The tree
This week's study is on the oldest story of God's love for mankind, in the beginning of creation, when Adam and Eve were in the garden. We don't know how long they were there before these verses take place. Maybe it was a day. Maybe it was four years. Maybe it was a thousand centuries.
We'll start with Genesis 3:1-6:
And jump to Genesis 3:23-24:
When God made man and woman in the first days of his creation, he gave them everything they would ever need. He loved them and wanted them to have a perfect world to live in. They could do anything they wanted except for one thing: In their perfect world was a tree that God asked them not to eat fruit from.
Our verses start when the serpent appears in the garden. The Bible says that he was more crafty than any of the wild animals in the garden. That means he was not Adam and Eve's friend. The serpent was only the serpent's friend. He shows it by questioning God's warning to them.
The serpent asks, "Did God really say that?" He knows what God said, but he wants to plant doubt in their minds, hoping they'll question God's command. Maybe they'll forget the details. Maybe they'll misremember them with his help. He uses black and white exaggerations to confuse the truth and paint God's command as ridiculous. "Does God really not want you to eat from any tree at all?"
Eve remembers what she was told though. So the serpent switches tactics to make God himself look bad. "Yeah? Well God is just saying that because he doesn't want you to be truly happy and empowered." Now God looks like he's got something to hide, and the serpent looks like their only friend. His trick works.
Eve and Adam both commit what we now know as the original sin. They disobey God and break the one rule that cannot be overlooked. They expect things to get better than they've ever been, but immediately things are not as they hoped. They become self-conscious and afraid. They mistrust God. They start wanting things they don't need. Something changes, and it isn't good.
How God must have ached with disappointment when they ate the fruit! He was betrayed! And now he was forced to curse those he loved, and to banish them forever from the perfect world he created for them. They were now on their own in a land of hardship, prevented by a deadly barrier from ever returning.
You might ask yourself, what's wrong with knowing good and evil? Surely that would help with pleasing God, right? The problem is that seeing good and evil would cause them to start making their own rules, which would confuse them, as they would then feel as though they didn't need God anymore. But there are lots of fancy theological reasons for why the tree was bad to eat from, and really the only one that matters is that God asked Adam and Eve not to do it.
So then you might ask, why put the tree in the garden then? Why not put it out of the way so that Adam and Eve wouldn't get hurt by mistake? There had to have been a reason it was there. God is not careless. There are no accidents of creation. There was no moment where God was like "Oh crap, didn't mean to put that there. Uh guys? Don't eat that one, okay?"
So then why is there a serpent? And why does God let him get near Adam and Eve? And why did God not step in and stop them when they reached for the fruit? Was God not paying attention? Was he elsewhere?
I think God intended them to be tested all along. Maybe that was the whole reason the tree was in the garden, and why the serpent appeared in their midst to sow trouble. I think God was in their midst the whole time too, silently, invisibly rooting for them to make the right choice until he was utterly heartbroken by their failure.
The tree was a test. Anyone can say that they love someone else, or that they trust them, but what do their actions say? If there was no opportunity to mistrust, and no opportunity to not love, what value do trust and love have? God gave them a test, and gave them the answers they needed to pass. His actions said "I love them, but do they love me?" If he intervened, it wouldn't be a test.
God's commandment tested whether Adam and Eve loved God and wanted to please him. ("We don't understand why the tree is a big deal, but we know God will be upset if we eat its fruit.") It also tested whether they trusted in God's good will towards them. ("God must be telling us about this tree for an important reason, so we should stay away.")
When God confronts Adam and Eve, his confrontation is a confrontation of love, not revenge. He wasn't all "That's right! Now you'll get what you deserve! That'll teach you to mess with me!" No, his confrontation is "What have you done?! Now you'll be cursed and banished!"
God was forced to banish these people he loved. If they had access to the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil at the same time, they would turn against him. His world of order would be a world of strife. Once Adam and Eve had crossed that line, things could never be as they were.
Imagine his sorrow. He's the husband whose wife gets drunk on a business trip and cheats on him. He's the parent of a drug addict who gets caught stealing from them one too many times. He has to draw a boundary that separates him from his loved ones. If there was any other way, he would have taken it. He is God, after all.
But couldn't God just forgive their sin and put everything back like before? Not if the world was to remain intact. Without consequences, rules are just words. If there was no penalty, no change in circumstances, what is to keep Adam and Eve from destroying more of his creation? They've already proven they neither love nor trust.
Worse still, if God were to forgive their sin, he would be submitting to mankind's sense of right and wrong, rather than mankind submitting to his. In all things, the weaker must always submit to the stronger. If it's the other way around, things spin out of control. If God submitted to mankind, he would tear the universe to pieces trying to please us.
So Adam and Eve failed the test and were banished from the garden. They suffered but God also suffered. But it couldn't be any other way.
The rest of the old testament describes God's attempts to help mankind from a distance. He's punished them and he knows it can't be any other way, but he's also a God of love. He finds a way to get us back and pay the price another way, through Jesus being crucified for every mistake we have ever made in eternity. Instead of us being trapped outside of the promise he has for us, the consequences are now transferred onto Jesus. Mankind failed the test, but God's love never failed.
We'll start with Genesis 3:1-6:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “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.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
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.
And jump to Genesis 3:23-24:
So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
Backstory
When God made man and woman in the first days of his creation, he gave them everything they would ever need. He loved them and wanted them to have a perfect world to live in. They could do anything they wanted except for one thing: In their perfect world was a tree that God asked them not to eat fruit from.
The serpent
Our verses start when the serpent appears in the garden. The Bible says that he was more crafty than any of the wild animals in the garden. That means he was not Adam and Eve's friend. The serpent was only the serpent's friend. He shows it by questioning God's warning to them.
The serpent asks, "Did God really say that?" He knows what God said, but he wants to plant doubt in their minds, hoping they'll question God's command. Maybe they'll forget the details. Maybe they'll misremember them with his help. He uses black and white exaggerations to confuse the truth and paint God's command as ridiculous. "Does God really not want you to eat from any tree at all?"
Eve remembers what she was told though. So the serpent switches tactics to make God himself look bad. "Yeah? Well God is just saying that because he doesn't want you to be truly happy and empowered." Now God looks like he's got something to hide, and the serpent looks like their only friend. His trick works.
The fall
Eve and Adam both commit what we now know as the original sin. They disobey God and break the one rule that cannot be overlooked. They expect things to get better than they've ever been, but immediately things are not as they hoped. They become self-conscious and afraid. They mistrust God. They start wanting things they don't need. Something changes, and it isn't good.
How God must have ached with disappointment when they ate the fruit! He was betrayed! And now he was forced to curse those he loved, and to banish them forever from the perfect world he created for them. They were now on their own in a land of hardship, prevented by a deadly barrier from ever returning.
Why?
You might ask yourself, what's wrong with knowing good and evil? Surely that would help with pleasing God, right? The problem is that seeing good and evil would cause them to start making their own rules, which would confuse them, as they would then feel as though they didn't need God anymore. But there are lots of fancy theological reasons for why the tree was bad to eat from, and really the only one that matters is that God asked Adam and Eve not to do it.
So then you might ask, why put the tree in the garden then? Why not put it out of the way so that Adam and Eve wouldn't get hurt by mistake? There had to have been a reason it was there. God is not careless. There are no accidents of creation. There was no moment where God was like "Oh crap, didn't mean to put that there. Uh guys? Don't eat that one, okay?"
So then why is there a serpent? And why does God let him get near Adam and Eve? And why did God not step in and stop them when they reached for the fruit? Was God not paying attention? Was he elsewhere?
I think God intended them to be tested all along. Maybe that was the whole reason the tree was in the garden, and why the serpent appeared in their midst to sow trouble. I think God was in their midst the whole time too, silently, invisibly rooting for them to make the right choice until he was utterly heartbroken by their failure.
The tree was a test. Anyone can say that they love someone else, or that they trust them, but what do their actions say? If there was no opportunity to mistrust, and no opportunity to not love, what value do trust and love have? God gave them a test, and gave them the answers they needed to pass. His actions said "I love them, but do they love me?" If he intervened, it wouldn't be a test.
God's commandment tested whether Adam and Eve loved God and wanted to please him. ("We don't understand why the tree is a big deal, but we know God will be upset if we eat its fruit.") It also tested whether they trusted in God's good will towards them. ("God must be telling us about this tree for an important reason, so we should stay away.")
Consequences
When God confronts Adam and Eve, his confrontation is a confrontation of love, not revenge. He wasn't all "That's right! Now you'll get what you deserve! That'll teach you to mess with me!" No, his confrontation is "What have you done?! Now you'll be cursed and banished!"
God was forced to banish these people he loved. If they had access to the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil at the same time, they would turn against him. His world of order would be a world of strife. Once Adam and Eve had crossed that line, things could never be as they were.
Imagine his sorrow. He's the husband whose wife gets drunk on a business trip and cheats on him. He's the parent of a drug addict who gets caught stealing from them one too many times. He has to draw a boundary that separates him from his loved ones. If there was any other way, he would have taken it. He is God, after all.
But couldn't God just forgive their sin and put everything back like before? Not if the world was to remain intact. Without consequences, rules are just words. If there was no penalty, no change in circumstances, what is to keep Adam and Eve from destroying more of his creation? They've already proven they neither love nor trust.
Worse still, if God were to forgive their sin, he would be submitting to mankind's sense of right and wrong, rather than mankind submitting to his. In all things, the weaker must always submit to the stronger. If it's the other way around, things spin out of control. If God submitted to mankind, he would tear the universe to pieces trying to please us.
So Adam and Eve failed the test and were banished from the garden. They suffered but God also suffered. But it couldn't be any other way.
Aftermath
The rest of the old testament describes God's attempts to help mankind from a distance. He's punished them and he knows it can't be any other way, but he's also a God of love. He finds a way to get us back and pay the price another way, through Jesus being crucified for every mistake we have ever made in eternity. Instead of us being trapped outside of the promise he has for us, the consequences are now transferred onto Jesus. Mankind failed the test, but God's love never failed.
Comments
Post a Comment