“1 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’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 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.’”
4 “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat
of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 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. 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.
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How has 9/11 affected you? Maybe you yourself were involved in some of the military action that came about as a result of that attack. Maybe you had a business that went under as a result of the recession that followed. That attack affected some lives more directly than others. Pete Davidson is currently a cast member on Saturday Night Live. His father was a New York City first responder who died as a result of the attacks. Pete was eight at the time. How do you think those attacks affected him? He lives in Staten Island with his mother in a home they purchased together. I doubt many twenty-something millionaires covered with over 40 tattoos choose to live with their mother. That tragedy has had an effect on Davidson.
Those attacks have lingering effects on many people. Firefighters suffer lingering health effects. Those who arrived first have a 44% increased risk for cardiovascular disease when compared with those who arrived later. Many people still suffer some form of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of those attacks.
Perhaps you weren’t alive when the towers fell. Those attacks have still affected you. They affect you if you’ve ever flown in a plane. There are any number of regulations introduced as a result of 9/11. They affect you by way of the multiple trillions of dollars we have a nation have spent in the wars that followed those attacks.
You simply can’t understand America today without understanding those attacks. You probably can’t understand Pete Davidson without understanding the effect those attacks had on him. You can’t understand the people who still suffer results of trauma without understanding those attacks. The same is true for humanity in relation to what we will begin studying this morning. You can’t understand us without understanding the fall into sin. You can’t understand why we do what we do without understanding the effect this event had on us and still has on us. It leaves all sorts of marks on us and continues to effect day to day life in thousands of different ways. You can’t understand humanity without understanding the fall into sin. That’s the claim of this sermon: you can’t understand humanity without understanding the fall into sin.
We will study this in two points. First: the crafty serpent. Second: eating the fruit. We will see the crafty serpent in verse 1-5. In verses 6-7 we will see Adam and Eve eat the fruit.
First: the crafty serpent. The account of the fall into sin frontloads the serpent. Usually Hebrew sentences begin with a verb, but this one begins with the word for serpent to highlight his centrality to this story. The fall into sin wouldn’t have occurred were it not for the serpent.
Throughout the Ancient Near East the danger of chaos was often pictured as a serpent. Chaos, as we saw in our study of heaven, threatens to unravel order. It threatens to undo what is good. This chaos was often pictured as a serpent. You see this in Isaiah’s plea to the Lord; “awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?” Isaiah was speaking of the myths that pictured a dragon, a flying serpent, as a threat to creation. He was saying that it wasn’t a mythical hero, but actually the Lord who did away with that chaos and created order. That’s what’s going on with the days of creation. It shows God establishing order. The serpent came to sow chaos into that order.
The author was drawing attention to that fact by frontloading the serpent. Satan was speaking through this serpent, perhaps similar to the way that demons entered into and influenced the pigs when Jesus cast them out of the demon possessed man.
We read that the serpent was crafty. Such comments are rare in Hebrew narrative—the author usually lets the story speak for itself—so this craftiness must be important. This word used for craftiness isn’t inherently negative. The same word is used for the prudent man in the book of Proverbs. “All who are prudent act with knowledge, but fools expose their folly.” “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.” The same mental muscles that show up as craftiness can also show up as prudence. It is a word that speaks to understanding the lay of the land and knowing how to act accordingly. We will see how the serpent used and uses this skill to his advantage and our disadvantage.
This word for craftiness is also important because of its sound. It sounds just like the word for “naked” in the verse before verse 1, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” This is a story about how the craftiness of the serpent moves Adam and Eve from no shame to shame, and why you as a child of Adam and Eve know shame all too well.
We see the craftiness of the serpent at work in his question in verse 1, ‘He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”’ The serpent used a general title for God rather than using His personal name to make the Lord appear more distant to Eve. It seemed to work because Eve responded by talking about God with the same title. God was becoming less personal in Eve’s mind. She was now talking about God. God and His will was now a topic of conversation to be debated. You see the fingerprints of that all over the church and world today.
The serpent smeared God as surprisingly withholding; “‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ The serpent put God’s prohibition first—“You must not eat”—while God had put His generosity first; “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden,” and then added the prohibition. God is an exceedingly generous giver who points out boundaries for our good, but you wouldn’t pick that up from listening to Satan in the garden or today.
Satan’s goal was the change the way Eve thought of God and the way we think of Him today. You can tell that Satan’s words were having an effect when you notice that Eve, like Satan, exaggerated. Satan exaggerated the extent of God’s prohibition and so did Eve; verse 2, ‘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.’”’ God hadn’t said anything about not touching the fruit or the tree. Eve was starting to think of God’s commandment as arbitrary rather than purposeful, as if God put that tree in the garden as some sort of threat to them. As Calvin put it, Eve, “erred in not regulating the measure of her knowledge by the will of God.”
Next Satan worked to remove the consequences of sin from Eve’s mind; verse 4, ‘“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman.’ God had promised that disobedience would bring death, but Satan opened the door for some wiggle room on this matter. He still does that. In order to seduce us into sin, which God says always brings consequences, Satan must convince us that this case will be an exception or that the joy of the sin will be worth the consequences God unfairly gives for sin.
To understand the force of this consequence of death, you need to read Genesis through Deuteronomy backward. Moses put the first five books of Scripture together as a unit. At the end of them and the beginning he was thinking about how sin would lead to death. He was thinking about expulsion from the garden at the beginning and expulsion from the Promised Land at the end. The Genesis 3 story is repeated over and over and warned against over and over throughout the entirety of Scripture.
Jesus came so that some people would stop repeating it. He came so that some people might escape its cycle. He came so that our story could be told without this fall into sin being the determinate factor. Is 9/11 the determinate factor of Pete Davidson’s life? I don’t know, but I do know that this fall into sin and its consequences is the determinate factor of everyone who doesn’t put their faith in the Christ who reverses this curse. That’s why God gave the promise shortly after this fall into sin, as we will study next week.
Satan wanted Eve to distrust God. That’s why he exaggerated the commands. That’s why he smeared God’s generosity. That’s why he hid the consequences for sin. That’s why he questioned God’s intentions. In many of the Ancient Near East creation myths, the gods actively prevented people from becoming like them. They did so to keep humanity subservient and oppressed. The serpent implied that God wanted to keep Adam and Eve in their place; verse 4, ‘“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat
of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”’ The serpent told Eve that God didn’t want her becoming like Him. Satan wanted Eve to consider this an intolerable situation. As Calvin put it, “They had been made in the likeness of God, but this seems a small thing unless equality be added.”
To eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is to judge for yourself rather than accept the judgments of God. Why shouldn’t Eve judge for herself? That’s the serpent’s logic and some modern readers. Listen to this summary of Dutch scholar Mieke Bal’s take on this passage, “Eve’s decision to eat the fruit is the first act of human independence. This independence forces the human and the divine into a real relationship of give and take rather than an artificial relationship of puppet and puppeteer. Eve does not “sin”; she chooses reality over her naïve, paradisiacal existence. Her choice marks the emergence of human character.”
Gordon Wenham would disagree. He says that this choice to eat the fruit leads to, “an independence [from] the creator incompatible with the trustful relationship between man and his maker…” You see that lack of trust in Mieke Bal’s words; calling God a puppeteer is not a posture of trust. That’s certainly wasn’t the attitude of Jesus toward his Father, and remember Jesus is the only who actually has obeyed all the way, right way, all the time.
So as you truly ponder Satan’s words in this passage, and I hope you do ponder them now because he is actually whispering them to you in a dozen different ways every day, you need to ask yourself if you agree with Bal or with Wenham. Do you think that Satan was inviting Eve into independence or do you think that Satan was tempting Eve into forfeiting her trust in God?
Perhaps the better way to come at this is to ask if you think that submitting to God’s commandments are an act of sacrificing your independence or an act of trust in God? We are going to be studying sexuality and marriage in a month. Do you think that to submit to God’s commands in those areas is to sacrifice your independence or do you think submission to God’s commands is an act of trust in Jesus’ Father? Be careful here. It’s very dangerous to find yourself in a camp that subscribes to the logic of Satan.
We’ve been studying the craftiness of the serpent. Now we see that Adam and Eve weren’t near as prudent as he was crafty. That’s our second point: eating the fruit. Satan’s craftiness had its way with Eve. You see that in verse 6, “the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom.” You can see that Satan had tricked Eve by the fact that she saw one fruit as desirable for gaining wisdom. I’ve got a variety of fruits here this morning. By show of hands, tell me which fruit looks most likely to give you the ability to make judgments for yourself rather than submitting to those made by God. Who votes for the apple? What about the orange? Who votes for the banana?
Who has no idea how to vote? You’ve got no idea how to vote because no fruit appears desirable for gaining wisdom. Eve only thought that fruit did because Satan told her it did. We humans think all sorts of nonsense because Satan tells us it makes sense. Just look at our culture. Just look at ourselves.
Eve believed Satan. That’s why she thought the way she did about whatever fruit that was. That’s why she ate; “she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” We will focus more on what Adam was up to in our third study.
So they ate the fruit. They weren’t as prudent as the serpent was crafty. Jesus was doubtlessly thinking about that when he told his first disciples, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” That Greek word for “shrewd” is the same as the Greek word used to describe the serpent here. That’s how Adam and Eve could have maintained their innocence—being as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. That’s the call today, and Calvin tells us how to do it. He describes the restraint that Adam and Eve before they listened to Satan; “their best restraint was the thought which entirely occupied their minds that God is just, that nothing is better than to obey His commands, and that to be loved by Him is the consummation of a happy life.” That’s your best restraint too.
Adam and Eve ate the fruit Satan said would give them the right to judge for themselves. They ate from the tree of knowledge, and their eyes were opened, and they did experience profound realizations; verse 7, “then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked.” There is a slight difference in the pronunciation of this word for naked and the one in 2:25, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” Their nakedness was now different. It wasn’t innocence. It was an awareness that something was wrong. They were not like God. He has it in them to judge correctly between good and evil. They didn’t. We don’t. They wanted to be like God and became quite unlike God. That is what is happening all around this world today. People want to be like God in all the wrong ways and they wind up becoming less and less like Him.
Adam and Eve realized this, and their response was so pathetic that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so familiar to our own experience; verse 7, “they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” Their goal as Calvin put it was to, “keep God at a distance, as by an invincible barrier.” A fig leaf is about as invincible of a barrier as you would imagine. As we will see next week, it hid nothing. The fig leaves we use to hide our shame hide nothing. We create our own barriers—our reputations, our success, our attractiveness, our indispensability—we cultivate these to hide our shame and it hides nothing from ourselves or from God.
Adam and Eve didn’t receive the freedom Satan promised. They found that what Satan painted as freedom from God in all the ways they wanted turned out to be freedom from God in all the unpleasant ways, but that’s par for the course because Satan excels at half-truths.
Adam and Eve were left with shame and that shame has been the natural human condition ever since. Humanity is far more affected by that than Pete Davidson was and is affected by 9/11, and that young man was and is certainly affected by that event. Humanity is more affected by that than those firefighters with PTSD are still affected by 9/11. The only way to leave this lifetime and eternity of shame is to accept the return to innocence.
You can do so because innocence came down to you. We just celebrated that at Christmas. When Jesus started his public ministry, he was driven into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. He faced the craftiness of the serpent just like Adam and Eve did, but he maintained his innocence. He was more innocent than a dove while being shrewder than a serpent. He offers that innocence to you. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Righteousness can be yours. It can be yours in no other way than through the cross of Christ. It can be your children’s in no other way than through the cross of Christ. That’s why Jesus came. He came because otherwise what we studied this morning would be the determinative factor for everyone’s life. You need to decide what you want to be the determinative factor of your life because if it isn’t the cross of Christ it is this fall into sin and the craftiness of the serpent. Amen.