Song: Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days: https://open.spotify.com/track/4lLTPmQ06wOXTFmjZtiVBw?si=f45ea5c318764463
Song: Abide with Me: https://open.spotify.com/track/3WIM3qKRu2OGenEq5OSke2?si=db030bd578af4739
Song: All Praise to Thee: https://open.spotify.com/track/6NRG51DQUbUksN3efgUoNQ?si=a4cb4b57484f422d
BIBLE STUDY + SERMON MANUSCRIPT
Deep Dive into Genesis 3: Contextualizing and Absorbing the Text
The Obvious
Genesis 3 is the first great story of the Bible. It has vivid characters, plot, conflict, suspense, tragedy, traces of humor, pathos, etc. It introduces themes common to human life: dilemma, ambition, embarrassment, fear, loss, death, domination, pain, punishment, homelessness, shame, guilt, faith, stupidity…. Careful readers are amazed at how much narrative, complexity, depth, and simplicity is packed into just 24 Bible verses—677 words. From a literary perspective, it ranks with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: pithy and provocative, generating an endless stream of insight and wisdom. It exceeds the Gettysburg address with its rich characters, plot, pivots, and foreshadowing.
The story of Genesis 3 is simple. Two individuals are living happily ever after in a lovely paradise, communing daily with God, enjoying the pleasures and adventures of a blissful garden. Ignorance is bliss. And that ignorance is maintained by one simple abstinence: don’t eat the fruit growing on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
We know right off that the serpent who pops up in the story is not to be trusted. He feels slimy right from the start. We want to yell at Eve to chop his head off with a garden hoe. But she naively falls for the serpent’s con. We picture the tragedy unfolding in slow motion: with Adam standing flaccidly by, Eve makes up her mind, her hand reaches for the forbidden fruit, and she bites into it. We don’t see her reaction: was it sweet, sour, mushy, crisp; pleasant, unpleasant? We don’t know. She hands it to Adam and he plays along
The serpent fades from the stage.
The man and the women feel different. Their thinking changes. Something seems wrong to them. New knowledge suddenly floods their brains. They begin to ponder nakedness, danger, exposure, shame, guilt, death, individuality, aloneness, divine mystery—all in a swirl. They know things, too many things; but they don’t know what to do with what they know. And not knowing, they do the wrong thing: they hide from God. But they don’t quite know how to hide, that you are to be quiet as well as invisible. God calls, “Where are you?” If you’re going to hide, don’t take big-mouth Adam with you. He’s a talker, that one.
Adam starts babbling about “nakedness.” It has quite upset him. He obviously ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God wonders why. Adam, who had already demonstrated a lack of self-agency that day, decides to play the victim. “Remember the woman you gave me? She gave me the fruit. All I did was eat it. Did I mention that YOU are the one who gave her to me?”
The woman blamed it on the serpent. “He tricked me.”
And so, the people who were given what was behind Door A, the Garden of Eden, chose Door B instead. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would now reveal what is behind Door B. They would now experience both good and evil in ways far beyond Eden.
The serpent will heretofore crawl on its belly and eat dirt. People will despise the serpent. The woman will suffer in bearing and rearing children. She will have to suffer the male ego. The man, because he tried to please those around him and caved to what he knew to be wrong, will sweat and struggle against the earth—and eventually die and disintegrate into that same ground from which he was first made.
The man’s ego kicked in immediately and he presumed to name his better half, “Eve,” meaning, “mother of life,” in anticipation of her unique role in bearing children.
God, noticing that the two humans were wearing fig leaves, had pity on them. Fig leaves are rough on the skin. So, God made them clothes, of animal skins. The first ones to die because of human folly: several animals. More death to come.
One thing God’s creation doesn’t need is for these two characters to “live forever.” That would be bad news. And so, lest they munch on the fruit from the Tree of Life, they are banished from Eden, driven out, and prevented from returning anywhere near the Tree of Life by an onery cherub who flourishes a flaming sword.
The Less Obvious
First, it probably wasn’t an apple. The Romans started that rumor. The Latin word for apple is “malum,” which is also the Latin word for “evil.” So…
Second, the Hebrew word for “serpent” merely means “snake.” But “snake” sounds too humdrum for such a history-changing catalyst. And so translators upgrade the character to a “serpent.” That sounds more mysterious, formidable, satanic—more blameworthy. It is more pleasing to the conspiratorial mind. But alas, in the Hebrew text, it is just a snake, with a reptilian brain, dangerously crafty at times—but just a snake. We miss the point of Genesis 3 when we allegorize the snake and turn him into the Devil. It’s just a snake.
Third, the snake speaks—in this one story. Later in the Bible, we will also hear from an ass. Talking animals are rare in the Bible. When the ass speaks (Numbers 22-24) it brings to light what humans don’t see. Perhaps the snake in Genesis 3 merely brings to the surface what was already germinating in the human mind. “I hear that all the trees in this garden are off-limits to you two.” The woman quickly corrects him: “Oh no. Only one tree is off-limits.”
Fourth, the woman expands. (Just like we sometimes expand and exaggerate.) “We’re not even allowed to touch it. Or we will DIE.”
Did the snake give voice to their unspoken doubts when he said, “You will not die. But rather, your eyes will be open, you will be like God.” Once the threat of death is removed, desire and appetite are free to control human thought and judgment. Once the woman began to toy with the notion that death didn’t apply to her, she began to see all the “pros” in harvesting that tree. She would sip the nectar reserved for God—who is immortal, all powerful, all knowing. All she could imagine was the upside.
Her boyfriend was idly standing there the whole time. Not once did he offer his two cents or argue. Did he not know that two heads are better than one? Instead of taking responsibility, he just stupidly took the fruit and wolfed it down. In verse 17, God will say to him, “Because you have listened to the voice of your woman” the ground will be cursed and you will sweat to make it produce food for you and you will someday return to the earth from which you were made. Wow! All because the man listened to his woman! Talk about kicking the door open for sexism!
But maybe not so quick. The Hebrew word for “listen” is “shamat.” It can be translated as “listen.” But it is just as often translated as “obey.” There can be no dispute that the man should NOT have obeyed his wife, back at the tree, when she offered him the forbidden fruit. But to extrapolate from this one stupid passivity that all men should NEVER listen to or obey the women in their lives is illogical. To jump from this story into a generalization that men should be forever the boss and women forever submissive is an act of absurdity fueled by an ambition to dominate other human beings. And women who would have men be above them in a hierarchical relationship are just as guilty as Adam—who stood idly by in this story and refused to argue or stand up for God’s will.
Fifthy, were Adam and Eve married at this point? The institution of marriage is an anachronism in Genesis 3. It will eventually become an institution defining a husband’s legal right of possession and supremacy in regard to his wives. But in Genesis 3, we simply have a man and a woman, sexual beings, partners, blessed by God, with no legal contract or even covenant defining their relationship. The text implies that they are husband and wife, but simplistically in a way that we moderns can barely imagine. I don’t even use “husband” and “wife” in my translations because of how those terms are weighted with so many cultural and complex definitions today.
Sixth, the text gives us several insights into the nature of temptation. (v. 6) As creatures who have been endowed with divine characteristics (Genesis 1:26), humans reflect the same impulses found in the Genesis descriptions God: desire, anger, avoidance, creativity, appetite, imagination, boldness, rationale, relational, ambition, and control over others. In humans, there is an understandable impulse to imitate God, to be like God. These impulses in themselves are neutral—neither good nor bad. In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus recognizes those destructive temptations: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” It is good when we are tempted to abide in Christ and let Christ abide in us. It is evil when we are tempted to step beyond the boundaries given to human beings—such as when we embody our anger and pride in abusing others.
In Genesis 3, we are privy to the thinking of the woman. (Later to be named “Eve.”) She is part of a system—the Garden of Eden. And she is tempted to improve on the system. She is tempted by her restlessness—not content to just be who she is, not content with her current relationships. She is also not content to have the shadow of death hanging over her head. (“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 die.” Genesis 2:17) She can imagine how things might be better. And she is tempted by her imagination.
She is also tempted by her appetite. Here we distinguish between hunger and appetite. Hunger satisfies deficiencies in the biological body. Appetite satisfies psychological restlessness. There is plenty of food in the garden to meet the biological needs of the man and woman. But the woman has developed an appetite as well. This should not surprise us, as she was created in the image of God, who has no biological needs—but only appetite. She has an appetite for knowledge, an appetite for immortality, and appetite for pleasure, an appetite for adventure.
Temptation is fundamentally a godly matter. But temptation comes with a profound question: are we wise enough, good enough, strong enough, mature enough, skillful enough to navigate the consequences of saying “yes?” Not always, as we soon find out in this story.
Seventh, their eyes were opened, and they saw that they were nude. They weren’t prepared for that~ Of course, they had been nude for some time prior to this little snack they’d just snitched. And up until this very moment, they’d had no shame. But whereas their eyes had previously seen physical curiosities and delights, now they became obsessed with bodily vulnerabilities and flaws. The man and woman instantly felt body-shamed—whether from an internal anxiety or something the other one said—we do not know.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil opened their eyes to both the promises and vulnerabilities of their own bodies—good and evil. Perhaps they went from delighting in their different anatomies to fearing those differences. Their eyes were opened to the dangers of being too transparent, too open, too truthful. And so they quickly covered up with fig leaves. How could someone so different from me actually understand me? Their eyes saw what might go wrong. And so their nudeness became intolerable, it must be disguised. Each one became self-conscious of needing defenses. And so defense mechanisms were instantly created, even if they cut and itched like fig leaves, doing more damage than good.
Yet, for all they could now see, after eating the forbidden fruit, what they could not see was their own agency, their own culpability, their responsibility. Their sudden grief of a lost world of innocence morphed into grievance. Blame. Finger pointing. “The woman, whom thou gave me, she caused it. You and she are to blame. I am the victim of what the two of you did.” “The snake talked me into it.” When others are to blame, there is all the more need for building defenses around ourselves. Let us find another fig tree—for more leaves.
Eighth, and then there were consequences. Did God design the consequences on the spot that day? Or were the consequences already built into creation? The system of Eden was broken. The man and woman broke it and would now have to move somewhere else, into a more hostile environment. They would now know pain and death, sweat and injustice in this new system, beyond the gates of Eden. But they would also know of God’s mercy and joys. They would experience new life as well as death. They would have to struggle to remember their origin stories: that humans came from the earth and that they came from each other. Real life would now put a strain on that: they would struggle to be in harmony with the earth—now confronting them with thorns and thistles, and they would struggle to be true partners with each other—now confronted with the notion that the male would pursue dominance over the female. The short and sweet story of Eden had now become a long and suspenseful story of life in the real world.
Ninth, the theme of death has been given insufficient attention in this story. The subject of death was introduced back in Genesis 2:17: “Of that tree…you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Eating from that tree is a bad thing because it leads to a bad result. Bad. Bad. Bad. And so already the man and woman have become leery of death. The woman is no dunce—and she has likely thought of further ways to protect herself and her partner from this peril. How to put a few more locks on that door? Is it prudent to just sit back and passively expect death to be kept at bay by simple abstinence from a single tree? When the text says that the snake was “crafty” in 3:1, the Hebrew word most often is translated, “prudent,” as in, stock up on insurance.
When the snake puts the notion in her head that she won’t die—but even become like God (who happens to be immortal) then her appetite for the forbidden fruit goes over the top. She is deluded into thinking that she can defy death. That’s all it takes. This human urge to deny death is irresistible. In Genesis 3, it takes the form of eating forbidden fruit. But with every person, in every age, the yearning to deny death leads to crazy behavior.
While death does not come to the man and woman that very day, it does come quickly to the animals who had to be sacrificed so their skins could be used to replace the inadequate fig leaves. (Genesis 3: 21) It turns out, ironically, that human actions to deny death actually hasten and spread it.
Tenth, most of us, because we are human, tend to read Genesis 3 through the POV of the woman or man. (Point of View—the character in the story through whose eyes the author sees matters.) But what happens when we allow the POV to be God? What is happening inside God’s mind and heart as this story unfolds?
God asks three questions—to which he already knows the answer. “Where art thou?” in verse 9; “Who told you that you were naked?” in verse 11; and “What have you done?” in verse 13. Why ask the questions then? Despite being betrayed, these three questions indicate that God has chosen to still be vulnerable to these two flawed human beings, sharing both thoughts and feelings. When spoken in tones of deep grief, “Where are you?” becomes a revelation of God’s vulnerability to us. When spoken in tones of anxiety, “Who told you that you were naked?” becomes a wistful desire that anyone but the human creatures might be responsible for this. And “What have you done?” is the painful coming to grips with reality, what is, not what God wishes it to be.
The more we tune into the character of God in this chapter, the less likely it seems that God conjured up all these punishments on the spot. God, who built “free choice” into the human experiment, must now work with the logical consequences of those choices—just as the human must. For God to intervene and erase these human choices as though they were never made—is to negate the whole experiment of human choice in the first place. God will not abandon the experiment of human choice. Instead, God will now adjust to find new ways to love these human beings. God has put these humans in “nature.” Nature has rules and consequences. God will not remove them from nature, but instead make them more vulnerable to it.
Finally, is it appropriate to title this story “The Fall of Man?” No. That is a label that comes from systematic theology imposing its doctrine and framework on the text. While such terms are appropriate in a work systematic theology, they distort the interpretation of scripture before we even get into exploring the text. No labels please. They vandalize the word of God and expose us to false interpretation of scripture.
Did God not know that the woman and man would eat of the forbidden fruit. How could God not know in advance that the desire to “know” and the repulsion of death would not drive human decision making? God even made it more tempting by pointing it out and then forbidding them to partake. God created the temptation—the overpowering temptation. It is as though God created this wonderful world—and then, lacking the tension needed to make it dynamic, real for humans to chose love and liberty, truly joyful—this story is less of a surprising disappointment to God than God’s plan all along. Instead of being called “The Fall of Man,” perhaps it should be called (if we must have a label) the beginning of what it means to be really human, and really in a relationship with God and each other and the world around us.
THE GOOD WORD (manuscript on Denying Death)
We are currently in the first week of Lent: a forty day season that begins and ends with thoughts of death, beginning with Ash Wednesday and closing out with the story of Jesus’ death and burial. Easter, of course, will greet us with resurrection and new life. But Lent, standing alone, only takes us from death to death.
On Ash Wednesday we gathered to have ashes smeared on our faces. The ashes of dead palm branches. And we walked out into the world that day with this sign of death broadcast on our heads, for all the world to see. Why would we do that?
We really don’t like death. We really don’t like death. Sure, at times it comes as a relief, as when a person has been suffering for a lengthy time, and death comes at long last, and the poor suffering soul is finally resting in peace. Death can be a relief. But we wouldn’t say we’re ready for a whole bunch of it.
And of course, heaven is quite popular—that place of paradise where we go after we die. But death is the toll gate we have to pass through before entering that promised land. When it came to passing through death, even Jesus prayed, “Take this cup from me if it be thy will.”
But here we are at the start of Lent, hundreds of millions of Christians sauntered out of their churches with this grotesque sign of death smeared conspicuously on their foreheads.
None of us are eager to be reminded that we are dust, and unto dust we shall return.
Death haunts us, and we don’t have to be very old before that haunting begins. Granted, death’s vile terrors don’t register with the smallest of children. Their minds haven’t hardened yet—enough to contain notions of death’s finality, it emotional pain, or brokenness of the remnant in death’s aftermath. But I remember, as a young schoolboy, having enough experience of death to have awful dreams of my parents dying and being forever bereft. It doesn’t take too many years for humans to abhor and fear death. What is the psychology behind our loathing of death?
When I was in college, I decided to major in Psychology. Psychology boils down to one simple question: What makes us act like we do? We can expand on that: what makes people act that way, talk like they do, think like they do, and feel like they do? What causes me to be like I am, or the people I know—what makes them that way?
Freud was the first great psychologist. I don’t want to oversimply him, but I will. Freud suggested that the main drive behind what we do, say, think, and feel…the main power in shaping our lives—is sex.
You can imagine that Freud’s theories provoked quite a storm, not only among psychologists—but among anyone else who ever learned even a little about his ideas. For myself, I think Freud had some workable theories. But my understandings of psychology have been influenced by other sources, particularly the Bible and the wisdom of Jesus. Consequently, I think that much of our subconscious behavior is not so much about sex as it is about death. Humans will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid death, deny it, delay it, and defy it.
In fact, according the first full length story in the Bible, the origin of human sin begins with the denial of death.
Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden, enjoying themselves, distracting themselves from the one rule they were given—do not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden—or you will die. If you eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will bring upon yourself a swift death. Fortunately, there seemed to be plenty to do in the Garden of Eden to keep Adam and Eve distracted from that unpleasantry. Perhaps Adam and Eve never spoke of that tree—or of death. I don’t know. I also don’t know what exactly they knew about death, but we do know that they knew enough about it –to want to avoid it.
It was the snake who first brought up the subject. “I hear you are forbidden to eat fruit from the trees around here.” Eve quickly corrected him. “We can eat all the fruit we want, from anywhere in the garden. Just not the tree in the middle. If we eat that fruit, or if we even touch that tree, we will die.”
Now, here’s the thing. The Lord never told them to not touch the tree. Perhaps they were so determined to avoid death that they added that clause on their own, just to feel more in control of the situation. True, they would die if they ate the fruit from that tree. (Genesis 2:17) But the part about dying if they even touched the tree—that was something they made up on their own, plausibly out of their own anxieties.
Already we can see that Adam and Eve are skittish about death. I get the sense that if this couple could figure out a few more layers to help them avoid, delay, and deny death–they would grab at the chance.
And so, on this particular day, the snake throws a proposition at them that they can’t turn down. “If you eat the fruit of that tree, you won’t die. You will become enlightened. You will come to know what God knows. You will be like God. Who happens to be immortal.”
The man and the woman, already tremulous at the thought of death, swallowed this lie. I don’t know, once they ate the fruit of that tree, what immediate effect it had on their bodies. Maybe it gave them diarrhea, or a rash. But I do know that it was the lie they swallowed that was their undoing.
We human beings are so terrified and disgusted and revolted by death that we will swallow a whole bottle of lies if we have even a mustard seed smidge of hope that it will help. We will put up any and every defense mechanism we can find in order to defy and deny death’s reality. And so it was that Eve, and Adam, partook of the primal lie. They swallowed the bait that they would not die.
Sin and death go hand in hand in Christian theology. I had a man in my church decades ago who had a stroke, went into a coma, and clearly would never recover. But neither his family nor his egotistic physician could entertain the thought of death. So, he was put on life support until his unresponsive body became bloated to the point of bursting. While death itself is indeed a sorrow and a tragedy, the denial of death adds travesty to tragedy, foments injustice, and destroys far more than death alone does.
During the decades of my ministry, I’m thankful that hospice has evolved and grown—and helped people avoid that inhumaneness.
The seven deadly sins all have some role in building up the illusion that we can deny and defy death. Gluttony is an undisguised example of our denial of death. It kills us slowly enough that we can deny it is even a problem. Anger, as a sin, gives us the illusion that we can toy with the fires of rage without heading down pathways of death. But Jesus saw through that ruse when he warned his followers to discipline all feelings of anger and not let those eruptions of feelings harden into attitudes.
In lust, we objectify others and distort their life stories to satisfy our appetites. Our frenzied pursuit of sexual pleasure and all our sexual addictions are never about sex—but instead, deep in our unconscious, they are fake antidotes, superstitions we have that sex can delay and deny death. But in our feverish denial of death through sex, we destroy one another’s humanity reducing human lives to fabricated, one-dimensional caricatures, humans become used and then disposed.
Envy and greed, with their limitless possibilities and their license to trespass wherever we want, take whatever we want, without consequence, envy and greed feed the illusion that death is meaningless, whether our own death or the deaths of those who are destroyed in our lifestyles and choices. We use the euphemism “collateral damage” in both war and greed, another lie in the service of denying death.
In the deadly sin of laziness, we hold to the illusion of defying and delaying death, we flirt with the lie by putting procrastination before responsibility.
Even politics is effected by our denial of death. Our lazy response to environmental disasters, present and future, is evidence of our denial of death. Nationalism, whether it be racial or religious, traffics in violence and ends in death—and our embrace of all forms of nationalism—or our cluelessness in effectively resisting it–are forms of denial of death. Our hardness of heart toward refugees and a refusal to come up with pragmatic and sustainable responses to their plight– is another sign that we are caught up in the deadly sin of denying death.
When we notice that a political position or a political hero is trafficking in the denial of death, it does us no good to react in a frenzy. Christians do not have the luxury of obsessing and raging over the irrationality or the damage this person or position is causing. Whether a single person or a whole group—when people are caught up in the denial of death—wreaking even more death and injustice in their grief and grievance, we must take strategic and effective action to reverse the political trajectory. But because the denial of death is at the root of this political insanity, we must relate to people with humility and grace. It is impossible to approach a frightened people otherwise.
In a metaphorical sense, our churches are dying, but we are in denial of death there too, and refuse to make any real changes in the system—and the consequence of our denials is excessive spiritual death among our neighbors, because churches are no longer Christlike and offering good news to hurting people.
But in Lent, all this denial comes to a temporary halt. In Lent, we refuse to deny, delay, defy, or avoid death. We muster our courage, surround ourselves with all the gifts of grace our faith traditions can provide, and we put dead ashes, symbols of death, right smack on our faces—for all the world to see. There is no life in perpetrating the lie. And so at the beginning of Lent—we face the hardest truth humans can face—the reality of death—our own, our loved ones, our institutions, our ways of life, our precious causes—we accept the ashes on our foreheads—and take the first steps toward our salvation by letting the ashes tell the truth. In my denial of death, I always think I’m going to feel bad on Ash Wednesday, particularly when someone reminds me I’m going to die, and even more, when I, as the pastor, have to put ashes on the heads of old people, and fragile children, and robust adults, I think I’m going to feel bad when I proclaim the reality of death: “remember that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return. But surprisingly, instead of feeling bad, I feel comforted. The truth sets me free. It is the denial that tilts me toward anxiety and panic. The ashes on our faces tells a story of a thousand words—a story of death, and God’s grace through death, and God’s resurrection from death.
My dad died four and a half years ago. He’d had a chronic lung problem for years. But we didn’t want him to die from that. Then he had a ruptured colon and almost died in surgery. But we didn’t want to lose him then either. We weren’t ready. Then he had a stroke, and he lost his power of speech—the one power he would have kept, even if he had to trade in all others. For five years before he died, the battering rams of death assaulted him. He fought back. He defied death. He delayed it. But in those last five years, I noticed something about him that I hadn’t seen before. He came to a point where he no longer denied death. He denied death when he was younger—with some of his reckless antics that are now legendary in our family lore. But in his last years, God gave him the grace to no longer be terrified of death, to no longer deny it, to no longer lie to himself about its inevitability. It was as though he might have decorated himself with ashes every day in those last years. I thought he was done teaching me when I left home to go to college. But the old man had one more workshop to offer me: how to respect death, not deny it. How to hope beyond death, not avoid it at all costs, how to listen to death in order to make our days in this world more poignant, how to dance with death in order to celebrate all the gifts and graces this world has to offer.
I’m still not eager for death—either for myself or any of my loved ones. But first Jesus, in the gospels, and then so many of his followers and saints since—have shown me the more graceful, lifegiving, and joyful way to both live…and die. Thanks be to God.
Repertoire 