Adam and Eve

I'm gonna get right in.

Um, okay, over time, if you do right, if you do uh you develop correctly and you do life the right way, you will develop wisdom.

Right?

Like more life experiences, you analyze them properly, you can add to your learning, you become a wiser person.

It's not guaranteed, but it can happen and should happen.

One of the things that will happen over time is you start to learn how to choose your battles.

That's a mark of wisdom.

Early in life, you got all this energy, you're just bustling and bounding with energy, so you'll pick fights easily.

And as you get older, you start to realize your energy is dwindling a little bit, and I can't I can't fight everybody about everything.

Newlyweds tend to bicker quite a bit, right?

You get married at first and you're arguing about the toothpaste, uh, you know, and how it's squeezed and where.

And uh I promise you, man, nobody that's been married for 10 years or beyond is is is arguing about toothpaste anymore.

I gotta pick my battles.

All right, I don't have boundless energy, I've got to pick my battles.

And so that that that concept is not hard to uh understand, that it's important, it's wise to pick your battles.

Uh the question becomes all throughout life, what battles should we pick?

That's not always clear.

Sometimes as you get older, things that might seem petty, you have a sense that there's a volcano underneath there.

There's a lot there.

And is it wise?

If I go pick at that, the the volcano might erupt, which is terrible.

Or we might need to do something about this because eventually this is going to erupt and it's going to create more damage than I want to, you know, wanna wanna have.

So you have to decide throughout life what battles do you pick.

This is true for your marriage, it's true in your relationship with your kids, it's true in your relationship with your uh extended family and your neighborhood and your community and your co-workers and your business partner and all of that.

It's certainly true for Christians.

What battles should we pick with one another?

Right?

Jesus says, by this all men will know you're my disciples, that you love one another.

But sometimes you love people, you need to have battles.

And but sometimes you'll see, like you look up, and Christians are polarized and divided, and there's uh often we're demonized or we villainize one another, and and of course it's a poor testimony to the world, but I think we all want to make sure that we're not lacking courage to fight the right battles.

Uh, one of the things that Christians often fight about are scriptures.

At what point is it okay to agree to disagree?

At what point is it as you see it one way and I see it another way, is that totally fine?

We can continue to worship together, or at one point is it like, you know what, that's way wrong.

I can't, I can't get with that.

Um, you know, there's some some uh places in the scripture, Jesus, Paul, uh, John on the Isle of Patmos, and uh uh Revelation 22 basically says this don't add to this word, right?

Don't add to it, don't just get this pop culture uh thing where you just start adding to the to to God's word.

Um and many of us have heard that, right?

And so we don't want to do that.

Uh we're certainly, I think there's a nobility in a desire to not allow the trendy theology, pop theology to pop up and um take people in a short-sighted fashion.

And so uh when we're trying to figure this out, what are the hills worth dying on?

Uh what battles should we pick?

I want to start here, and and I'm gonna eventually get into Genesis.

We're in a series here, Eden talks, and we're looking at the first three books of Genesis, and um I want to take a moment and I want to do something in this about 10 minutes here that I think is part of a bigger conversation.

It's going to heavily apply to Genesis 1 through 3, but it's gonna heavily apply to your entire Bible.

And I think what I can do for those of you that have a passion to be a really good reader of ancient texts, and the Bible is an ancient text.

Yes, it is relevant and it has much to say to a modern audience, but there's a difference between understanding an ancient text has something to say to a modern audience and reading an ancient text like it's a modern text.

That's not the same thing.

If you read an ancient text like it's a modern text, you you're prone to all kinds of misinterpretations and mistakes.

So the best the best way we can honor the ancient text in a modern context is to really do our best to not just read the Bible, but to study the Bible.

To study the Bible.

And I want to give you some handles for that, and this is gonna serve you hopefully the rest of your life.

For some of us, it may cause us to have to go backwards a little bit in some of the things we've been taught or told or learned or read and interpreted, uh, but it'll serve you in the future if you do it well.

Um, start with this concept.

Whenever you read your Bible, reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience.

It's a cross-cultural experience.

Last year, Shaylin and I, my wife, we we went to South Africa.

All right.

We started here in Columbus, Ohio, went to New York, and then we ended up down here in South Africa.

We went to three cities in South Africa.

We went to Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town.

Um, before we left, um, I did some study on South Africa.

I did some research, I read up on some stuff.

I knew before I even knew I was going to South Africa, I knew a little bit about South Africa.

I knew who Nelson Mandela was, I knew what apartheid was, I knew a little bit about the history, but I didn't know a whole lot.

So I went in, I watched some documentaries, I read some articles, I went into Wikipedia.

Come on, somebody.

I went to Google Images, Google Images, and I looked up some pictures from Cape Town and Table Rock and some of these different things, and I learned a little bit about the history.

Am I now a know-it-all as it relates to South Africa?

The answer is absolutely not.

I know just enough to get on the plane and to fly there.

Once I got there, as I'm there, um, because of some of the research I had done, a little bit more that I knew about the history, it helped me understand and decode a conversation I had with the man sitting next to me on the flight from Johannesburg to Durban, who was a native of South Africa, and so he's telling me things, and I wouldn't have picked it all up had I not done some research, so I was picking up what he was putting down.

Otherwise, a lot of it would have gone up over my head.

Now, am I now a know-it-all about South Africa?

Absolutely not.

I'm a student of South Africa.

In fact, even if I lived there for five or ten years, even if I was born there, I still wouldn't be a know-it-all about or shouldn't be a know-at-all about South Africa.

I would want to learn as much as I could because someone else's perspective is different.

Something else is going on in this other city, and so there's much more to learn.

Unfortunately, and those of you that have traveled abroad, you know that sometimes Americans have an international reputation for the way we travel internationally.

Essentially, we think a lot of our culture, and Americans often try to bend the cultures of the world around our culture.

Just so you know, when you go out there, no matter how nice they are to you at the resort, because they'd like a tip, that's what they say when they go back in these Americans.

Because Americans get off the plane and they say stuff like this.

Why are they driving on the wrong side of the road?

That food tastes bad.

That those clothes are weird.

Americans, and I'm no nobody in this room, nobody in this room, you guys wouldn't do that type of thing.

Some of your fellow Americans are known globally to go into cultures and look at all those cultures based on just our culture.

I'm gonna tell you, a lot of Bible readers tend to do the same thing.

And often go into the cross-cultural experience of the Bible and read it straight through an American 2023 lens, which often causes us to miss things.

There's so much to learn.

Become a student of the Bible.

Take the same attitude that would be proper if you were going to travel the entire globe.

Imagine you were gonna go to South Africa.

You would, when would you become a know-it-all?

When?

When?

Never! Never.

You would always be a student.

You'd be wanting to learn something new about the culture, you'd be wanting to learn a new nuance of the history.

If you got in a plane and you went to Turkey, and you went to Turkey, what would you do?

You'd want to learn about the Ottoman Empire.

You'd want to learn about why, why that statue is there, why it says that.

You'd want to learn about the language.

And so, just what a like a good world traveler, we do the same with our Bible.

Think about this now.

Think about your translations.

You read the Bible in English, you're reading not just a translation, but an interpretation.

So let's take it like this.

I got two friends that speak Spanish.

Ricardo, he studied Spanish.

Rome Romeo, who grew up speaking Spanish, he grew up in a Latin American country.

Okay?

I know Ricardo better than I know Romeo.

Romeo speaks uh uh a certain kind of dialect, a certain type of Spanish.

Uh Ricardo didn't grow up speaking Spanish, it's his second language.

If I was speaking and they were both translating in Spanish, I might say something.

And Romeo would say one thing, and Ricardo would say something else.

Wouldn't be the exact same languages because there's not a word-for-word translation.

What is Ricardo doing?

He's doing it based on not only the Spanish he speaks, but his relationship to me.

I'm closer with Ricardo than I am Romeo.

So Ricardo might take some liberties and going, no, I know this dude, I know what he meant by that.

And Romeo's like, but he said that.

Ricardo's like, but he didn't mean that.

So now Ricardo and Romeo are arguing about how they should interpret my English into Spanish.

Good news is now 2023, we're actual people, they can come to me and say, What did you really mean?

And I could give them paragraphs about what I actually meant, and then they can figure it out.

When you're reading Moses writing in Genesis 1, that was 3,400 years ago.

It's a cross-cultural experience.

He's speaking in the ancient Near East.

He's been impacted by ancient Near East cosmologies.

What's cosmology?

Cosmology is how the universe was ordered.

He went to Cairo Academy.

Not really, but you you understand, like, remember the story of Moses?

Pharaoh's killing all the little Israelite boys.

Remember that?

And his mom puts him in a basket, and Pharaoh's daughter finds him and says, I'm gonna adopt this kid, and she brings him into Pharaoh's house.

It'd be like you and I ending up somehow in the White House.

And so, what kind of education do you think he got?

He got an outstanding Harvard, Ivy League, Egyptian education.

And so he understood the Mesopotamian cosmologies, he understood the Assyrian cosmologies, he understood all these things.

So when you read Genesis 1, 2, 3, you're going to see that if you compare it to other ancient Near East cosmologies, there's some similarities of things coming out of the water and some of the beliefs.

In fact, you it helps.

It helps, and again, you can be dogmatic as you want about like one of the things when I was studying Genesis 1, 2, and 3, and I was just trying to educate myself further, I'm reading a lot of stuff and I'm seeing like Christians just shredding each other.

Because some Christians believe that Adam and Eve were uh real people and that it was a seven-day creation, exactly, you know, 24-hour, seven days, and then others believe it was an allegory.

Uh, and and so you have I think Christians that that are uh fighting for a seven-day creation, and and they're they're fighting for that really hard because they don't want to take away from the veracity and the validity of the scriptures, okay?

They don't want to add something, right?

And or maybe they were taught that, and so because of that, they feel that if it was an allegory, then it wouldn't be true.

Well, hold on a second.

Now I'm not here to take a stance on whether it was seven days or whether it's an allegory.

I wasn't there, and I don't get to ask Moses.

I've got my opinions, I've done an insane amount of study.

I definitely don't, I've already over my time for this part.

But what I'm gonna say is you gotta understand why Moses wrote this book, otherwise, you'll get you'll start arguing about science in Genesis 1 and 2, and you'll miss the point of what Moses was trying to do.

If you understand the way Moses thought, it wasn't until 1492 that Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

So when when Moses in 1400 BC said, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

What comes to your mind, what comes to my mind, is not what was in Moses' mind.

So the heavens and the earth, you might think of a celestial city or something beyond the clouds, and the earth, you think of a globe.

It wasn't until 1960 we had a picture, or in the 60s, we had actually a picture of the globe.

But we all have it as common knowledge as 2023.

We know the earth is round.

In Moses' day, the cosmology, the belief was that the earth was flat, the sky was a dome, the stars were fixed to the ceiling, like Truman showed.

And God's up there like Ed Harris, and the sun is revolving around the earth.

That's what they that's what they thought.

Moses didn't write Genesis 1, 2, and 3 to make scientific statements.

He's talking theological statements.

He's talking about the nature of God, he's talking about the nature of relationship.

You gotta understand this because have your opinion, but lower your dukes, do your research, do some stuff, don't be intimidated by science, and certainly understand that whatever your opinion is, is probably worth listening to maybe where someone else thinks as well.

And by the way, understand Moses didn't write Genesis 1 and 2, so you could take Genesis 1 and 2 and tell the quantum physicist and the biologist how dumb they are.

What he was doing was trying to put something in your hand that maybe you can go to the quantum physicist and the biologist and help them with their marriage.

Preach that junk, kid.

You're killing it today.

You're killing it.

Woo! Woo! Okay.

I'm gonna stay there for a little bit because it feels so good.

John Walton, Ancient Near East Thought, and Old Testament.

He wrote a book called Ancient Near East Thought and Old Testament.

By the way, by the way, by the way.

I won't say this because I don't want to be condescending.

I don't want to, I don't want to freak you out or to in some way make you scared.

Because this shouldn't scare you, it should excite you.

And you should have permission to go really look at your beliefs and look at your interpretations.

Go back.

Don't be afraid of this.

We're afraid because of things like don't add to it.

Well, add to what?

A lot of the traditions, if you did grow up in church, a lot of the traditions that you came up with formulated with people like Martin Luther, people like John Calvin, John Wesley, okay, Matthew Henry, a lot of these people that live call it four or five hundred years ago.

So they're old, there's a difference between old and and ancient.

So something that's been around for a few hundred years, to us feels it's it's old, which is good.

It's I'm anchored in something old from before I was born.

And so I'm gonna hold to that in a sense.

There's some even some nostalgia connected to it.

But when you read a scripture like in Revelation 22, where John is saying, don't add to this, okay, it's possible somebody could add to it 500 years ago.

So then don't add to it.

Like if you're looking, if you have a better understanding of 3,500 years ago than they did 500 years ago, it would be a mistake to hold on to the thing that's old and and versus the thing that's ancient, if that makes sense.

To go all the way back to be able to understand it, you know, and and this is why a lot of us again grew up in churches where the guy standing up here wasn't necessarily a Near Eastern um person that understood the cosmology, that understood academically even what they were looking at.

They were a really good pastor, might have been a wonderful pastor who loved you and helped you and was reading things in English in front of you that you're receiving, and as a modern audience, so there's no like God's not up in heaven like angry with you for you to become a student of things before that and to compare what you've been told that's a few hundred years old to what was there a few thousand years old.

Does that make sense?

We're trying to do this, we're trying to rightly divide the word of truth.

Um, John Walton says, effective communication requires a body of agreed upon words, terms, ideas, and common ground of understanding.

For the speaker, for the speaker, and it could be the writer or the speaker, this often requires accommodation to the audience by using words and ideas that they will understand, by making it relevant.

For the audience, the listener, whether it's this context or you reading your Bible, if they are not native to the language and cultural matrix of the speaker, this means reaching common ground may require seeking out additional information or explanation.

In other words, the audience has to adapt to a new and unfamiliar culture.

Let this excite you.

Very few people would disagree with what I said, but most people, especially when it comes to the Bible, tend to ignore this.

So you you who's gonna disagree with we should read things in context, but often we tend to ignore it.

And this is the exciting thing about the day we live in now.

It's an information age.

Yeah, there's bad information, but there's more good information out there than there's ever been.

And so now you can go very specifically uh into these um different texts, Old and New Testament, and get a better understanding.

All right.

So let's take this and do something good with it here.

We're in Genesis uh one, two, and three.

Last week we we uh were looking at what what is I'm gonna preach to you the message I think Moses would preach if he was here now.

Like the one, the conversation you would want to have.

And and we see in Genesis 1, remember we talked last week about God integrate his victories essentially.

He does work, he completes a project, and he sits back and admires his work, and he says, it was good.

And so we talked last week about integrating victories.

Often, if you don't integrate your victory, okay, you've got all these trophies that are behind you versus fully integrating and seeing the magnitude of your life.

And people that don't integrate victories sometimes undervalue their life and often will trade their life for something that's not worth the victories that God has brought into their life.

It's a good thing.

So I told you last week, I said, hey, look, my Sabbath is Mondays, right?

You guys Sabbath today, mine's tomorrow.

And tomorrow I'm gonna integrate my victories.

I'm not gonna pick myself apart, I'll save that for Tuesday.

I'm not gonna beat myself up, I'll save that for Wednesday.

Uh I'm about Monday, I'm gonna fully integrate victories.

That was what I told you last week, right?

Okay, so I I leave here and and uh we ate, and then we were coming, getting ready to come to Night to Shine reunion, and we're loading the car, and my son Hudson uh does a circle on his bike, and we all cheered for him, and and then my son Miles saw all the cheering that Hudson was getting, and so then he wanted to turn on the bike, so he hops on.

He's not as good of a bike rider, and he got going downhill and couldn't get himself stopped.

Long story short, bites it on the pavement, knocks out his tooth, bangs up his mouth, and ends up with 14 stitches in his knee.

His last Sunday night.

14 stitches in his knee.

Okay, so I missed the night to shine reunion, unfortunately.

Um, I go to the ER.

My wife and I are holding Miles down as he's getting stitched.

Uh, they'd given him some stuff to numb his knee, but his knee was actually bruised.

And of course, you know, the young man has autism.

He's laying there and he's watching somebody with a needle and thread, you know, sewing up his knee.

He's freaking out, he's primal.

I got his left side, Shale's got his right side, he's laying back and he's like, no joke.

He's like, Doc, what are you doing down there?

It's pretty funny.

Doc, what are you doing down there?

And so we try every time he'd look down, you know, and that's traumatic a little bit, you know, see someone sewing your leg, you don't really know.

So we're we kept like getting in his face, like, hey, let's count to 100, you know, let's say our ABCs, uh, hey, what's your favorite color?

Um, just anything we could do, and you know, uh, but dude, it was a long night, it was exhausting.

We get home.

Next morning I wake up, take Shaylin to breakfast, and we go to order our breakfast, and she goes, All right, big guy, you ready to integrate these victories?

I was like, Yeah.

So, you know what's funny though is we started doing it as a joke, and but we did it.

We did it, and it was incredible.

Um, things that normally like I kind of came away from like Monday morning, I had this kind of like bad taste in my mouth from the night before.

I felt like, you know, I was like, Well, what could I have done?

What should I have done?

Kind of the whatever parent guilt type thing.

As we sat there and we started to integrate the victories, it was amazing, actually.

Some things I probably would have just flown right past.

And yet, as we integrated it, it there were there were a ton of victories.

I won't bore you with all of them, but there was a lot of them.

And so it was, it works.

And this is what God did.

Not it wasn't Genesis 1, God wasn't integrating his victories because he needed a morale boost.

He was doing it to set an example to Adam and to Eve and to you and to me, right?

This is what we this is what we need to do in our lives.

Okay, so here's where we pick up from last week.

You've got uh God creates Adam, He makes him in His image.

Adam's created in God's image.

Eve is also created in God's image, it says in Genesis 1.

He's he's uh but he's made mankind in his image, and then um he gives them work to do.

And we talked about the work that God has, like the idea of flow state.

God's given you some creative ability, and he's given you the ability to do certain things well.

And when you get in the work of what God's done, it's intrinsically motivating.

It's it's amazing.

It's work didn't happen because of sin.

It happened before uh anybody made any mistakes.

It's part of our, you know, our purpose here on the earth, okay?

So so he's doing that, right?

And he's so he's he's doing work in flow state.

He's eating of the fruit of the trees, all except the one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but he's eating from all the other trees, and then he's working in flow state, and then he's integrating his victories, and then he's eating fruit, and that fruit energizes him to get back to work in the flow state, and then because he's in flow state, he's winning, and as he wins, he integrates the victory, and then he eats some fruit to celebrate and to energize, and then he gets back into flow state, and then he gets some victories and he integrates them, and then he eats fruit.

You get the idea.

Okay, so this is where we picked up in Genesis 2.

Genesis 2, it says the Lord placed the man in the garden to tend and watch over it, but the Lord warned him, You may eat freely of every tree in the garden, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for if you eat its fruit, you will surely die.

Then the Lord God said, Look at this.

It's not good for man to be alone.

God understood that he has designed us in such a way that yes, we need connection to him, but just you and God is not the full picture of what God intends for your life.

God's walking with Adam, he's connected to Adam, they're in good relationship, but God designed Adam to be in relationship with Eve, to be in relationship with other human beings.

He's alone.

He says, It's not good for man to be alone.

I'll make a helper who's just right for him.

And then in Genesis 2, 23, Adam catches the spirit of Edda James.

God makes Eve.

Adam looks, he's like, At last.

Exclamation point.

My love has come along.

My lonely days are over.

My heart is wrapped in clover.

Come on, somebody.

And now he has his companion.

Says at last.

This one is bone of from my bone and flesh from my flesh.

Verse 24, foreshadowing, said this explains why a man leaves his father and mother is joined to his wife, and the two are united as one.

Look at this, verse 25.

It says, Now man and his wife, the man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame.

This is um this is a famous part of the story, right?

If you ever see it in a cartoon, they tastefully, you know, put leaves and stuff, you know, in the uh strategically.

Um, but the idea being that um that that they were naked, that they were vulnerable in front of each other, and and and yet they felt no shame.

And with within this, you have not just a physical, but also an emotional and mental and spiritual example of large concepts like being fully vulnerable with someone.

I I have nothing to hide.

You see me completely as I am, and when you see somebody in that vulnerable state, it says they felt no shame.

In other words, they felt secure.

And this is how God intended for marriage to be.

This is how God intended for a man and a wife in their relationship, husband and wife, to be fully vulnerable, fully exposed.

You see everything.

I have nothing to hide.

And you're safe, and you're protected.

And this is what we promise each other, essentially.

We promise a lifelong commitment, but we promise safety.

And this is where marriages break down, because when I'm fully exposed and vulnerable, now you see my weaknesses and you see where I can be hurt, and you see my vulnerabilities.

And if you've ever, even beyond physical safety, if you've had somebody to see you fully exposed and vulnerable, and you trusted them with that to be known completely, right?

Because we've kind of been trained at this point.

We know to present our best self, we have to cover stuff up.

I gotta cons I gotta cover stuff up so that you don't fully know all my weaknesses, to make myself completely open and vulnerable to somebody so they know what I really look like, and and and there's nothing to hide, it's all revealed.

And then to be safe or to not be safe.

And if somebody takes your vulnerabilities that you trust enough to expose, and then they beat you with it, and they hurt you with it, and they stab you with it, so they know exactly how to hurt you, and just at the right time they did.

Now it causes you to want to conceal and hide.

It's a kind of death.

And for some of us in this room who've gone through enough of those, enough of those, eventually you get to a place where you are alone because you'll choose the safety of isolation over the risk of vulnerability.

And God intended for at least one relationship on this earth to have that level of vulnerability and that level of security.

You know, it's interesting because as you think about the fact, you know, we think of obviously we know men and women are physically compatible, physically compatible, and because of that, if you go back to Genesis 1 of the mission and the purpose that God gave them in Genesis 1, um, it says that um, of course, verse 27 says, God created human beings, both man and woman, in his image.

He created them male and female, he created them, verse 28.

Look at this.

Then God blessed them and said, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it.

Be fruitful and multiply.

So he makes them compatible, he makes them suitable for one another, but he gives them a mission that neither of them can do on their own.

Both of their bodies contain a seed that needs the seed of the other to be able to fertilize and to multiply.

Together, they're better than the sum of their parts.

And they see the compatibility, but think about how this happens.

Again, often when we think about in the world how opposites attract, right?

They say this when when you're dating, opposites attract.

When you're married, opposites attack.

When you were dating, she was creative.

Now you're married and she's just messy.

When you were dating, he was ambitious and driven and focused.

And now you're married and he ain't paying attention to you.

He's locked in at work, right?

It was cute then, and now it's not cute anymore.

So, what happens oftentimes is this compatibility and these differences.

We need the differences of the other person.

We need to value the other person.

In fact, I'm gonna give you a nugget here that none of the other services got.

Come on, you get a special one here.

You showed up, you slept in, and you're like, I slept in and I have no shame.

I don't blame you.

So one of the, if you've been around church, one of the popular things here is it talks about Eve was created as a helper, as a helpmate, right?

And some people have taken that again back to our uh being a good world traveler of the scripture.

You read that in our language, we hear helper, and it sounds like this secondary or tertiary character, right?

They're just kind of, oh yeah, the helper.

Hey, that's my little helper over there.

And so a lot of times it's been used to subjugate or diminish females.

If you actually look in in Genesis 2, the word that's used, it's only used derivatives of the word are used several times in the Old Testament, but the exact word that's used is only used four times in the Old Testament, and it's actually the word easer, which means which means help.

Another time it's used is actually in Psalm 89, 19, where it said, God is the easer or the strength giver to the strong.

So so why would they use a word that ultimately is attributed to God as some sort of secondary term?

So it's saying helper.

And what's also interesting is the word that isn't used, which is the word uh the word Eved, which is the word servant.

So you'll see where it talks about kings and servants.

Um, you know, Rehaboam uh essentially had servants, the word eved is used.

So when it's talking about the relationship between uh a man and a woman, a husband and a wife, this isn't like, hey, you're you're down here some secondary character.

It's actually the word that it uses of what God did to help the strong.

So it's it's a it's a deeply connected relationship.

So this is how it's designed, right?

That we're better together, we're doing work together, we're vulnerable to one another, and what happens?

Well, Genesis 3.

Genesis 3.

Oh, by the way, let me say this.

Talks about one flesh.

Paul talks about this in Ephesians 5, 28, says in the same way, husbands ought to love their wives.

Look at this, as they love their own bodies.

For a man who loves his wife, look at this.

A man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself.

Is he saying, like, hey, when you love your wife, you're doing it in a self-serving way?

No, what he's saying is the connection, the way you see one another, it is like if she hurts, I hurt.

If she wins, I win.

We're not trying to dominate one another.

We are one.

So what happens?

Genesis 3, you know the whole deal.

The serpent shows up, begins to actually deceive Eve.

He tricks her.

He says one day he said to the woman, now let's look close real quick, and I'm gonna go fast.

He asked the woman, Did God really say you must not eat the fruit of any of the trees in the garden?

What is the what does the serpent, what does the evil one do?

Is the first thing he does is he distorts God's word.

Because that's not that's not what God said at all.

God said, You can eat of all the trees, even the tree of life, just don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And so he starts with this distortion.

Did God really say you must not eat of the tree?

Okay, Eve says, No, he didn't say that.

He just said we can't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or we'll die.

Verse 4, he says, You won't die, the serpent replied to the woman.

God knows that your eyes will be open.

Your eyes will be open.

Notice the deception.

Notice how seductive this is.

Who doesn't want their eyes to be open?

That's a reasonable, rational, noble thing to want.

I want to open my eyes.

Your eyes will be open as soon as you eat it.

Look at this.

You'll be like God.

You'll be like God.

Well, first of all, what are you talking about?

They are they already are like God.

They've been made in the image of God.

He said, Oh, you'll be like God, knowing both good and evil.

The serpent's trying to get her to take something she's already got.

Make her think she's missing something that already belongs to her in a better form.

Trying to get her to get a different form of what God already gave her in a pure form.

Knowing both good and evil.

Look at this verse 6.

It said the woman was convinced and she saw the tree was beautiful and the fruit looked delicious.

And now what look at this?

She wanted the wisdom it would give her.

She wanted the wisdom it would give her.

Is that a wrong thing?

To want wisdom?

Of course not.

So she takes it and she eats the fruit and she's deceived, and then she gives it to Adam and he eats the fruit and he's not deceived.

He knew he wasn't supposed to, but he did.

What's this tree of knowledge of good and evil?

What does deceivement mean?

Why would God not want them to know good and evil?

That doesn't make sense.

Think about if if you have children, what's the first thing first thing you do?

One of the first things you do is you teach them right and wrong.

Teach them good and evil.

That's bad, that's good, right?

That's like your first several years.

What's the big deal with them seeing or eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

What this represents is to take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is to take in your own hands the authority to be like God and to determine good and evil through your perspective, through your eyes.

You now have given yourself the empowerment.

We see this all this theme runs all throughout the Old Testament.

It runs to today.

Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, everyone ends up blind.

Why?

How many things throughout your life were you sure you were right in your judgment and you look back and you were wrong?

I say it all the time.

If I knew then what I knew then, I'd do the same thing.

If I knew then what I know now, I'd do it totally different.

So essentially it's this idea.

If you take the God position and you start taking and you start determining good and evil based on your perspective, that's not what humans are supposed to do.

That's not what God has given us to do.

We don't have the faculties to do that well.

We're prone to deception, we're prone to weakness, we're prone to being deceived like Eve, we're prone to sometimes doing the thing we know not to do like Adam.

And God said, if you do that, you'll bring death.

What does he mean by death?

Because they don't eat the fruit and just die right away.

What do they do?

They're banished from the garden.

God starts to tell them, look, now here's here's what you just brought in your relationship.

Now what starts happening?

They start throwing each other under the bus and backing over.

They have tension, they try to dominate, there's a power struggle between them.

They miss opportunity that they would have had, and now they're expelled from the garden.

And so Genesis 3 ends with them walking out in animal skins.

Of course, they did stuff like, oh man, I'm out of time, but you can hang, hang, hang.

All right.

Uh they he took they took things like leaves, which were designed for photosynthesis to make more fruit, and they took them from their purpose to conceal themselves.

Things God had designed for a whole other thing to bear fruit now, can't even bear the fruit it's supposed to bear, or do the thing it's supposed to do, because I have to now use it to cover my shame.

Take that to your biologist, take that to your quantum physicist.

That travels.

That's powerful.

So here they are, steeped in shame.

And and uh the good news about the Eden narrative is it doesn't stop at the end of Genesis 3, where they kind of walk out having lost access to the tree of life and all of this.

What we're gonna look at next week, I'm gonna give you the opening passage for next week.

We're gonna bring this home.

Paul talks about this 1400 years later, after the resurrection of Jesus, and he's helping us understand the gravitas and the power of what happened through the gospel of Jesus Christ, through the good news.

What is this good news?

What is it?

Because this Adam and Eve thing, it's you and me.

It's everywhere on the globe.

It's billions of people over many, many years.

Paul says this in Romans 5.

He said, When Adam sinned, sin entered the world.

Adam's sin brought death, brought death.

So death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned.

Look at this.

Yes, people sinned even before the law was given.

But it was not counted as sin because it because there was not yet any law to break.

Still, everyone died from the time of Adam to the time of Moses.

In other words, even though the Ten Commandments hadn't been given and there wasn't anything in writing that said, Thou shalt not steal, people were stealing before there was a rule.

And when you steal, you hurt relationships and sometimes kill relationships.

People were lying before there was thou shalt not lie in written down.

So even before the law was declared, people were acting in ways that brought death and sin.

And he said, so that happened the whole time.

He said, even though they didn't disobey an explicit commandment of God as Adam did, yet Adam is a symbol, a representation of Christ who is yet to come.

Next week, I'll tell you, give you, I'll give you the title in next week's message.

This week it says Adam 2.0.

Adam 2.0.

God sent Adam or Jesus as a second Adam.

And we're gonna talk about the impact of that.

I'm gonna tell you this.

This has an impact not only in your relationship with God, your relationship with yourself, your relationship to everybody who's hurt you and who you've hurt.

And we see what the second Adam did to help us produce the fruit that God designed for us to do.

Don't get too discouraged watching these guys walk out of Eden.

God's not done.