Just something to say here as a preliminary to the discussion of this story of Eve and the Serpent; the people who wrote this down did not have the same understanding of history that we have today. We think of history as true if the facts or details are correct. Back then, probably around 900 BCE, the truth of history was not found in the facts but in what it said about us. It’s like the difference between a genealogy and family stories. Genealogies are full of dates and details. Family stories tell us who we are. There are certain stories that I will tell my children about their great-grandparents that have nothing to do with dates and details but everything to do with who Benson’s are in character. The Garden of Eden story of Genesis 2 and 3 is like a family story that tell us about who we are as human beings. It describes and explains the fundamental human problem. It isn’t so much about how humanity’s problem with that “S-word” sin began, though that could be part of the intent behind it. It is more so that the story describes how we are right now, this very moment.
The person who wrote down Genesis 2 and 3 wants us to know that God created us humans and placed us in His good creation with certain responsibilities. The Creation is really, really good, “very good” in fact, and we have incredible freedom to explore it, tame it and, indeed, to enjoy it. God put a limit on our freedom that we have difficulty heeding. One obvious piece of evidence that we have a problem is the way we use our freedom to exploit the Creation. No wonder our Creator has placed a limitation on our freedom.
The limitation? There’s that one tree in the garden we ought to leave alone because it is the death of us. It is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Although the fruit looks good, it is far from it. Paying attention to the word play in the tree’s name, it is not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good or Evil. It is Good and Evil. As a result, of eating it we become both good and evil. Good looks evil, evil looks good, and the two are mixed up in everything we do; indeed, every thought that we have. Sometimes, we think we are doing the good only to wind up doing evil. So also, sometimes we have to do what we know is evil hoping that the end result will be good. That’s the main rationale behind war and the free market economy. Moreover, if you pay attention while you read the Bible, you will begin to notice that even God often has to do evil when dealing with us so that good will result. So also, God is very good at taking the evil that we intentionally do, the evil we do wanting evil to result, and using it to bring about the very good; the crucifixion of Jesus being the best example.
So, the key thing that the writer of Genesis 3 wants us to know about ourselves is that at our very cores we have an enmeshing, a melange, of good and evil. The end result of this enmeshment is a profound wounding of both our relationship to God and to each other. Instead of the wonder of innocence, we have a persistent sense of shame, nakedness, and so we hide. With respect to our relationship to God, we are afraid of God and want to hide from him but from even though we don’t have to. It is impossible for us to seek God and find him because we come up with some pretty bizarre ideas about God and create false images to convince ourselves that God is the problem. So, it winds up God has to seek us out and confront us as to why we are hiding from him. Thus, we find that we are unable to accept responsibility for the way we are and for what we do. We will even point at God and say, “If God is a really loving God, why did he put that tree in the garden.” Moreover, we want to be God or at least be equal to him.
This problem also profoundly affects our relationships. The crown jewel of God’s very good creation, human relationship, which is the image of God in us, is made ugly by our blaming, our efforts to control, profound emotional pain, and guilt and shame. We are no longer in the garden carrying out our joyful created purpose. We hurt and we hurt others. Finally, there’s the brutal reality of death.
Our problem is a sickness, a disease of the mind as it affects how we know and understand God, ourselves, each other, and the world in which we live. This sickness profoundly culminates in the harsh reality of death. Humanity is a mess of brokenness, futility, shame, and death, in fact the whole Creation is this way because humanity, it’s caretaker, is sick to death because we have this Knowledge of Good and Evil rather than Life.
Having said that, there is a deeper question we must ask: What makes us this way? Why do we eat that damned fruit? This is where we have to pay careful attention to the conversation between Eve and the Serpent. First, who is this Serpent? Well, traditionally people have said that the Serpent is Satan. Yet, I don’t think the writer of Genesis 3 had a very developed understanding of Satan. The being we call Satan doesn’t really start to show up in ancient Israelite writings until 500 years later. That said, the who or what is it?
Here’s another more likely possibility. Genesis 3 was most likely developed during the days of King Solomon in the 900’s BCE when there was a Temple and a priesthood with the luxury of time to write. At that time, the big problem they wrote about in their struggle to be faithful to God was idolatry. Their dominant God-question (so also ours) was “How do you worship one God when everybody else around you has a bunch of gods?” Moreover, the worship of those other gods was quite more hedonistically appealing than the worship of Israel’s God who simply required obedience to a code of upright conduct rooted in uprightness, justice, and equity. Idolatry is the problem the Serpent represents.
Why a serpent? Well, when the Israelites were in Egypt in the land of Goshen, the main Egyptian god over that area was a goddess named Wadjyt who was a winged serpent. She was Pharoah’s protector and the protector of the Nile Delta, that breadbasket of Egypt. She was powerful. If you recall pictures of Pharoah’s wearing a turban with a serpant head poking out the front, that’s Wadjyt. If you remember in the story of the Exodus, the greatest temptation they faced along the way was to stop following God and turn back to Egypt and its gods. So, the Serpent represents our inclination to turn away from God and worship other things and even ourselves as gods.
This story was most likely written down Solomon was king and Solomon’s first wife was an Egyptian princess. He built a shrine for her within the confines of the Temple complex for her to worship her God and followed suit with the rest of his 700 hundred wives. He littered the Temple complex with shrines and then worshipped these other gods as well. This story was probably written down by priests serving during Solomon’s day to prophetically call him out on his complicity in idolatry with his wives. Thus, Solomon resembles the rather stupid, silent Adam who stands by while Eve eats the fruit and passes it to him to eat…and he does. So, at the heart of our problem of knowing good and evil is our idolatry, worship other things as God and also wanting to be or be like God ourselves.
Moving on, the way that our idolatry weasels us into eating the wrong fruit is that it twists our understanding of God by challenging God’s authority to place limitations on human freedom. Let’s take a brief look at how the conversation between Eve and the Serpent unfolds. First, God said to Adam, “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden; but of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Next, somewhere along the way Adam had to tell Eve about the Tree but in so doing he seems to have changed what God said. He probably said to her something like, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” Adam doesn’t want his perfect helpmate to die, so in fear he added the words “nor shall you touch it” to discourage her all the more from eating of that Tree. This addition of “nor shall you touch it” is what the Serpent used to twist Eve’s understanding of God.
The Serpent began his testing of Eve by seeing how much she knew about God and what God had actually said about things in the Garden. He said to Eve, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?” Eve answered, “We can eat from any tree” (not God said we can eat from any tree). “But God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” That’s not quite what God said. The question the Serpent asked focused Eve on the rules and starts to change her understanding of the God she knew. Eve’s understanding or knowledge of God then began to morph from God being the loving Creator, their Father-like friend who gave humanity immense freedom in the garden and who in love warned them of the real danger to human existence the Tree posed, into thinking of God as simply being a rule making God who nonsensically limits human freedoms.
Having gotten Eve to understand God and God’s motives wrongly, the Serpent outright lied and gave a false reason for why God gave that commandment. He said, “You won’t die. God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God (or gods), knowing good and evil.” The serpent reduced God to simply being a lying, jealous, power-mongering rule maker who was withholding from them the secret knowledge of good and evil that only gods have.
With God’s authority and identity undermined, Eve was left to her own ability to discern the value of the fruit and the merit of eating it. To her eyes, what God had in essence declared to be evil appeared very good. Notice that Eve’s and Adam’s eyes were not opened until they both ate the fruit because we are relational beings who do not exist in the vacuum of individualism. Our sickness is never simply an individual problem. Other people are affected by everything we do for good or for bad. After they both had eaten the fruit, their eyes were opened and what they sqw was their own nakedness. The secret knowledge they received was a sense of shame that could not be alleviated. Out comes those grossly inadequate fig leaves.
So far, I’ve said this story tells us that our problem is that each of us in our very core is both good and evil. The reason for this is that we are idolatrous. We like to put our faith in things other than the loving God who has created us. In order to persist in idolatry we have to convince ourselves that the God who created us in love in his own image is simply a petty, lying rule maker who wants us to tow the line or else.
Interestingly, if you go to people who don’t go to church but have grown up in Western Culture and ask them what church-going Christians believe about God. They will say that we believe God is a rule making God who demands we be obedient or he will send us to Hell when we die. They think this because the church particularly in Europe and North America has walked hand in hand with the Serpent and given them this idea. In order for our culture to be so materialistic, consumeristic, imperialistic, so warring, so indulgent; in order for us Western Christians to be like that and worship our culture’s false gods of money, sex, and power we have needed to understand the God who made us in a way that is different from how God has revealed himself. We have had to convince ourselves that the Triune God of grace, the loving Communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who made humanity to be a loving communion in his own image is rather an angry, bearded, old man sitting on a throne in a far away place called heaven watching to see if we can obey those impossible rules he set up for us because he enjoys punishing us even when we’re good and then somehow the wicked always seem to get their way.
The amazing thing we see in the rest of chapter 3 when God comes looking for Adam and Eve is that God hasn’t changed towards them/ towards us. It is we who have changed. Though there are inevitable consequences for what we do, God didn’t get Adam and Eve for what they did. In love, God covered their nakedness. So also, God covers us for our idolatry. In Jesus Christ through the presence of the Holy Spirit with us and in us he has once and for all covered our shame. Now, as disciples of Jesus Christ filled with the Holy Spirit we can live in him and with one another in loving community that reflects the image of God – living according to that one commandment of loving each other. In Christ, we are in the New Garden. Now, we get to eat of the Tree of Life.
Leave that false image of God the rule-making judge behind and the idolatry of power, sex, and money that comes with it. Follow Jesus and find your new life that’s hidden with him in God. Devote yourselves more fully to living the new humanity, the humanity that’s not driven by self-indulgence and the inordinate pursuit of freedoms which we think make us happy. But rather let yourselves be driven by the love of God. We have one commandment to follow in the living and life-giving, that we love one another as Christ Jesus has loved us. That’s the secret knowledge found in the Tree of Life. May our eyes be opened to our beauty of being made in God’s image rather than our nakedness. Amen.
