Fall

[Machine transcription]

Genesis chapter 3, verse 8, they heard the sound of the Lord God walking 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.
And then verse 15, the Lord says to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman
between your seed and her seed, He will crush your head, and you will crush His heel.
You may be seated.
Dear saints, this text from Genesis chapter 3 deserves a lifetime of study.
I hope at the end of the sermon you don’t think, well, you’ve almost gotten there.
We’ve been here for a while, but there’s a little work to be done here in the text.
text, for we learn not only of the fall into sin, how the devil came to tempt our first
parents, Adam and Eve, and how they succumbed to this temptation and brought death into
the world, but we also hear the first preaching of the gospel and this glorious promise of
the serpent’s crushed head.
So let’s take a look at the text.
We want to first consider the temptation that the devil brings specifically to Eve, but
both to Adam and Eve because really the devil’s strategy hasn’t changed, and there’s four
phases that his temptation moves through in the garden.
Step one, the devil questions the Word of God.
Did God really say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?
Now this is just actually ridiculous.
The Lord said that they could eat freely from every tree in the garden but one, but the
devil wants to get a question mark in there, and I think every temptation, specifically
every theological temptation, but every temptation that comes to us begins with this, that the
devil wants to put a question mark where the Lord has put a period or an exclamation point.
That’s where it starts.
But it quickly gets to step two, which is to deny God’s Word.
The devil says to Eve, you will not surely die.
And then step three, the devil questions God’s motives.
In fact, I think this is – and I didn’t notice this until fairly recently, maybe a
couple of years ago, but I think this might be one of the most important things in the
text, when the devil says to Adam and to Eve, you will not surely die, and then he goes
on to say, when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and so forth, he throws God into
the mix.
The devil questioned God’s motive.
He says, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened.
In other words, the devil wants us to think of God as the bad guy, as God as the one who
doesn’t want what’s best for us.
The devil comes along in temptation and he says, you want that thing?
And we say, well, yeah, I want that thing.
He says, I want that thing too.
I want you to have it.
You know who doesn’t?
God.
His commandments, they’re hard.
And then the fourth move, he substitutes the truth of God with his own lie.
He says to them, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and
evil.
Now notice how the devil’s lie is mixed up with the Lord’s truth.
They already know good, in fact they were good.
But God looked at Adam and Eve, they are created in the garden, and He said they are very good.
They already knew all about good.
The devil wants to add the knowledge of evil.
And they already were like God.
Adam and Eve were created in the image and likeness of God, and so the devil tries to
take it away and say, well, you’re not like God yet, but you will be.
So he mixes up his lies with these half-truths.
And he moves Eve especially through this temptation.
So you’ve got the four stages, right?
Number one, to question God’s Word.
Number two, to deny God’s Word.
Number three, to question God’s motives.
And then number four, to substitute God’s truth with a half-truth, with a lie.
And we notice, as we consider this also, Eve’s confusion.
Now this is a little bit subtle, and we want to be very careful when reading the text,
But when we see how Eve answered the devil, we notice that the original command that God
gave to Adam about not eating from the tree in the middle of the garden, that that command
has been changed in three ways.
I want you to see if you can catch it.
So let me read you first what the Lord says to Adam in Genesis chapter 2 verse 16 and
17.
You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
And now listen to how Eve responds to the devil when he says, did God say you can’t
eat any of these trees?
Eve responds, 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.
I want to see if you got it.
First there’s something missing, Eve takes something out.
The Lord said, you shall surely eat of all of the trees of the garden.
Part of the problem is that there’s a tricky little thing in the Hebrew language that doesn’t
translate easily into English, and that is that there’s no real modifier in the Hebrew
language.
There’s no word for very, at least that I know of, but the way that that is accomplished
in the Hebrew is you double up a word.
So if you say, if you want to say something is good, you would say it’s tov, if you want
to say it’s very good, you say tov, tov, double good, tov, tov.
Well, there’s a bunch of doublings that are happening in the text here, and the way
that it shows up in English is with the word surely.
So the Lord said, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden.
When the Lord originally said that to him, He said, eating you may eat of every tree
of the garden.
There’s a double eating there, a free eating, a generous eating, and Eve takes that first
eating out.
You may freely eat, you may surely eat.
Eve removes it, she says, the Lord said we could eat of the tree of the garden.
So there’s something missing.
And then you might have noticed this, there’s something added.
The Lord never said anything about touching the fruit of the tree, but Eve added to the
command, neither shall you touch it lest you die.
Now notice that, that the generosity of the Lord has been diminished and the strictness
of the Lord has been increased in Eve’s reporting of the command.
And then there’s something that’s changed.
The Lord said, on the day that you will eat of it, you shall surely die.
Again you notice that surely.
In the Hebrew it’s like this, on the day that you eat of it, dying you will die.
There’s a double death that will occur in the eating of this fruit and Eve changes that
to, you shall not eat it lest you die.
It seems like Eve had the idea, she was already befuddled by the devil’s questioning here,
and she has the idea that the fruit, that the tree is like poison.
If you eat of it, it will bring about a physical death.
But the Lord is saying something much more precise and something much more careful that
we want to note.
Look, the Lord doesn’t say that if you eat of it, you will die, like the fruit is poison,
but on the day that you eat of it, dying you will die.
In other words, if you find yourself eating the fruit, you in fact have already spiritually
died.
And this is when the fall happened.
Death comes before the actual bite.
In fact, death comes along as soon as God’s Word is doubted and the devil’s Word is believed.
And we see that Eve now is already flummoxed in this whole conversation.
So, the devil comes along and tempts her, and then she responds.
Now notice this response.
Notice how she now, with the devil’s temptation, is going to look at this fruit, and she is
going to judge the fruit according to her standards.
She’s going to judge the fruit apart from God’s Word.
She’s going to judge the fruit according to the devil’s lie.
So the woman saw that the tree was good for food.
That’s her own standard.
She notices that it’s not going to poison her, so that she won’t fall over dead if she
eats it.
She judges it apart from God’s Word.
She says, and it was a delight to the eyes.
And then she judges it according to the devil’s lie, that the tree was desired to make one
wise.
So, she took the fruit and she ate and she gave some to her husband who was with her
and he ate.
The crack of that fruit, the bite into that fruit was the sound of the back of the universe
being broken and all of creation was plunged into darkness and death.
How do we see it?
The text says that the eyes of them were opened and they saw their nakedness and they were
ashamed and they went to make coverings out of fig leaves.
Now, there’s something for us to consider here.
These fig leaves, in my own mind, are a metaphor or a picture of every religion in the world,
of every attempt to cover our own shame and our own nakedness, our own inadequacy with
our own efforts.
And it seems, it seems to Adam and Eve like this had worked until they hear the sound
of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and then they look at each other
in their fig leaves, they look at themselves in their fig leaves, and they run from the
Lord God and they hide in the trees.
They hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
Now, I want to pause at this, I just pause at this moment and see if you can see it in
your mind.
It’s Adam and Eve and the devil together with them, huddling in the bushes of the Garden
of Eden, wrapped in their fig leaves, trying to hold their breath and still their beating
hearts so that the Lord won’t find them.
This is a picture of death.
I think this is probably one of the worst texts in the Scripture, one of the worst verses
to consider.
One of…so, you guys know my kids are getting older, one of the joys of having younger children
is coming home, especially coming home if you’ve been gone for a little while after
a trip and you know how this goes, the kids, they hear the garage open, they know that
you’re there, and they come, and they run, and they jump on you.
Daddy, I’m so glad you’re home, and they sit on your feet while you drag them into
the house, and they grab ahold of you.
How was your trip?
How was your flight?
How was everything?
Did you get us anything?
You know how this goes.
Now, I just imagined coming home after a trip, and there’s no – I can’t find the children
anywhere.
They’re just silent, and I call for them, and I’m looking for them, and I can’t
I finally find them, and they’re huddled under their beds, and they’re hiding from me, and
not because they’re playing a game, they’re hiding from me because they’re terrified,
because they think that I’m home to beat them or kill them.”
Can you imagine that?
I mean, that’s how it is with Adam and Eve.
They’re hiding from the Lord because they’re terrified of the presence of God.
It should be that when they hear the sound of the Lord walking in the cool of the day,
that they should run straight to God, straight to Him.
Lord, look at how things are going in the garden, look at this tree that we found, look
at this, you know, we figured out the orbit of the moon, and who knows, look at all these
things that we know, and look at the beauty of your creation, we’re starting to delight
in it more and more, and would you teach us something, and could we hear something of
your word and to run to the Lord and to grab a hold of Him and to sit with Him and to talk
with Him and to smile and to see His face and to rejoice.
This is how it was supposed to be with Adam and Eve, to run towards the sound of the Lord’s
feet, but instead they run away from Him.
They’re hiding for fear, for fear of God’s wrath, and rightly so, because they know that
they’ve broken everything that God said was good, they’ve broken.
Everything that God said was nice, they have destroyed.
They’ve wrecked the universe, and they rightly know that they deserve God’s wrath.
And so they hear the preaching of the footsteps of the Lord in the cool of the day, and they
run.
Now, I don’t want to miss this, that there in the trembling, panicked hearts and consciences
of Adam and Eve, wrapped in their fig leaves and hiding in the bushes, is the devil.
They’re not running from the devil, they’re running with the devil.
They’re not hiding from the devil, they’re hiding in the bushes with him.
And this, this Adam and Eve cowering from God, afraid, trembling in the bushes, this
is where you and I were conceived and born.
This is our natural state as well.
To know that we deserve God’s anger, to know that we deserve His wrath, to know that we
We also are sinners, that we were born with a sinful nature, and that we’ve added to
it since.
Running from God, hiding from God, wrapping ourselves with fig leaves, making treaties
with the devil.
This is the state of fallen humanity.
But the Lord won’t leave them there.
He finds them.
Where are you?
He says.
He knows where they are.
Where are you?
I was hiding because I was naked.
Who told you you were naked?
Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?
And Adam says to the Lord, the woman who you gave to be with me, she gave, you’ve got
to hear the animosity in his voice, she gave me the fruit.
The woman that you gave me, it’s your fault, it’s her fault.
So, the Lord turns to Eve and says, and you hear the sadness, the kind of, He asks, what
have you done?
And Eve says, the serpent deceived me and I ate the fruit.
And so, the Lord turns to the serpent, to the devil, to this great angel fallen by pride
who has now brought death into the world, the Lord turns to the devil and he preaches.
Now I want you to notice, and this might be a small point, but I want you to notice that
the Lord asks a question to Adam, He asks a question to Eve.
He says to Adam, where are you?
Who told you?
He says to Eve, what have you done?
But there’s no question for the devil, the Lord just launches straight into him.
And these two verses, I think I can say this with boldness.
these two verses, Genesis chapter 3 verse 14 and especially chapter 15, are the
most important verses in the entire Old Testament. If we understand these verses
then we’ve got a chance at understanding what the Old Testament is about, but if
we miss them then we don’t have a chance at all. Chapter 14, the Lord hands
out the first curse. You are cursed and you will go on your belly and you will
eat dust all the days of your life.
Now we want to notice again that there’s two things that the Lord is going to curse, and
they are not Adam and Eve, they are the serpent and the ground.
But then verse 15, in fact, I wouldn’t mind if you guys had your eyes on the text and
the bulletin, because it’s something like a riddle, if you want to pull it out and we’ll
just walk through it.
This verse has a name, it’s called the Proto-Evangelion, and I guess I suppose if a text has a Latin
name, you know it’s going to be important.
It means the first gospel, but you have to see how this went.
The Lord says to the devil, I will put enmity between you and the woman.
Enmity means war, conflict, battle, hatred, fight, strife.
In other words, the Lord looks at the situation with Adam and Eve sitting there in the bushes
with the devil, and he says, this will not do.
It will not, and in fact, already the gospel is beautiful in this very text.
The Lord says, it will not do for you, Eve, to be at peace with this devil.
It will not do with you, Adam, to be at peace with the devil and to be at war with me.
If there’s going to be war, it’s not going to be between us and God.
It’s going to be between us and the devil.
The Lord says, you are on the wrong side.
God.
You are with me and the devil is there and this is where the battle is.
So the Lord is pulling apart Eve and the devil and this friendship that was formed in the
fall.
I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring.
Better to translate that seed.
Between your seed and her seed.
Now what is the seed of the devil?
The devil can’t have babies, there’s no little baby devils running around.
So what is the seed of the devil?
Well, it’s sin and death, it’s destruction and darkness, it’s trouble.
But look at what it says there too, between your seed and her seed, that also is a unique
construction.
Every other time the Bible talks about the seed in the rest of the Scriptures, it’s
always the seed of the man, the seed of Abraham, the seed of Isaac, the seed of Judah, the
seed of David.
In fact, I mean this is kind of how it goes because, just as an example, the Greek word
for seed is spermata.
It belongs to the husband, not to the wife.
But here it says the seed of the woman.
Now this is again a strange construction, but this text is already a shadow of the virgin
birth, that there will be a man born of Eve without the help of another man.
And what will this seed do?
He, the seed of the woman, will bruise or crush or deliver a death blow to your head
and you shall crush his heel.
The battle switches between Eve and the serpent to the seed and the serpent and they will
engage in this battle to the death.
The picture is of a barefoot farmer crushing the open mouth head of a snake.
There will be two crushings then, two death blows, but of a different sort.
One on the head and the other on the heel.
The seed of the woman and the devil will both die, but one will not stay dead.”
So you see what’s being confessed here.
There will be a man born without a father who is also God.
He has the capacity to destroy the devil.
This God-man will die but will not stay dead, and in his death he will destroy the devil
and His seed, sin and death.” It’s a phenomenal text. It’s a phenomenal promise.
And Adam and Eve, believe me, believed it. In fact, Adam and Eve, after the Lord
gives them this promise, could basically confess the Apostles’ Creed. They just
didn’t have the names down. Adam and Eve, because of this promise, if they came to
visit Austin, Texas, they would come to church here and not at the synagogue
dog, where this is confessed and where this is believed.
In fact, we so see it in the very next verse because after the Lord finishes the cursing
of the ground and giving Adam and Eve the trouble of the home and of the field, then
now it’s time for Adam to give a name to Eve, and I think I’ve mentioned this before,
that if I were to be Adam at this point and it was time to give a name to Eve, I would
probably think of something like moth, death, or curse, or destruction, or fall.
But look at what Adam names his wife, Eve.
That means life.
Because you are the mother of all the living.
Because from you will come life and life eternal.
eternal, because from you will come the one who will destroy the devil.”
And then the Lord just to put this preaching in place is going to take an animal and take
the skin of the animal and take the fig leaves off of Adam and Eve and wrap them in skin.
I want you to try to imagine this.
Some of you are hunters, you know, and you’ve been out there
skinning an animal. I remember one time I took
Andrew’s fifth grade class on a retreat and we were up in the
mountains on this retreat and some guys were using a hunting cabin kind of across
the way and about twelve at night I heard this noise and I looked out and the
guys were up there and they were gutting an elk. So I woke up all these fifth
grade boys and I walked them over there in the middle of the night
to watch these guys gut this elk, and they said,
we’re never going to be able to sleep again.
Now, this is a brutal process.
It’s not pretty, but you’ve got to see it in the garden.
Can you imagine the very first thing to die?
The hands of the Lord, who takes an animal, and He kills it,
and He drains the blood, and He hangs it up,
and He starts to carve the skin off
of the corpse of this animal, and He takes the skin, still wet and warm, and wraps it
around Adam and Eve, and the flesh sticks to them and covers them.
And they say, is this what it takes to cover our nakedness?
Is this what it takes to cover our shame?
Is this what it takes to cover, to make up for what we’ve done wrong?
Is this what it takes?
And the Lord would say to them, no, this is just a picture, because this skin and this
blood, and this death is simply preaching the skin and the blood and the death to come
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent
by being crushed for Him.
It’s an astonishing thing.
Maybe we’ll end with this thought.
It’s an astonishing thing that the Lord said to Adam and Eve in the garden, on the day
that you eat of it, dying you will die, but now the Lord comes back and adds
something to it. On the day that you eat of it, I also, says the Lord, will die. And
in my death you will find life. In my death you will find deliverance. In my
death, you will find salvation.
God be praised.
That where Adam and Eve fell, our Lord Jesus Christ stood, and through the one man death
was brought into the world, through the one man, Jesus Christ, life eternal is brought
to us.
May this be our eternal comfort and peace.
In the name of Jesus, amen.
and the peace of God which passes all understanding. Guard your hearts and
minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.