Genesis 3:1-24 — The God of Hope

If there's one problem that we keep running into over the last few weeks in Genesis,

it's

that the world we live in just doesn't look like it once did.

The world is broken,

and we are broken, and human history is essentially the story of a

train gone off the tracks over and over again.

Well, in Genesis chapter 3,

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

we finally get an explanation for why that is, and it's not

from the perspective of man,

but it's from the perfect perspective of God.

A lot of people throughout history have tried to explain and treat the symptoms of this

kind of recurring train wreck that we have brought on ourselves.

But no one but God has the perspective to diagnose the real problem.

And no one but God can supply a sufficient solution for this problem of sin and pain and brokenness.

So I titled this message on the fall in Genesis 3,

The God of Hope.

Because while God gives us an accurate picture of sin and temptation and the curse on all of creation,

he also entered into our brokenness to bear our shame and then offer us his righteousness in its

place.

The only hope of fallen mankind is found in the risen Jesus.

And so let's start by reading

verses one through six and witness this initial deception.

Now the serpent was more crafty than

any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.

He said to the woman,

did God actually say

you shall not eat of any tree in the garden.

And the woman said to the serpent,

we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden,

but God said,

you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden.

Neither shall you touch it lest you die.

But the serpent said to the woman,

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.

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food,

and that it was a delight to the eyes,

and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise,

she took of its fruit and ate.

And she also gave some to her husband who was with her,

and he ate.

So everything in the garden that God planted was called to bear fruit of its kind and produce seed

according to its kind. But here we witness a different kind of seed being planted,

and it is

the seed of doubt planted in the heart of the woman and the man.

And when that doubt has grown,

it takes root and turns into deception,

and eventually it bears the fruit of disobedience.

And that fruit will bring ruin to the woman and the man and all of creation.

And it also creates

a kind of circle that just keeps feeding on itself and repeating itself,

which is why it is so helpful

for us to understand it. That's why God gives us this passage,

because this process repeats today.

And when you learn to see the deception clearly,

you can better be on guard against it.

Let's look at the characters in these first few verses here,

and then we'll look at this well-worn

road that leads to sin.

So the first new character is the serpent.

And we need to see and understand

this character on two different levels.

First, it is an actual snake that was one of the beasts of

the field and very crafty or a cunning creature.

But this snake is also being either possessed or

in some way used by someone else.

Someone who is not really identified by name until Revelation

Revelation 12 · chapter mention

chapter 12 at the end of the Bible as Satan.

And we know relatively little about how or when

Satan and a great number of angels were cast out of heaven.

But throughout the rest of scripture,

a few things become clear.

Satan was not made in the image of God,

but he was made to reflect

the glory of God.

But instead of doing that,

he tried to take the glory for himself and was cast

out.

So now he is bent on the destruction of those made in God's image,

and his tactics and

temptations are always in some way related to that desire to be equal to God and to call others to

try to do the same.

And I know that we all probably have many more questions and a natural sense of

curiosity about Satan and this cosmic conflict,

but I also need us to understand two things.

First,

that scripture is the only authority when it comes to spiritual matters.

And second,

that scripture

tells us all that we need to know,

all that God chose to reveal to us on this topic.

So the other

two characters I don't really need to introduce because you already know them as the woman and the

man. However, there is one detail that we need to have clear right off the bat,

and it comes out of

verse six.

Where is the man during this extended conversation between the serpent and the woman?

He is right there with her.

So during this whole conversation and deception,

while the serpent is interacting with the woman,

where is the man who is supposed to be caring for her and watching out for her and reminding

her of what God instructed?

He's right there.

And he's absolutely silent and complicit in all of this.

And I just want to make sure that we go into this with both eyes open,

particularly those

of us who grew up with a version of this that was somehow more favorable to the man.

than it ought to have been.

So where does this road begin?

It begins with the seed of doubt

that is planted by the serpent.

Did God actually say? The question is posed,

but with an air of

disbelief almost.

You know how sometimes when you're telling a story about an argument you

just had with someone and the person stops you and says, wait, did you actually say that to them?

That's the feeling of this question.

And then it goes on to not even be an honest question.

Did God actually say that you can't eat fruit from any tree in the garden?

Well, of course that's not what God said, but look at the way the question is framed.

It's taking the command of God,

one involving a protective boundary,

don't eat from this

one tree,

and he's repainting it as some kind of restrictive barrier.

It's asking a deceptive question that makes them start to question the goodness of a God-given

boundary.

It's the implied idea that God is trying to keep something good from you.

And if Satan can get us to question or doubt God's motives,

we become easy pickings when

it comes to the actual deception.

When we start to question the goodness of God, it becomes much easier for us to be deceived.

Why is it so important for us to spend time intentionally dwelling on the goodness of God

as a church,

individually,

reading about it, singing about it?

Well, it's because we are actively remembering his goodness.

And when we do that, we find it much harder to be deceived otherwise.

But the serpent moves on from his planted doubt to this direct deception.

And the deception is that the consequence of God might not be carried out.

And furthermore, he fans this little doubt into a flame,

suggesting that not only will

they not be punished,

but they'll be rewarded.

He says, you won't die.

God is trying to hold back this good thing from you and you'll find out it was worth

it.

Again,

this deception is much easier to sell to an audience who doubts that God and his

boundaries are good.

But the deception doesn't end with the words of the serpent,

does it?

It ends with the woman making a decision,

even before that first bite, to rely on her own

limited senses and desires and knowledge instead of the wisdom of God.

Look at verse 6.

She comes to believe that it will satisfy her desire.

It looks good on the surface and it will make her wise.

Instead of the wisdom of God,

look what she has put in the pilot seat of this decision.

Her desires,

her senses,

her knowledge.

How often have those three things failed us and yet we continue to fall for the same type

of deception?

Satan is not creative.

He uses the same methods over and over to deceive us, and it always starts and ends in the same way.

Let me use a simple example from one of my younger children.

My daughter was convinced that she wanted to go down the stairs by herself to our basement.

There were toys down there, snacks in the pantry,

the TV.

In her eyes, it was everything good.

But we put a gate at the top of the stairs and said,

You can go into any door in the house,

but not through that door.

The stairs are dangerous.

And she thought to herself,

just maybe.

Mom and Dad are just keeping the good stuff from me.

And she looked and she saw the toys that she wanted.

And she thought, those steps don't look that tall.

You know, I'm sure I can get over this gate.

So she desired and she saw and she decided.

And she got over that gate.

And about five seconds later,

we hear this thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.

And then a momentary silence as she hit the bottom before realizing what had just happened.

And she got hurt badly.

And you and I have each struggled with various temptations,

most of which have to do with

twisting a natural God-given appetite for something.

We have good desires for food,

for intimacy,

and even a good desire to become wise.

But when we start to doubt the goodness of God,

and we instead choose to seek satisfaction

by doing what God has forbidden,

it will always end in ruin.

Verse 7 says,

Then the eyes of both were opened,

and they knew that they were naked.

And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the

garden.

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him,

Where are you?

And he said, I heard

the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked,

and I hid myself.

He said,

Who told you that you were naked?

Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?

And the man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me,

she gave me the fruit of the tree,

and I ate.

Then the Lord God said to the woman,

What is this that you have done?

And the woman said, The serpent deceived me,

and I ate.

The irony here is that this man and woman who are at this point more clearly like God

than any other part of creation,

being created in his image, and they fall for a lie that

by disobeying him,

they will become like God.

The moment they failed to give God the glory

and try to take glory for themselves,

they lose everything.

And the immediate result is that

they are filled with shame.

Remember just a few verses earlier when they were naked and had

nothing to be ashamed of.

Now they are filled with it and they respond in two ways. They run

and they hide.

They desperately try to make these poorly assembled garments from fig leaves,

and then it gets worse because they hear the sound of Yahweh,

the Lord,

walking in the garden as he

did. And so what do they do?

They hide.

What was once a joyful time of walking in the presence of

the Lord, communing with him,

being fully and shamelessly known by him,

becomes the worst thing

that they could possibly imagine.

Instead of having a fear of the Lord, a respect and awe for

his presence and power,

they are now only afraid of him.

Picture the weight of what has just happened.

The image bearers,

this unique man and woman who were given dominion over all of creation,

with a wonderful work that has barely even begun, the representative king and queen who were placed

over creation to rule under the blessing of the Almighty God,

whose image they bear,

have now committed treason against him.

It's unthinkable.

And they rightly cower in fear,

disgusted with themselves,

trying to cover themselves up, and really trying to find someone

else to blame.

It just leads them even further into sin. God asks, where are you? Not because

he doesn't know,

but as a parent might ask a child sitting in a pile of empty candy wrappers,

what did you do?

He asks, who told you that you were naked?

Because suddenly they feel a sense

that there is something they need to cover and they try to cover up.

That's exactly what they do.

The man blames the woman,

but he also blames God.

Did you hear how he said, the woman who you gave

me,

handed me the fruit. And notice how he leaves out that he was standing watching the whole thing

go down.

The woman blamed the serpent and takes no responsibility for believing the serpent

instead of believing God.

The truth is that you can make excuses for your sin all day long.

You

can try to cover it up.

You can pretend like it wasn't a big deal, but God sees our hearts and he

knows whether we admit it or not.

You can try convincing yourself that it was someone else's

fault,

not take responsibility for it, but at the end of the day,

you will be held accountable.

Just like us, this man and woman are trapped by their own choices in a mess of their own making,

and now there's no going back.

And the way forward is going to be hard,

but it is not without hope

because God is so very good.

So let's read a little more about the consequences of what has just happened.

This is verses 14 through 19.

The Lord God said to the serpent,

Because you have done this,

cursed are you above all livestock,

and above all beasts of the field.

On your belly you shall go,

and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

I will put enmity between you and the woman,

And between your offspring and her offspring,

he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

So God begins by addressing the oldest enemy, that is the snake, and the entity that it represents,

which is Satan.

We'll look at physical and spiritual consequences for each character.

So let's start with the physical consequences for the snake.

All creation will experience this curse, but the snake will be cursed above all others.

Instead of walking on legs as it perhaps once did, something about his physical anatomy

is changed and he will be forced to traverse the earth on his belly,

eternally bowing before

every other beast of the field.

And apparently there will also be this ongoing bad blood between snakes and mankind.

Even if you don't mind garter snakes in Iowa, which is really about one of a couple snakes

that we actually have, you might feel differently.

if you lived around the venomous vipers that are common in other parts of the world.

But it's the spiritual overtones here that make this particularly interesting.

There's this idea of eating dust.

That meant the same in the ancient world as it really does today when we say another one bites the dust.

It's a symbol of ongoing defeat and humiliation,

even while being free to roam for now.

But it's verse 15 that is the first glimmer of hope in the middle of this mess that is

the fall.

It's the first whisper of the gospel.

Because God foretells that there is one of the woman's offspring who is coming.

And while the ESV renders this bruise, a better option for this word in the Hebrew really

is crush.

This offspring of the woman will be wounded,

but ultimately will crush the serpent's head.

In this list of consequences for the enemy snake, there is no restoration or redemption promised.

Only destruction will be his end.

But let's look at the woman's consequences.

This is verse 16.

To the woman he said,

I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing.

In pain you shall bring forth children.

Your desire shall be for your husband,

and he shall rule over you.

So for the woman,

we already have the promise that she will bring forth offspring.

She has not been made barren or unable to have children,

but what was meant to be an

experience of joy now becomes filled with pain and suffering.

There's this mixture of joy and pain and a gift and heartbreak all rolled into one event.

But on the spiritual side of things, we have the curse impacting something that was to be

a core part of her identity in her relationship with the man.

Remember,

she was made for the man's

side and her role in that God-ordained relationship was of the most wonderful helper.

But now look at what happens. She will wrestle with a new desire to overtake or to dominate

her husband,

taking his role of leadership for herself.

The structure used here in this

"Desire shall be for your husband"

part of that verse is very similar to a chapter later when Cain

rises up against his brother desiring the favor that his brother has.

It is as if the helper is

rising against the one that she was supposed to find great joy in helping.

And the sinful response

of the man to this isn't any better.

It's that he rises up against her and rules over her.

He does

not naturally treasure and value her. He lords his authority over her.

And marriage is forever

changed.

When we seek our own glory,

when we seek our own control,

when we respond with harshness

to one another,

and we forget all of the ways that we were created to serve God and one another

in our quest for glory that isn't ours.

Finally, to the man,

to Adam,

God speaks in verse 17.

And to Adam he said,

When there is disobedience or wickedness at the highest levels of authority,

there is this trickle-down effect that is experienced by everything and everyone under that authority.

And this is true of political leadership and church leadership and even family leadership.

So as a result of the man and woman sinning,

there is a curse that not only applies to them,

but to everything that was to be a part of their dominion,

that is all of creation.

And that curse is a direct consequence or result of the man and the woman's choices.

This is what it looks like to be an enemy of God.

And the physical impact on the man, and therefore on all of mankind,

all people,

has to do with

the ground.

This earth that he was supposed to have dominion over is now going to resist that dominion.

It's not just a good work in which the ground cooperates with the man.

It is sweat and pain and toil and resistance.

No longer does he simply eat from the trees of the garden, but he has to eat these plants

of the field, meaning he has to plant and work and water and harvest.

No longer does the earth willingly give provision.

It has to be worked for.

And that brings us to an effect on all of mankind,

which is this introduction of death to mankind.

Whatever the plan may have been for mankind on the earth, the consequence of sin means that our lives now end in death.

Our bodies break down. They get sick.

We die.

We decay.

So there's really nothing natural from the Christian point of view about death.

And because we all inherit this sinful condition from Adam, we are all subject to the consequences

of the curse,

which is death.

And we still live in a world that is under the curse.

We have famines and floods and tornadoes and hurricanes and pests and disease.

We have sickness and war and broken bodies.

And we witness death taking its toll on all of us.

And we have broken relationships with others.

and we have a broken relationship with God.

However,

that is not the end of the story.

And even in the last few verses of Genesis 3, we have these notes of hope that rescue is coming.

Let's read these last few verses,

verses 20 through 24.

The man called his wife's name Eve,

because she was the mother of all living.

And the Lord God

made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.

Then the Lord God said,

Behold,

the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.

Now lest he reach out his hand and also

take of the tree of life and eat and live forever.

Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the

garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.

He drove out the man,

and at the east

of the Garden of Eden,

he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way

to guard the way to the tree of life.

What seems like a hopeless situation is actually filled with these markers of God's grace.

And I want you to see a couple of them.

The first is that the woman is now given a name.

So up until this point,

she has been named the woman,

which means taken from man.

That was a key part of her identity.

But now Adam gives her a new name in light of what God said in verse 15 about her offspring

being the one to crush the deceiver.

So he names her Eve,

which means mother of all living.

She is not named the mother of a dying race or recognized by Adam for her role in the disobedience,

but is given the name indicating that life will come from her.

And this brings to mind the place in all three of the synoptic gospels where Jesus

claims that our God is the God of the living.

And ultimately,

the one who will bring victory over death and eternal life in the end

will come from Eve's offspring in the person of Jesus.

The second note of grace is found in these garments of skin that God makes and provides

to cover and clothe them.

While they are filled with shame over their sin, God puts in place this sacrificial kind

of covering for the time being.

It's a simple kindness,

but also introduces the idea of a price

being required to cover this shame.

Animals were killed,

blood was shed, and these animal skin

coverings were a constant reminder to them of the price paid to cover them.

Later,

God will introduce

the sacrificial system to Israel as a way to keep before them this cost of their transgression,

their separation from him and their need for something else to be the solution.

Hebrews 9, verse 22 explains that forgiveness of sin requires the shedding of blood or a heavy

Hebrews 9:22

price.

And all of this points forward to the eventual shedding of the blood of Jesus,

which is such a costly sacrifice that it offers forgiveness for the sin of any who would come to

him for it.

Finally,

they are exiled from the garden and they're banished from taking fruit

from the tree of life.

And that doesn't seem very gracious, does it? But this too is a note of God's

wisdom and grace.

See, the worst possible thing isn't death.

The worst possible thing is to live

forever under the curse of sin.

This exile from the garden,

this allowing of our earthly life to

run out is in that sense a merciful act of God that allows for an end to the grip of sin on us.

However, we're still left with a longing for everything that was good in the garden,

aren't we?

As we read about the way that creation was created to be, as we read about the way relationships were

meant to be, the way that we were meant to have relationship with this wonderful personal God

who dwells with his people in the paradise that he has provided,

I am left with a longing for everything to be restored.

And with that longing, I can joyfully run to the good news,

the gospel that Jesus has done and is doing exactly that.

There's all these symbols in Genesis that are pointing ahead towards something

that would be fulfilled in the coming and the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

He came and lived the life that Adam did not and lived completely obediently without sin

and showed us what it looks like to give God the glory in everything.

He died on a tree that he

created for the people created in his image and took the full weight of the curse of sin,

all the way from the crown of thorns on his head to the nakedness of our shame,

to the separation from the Father that came as a result of that.

In Matthew 27:46,

Matthew 27:46

Jesus

cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Quoting from the Psalms.

And he endured

that separation on our behalf,

but also brought that separation to an end.

Remember those

cherubim,

those angels that barred the way to the garden,

to the tree of life in Genesis.

When Solomon built the temple, he was instructed to make a thick curtain that would separate

off the holiest area of the temple.

It represented the fact that we were separated from the holiness of God.

And on the corners of that curtain were to be images of the cherubim.

And do you know what happened at the moment of Jesus'

death?

That curtain that separated us was torn from top to bottom because with the final sacrifice,

of Jesus,

there will be no more sacrifice and there will be no more division.

Because in Christ,

the exile is over for those who confess and believe in Christ.

In Romans 10.9, Paul writes,

if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from

the dead, you will be saved.

And instead of shame, we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

2 Corinthians 5.21,

for our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin,

so that in him we might

become the righteousness of God.

We now have the Spirit of God dwelling in the hearts of men and

women who have turned to Jesus for their salvation.

And we live as representatives of Jesus to a world

that is desperate for the hope that we possess in Christ.

A firm hope that Jesus rules and reigns,

that he is returning and that we will again be with him for eternity.

And I just want to read

one last passage to close because at the end of Revelation, we get a picture of what eternity

will be like.

And it is the answer to this yearning for the God of the garden.

This is

Revelation chapter 22 verses one through three.

Revelation 22 · chapter mention

Then the angel showed me the river of the water

of life,

bright as crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb,

through the middle of the

street of the city,

also on either side of the river the tree of life,

with its twelve kinds of

fruit yielding its fruit each month.

The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

No longer will there be anything accursed,

but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it,

and his servants will worship him.