Hello, welcome to the podcast, Bible Wisdom Today. My name is Stan Watkins.

Why is life so hard?

Did you ever ask yourself that question? Of course, part of the answer is that you and I have made stupid decisions and are now suffering the consequences. Other times, it seems that we know the right thing to do, and yet we keep doing the wrong thing anyway. Sometimes we even find ourselves suffering because of the actions of others. They may make poor decisions that have a real impact on our lives. They may even act with intentional malice toward us which can scar us to our very core. Do you ever feel like life really shouldn’t be like this? Somehow, this world is not as it should be.

If you have ever asked these questions, you are not the first. These profound questions have lain heavy on our human heart for as long as we have record. Significantly, the author of Genesis takes up this question at the very beginning of the book. Immediately after an opening hymn to the creator, he launches into the story of the Garden of Eden. We discussed the beginning of that story in our last episode, recalling how God created a garden, created a man and placed him into the garden, then created a woman to be a helper for him. Today we continue that story of how the woman succumbs to the temptation of a serpent to eat of the forbidden fruit and convinces her husband to do the same. God, as a judge, pronounces sentence on all the characters in the story, serpent, woman and man, then banishes them from the garden. This begins to answer the question, “Why is life so hard?” but we still may have questions about our human nature. Thankfully, our reason for hope is not based in a better understanding of our human nature, but in a better understanding of God’s nature. Throughout this story we not only see the fickle nature of mankind but the constant compassion and love of God. That is the true foundation for hope in this hard life.

Are Adam and Eve historical?

As we begin our study, today, we need to face head on an important question of interpretation. How historical is this story? Were Adam and Eve real people? Another way to ask this question is, “What type of literature is this? Factual history? A figurative story? Some of both? For this question, I will lay out four possible positions on the issue of human origins. The basics of this approach come from a presentation by Deborah and Loren Haarsma recorded on the website of the organization, Biologos. You can find the complete citation on my podcast website, biblewisdomtoday.com.

The first model of human origins will likely sound familiar. It sees Adam and Eve as recent ancestors. These first two humans were specially created by God—not descended from animal ancestors—about 8,000 years ago, and all humans are descended from them.

At first look, this seems like an appealingly obvious reading of Genesis 1-3, but it faces serious challenges from all branches of science. Both geology and astronomy show that the earth is very old. Paleontologists have discovered human fossils from around 150,000 years ago in Africa. Anthropological studies postulate that human populations spread from Africa to other continents, reaching the Americas about 15,000 years ago. Archeology has uncovered human artifacts dating back some15,000 years and older. Both biology and genetics tell a story of common ancestry of humans and other apes. Genetic calculations have determined that human DNA contains more variety than could possibly arise from a single ancestral pair. The minimum at any one time must have been thousands of individuals, not two.

In addition to the challenges of science, this view that all humankind descended from a single pair only a few thousand years ago faces challenges found within the Bible itself. When we come to Genesis chapter 4, which we will consider in our next episode, we find hints that there were other humans on earth besides Adam and his family. Genesis leaves unanswered the questions of who did Cain marry? Who did he fear would take reprisal for his murder of Abel? And who would live in the city he built. We also see possible clues of the non-historical nature of the narrative when we read of two miraculous trees, a talking serpent, and two main characters, who we know as Adam and Eve, but whose Hebrew names mean “the man” and “life.” This begins to sound more like folklore than history.

The second model of human origins holds that Adam and Eve were ancient ancestors in Africa. They were specially created by God 150,00 years ago. This is an obvious attempt to answer the challenge of human origins in Africa, and it generally does better with the scientific challenges than the first view, but it still does not answer the challenge of common ancestry with apes and the genetic bottleneck of one ancestral pair, rather than the thousands required. Additionally, this model faces the same biblical challenges as the first view plus a new biblical challenge. The Bible represents Adam and Eve as Middle Eastern farmers, not African hunter-gatherers.

Continuing to search for a model of human origins that answers all the scientific and biblical challenges, the third point of view suggests that Adam and Ever were recent representatives of humanity. Through a process of evolution, God created the human species about 150,000 years ago in Africa, humans spread across the globe, and Adam and Eve lived 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, along with a lot of other humans. God chose these two neolithic farmers and revealed himself to them, but they rebelled and fell into sin. One possible source of biblical support for this view might be that Genesis 1 refers to the creation of all mankind, while Genesis 2 refers only to one human couple. The genealogies in Genesis are only from Adam.

In terms of the scientific challenges we have mentioned, this model is fully consistent. It also solves most of the biblical challenges, giving an appropriate cultural context for the human interactions between Cain and a larger population of people. One possible new biblical challenge might be that the Bible says that death is the consequence of sin, but in this model, many people must have died before Adam and Eve were on the scene. Perhaps the sentence of death was referring to spiritual death, not physical death.

The final model of human origins from a biblical perspective is that the story of Adam and Eve is symbolic. It does not refer to a historical Adam, or a single event. Rather, the story of the first couple in the garden is symbolic of many acts of rebellion against God by our ancestors over a long history, as well as a template for understanding our own temptation and failing. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of every man and every woman. This viewpoint is fully consistent with the science and answers the biblical questions regarding the additional people needed in the story of Cain and the apparent symbolic character of the story of Genesis 2-3. One possible biblical caution, however, is that Paul compares the second man, Jesus, to the first man, Adam in Romans chapter 5. This model does not have a single person to stand in comparison to Jesus. A possible answer might be that Paul was speaking from within his own cultural context, which assumed a historical Adam. I would add that a literary individual can also be an archetype, just as well as an historical figure.

Given these various suggested models, I find the most satisfying option to be that the story of Adam and Eve is a symbolic tale. It answers all the scientific questions and does the best job answering the biblical challenges. It also relates the story of Adam and Eve most closely to our own experience. This was not just a single historical event in the distant past, but a “coming of age” story of the human race, portraying the shift from innocence to knowing good and evil, and explaining why we all feel somehow out of place. It also is a literary picture of how temptation and sin function in your life and mine. 

Temptation

Let’s begin this model story of temptation with Genesis 3:1.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’? ”
 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” 
 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
 Genesis 3:1-5

Suddenly a serpent appears in paradise. The first Jewish readers would have been shocked by a serpent in the garden of delight, but they would have understood it as an apt metaphor of opposition to God. They would have wished to yell out, “Watch out, Eve!” She was in grave danger.  Serpents were ceremonially unclean. They could not be eaten or offered as sacrifice. When the impatient nation in the wilderness complained against God and against Moses, God sent venomous serpents among them as judgment (Numbers 21). Additionally, the Psalmist describes Israel’s enemies with the metaphor of Leviathan, a mythical sea serpent. The creation accounts of the surrounding nations also used serpents as an image of powerful force opposed to the creator.

The Old Testament never identifies the serpent as Satan, but the author of Genesis must have thought of this creature as something more than a general principle of evil, since God himself later spoke of an ongoing enmity between the serpent and the seed of the woman (3:15). It is not until we come to the last book in the New Testament, however, that we find a specific identification of the serpent as the devil.

He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. (Rev. 20:2)

We read here, “The serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.” Genesis tells us that God made the serpent but makes no attempt to explain the origins of evil, only the origins of human sin and guilt. Stating the character of an actor this explicitly is rare in Hebrew narrative. Normally, the reader is expected to determine someone’s character by their actions. In being so clear the author warns the reader not to take the serpent’s words at face value, like Eve did. “Crafty” can mean “wily” or “intelligent.” Such ambiguity characterizes this story. The Hebrew word for crafty is arum. This is nearly identical in sound and spelling to the word “naked” in the immediately preceding verse in Genesis 2, which is arom. Adam and his wife were arom…The serpent was more arum. Or, to show this connection in English, we might translate it,

“The man and his wife were nude…Now the serpent was more shrewd…”[1]

This play on words hints at the central irony of the narrative. Although they were nude, Adam and Eve wanted to become shrewd. In trying to become shrewd, they discovered they were nude.

The crafty snake begins the conversation with a question, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden.’” Notice that the double name LORD God, which is normally used in this story, is shortened by dropping the name “LORD.” This is our English translation of “Yahweh,” Israel’s covenant God. The serpent was only a created creature, not a party to Israel’s covenant with God. His tactic was to cause doubt and inject distance into the relationship.

When God first gave Adam the command not to eat of the Tree of knowledge of good and evil, he gave them a specific command with an immediate consequence, “you must not eat … for when you eat …you will certainly die.” Here, the serpent softens the command to simply, “Did God say?”

The woman follows the serpent’s example in dropping the double name LORD God in favor of the simple name “God,” and she also adds an additional prohibition, “you must not touch it.” Like the serpent, she also softens the stated consequences. “You will certainly die,” becomes simply “you will die.”

At this point, the serpent outright denies that they will die, “You will not certainly die.” This English translation is ambiguous, as is the Hebrew. It could mean “Certainly you will not die.” Or it could mean, “It is not certain that you will die.[2]

Then the serpent tries to make God seem stingy, “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” He calls God’s motivation into question. God is not good and gracious, but selfish and deceptive.

This story is a profound representation of how temptation works in the inner dialog of our conscience. The temptation seems to come as a suggestion from an outside source. Then we question what God has really said, soften the prohibition, overstate the prohibition, tone down the consequences, and question God’s motives. This creates a lack of trust and brings outright disobedience.[3]

Before we leave this story of human temptation, we must answer one other interpretive question. What is the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Even for those who believe it was a literal tree, it still obviously has a deeper meaning. It is only referred to in this story and interpretation is difficult. Let’s begin by briefly mentioning three inadequate suggestions. First, perhaps it means moral discernment, knowing right from wrong. This seems like an attractive meaning, until we realize that the whole thrust of the narrative implies that the human pair did know that it was wrong to eat of the fruit even before they did it. A second possible meaning is that it represented sexual knowledge. After they ate, they realized they were naked. Again, this seems attractive at first, but then we remember that God had commanded them to be fruitful and multiply. Surely, he would have intended them to gain sexual knowledge if they were going to fill the earth. Finally, it is suggested that the knowledge of good and evil is a metaphor for knowing everything. Good and evil are two parts which make up the whole. Again, this seems plausible, yet the narrative makes it clear that they did not gain omniscience, only guilt and shame.

To find a conclusion, we will have to dig deeper. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is referred to only in this story, but the phrase “knowledge of good and evil” appears in several places in the Bible. What can we learn there? First, further on in this same passage, Genesis 3:22, we find that knowing good and evil is godlike.

Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.”

Secondly, in Deuteronomy 1:39 we learn that little children do not have such knowledge. 

And as for your little ones, who you said would become a prey, and your children, who today have no knowledge of good or evil, they shall go in there.

Finally we learn that this knowledge is something that is to be desired, and God may grant it. In 1 Kings 3:9 King Solomon prayed,

Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil (ESV).

This allows us to settle on a final meaning. The knowledge of good and evil is the wisdom to make right choices. This is something that children do not have, since it requires maturity. It is something that God does have, and he desires for us to have, as well. 

This wisdom must be received in God’s way. The tree of knowledge of good and evil was given to help mankind develop this wisdom. Had he resisted the temptation to eat of the fruit, he would have gained maturity in making wise moral choices, but because he reached for wisdom without submitting to God’s process, he received the opposite of his desire. He now understood the weight of making wise choices, but he became the servant of evil, rather than its master.

How ironic! The first couple in our story could gain the knowledge of good and evil either by eating from the tree or by not eating. If they resisted temptation, they would learn the importance of choosing good and gain the ability to resist evil; if they disobeyed and ate the fruit, they still gained the knowledge of good and evil. Now, however, they knew good, but were powerless to choose it; they also knew evil but were powerless to avoid it.

Disobedience and guilt

The actual downfall of the woman and the man is told very briefly, especially in comparison to the long description leading up to it and the long treatment of the consequences following it. Listen to these words beginning in verse 6.

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. 
 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?” 
 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? ”
 The man said, “The woman you put here with me —she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
 The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
 Genesis 3:6-13

Just five simple verbs tell the story in quick succession. “The woman saw…took…ate…gave…he ate.” First the woman usurped God’s role in deciding what was good. The word desirable is the same root meaning as “to covet” from the ten commandments. The last decisive act of disobedience was the man’s eating. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened.” The prediction of the snake was fulfilled exactly, but what they saw was a total letdown. They realized that they were naked. They “knew” they were naked because they ate of the tree of knowledge. The woman had great hopes for this fruit. It was good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable to gain wisdom, but those hopes were all dashed by the actual consequences. They stood naked, hiding among the trees. Their innocence and trust were replaced by shame and guilt. Fig leaves were the largest leaves in Canaan, but their heavy indentations would have made them insufficient covering. Who were they trying to cover themselves from?

Now they heard the LORD God walking in the garden. The return of the covenant name of God hints at of hope for reconciliation. “The cool of the day” could more exactly be translated “the breeze of the day.” 

God uncovers their sin through questioning, not accusing. As he questions them in turn, each character appears in the opposite order from the previous temptation scene, first the man, then the woman. The snake also appears, but is not questioned. 

God initiates the dialog with the man using a rhetorical question, “Where are you?” This was God’s gracious call. God played the role of a parent playing hide and seek with their child. “Where are you,” he cried, even though he knew exactly where they were. They were naked, rebellious, ashamed, guilty, shifting blame, afraid and hiding behind the trees.

The man’s answer shows that he understood God’s question as an invitation to come out of hiding and explain his actions. Those trees, of which God had said, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden,” had now become a hiding place. The park had become a prison, but God was not willing to leave it that way. He wanted to bring mankind back into a relationship with him. Humans deserved immediate punishment, but God humbled himself to become the seeker, demonstrating His mercy and grace.

“I was afraid because I was naked.” Adam was not ready to own up to his sin and tried to divert attention to his hiding. He did not seem to realize that his excuse simply drew attention to his misbehavior. 

“Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to?” These questions show that God already knew the answers.

“The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” More accurately, this should be “the woman you gave me gave me some fruit.” Adam’s implication is inescapable. God is responsible for his downfall. In saying that God’s good gift of the woman was malicious, Adam follows the same line of thought as the serpent. God was not truly good. This is totally typical human behavior, blaming our actions on circumstances or fate.

When God turned his questioning toward the woman, she continued recounting the events in reverse order. “The serpent deceived me,” she said. Strictly speaking, this was true, she had been deceived, but she also had all the information she needed to resist the temptation. Lacking any justification for her behavior, she resorted to shifting blame. 

Consequences

God now turns to the consequences of their sin. He pronounces sentence on each character in turn, again returning to the order in which they first appeared, serpent, woman, man. 

Reading from Genesis 3:14,

So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
 “Cursed are you above all livestock
 and all wild animals!
 You will crawl on your belly
 and you will eat dust 
 all the days of your life.
 And I will put enmity
 between you and the woman,
 and between your offspring and hers; 
 he will crush your head, 
 and you will strike his heel.” 
 Genesis 3:14-15

First God pronounces a curse on the serpent. This is another wordplay on the description of the serpent’s character, “crafty.” In Hebrew, the word for “crafty” is arum and the word for “cursed” is arur. “You will crawl on your belly,” God said. The consequence fits the offense. The one whose cleverness set him apart from the other animals is now set apart in his humiliation. “You will eat dust,” he adds, reflecting his temptation of the human pair to eat the forbidden fruit. “Eating dust” becomes a common figure in Scripture for personal humiliation.

The description of the consequence for the serpent in Genesis 3:15 is the most significant verse in this chapter. This means far more than simply, women won’t like snakes! With these words, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers,” God sets out the conflict of the entire Biblical narrative and hints at the climax and resolution as well. This is sometimes called the “protoevangelium,” the first gospel. It is the beginning and germ of all prophecy. In his Lectures on Genesis, Martin Luther declared, “This text embraces and comprehends within itself everything noble and glorious that is to be found anywhere in the Scriptures.”

Here is the description of enmity, long-lasting hostility between the serpent and the woman. Why? because God established it, “I will put enmity.” God will not allow this enmity to die down. He wants us to continue in undying opposition to evil. Peace cannot exist between the children of the woman and the children of the serpent. The children of the woman have the opportunity to be friends of God, the children of the serpent are in league with the evil one. There is natural, appropriate hatred between the two.

Both the woman and the serpent are individuals, but they represent many offspring, or “seed,” which is a word which can be either singular or plural. This ambiguity implies that all the offspring are involved in this struggle, which will be climaxed by an individual. The Apostle Paul alludes to this statement when he says in his letter to the Galatians, “when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman… that we might receive adoption to sonship” (Gal. 4:4-5).

Both the words “crush” and “strike” translate the same Hebrew word. Crushing the head, however, is a mortal wound while striking the heel is only temporary. Isn’t it ironic that the one who fell for the serpent’s trick should be the one to ultimately bring him down? Sin came into the world through a woman, but a woman also birthed the world’s savior.

Perhaps we can understand this continued enmity by looking at popular culture. Do you enjoy watching Westerns? Why are they so popular? It is because they dramatize the eternal battle of the ages, the classic story of good vs. evil. When you hear the hero say, “All right, you snake, crawl out here on your belly!” or perhaps he says, “Jes give me a chance, and I’ll make him lick the dust!” then you know that you are watching a Sunday School lesson in action. We want the good guy to win, but in real life, it doesn’t seem that good always wins. That is because we don’t see the end. In our western shows we do, since it only takes an hour or two, but in real life, our life, we have not yet reached to the end. This promise in Genesis tells us what the end will be. “He will crush your head.”

After his judgment against the serpent, God turns to the woman. 

To the woman he said,
 “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
 with painful labor you will give birth to children. 
 Your desire will be for your husband,
 and he will rule over you. ”
 Genesis 3:16

God charged the serpent with deception, and later he will charge Adam with rebellion, but he does not level a charge against the woman. She was guilty through deception, not willful disobedience. God does impose a penalty, however, that brings disruption to her maternal role. At creation, childbearing was the center of God’s blessing. After the tragedy in the garden, childbearing continues to be the means for God’s blessing to be restored. Her child will bring the salvation of all. This reminds the woman not to lose hope. Through the birth of a child, the serpent will be destroyed. That birth pains reminded the woman of both her sin and her redemption is probably what the apostle Paul meant when he tells Timothy that the woman “will be saved through childbearing” (1 Tim. 2:15). [4]

The penalties against both the woman and the man involved a disruption in their highest points of fulfillment: maternity for the woman and food production for the man. God’s sentence on the man is the longest and fullest of the three.

Cursed is the ground because of you;
 through painful toil you will eat food from it
 all the days of your life. 
 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
 and you will eat the plants of the field. 
 By the sweat of your brow 
 you will eat your food 
 until you return to the ground,
 since from it you were taken;
 for dust you are
 and to dust you will return.
 Genesis 3:17-19

Remember that Adam simply means, “the man,” so its usage in Genesis 2 and 3 is ambiguous. Even so, many commentators believe this is the first instance of the word “Adam” used as a personal name. Adam’s fundamental mistake was listening to his wife rather than God. “Because you listened to your wife,” God said, “cursed is the ground because of you.” God’s curse falls on man’s environment, not man himself. Both woman and man are still objects of God’s care.

Adam’s sin results in pain in his work and conflict with the ground. The ground becomes Adam’s enemy rather than his servant. The most time-consuming task of our lives, our work, becomes marked with pain. Work is not Adam’s punishment, just as having children was not Eve’s punishment. Rather, the consequence for Adam was “painful toil,” just like the consequence for Eve was “painful labor.” The words are the same. Both childbearing and work were part of what it means to be human before the tragedy in the garden. They were good gifts from God to his image-bearers. The punishment is pain. [5]

The idea of eating is mentioned five times in God’s corrective words to Adam. His offense was eating the forbidden fruit, so his punishment is also centered on eating. Toil and pain were now necessary in the preparation of every meal, made more painful because they remembered the ready supply of food they had enjoyed in the garden.

As a child, I grew up on a farm. Although we were poor, we did not go hungry, because we could raise our own food, but our entire life was consumed with food—cultivating, planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, preserving, feeding the cattle, . Every mouthful was filled with pain and sweat.

The punishments of God begin with the serpent eating dust all the days of his life and end with the man eating food from a cursed ground through painful toil until he returns to the dust. 

“For dust you are and to dust you will return.” This was confirmation that God’s promised punishment for eating the forbidden fruit would be fulfilled. Ultimately the man and woman would experience physical death, but even now, they were dead. Only life in the garden is truly life.

As we come to the end of this Biblical story, let me read the final verses, beginning with verse 20.

Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
 Genesis 3:20-24

Just like Adam had named the animals near the beginning of the garden story in chapter 2, he now names his wife near the end of the story. The name he gives her is the Hebrew word for life. The Greek Septuagint translation used the name Zoe, which is the Greek word for life, in its translation, but English translations typically use Eve, which is an attempt to give the Hebrew word chavah’ an English pronunciation. We are told that Adam named his wife Eve, or Life, because she would become the mother of all the living. God had promised offspring to the woman, and promised that her offspring would trample on the head of the serpent. Adam took God at his word. He trusted that his wife would produce that offspring, and so he called her “Life, the mother of all the living.” 

In that moment, he went from rebellion to trust, and so can we. The moment we turn to God in faith, God gives us new life. In this world we will still have toil and pain, but God will turn our pain, even our scars into good.

We see another hint of hope in God’s provision of garments of skin. God provided a covering for their shame. The fact that animals had to give their life to provide the skins was also a reminder of the cost of their sinfulness. This was their first experience with death. God himself prepared coverings for them. That must have been a tremendous wonder to Adam and Eve. God acted out his personal warmth, tenderness and mercy.

Isaiah uses this same picture of God’s mercy when he says,

I delight greatly in the LORD;
 my soul rejoices in my God.
 For he has clothed me with garments of salvation
 and arrayed me in a robe of his righteousness,
 Isaiah 61:10

We also see hope in God’s banishment of mankind from the garden. “The LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” God acknowledges that the snakes’ promises had been partially fulfilled. They did gain knowledge belonging to God, their eyes were opened, and they did not immediately die physically. But the serpent had left unspoken other consequences. They were immediately assigned to death and expelled from the garden, and with their opened eyes they saw their nakedness. “Now,” God said, “he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” God had sympathy on the human couple and did not consign them to their new pitiful state for eternity. If mankind had eaten of the tree of life, he would be doomed to live in this body of pain forever and would have no hope for a resurrection body. 

In mercy, therefore, God banished them from the garden of delight. Mankind lost the presence of God which they had enjoyed, so God sent them out to preserve them. He then placed cherubin on the east of the Garden. The entrance to the garden was apparently in the east, just like in the later tabernacle and temple. Cherubim were not fat cute little babies, but human-headed winged lions, the traditional guardians of holy places in the Near East.

In this final scene, the man and woman move outside the garden, where the man had begun at the start of the garden narrative. Just like the man had passively slept while God prepared a helper for him, mankind becomes passive again. God again becomes the sole actor, clothing them, banishing them from the garden for their protection, and preparing for their ultimate salvation. 

Final questions

We have learned a great deal from this story about why life is so hard, but we still might have questions. We might ask, “What does this story tell us about the nature of sin?” “Well,” we might answer, “sin is disobedience. We certainly can see that in this passage.” Or we might suggest that sin means rebellion. That is here, too, but maybe we could generalize just a bit further. At its foundation, sin means putting yourself first. Adam and Eve serve as outstanding archetypes in that behavior and each of us follows their footprints in putting our own needs first. All humans come into the world thinking that they are the center of the universe and that no boundaries really apply to them. A baby simply wants to meet its immediate needs and is not concerned about anyone else. This is simply the way they are. They have a strong “instinct for self-preservation.” We usually do not see anything sinful in a baby’s cry when they are hungry, yet this human tendency has enormous potential for disruption in this world. It is one thing for a week-old baby to demand that the world should serve them, but it is quite another for an 18-year-old or a 68-year-old to make the same demands.[6] All humans are born with this inclination toward selfishness and all humans succumb. The original story of forbidden fruit is replayed in each one of our lives as we grow in our social and spiritual consciences yet continue to put ourselves first. Thankfully, this sort of human grasping is just the opposite of our savior, who “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself by…being born in the likeness of men…becoming obedient to the point of death: death on a cross" (Phil. 2:6-8 NASB). Praise God for the selfless nature of Jesus who made a way for our relationship with God to be restored.

In our next episode we will see how humanity’s broken relationship with God showed itself in Adam and Eve’s children when we examine the story of Cain and Abel. You probably know how that is going to turn out.

If you have found this podcast helpful, I would appreciate your help in expanding its reach. One of the best ways to assist is by recommending it to your friends. The easiest way to do this is to go to the podcast website, biblewisdomtoday.com, copy that link and then share it with your friend, along with your comment. Your personal recommendation is powerful. I look forward to spending time again with you, soon, along with your friends. Thank you for your help in growing this Bible Wisdom Today family.

[1] Alexander, Denis, Creation or Evolution; do we have to choose? (Monarch Books, Oxford, UK, 2008) p. 17
[2] Wenham, Gordon J. Word Biblical Commentary: Genesis 1-15. Word Books, 1987.
[3] Middleton, J. R. (2017, March 2). Evolution and the historical fall: What does genesis 3 tell us about the origin of evil? - article - biologos. https://biologos.org/series/evolution-and-biblical-faith-reflections-by-theologian-j-richard-middleton/articles/evolution-and-the-historical-fall-what-does-genesis-3-tell-us-about-the-origin-of-evil

[4] Sypert, J. (2022, March 17). Genesis 3:16-19: “pain is the punishment.” Preston Highlands Baptist Church. https://prestonhighlands.org/2022/03/13/pain-is-the-punishment/#:~:text=Overview%20of%20Genesis%203&text=They%20wiggle%20around%20the%20truth,17%2D19).
[5] Sypert, J.

[6] https://www.crivoice.org/gen3.html#:~:text=The%20narrative%20itself%20has%20usually,God%2C%20in%20a%20new%20light.