanity was radically altered, so that every human being born into this world is now born with a nature that cannot help but sin.

We are like a ball on a bowling green. Lawn bowls do not travel straight, they are weighted to one side, which gives them a bias to the left or right. No matter how hard you try to make them go straight ahead, they veer off to the side. We are like that. We try to reach God, we try to obey His Laws, but we keeping veering off the path. We have a natural bias to evil. This is called original sin.

Every parent knows this is true. You do not need to teach your kids to do wrong. It just comes naturally. And only God can change human nature.

Do not believe the lie that human nature is basically good. Since the Fall, our nature is fundamentally evil. That is, opposed to God. Every religion and philosophy that tries to improve the world, and put forward some sort of plan of salvation; fails to reckon properly with sinful human nature. In Genesis 3 the Bible explains how we got that nature and how sin, evil and destruction entered the world. Genesis 4 and following chapters show the inevitable spread and dreadful consequences of sin. Any solution to the world's problems must take sin seriously. That is why humanism doesn't work. That is why communism doesn't work. That is why capitalism works, but only for the rich. All these ignore the real problem - alienation from God, and the solutions they offer do not work because they overestimate the natural goodness of people.

But along with the bleak picture of the deterioration of mankind from our original perfect state, Genesis shows God's reaction to human sinfulness. He puts into operation his plan of salvation. We see a pattern develop in Genesis 1 to 11. A pattern of sin, Punishment, mitigation, and promise. Adam & Eve sin. They are punished by being thrown out of Eden. But then their punishment is mitigated, that is, lessened, or eased by God.  We talk about flood mitigation schemes - that is things we do to lessen, or make less severe, the effects of flooding. A dictionary definition of mitigate is "to reduce the severity of punishment." How did God mitigate the punishment of Adam and Eve's sin?.... We see that he provided skins to cover their nakedness, in place of their own pathetic attempt with fig leaves. The skins came from what in effect was the first animal sacrifice, and the first hint that somehow the death of another could atone for sin.

And we see His first promise of salvation, in verse 15 of chapter three. God says to the serpent, “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.”

Strange, isn’t it that God said this of the woman, not of the man, nor of the man and woman together. No, it is the offspring of the woman who will crush the serpent’s head. Jesus is that offspring of the woman. Born of a virgin, he is uniquely the woman’s offspring. And so just as the serpent used Eve to bring death to mankind, so God used another woman, Mary, to bring the Saviour of mankind into the world. Jesus is the antidote to sin and death. The one who bore both, and defeated sin, death and devil. The one who did not give in to temptation, though the devil tempted him in just the same way he tempted Eve. Eve took and ate, and gave to Adam, and he took and ate, but Jesus comes saying, “take and eat, this is my body, which is given for you.”

If you know your sinful human nature and your need of salvation by God, you will not listen to the devil’s invitation to take and eat the forbidden fruit of self-worship and ignoring God’s commands. Instead, you will hear Jesus say, take, eat, I am the bread of life. You will realise that your attempts to cover your sin and deal with the breakdown in your relationships are as pathetic as the fig leaves which Adam and Eve sewed for themselves, and instead you will accept God’s own covering, the blood of Jesus shed for you.

And, in the Christian life, as Dirty Harry said, “a man’s gotta know his limitations.” Do not underestimate the sinfulness of your own nature. If you believe you are capable of any sin, then you will not put yourself in situations of temptation. But neither underestimate God’s ability to change you and enable you to grow in Christ. For the Christian enters into new relationships, with God and with others. As we grow in Christ, we become more like his perfect nature, until one day, when He returns, you will be once more perfect. Not innocent and perfect like Adam was before the fall, but forgiven and perfect. And instead of looking back wistfully at the flaming sword which Adam and Eve saw barring the way back to Eden, we look forward and see the gate to the Garden City, the New Jerusalem. And we hear with John, these words from Revelation chapter 21. “Now the dwelling of God is with Men, and he will live with them. They will be his people and he will be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” And we hear Jesus say, “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.” Take and eat, and live.