Well, hey friends, thanks for making time to be with us.
Good to have you back.
Good to join you again as we continue to make our way through the book of Genesis.
An interesting transition today as we come to the end of chapter three.
The man and the woman,
the man and wife,
they have disobeyed God.
The punishments have been handed out.
And now the transition from garden to world happens,
from obedient to disobedient and
in the aftermath of what that means.
Some very interesting aspects to the way in which this story is wrapped up.
So we are in verse 20.
We’ll jump in here for a couple of verses.
The man named his wife Eve because she’s the mother of all living.
And the Lord God made garments of skin for the man and for his wife
and clothed them.
We can go ahead and stop there.
We’ve seen before the man had the ability to name things.
The word Eve is very like the word living or living one in Hebrew.
The idea is that she is the source of life,
that she will birth
the human race.
And then,
well, let’s stop there in that verse for now.
Michael, anything to add there?
No, I mean, just fundamentally that God has ordered the world in such a way that
despite the sin that we see creating this misordered relationship between Adam and Eve,
God’s still providing a way for life to continue on because she is the mother of all things,
right?
So even in a disordered world,
God’s order and intention still does exist.
There’s even grace in the midst of consequence if you’re willing to see it.
So then this next verse is fascinating.
“And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them.” Remember,
in the course of this story,
we started with the man and woman being unclothed
but unashamed.
They were naked and the text specifically tells us they weren’t ashamed.
And then when they took the fruit,
when they disobeyed God,
they felt shame and distance
from one another and they clothed themselves with fig leaves, with leaves.
And now we have,
and yes, we could argue to some extent whether this is actual or not,
but in the course of the story,
we now have essentially what becomes the first sacrifice,
the first death in the garden.
The Lord takes skins from some animal
and makes clothing.
So God has now,
on behalf of protecting the man and woman,
taken from the creation in
a way that wasn’t part of the original.
And that death has now served to some extent the man and the woman as they prepare or as
God prepares to have them exit the garden.
And this in some ways is a very subtle foreshadowing
of what has happened and again,
the deep wound that their disobedience has brought not only to themselves but to the created order.
And yet,
it is also a sign that even in the midst of punishing them,
even in the midst
of holding them accountable,
even in the midst of pronouncing consequence on them,
God shows mercy.
God shows grace.
God shows an inclination to cover them,
to help them,
to protect them,
even in the midst
of what they’ve done in turning away from God’s instructions.
So this is a masterful connection to the earlier parts of this story.
So I just want to bring this up here so that we could remember this.
So I’m looking here.
This is Genesis chapter three.
I’m skipping all the way back here to the end of verse four.
The serpent says, “You will not die,
for God knows that when you eat of this fruit,
your eyes will be opened.
You’ll be like God,
knowing good and evil.”
Look a little bit farther down here.
Verse seven, “Then the eyes of both were opened,
and they knew that they were naked,
and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.”
So here we see this really interesting transformation where the serpent promises them one thing,
open eyes,
the ability to see what you haven’t seen before.
They consume of this fruit,
and then in that action,
they suddenly now see not what they
had hoped to see,
but rather they see a kind of vulnerability and shame that they didn’t
know to exist before.
Their eyes have been opened,
but in the direction that they didn’t plan on.
What we have today is God taking part of this created order and God making an accommodation
for them.
In the earlier part of the story,
they are making a solution for themselves.
They’re making their own loincloths that the text says.
But now,
God who has encountered them,
he’s shared with them the results,
the reality of the consequences of their sin,
now they are given a divinely
chosen sort of path that’s
going to help remedy the problem.
Their eyes continue to be open,
they are still beset by shame,
they continue to struggle with this vulnerability,
yet God is now going to provide a more lasting solution to that
immediate problem.
The long-term solution,
of course, is far ahead of us,
but this is God responding and
making a way where Adam and Eve made a detour.
And that continues into what is one of the strangest parts of this story for us as modern
readers, I think.
Verse 22,
“Then the Lord God said,
‘See, the man has become like one of us,
knowing good and evil.
And now he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever.’”
So, we’ve seen this before in the first chapter, this
reference of God to himself in the plural.
Let us make mankind in our own image.
Here we see it again.
The man has become like one of us.
What has exactly as the serpent said,
they know good and evil.
They have now the capacity to disobey.
They have now
secured for themselves a kind of disobedient stance.
And then the Lord says,
“Now what if they eat from the tree of life and live forever?” Now,
again, we’ve said throughout this story that some of this explains why things happen
in the natural world.
All creation stories, all origin stories have notes of explanation in them.
Why do men and women live 50,
60, 70, 80 years because we didn’t get to the tree?
So the other inference is there is now this
competitiveness.
Why did Eve find herself attracted to the tree?
Because she wanted to be like God.
And what does God now say?
They would be like one of us.
So there is now this sort of competition,
this not quite animosity,
but there is this
tension between the created and the creator.
And so God in the context of this
is concerned.
And there’s lots going on in these verses.
It’s a strange twist of the story.
But I think if you put it in conversation with the rest of the story,
you see how it gets there.
Yeah, we have this sense in the earlier creation stories that the way that God has made things
does require work.
We have this inference earlier in the story that work is part of Adam’s role on the earth.
Yet we don’t get the sense that this garden is somehow decaying or that it’s turning
into a more difficult place to live.
The idea is that God is sustaining and
caring for the place.
What we have here is this inference that there is some danger that the human could somehow
grasp for more than what is there more the lot.
That there is something at stake in them maybe reaching and grasping for something that would
keep them even from experiencing the fruit and consequence of the sin that they now brought on themselves.
We’re in a really interesting territory in the text because ultimately God has been metering
out a form of consequence for the sin that’s been committed.
And so now here we have this reality that the consequence also requires certain boundaries,
that some things now will need to be off limits for these humans.
And we’re going to see those limits codified,
really made explicit in the future sort of
covenant and then ultimately in the sort of Levitical codes.
You’re going to see this flushed out in much more detail.
But to start with,
there’s a certain place in the garden that now you shall not be able to go.
In order to do that,
there’s going to need to be consequences.
Right.
Let’s jump in and we’ll circle back to that.
Verse 23.
“Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from
which he was taken.
He drove out the man at the east of the garden of Eden and placed the cherubim and a sword
flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.”
So in the telling of this story,
the man and woman are driven from the place they were created for.
They’ve essentially lost their home.
They now have to, in their disobedience,
go out and do the hard thing of creating a life
outside of the perfection,
outside of the safety,
outside of the security of the place
in which they were originally given,
the place that was given to them.
And
not only that, but the way is closed to them.
Cherubim is a kind of angelic creature.
It’s a little bit loose,
but we see it throughout the scripture,
particularly the Old Testament,
although it makes some reference again in the book of Revelation.
But this cherubim who is an agent of God and a flaming sword,
the man and woman,
the point is they can’t get back to Eden.
That has been lost to them.
Now
what was the original pronouncement?
God said, “When you disobey,
when you eat of the fruit,
you shall die.” And some people point out that they don’t die.
But really, I think that’s a very small reading of the text.
They now know death.
In the garden,
they knew no death.
Now human life has a fixed end.
Now human life has the threat of death hanging over it.
And we will get to that reality very quickly in the next chapter.
But now death is a part of human reality.
On the day you eat of it doesn’t mean you drop dead.
It means death now enters the human story and is, to some extent,
the omnipresent reality
shadowing life.
Yeah, there’s a kind of futility that’s been introduced into the created order.
Think of it.
Everything that God has done up to this point has been for the sake of building towards
a creative end.
God’s been building one layer upon another,
especially in that first creation story.
But then you have in that second story the idea of hierarchical relationships and order
given to the man’s life so that he even has a job and then he’s given a partner, right?
All of this is building up a beautiful,
perfect kind of ecosystem,
a life that all lives onto
its own perfected end.
But now what we see happening is a kind of futility where in verse 23,
let me throw this up here,
the Lord sends him forth from the Garden of Eden.
What’s he going to do?
He’s going to till the very ground that he was taken.
So we have this theme that we’ve had now throughout this chapter of the stuff of the ground.
The serpent,
right, who is now destined to slither on the ground,
to even eat the dirt
of the ground.
Well, now the man is
going to till the very ground that he’s going to die and go back to,
right?
So there’s a kind of cyclical life and death relationship that now exists in this story
that is a first.
Because of sin,
there’s now a set end,
a known outcome,
but the man and the woman live in
the interval to get to that outcome.
So death isn’t immediate,
but death has been introduced into the system.
And so therefore there’s a kind of futility of living that’s on the other side of it.
Right.
And so this story ends with the man and the woman remembering the garden, but now faced
with the hardship of producing life,
childbearing,
and the danger of death,
killing the ground, hard work.
They now have the difficulties of life before them with the garden at their back.
And the way to the garden is blocked.
It is never to be regained.
It has been lost permanently from their possession.
And they go into that world covered with the skins that God has given them.
And there’s no sense in which the thing that is interesting about this story, not to get
too far ahead of ourselves,
but one might think this is where the story of people and
the story of God parted ways that God made them.
They disobeyed.
God kicked them out.
God hangs out in the garden.
The people have to go out and do their own thing on their own.
But we will see immediately in tomorrow’s story as we enter chapter four,
their stories are still intertwined.
They’re now in a new location,
but the connection relationally, though damaged,
is not erased.
It’s not gone.
God continues to have an interest in the creation and specifically in the human experience.
And that’s a stunning part of the story.
And really that this this parting of ways is not a permanent.
And though it is real,
it is not final.
Check me on this,
Clint.
But there’s a sense here that we need to make very clear this permanence you speak of.
It it’s the result of a choice made that has opened a new future that that by definition
makes it impossible to go backwards.
Right.
The grasping for divinity,
grasping for what isn’t rightfully given to humans.
And yet they forcibly take the opening of eyes,
that image that we have,
that there’s no unseeing the thing that was seen.
And so therefore,
this angel that guards the garden that the being expelled from this
perfect place represents the full culmination,
the ultimate eternal reality that the problem
has now been introduced and it is now final.
And the point I want to make here is that ultimately,
this is only three chapters of
the Bible.
Within three chapters, we introduce how God makes,
why God makes, who God makes, and what choice that they make that changes everything.
And that’s only three chapters out of a book with thousands of chapters.
So the very sort of number,
the very sort of reality of that is that the scriptures
are just by quantity,
less interested in teasing out all of the whys and what ifs and questions.
The hypothetical ideas that we bring to the scriptural text,
it just says in very simple plain language,
“This is the problem that humans made.”
And then the rest of the Bible is left for the solution.
Yeah, I don’t know the chapter count in the Bible.
I know there are 66 books.
I have no idea how many chapters there are.
But it’s interesting that only three of them,
and two of them really recite the same story,
that only three of them get us to the point where we have to account for human life as it is.
I mean, even if you discount the book of Revelation and say that’s a picture of how it will ultimately
be, the vast majority of the Bible is about the story of God with people as they really are.
And that’s why I think we do such a disservice to these early chapters of Genesis when we allow
ourselves to be drawn into fights about is a day 24 hours,
and what about the dinosaurs,
and did snakes have legs?
It’s not that those things aren’t interesting,
and maybe even at some level minorly important.
I don’t know.
It’s that they’re not the point,
that they miss the
much deeper themes, the much
more profound realities of what I think the text is trying to tell us.
And I think, Michael,
I think I would say that really from chapter four on we are largely
dealing with human life as it is.
It is very hard for us to relate to life in the garden.
Life pre-death, life pre-sin.
It is an interesting story,
but it’s not an experiential story.
I think beginning tomorrow when we see jealousy,
and pettiness, and violence,
and loss,
and grief,
I think this story takes a turn in that third chapter and becomes much more human.
And unfortunately for most of us, much more accessible.
Well,
I only point out,
I think your point is going to come to fruition tomorrow when
you talk about the idea that you could talk about these animal skins being this first sacrifice
kind of language.
I think we’re going to see tomorrow.
If you struggle with the fact that Adam and Eve don’t physically die the moment that they
eat the fruit, the obviousness of death that’s been introduced is inescapable tomorrow.
As we turn to this story,
it lives in the offerings that are being offered,
the animals that are losing their life on behalf of these first people,
and then ultimately the human
life that is lost.
Death has wound its way in a very,
you remember how the serpent was called tricky,
right?
I mean, there’s this idea that death itself is tricky.
It hasn’t come as a full frontal assault.
It’s come in through a side door,
and it’s infecting everything as it comes around.
It’s an insidious image,
and we’ll see it fleshed out.
But the point for today is what happened has happened,
and everything after it is,
as you say, life as it is,
not life as we hoped it would have been.
Hope you can join us tomorrow because there’s really important stuff in the transition, and I think,
I won’t say it’s an enjoyable story,
but it’s a fascinating one,
a very interesting one, and we’re grateful that you’ve been with us today.
I hope that can continue.