Genesis 3:1-3

Oh,
it wasn’t going before.
It wasn’t.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to today’s study.
We jump into Genesis chapter 3.
Welcome back.
Thanks for joining us.
We are moving today out of the creation narrative and into really the one and only
Eden story
that is recorded in Scripture, Genesis 3.
We may not get
too far today in terms of verses because there’s a lot going on that comes
at us kind of quickly,
but let’s read a couple of verses and then we’ll jump back in.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God made.
He said to the woman,
“Did God say,
‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?'”
Let’s stop there, Michael.
This is one of those places in the Bible where it’s very hard to read what it says without
adding to it from other parts of the story.
As this story is written,
on one hand,
keep in mind that this is a pre-Christian story.
There’s no understanding of Jesus, of Messiah,
of any of that happening.
When we meet this creature,
the serpent,
we meet a character that’s in the garden,
but we are told is crafty.
Now,
that’s where the story introduces and that’s where the story leaves it.
We of course read through the lens of 2,000 years of Christianity and thousands of years
of Judaism and thousands of pages of Scripture,
and we see a deeper,
bigger picture here.
Those kinds of texts that bring together what it says and what we think it means from
other things that it says are ripe grounds for misunderstanding,
for arguments.
This is one of those places I think we very clearly see,
as it is written,
there’s really no explanation given.
There’s a serpent.
If you think about it at a human instinctive level,
we know that serpents can’t be trusted because they slither.
I can’t imagine that in this group of people that someone isn’t going to say,
“I hate snakes.” There’s just something primal about seeing an animal,
that motion on the ground that feels dangerous,
that feels untrustworthy.
Some of that we’ve been socialized with,
but some of that is almost innate.
This story doesn’t endeavor to tell us much more than that.
If we want to really get into the story,
we have to be aware of that because we bring
so much of the other stuff with us.
Yeah, that’s completely fair.
I want to point out that it says the serpent was more crafty than any other.
It doesn’t say Satan.
That’s another thing that we’re really tempted to read into this.
What we have is not only a creature,
but we know,
because I’m going to here throw this
up so that you can see this.
Not only do we know it’s a creature,
but look at the end of verse one there.
Sorry, it’s in the middle of that verse right at the end of the first sentence,
that the Lord God had made.
Not only is this a serpent,
not Satan, which would be easy to read in,
but this also isn’t
some kind of parable,
like a moral of good and evil.
This serpent represents all evil that’s existed before the creation of all time.
No, God made this thing.
This is not God fighting some cosmic force.
You have this in some ancient stories.
You have where deities are fighting it out with the good and the evil here.
The serpent is a creature,
was made by God,
and we have this language here of crafty.
This is interesting, Clint, because the word chosen here is to give this idea of clever,
but not wise.
There’s other words to speak for wisdom.
Here you have this kind of
not really full-throated compliment.
It’s crafty, it’s a little devious,
but it’s not wise, it’s not reflective,
it’s something other than that.
I think we see that connecting to what you said,
this idea of the physicality of a snake.
Here we have this thing that isn’t really trustworthy,
but yet it’s in the story.
Yeah, and in the aftermath of this story throughout the years,
Christians have said this is a story about evil.
Scripture fills in some of the gaps on evil in other places.
We have this character that gets named the devil or Satan that becomes the kind of personification
of evil.
Those things have been read backwards into the story.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
It just means that when you come to the story itself,
it takes some mental discipline not
to bring all of those with you.
That is not how the original people would have read it.
We have provided some depth and detail that the story itself is largely unconcerned with.
As it is written,
the story is going to give us almost no clues to the serpent’s motivation
or to the idea that there’s a bigger thing happening here.
It’s just a tricky animal that can’t really be trusted,
and
he’s going to
practice that craftiness on this first couple.
Yeah, and let’s note how this craftiness is exhibited.
It starts with a question,
and this is maybe a little bit where we sort of lose some of
our own context here.
In the ancient world,
craftiness is a highly valued kind of skill,
not in the sense of
truly,
you would say, that this is an inherent value in the ancient world.
The fact that we see this now imposed upon this creature who’s coming to one of these
first created humans is something that,
to an original reader,
this would have stuck
out.
It would have been maybe a little more connective to their experience of story than what it is to ours.
We will see many instances in the book of Genesis where kind of trickery,
deceitfulness
is really almost presented as a value,
a kind of thing to be admired.
To get the best of someone is not altogether unwelcome in the Middle Eastern literature
of this day.
It’s pretty common.
So, and notice where it starts.
Here’s the shrewdness, the craftiness of the serpent.
Did God say, here’s the question as Michael referred to it,
did God say you shall not
eat from any tree in the garden?
Now,
the best deceit takes a kernel of truth with it, right?
That’s not what God said.
God said almost exactly the opposite.
You can eat from any tree of the garden, but not one.
And notice that the serpent flips that around to say,
so God told you you couldn’t eat anything?
Already casting God in a negative light,
already kind of insinuating a sort of distrust,
a kind of wrinkle,
but notice that the serpent begins with something that has enough truth
in it to sound like a misunderstanding,
but is intentionally misleading.
Well, yeah, and I don’t want to make this too practical,
but this is fundamentally even
logic that my daughters use,
right?
You start with this intrinsically simple question that is just off enough to make the person think, right?
Hence the craftiness.
So did God say this thing?
And Eve’s obviously going to respond to this with a correct thing,
but the point wasn’t
to trick her with that question was to lead to the next question.
You’re beginning to lead down this chain.
And this is where we begin to already see,
the lesson is already starting to flush itself
out, that the first question that you answer matters,
how you receive sort of these questioning
of God and God’s intention,
that this has an impact in the world.
So but we’ll see that,
sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself,
we’ll see that play out here
as we go.
Right.
So let’s go another verse here.
Verse two,
“The woman replied to the serpent,
‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the
garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of garden,
nor shall you touch it,
or you will die.'”
So let’s stop there.
So Eve responds to this question.
She’s been drawn into this kind of debate and she says, “No,
God said we can actually
eat from any tree except one.”
And then she repeats what had been said to Adam,
“The day you eat of it or touch it,
you shall die.” And again,
people have been very interested in this idea,
the symbol of a tree.
What was it?
What does it mean?
In the story,
again, not to try and
evade the questions,
but in the story,
it’s just a tree that you’re not supposed to eat from.
It’s not a magic tree.
We’re going to find out later.
It has a kind of…
Well, actually,
we may find out that it’s not the tree itself.
The tree may or may not have anything to do with it,
but it is this limit.
The tree represents the limit of obedience and the opportunity for disobedience.
So why is it that in us there is something that if you have 100 options and one you can’t
have, you want the one?
You know, give a kid 10 choices and tell them they can’t have the 11th thing and that’s
the thing they want.
There is something inherent.
And the story knows this about us.
The story recognizes this in our nature.
And so the snake capitalizing on that is pointing Eve’s attention to the thing she can’t have.
Notice how quickly he got her to go from all the trees of the garden,
which we can eat
of any of them,
to the one thing we can’t have and that’s now where her attention is.
Yeah, Clint.
So you’re right to point this out.
You’re also now treading on grounds that I think like everyone who’s been a child who
has had a children’s Bible has at some point wondered,
why did God make a thing and put
it in the middle of the garden that’s going to cause this problem?
This seems like you’re setting yourself up for failure,
right?
This idea that what is this?
And you know, I’ve always been struck here that we find in this story a
reflection of
the limits of our patience and perseverance.
The idea that in the center of the garden is this thing that you pass by it all the
time.
It’s in the middle, right?
There’s a thing that is sort of the burr under your saddle.
It nags you.
I want to do this thing.
I want this.
And over time we become convinced,
no, this is a thing that I deserve,
or we talk ourselves into,
well, it can’t possibly be that bad.
What’s striking about this story is how few questions it takes to get Eve to a position
where she is literally willing to question the one who creates this whole good place
and then walks in fellowship and communion with her in it.
It’s amazing how that first question,
which we saw was just completely false,
she responds and now we’re going to get to this next sort of turn.
We’ve already got Eve on the hook,
and it’s amazing how quickly that’s reflected in our
own lives and our own faith,
how easy it is for us to get from maybe a place of questioning
or doubt to a place of just full-blown disbelief.
We love the idea,
I think, Michael, that these stories are about why God did things.
Why did God create the world this way?
Why seven days?
Why serpent?
Why would you make a crafty serpent?
Why would you put a tree in the garden and tell them not to Eve?
As long as we think these stories are about explaining what God does,
I do not think we
can read them through the eyes of those who told them initially.
These are stories about what it means to live in the world God has made,
not why God has
done things, even things that are specifically explained by God’s action,
like the pain of
childbirth down the road here,
or why is the ground so hard to work.
Even those things are never explained in terms of God’s motives,
God’s understanding,
they’re simply what God does.
One of the consistent themes of the Scripture is just a complete lack of interest in defending
what God does.
This book assumes that God does not need defending because God is God.
We often approach these stories hoping they’ll answer some of these questions.
Why would God do that?
You’re going to inevitably be disappointed.
This is a story about what it means to be faithful and unfaithful in the good creation
that God has given.
This is a story about what it means to relate well or poorly with those who have also been created.
This is a story about being in relationship and connection with the world, but ultimately
it’s going to offer little in the way of explaining why God does what God does.
Right, absolutely.
This story is far more interested in exploring what death actually is than it has exploring
the reasons why the world was constructed in the way that it was.
We’re not going to have time to flush this out today,
but what you’re going to see as
we go throughout this story is that one of the operative questions is whose understanding
of death is accurate because Eve says that we’re told that the one who eats of this fruit
is going to die,
that the serpent is going to put a spin on that,
and then we’re going
to see that all of these characters are really sort of transformed by this reality of death
though it’s different than what you and I think of as death.
It’s an amazingly nuanced look for what it means to be people who are living, dying, created,
falling into disorder from order.
This story is deep though it does so in few words like the rest of these creation stories.
It’s not significant or robust in its wording,
but the themes here are substantial and they’re
carry with us throughout the rest of this book,
well actually the scripture,
but yeah.
And so maybe as a parting shot,
when we read this story it is reasonable that fruit means fruit.
As the story is told,
the tellers envision trees,
they envision a garden,
they envision fruit,
but they are also well versed in a tradition that talks about our actions as our fruit,
bearing good fruit and bad fruit.
So what is the fundamental choice in the garden?
It is all the fruits of obedience or the dangerous fruit of disobedience and this,
I think, inherent in the story is the assumption that this is where people live.
We live in the tension of bearing the fruit of obedience,
the fruit of disobedience.
This is fundamentally the choice that tomorrow we’ll see before Eve,
but in the aftermath of Eve’s story is inherently present with all of us all the time.
And this story is remarkably deep.
Yeah, I think it’s a good summary.
We’ll jump back in right here tomorrow with verse four.
So I hope you have a wonderful afternoon evening and we’ll see you tomorrow at two o’clock.
Thanks for being with us.
Bye.