We continue to ask the question: Can you really believe? We’ve looked at what the Bible says about creation, humanity, and marriage. Today we ask whether you can really believe what the Bible says – about sin.
Society at large would say one of two things about sin. Some would say it’s a what a few minor celebrities did at the weekend. It gets reported in the tabloid press, and it’s more good for a giggle than anything to worry about. Others would say that sin is what a few criminals did in a dark alley. It gets reported in the courts, and it’s more about what might be done to us than about what we might do.
Either way, sin is something that we’re immune from, because we manage to avoid it and we’re fully in control.
You see why people would wish that the church wouldn’t talk about sin. Why spend time discussing other people’s misdemeanours, instead of our own lives?
Well, let’s look at what the Bible has to say about sin.
I’d like to draw 3 things out:
The heart of sin: Wishing we were God
First, the heart of sin. The heart of sin is wishing we were God. Wishing we were God.
At first sight, it looks like God laid an arbitrary trap for Adam and Eve. Here are all these trees, but if you eat the fruit of this one by mistake, something terrible will happen to you.
A bit like speed limits. You know how some country roads have a 6o miles per hour speed limit, but then there’s a section where it drops to 50. There’s no obvious reason why you should drive more slowly there; it’s almost as if it was done to catch you out.
That’s not what’s going on here. There’s a particular reason why this tree was forbidden, and that is found in its name. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eating that fruit is about wanting to know good and evil.
What’s wrong with that, you ask? We want to know right from wrong, and we encourage our young people to learn the distinction. Surely that’s a good thing.
There are a couple of clues in the passage. The first is what the snake says: You will be like God, knowing good and evil. They wanted to know good and evil in the way that God does. God doesn’t just understand what behaviour is good or evil; he actually knows it, he knows enough about how everything works to know for himself what is right and wrong. He doesn’t just do the right thing, he decides what is the right thing.
The other clue comes from spotting a Hebrew figure of speech. A very Hebrew way to speak of everything is to mention the extremes. One of the products you can buy for a baby is called “Top to toe wash”. The idea is not that you wash the crown of the baby’s head, and his ten toes, but use other products for the rest of your baby. It’s a way of saying that it is suitable to use on every part of your baby. So when the Old Testament speaks of the north and the south, it often means everywhere.
So here, Adam and Eve wanted to know good and evil. And everything else in between. They wanted to know everything. And actually, if you think about it, that’s what you need if you’re going to work out right and wrong for yourself. The only way you can be sure you’ve worked out whether a particular action is good or evil is if you can be absolutely confident that you’ve looked at it from every possible angle, know exactly what consequences would follow, and so on. To work out right and wrong for yourself, you need to know everything.
So this isn’t an arbitrary stretch of 50 miles per hour. This isn’t a “keep off the grass” sign. Adam and Eve eat that fruit because they wanted to be like God. They wanted total knowledge. They wanted to be self-determining.
What a contrast from the life held out by the rest of the Bible. Instead of knowing good and evil, the Bible invites us to know God. God does know right and wrong. God does know everything there is to know. And we can know that God, and then humbly listen to him and depend on him to tell us right from wrong, and anything else we need to know.
This is all very contemporary, is it not? There is nothing wrong with pursuing knowledge and expertise – be that in the arts or in the sciences? This is God’s world, and the more we know about it the better.
But so often we do that because we’re seeking out a way to make our own decisions in life. A way to work out for ourselves how to live, so that nobody else needs to tell us what is good or bad. We don’t like being told what to do, and if we’re honest we don’t even like God telling us what to do.
This is so different from society’s view of sin. Instead of sin being about a few exceptionally naughty people, it’s something we all do. We all crave that self-dependence, the chance to work life out for ourselves, to live how we want, with nobody telling us what to do. We all want to be like God.
That is the heart of sin: Wishing we were God.
The horrific fallout of sin: Pain, separation and death
The second thing to observe in Genesis 3 is the horrific fallout of sin. The horrific fallout of sin. That is pain, separation and death. Pain, separation and death.
In Genesis 2:17, God said to Adam: 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 sure enough, when they eat of it, there are 4 consequences.
The first is death. They don’t die physically, but they do die spiritually. Before this point their relationship with God was unimpaired. And so was their relationship with one another; they were both naked, and had no shame – they had nothing to hide from one another.
But straight after eating that fruit, God comes walking in the garden, and they hid in the trees. Their relationship with God is not what it was. And immediately they sewed fig leaves together to do the best job they could at covering up. Their relationship with each other was not what it was either. Suddenly, there are things to be hidden. Suddenly there is a sense of shame.
And it’s just the same today. People today hide from one another. There is never total openness in even the closest relationships. And people hide from God. Some people come to church to hide from God, while others stay as far from church as they can. Death. Spiritual death.
The second consequence is pain. Remember that work was part of the good world that God made. He gave us the task of caring for this world. Work isn’t bad. But our rebellion against God has turned it into something painful. Suddenly, getting food from the ground will hurt.
We all know this, don’t we. Crowded commuter trains. Tiredness on a Friday afternoon, and on a Monday morning. Lambing in the middle of the night. Industrial accidents on a building site. Computers that crash just when you can’t find your backup. Work hurts.
And the other thing God says will hurt is having children. That should have been so straight-forward, but now it’s filled with complications and with pain. Pain.
The third consequence is separation. Look at what God says to the woman at the end of verse 16: Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
We might have a guess at what that means, and we’d probably be right, but we can be absolutely sure once we compare that verse to chapter 4 and verse 7. Cain is being tempted to murder his brother, and God uses the same two verbs: Sin is crouching at your door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. Sin wants to take control of your life, Cain, but you must get the upper hand of it.
So God is telling Eve that her marriage will be a struggle for control. She’ll want to take control, to try and get things to run her way. But she’ll keep on losing. He will get the upper hand.
I don’t know if you know the childhood game King of the Castle, but I think it’s quite good fun. You find a grassy hill, and one person is on top of the hill. They are the king of the castle. But then other people try to become king. How can they get on top, and push the current king down the hill a bit. Great fun!
God says that is what marriage will feel like for women. Trying to be king of the castle, but never quite managing to achieve it.
How different from how things were before the fall, when she should have experienced Adam’s love and care, as he sacrificed himself and put himself out to look after, defend, and nurture his wife. Separation.
Death. Pain. Separation. And the fourth consequence is death again – only this time, it is physical death.
Here’s the tragedy in Satan’s question: Did God really say that you couldn’t eat from the tree in the middle of the garden? He took her eye off the fact that there were two trees in the middle of the garden. They were forbidden from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the tree of life was there for them to enjoy. They could have eaten from that tree and lived forever. But they didn’t. They wanted to be God, not receive life from God.
But once they’ve done that, life has become miserable. God could not allow them to live forever in this state. So they are cut off from the tree of life. It’s a kindness on God’s part, but it’s also the climax of his judgement. And so the day will come when they die, just as the day will come when we each die. You are dust, says God, and to dust you shall return.
There’s the horrific fallout of sin. Death, pain, separation, until the day we die.
And yet, for all that this isn’t very nice to think about, we all know these experiences, and it’s good to know that the Bible isn’t out of touch with reality. We all recognise this description, because we’ve all experienced a sense of shame, the frustration of work, the pain involved in children, and the grief and sadness of death.
That’s because we were all born outside the Garden of Eden. We’ve never known any other life.
But as well as explaining why life is like this, it’s also good to know that the Bible is the story of God’s plan to rescue us from this. To restore us to Eden. To end suffering and pain, and to give us life.
Hope in the face of sin: A human who will crush sin and death
And that brings us to the third point from this chapter: Hope in the face of sin. Hope in the face of sin. And that hope is of a human who will crush sin and death. A human who will crush sin and death.
It’s hard to believe, but God’s kindness shines through in this account. We see this in several ways.
God goes for a walk in the garden. The fact they heard him coming and hid suggests they knew the sound. God continued to walk in their garden.
God had said that they would die the day they ate of that fruit. We’ve seen they experienced the consequences straight away, but God was kind and delayed their physical death.
They sewed fig-leaves together. Like a loving parent who helps their child with a craft project, God makes some much more suitable garments for them. And it may be significant that he used animal skins to do so.
But as well as God’s kindness here, there’s an injection of hope. This comes in the curse on the snake. Verse 15: 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.
The picture here is that there will be a long-running feud, down the ages, between the people of God and the snake’s offspring. Never mind for now who the snake’s offspring are – ask me later if you’re interested – but this feud will reach a climax. That is when the snake himself – not just one of his descendants – will take on a single descendant from the woman. They’ll bruise each other – both of them will get hurt. But the snake will just deliver a blow to this man’s heel. But the man in question will deal a blow to the snake’s head. He’ll be crushed, and crushed forever.
It’s a fairly shadowy promise, but it’s a point of hope in the story. The snake, the serpent, Satan, who has caused so much damage here, won’t be able to do so forever. One day a human being will come who will destroy him.
And so the rest of the book of Genesis keeps asking whether one of the lead characters in the book might be this serpent crusher. Is it Noah – will he give us all the rest we long for? No. How about Abraham – will he restore God’s blessing? No. How about Isaac? Or Jacob? Or Joseph? In a small way, each of these characters prefigures this superhero, but evil itself is never crushed.
And so the book of Genesis, and indeed the whole Old Testament ends, and we’re still looking. But we know who this is, don’t we? It was as Jesus died on the cross that our sin was dealt with, and the decisive blow was dealt to Satan. It was as he rose again, that he became what the New Testament calls the second Adam.
The book of Revelation pictures Satan as a wounded dragon. He’s furious, because he knows his time is short, and that’s because he’s been fatally wounded.
He shall bruise your head. And you shall bruise his heel.
Why does God tell us this in Genesis 3? He knows that we find ourselves in this chapter. We read of our desire to be like God, to be autonomous, to take control of our own lives. We read of the chaos, the horrors, that ensure – the pain, the death, the separation that we know all too well.
And having found ourselves here, God wants us to find hope here. The reason he shows us our plight is so that we might look for Jesus, find him, and turn to him as the one in whom there is hope.
A few months back, we had someone come to talk at one of our evening services from a local organisation that seeks to help those with alcohol addiction, amongst other things. A major stumbling block to people coming for seek help is not realising that they have a problem. Once the penny drops that someone needs help, then professional help can be sought, and recovery can begin.
That’s what we human beings are like. God sent Jesus into the world so that we might be saved from our sin, and brought back into the fullness of life. But we don’t realise that we have a problem. We don’t know that we need help. So we think we can manage on our own.
Conclusion
Society’s view of sin is that it doesn’t matter. Most of us don’t sin badly enough for it to affect us.
God’s view of sin is that it does matter, and that we’re all born into a world where sin is a fact of life. We all experience its consequences.
Knowing how lost we are is the first step to turning to God for help. He sent his Son into the world to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. All we have to do is ask, and our sins will be forgiven too. Then we can live the rest of our lives sure in the knowledge that Satan has been dealt the decisive blow. One day, Jesus will come back and all sin, evil and suffering will be gone for good.
Paul ends his letter to the Romans with this reassurance for them, so that they don’t give up hope: The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.