We begin Genesis 3 with the serpent – Satan, although it’s not until Revelation 12 that “this ancient serpent” is clearly identified as the devil.
He’s a talking serpent, which might seem strange and has for many people reinforced their belief that Genesis 1-3 is mythological. But why not – a donkey talked in Numbers to suit God’s purposes. Satan is hardly an ordinary garden-variety snake, anyway.
He’s more crafty that all the other animals, and this description deserves some pause. Strangely enough, 3:1 comes straight after the end of chapter 2, which says “the man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame”. There’s no chapter breaks in the original, remember – this just follows on from there. In Hebrew the words translated “naked” and “crafty” rhyme and that establishes a link. So, it’s like the people are nude and the serpent is shrewd and what we then see is that the shrewd – representing sin and rebellion - overcomes the nude – representing purity and innocence.
So Satan tempts Eve. As you know, they’ve been given one rule. Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the consequences are clear – death.
The serpent then goes about using all sorts of lies and half-truths to convince Eve to sin. You won’t surely die, he says – and they don’t, at least not straight away. If you eat it, you’ll become like God, knowing good and evil. That was true, and humanity’s lust for power blinded Adam and Eve to the fact that becoming like God was a terrible thing for they had neither the wisdom nor the holiness nor the power to exercise this knowledge – it would only lead them to selfishness and pain.
So Eve takes the fruit and eats it. She gives some to Adam – and the context suggests he knew where the fruit had come from – and he eats it too. Then the world comes crashing down and millennia of war and grief and sickness and death are set in motion.
When one of my students does something bad and gets caught, there’s a number of different reactions that you can see. It depends on the student, on the teacher, and on what they’ve done. Perhaps the most popular of all is the blaming of others. He started it. She called me that first. Somebody else was talking as well, why are you picking on me? She gave me the cigarette. If God didn’t want us to swear, why did he invent the words? The woman you put here with me, she gave me the fruit and I ate it!
The man blames the woman and God, the woman blames the snake. It’s typical of human behaviour. There’s no acceptance of responsibility.
In this cycle of blame we can see that a big part of the sin in the first place was the reversal of the created order. The man was created to lead his wife in marriage, and both were created to rule over the serpent. And yet the serpent instructs the woman and the woman instructs the man – it’s the other way around.
So, they are put under a curse. The snake will have to slither along the ground. The woman will have increased pain in childbirth, and her relationship with her husband will be strained and oppressive. The man will struggle to get the ground to yield crops.
Notice how the curses are a corruption of the work the man and the woman are supposed to be doing. Eden wasn’t some holiday resort – Adam and Eve had tasks. They were to fill the earth, Adam was to tend the garden. But now their relationship has been soured and it will be painful for the woman to complete her task to fill the earth. Adam is still to work the soil, but now it will produce thorns and thistles.
And, ultimately, they will die. For from dust you came, and to dust you will return.
But there’s also grace and hope. God makes clothes for Adam and Eve as they leave the garden. The system of judgment and grace continues for the rest of Genesis 1-11: Cain is driven away but God protects him from being murdered in chapter 4. God destroys the whole world for its sin, but saves Noah and his family.
And then you’ve got vs. 15: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head and you will strike his heal.” Although the words “crush” and “strike” in the NIV are actually the same word in Hebrew, it’s still clear the serpent will come off worse – his head, not his heal is crushed. So what we have here is the first hint of the gospel. A curse on the serpent, but also a seed of hope for humanity. The job of the woman in Genesis 1 and 2 was to bear children to fill the earth. Now, for the rest of the OT we will be looking for the woman who will bear this seed, this offspring, who will crush the serpent’s head. And we know that seed to be Jesus.
That’s why throughout the whole OT whenever a woman is introduced into the story there’s almost always some sort of comment about her reproductive status. How many kids has she had, or is she barren. Almost always. The reason for that is we’re supposed to be looking for the seed. Will this woman be the bearer of the seed? Will this woman? Ultimately that woman is Mary – which is why she says in Luke 1:48 “from now on all generations will call me blessed”. She is the specially chosen vessel who is to bear the seed who will crush the serpent’s head.
If you’ve seen the Passion of the Christ you might have noticed that near the beginning of the movie Satan is tempting Jesus in the garden to not go through with his sacrifice. A snake slithers out from underneath his robes and moves toward Jesus, and Jesus stamps on its head with his heal. It’s not a scene that’s directly in any of the gospels, but I remember thinking that if Mel Gibson was the one to decide to put that in, then he knows his Bible well. Because on the cross, that’s exactly what Jesus does. He triumphs over Satan and crushes the serpent’s head.
(Romans 16:20)
The simplest message that we can get out of Genesis 3 is this – humans are guilty of and infected by sin. And the punishment for sin is pain and death.
As Christians, we hold to the Biblical truth that all people are sinful and fail to live up to God’s standard. Through Adam, all have been stained by original sin. David in Psalm 51 says that he was sinful even in his mother’s womb. Sin runs through our veins. We’re marked by it, infected with it, enslaved to it. We can only be set free by the blood of Jesus, we can only be washed clean by the blood of the lamb.
That’s not a popular position. People don’t like to think they’re inherently evil. Humanity doesn’t like to think that we are, in the end, powerless to help ourselves. But it’s the truth.
Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist who became a Christian late in life told this story of when he was in India as a young man, before he came to Christ. He went down to the river for an evening swim, and he saw a woman from a nearby village who had come for her evening bath. He immediately felt the allurement of the moment and was besieged by temptation. He thought of his wife, but he was weak. He swam furiously across the river toward the woman, literally trying to outdistance his conscience. But when he was just a few feet from her he saw that she wasn’t a beautiful young maiden at all. She was old and hideous with wrinkled skin; and worst of all she was a leper. “She grinned at me, showing a toothless mask,” Muggeridge later wrote. “What a dirty, lecherous woman!” But as he swam away a sudden shock gripped him. “It wasn’t just the woman who was dirty and lecherous,” he said. “It was my own heart.”
We all have dirty, lecherous hearts, friends. Every single person, if they are being honest with themselves, must admit that they are fallen, sinful human beings.
Many, many people deny it, of course – including many who call themselves Christians. It’s my contention that much of the heresy around today in Christian churches arises from a failure to take sin seriously enough. We don’t talk about judgment much because it seems too harsh – but that’s only because, deep down, we don’t think our sin is serious enough to be punished. Some teach that God doesn’t mind how we live our lives sexually. Some people question the atonement, the idea that Jesus took our punishment in our place and bore the wrath of God for us. Instead, they say that’s just divine child abuse. They say that because they don’t take sin seriously enough. They don’t understand how sin grieves God. How he is deeply hurt and offended by sin, how God is so holy that he cannot stand sin in his presence. They don’t take sin seriously enough and it leads to all sorts of false teaching and immoral behaviour.
I’m sure you’ve heard your share of evangelistic talks in your time. How do many go? Well, they might mention that God loves us and sent Jesus to die for our sins. And that’s perfectly Biblical. Others I’ve heard make it out as if God is the world’s biggest self-help guru who will help me reach my fullest potential and have a really fulfilling life. That’s not so Biblical.
In many such talks there might be an assumption of sin but it’s just glossed over before we get onto the good stuff of forgiveness and salvation and eternity in heaven.
Well, I want you to imagine going to the doctor because you’ve got the flu and need a medical certificate. Or perhaps because you just need a medical certificate. The doctor looks at you and says that you need a major operation on your intestines. Will next week be alright? You ask him what it is that’s the matter. He quickly says “oh, you’ve got something wrong with you – now about that operation. Is it all right if I book you for Tuesday with the Surgeon?”
How are you going to react to that? You’re not going to just leap in have major surgery, are you? You’ll first need to be convinced that it’s necessary. He’ll have to show you how you’ve got some obstruction down there, show you the blockage on the scans, and explain how if something’s not done about it very soon you’ll start excreting blood. If he explains that to you, maybe you’ll start thinking seriously about that operation.
It’s sort of like that with our gospel preaching. We talk about forgiveness and salvation but rarely do we really try to convince people of their need for salvation. We might mention sin but we certainly don’t leave people with a deep conviction that they are mired in sin and iniquity, and facing certain judgment if they don’t repent.
Most kids at my school, and many people in Sydney do not have some intellectual objection to the gospel. A good proportion of them will say they believe in Jesus and even believe that he rose from the dead. They’ll nod happily when you tell them that Jesus died to save them from their sins. What a nice man, they might think. But at heart they think they are good blokes and good sheilas. Not perfect, but not serial killers or paedophiles either. They don’t understand or accept that their sin is serious and because of it they are under the curse of death. In their hearts, they don’t believe they really need forgiveness.
We need to show people that they need Jesus before, or at least at the same time, as we present the solution of his atoning death on the cross.
When you read many of the great evangelistic speeches of the NT, especially those in Acts, we see a big part of them is a warning that people have done the wrong thing. In Acts 2 with Peter’s speech to the crowd on two occasions he condemns the people listening to him for killing the saviour of the world. And at the end of the passage, it says many were cut to the heart, and 3000 were added to their number that day.
They were cut to the heart. They were forced to look into their own hearts and when they did they realized they were deeply sinful and in need of forgiveness.
If you look at the great revivals throughout Christian history you see they almost always started not with “Jesus loves you” – which is true, of course – but with “you are sinful and facing certain death”. That can be said in a number of ways, it doesn’t have to be screamed abusively from an overly large pulpit, but the content is critical.
There was a great revival and awakening throughout the western world in the 1730s and 1740s. A Englishman named George Whitefield was at the centre of both the revivals in Britain and in America. In England, he preached in the open air to coal miners in Bristol and many other places. You know what he often talked about – sin and judgment before then providing a solution in the death and resurrection of Christ.
He traveled to America and teamed up with a preacher named Jonathan Edwards. In 1740, Edwards preached a very famous sermon entitled “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”. You can guess by the title what that sermon focused on. God decided to use that sermon to bring hundreds to their knees in repentance before his glorious throne. They were convicted of their own sin. They were rightfully frightened of the future that awaited them. And Edwards then told them about the solution.
I’ve been glancing through a number of Billy Graham’s sermons, including some that he preached at the famous 1959 crusade in Sydney where so many of our Christian leaders of today came to know Christ. The sermons are on a range of different themes but they all set out to show that the world and individuals have a serious problem, and that problem is ultimately caused by sin. Then he tells people about Christ and invites them to repent and accept forgiveness.
We don’t hear than much in a lot of preaching. We mention it, but almost apologetically before we get on to the good stuff.
But there’s a reason it’s at the start of the Bible here in Genesis three. There’s a reason it’s before the boxes about Jesus in the Two Ways to Live gospel outline. If you don’t accept the reality of sin and judgment then the sacrifice of Christ is a meaningless act. And people will never agree to have that major surgery to their life if they are not convinced there’s a problem in the first place.
So why is that we leave it out so often?
It’s because we think people will be offended by it. We think they won’t like it. We’ve been conditioned to think that convincing people to become Christians out of fear of judgment is somehow wrong. That those “fire and brimstone” sermons were embarrassing things of the past and now we’re in a more enlightened present.
Well, of course people will be offended if we say they are sinful, offensive to God, and headed for hell. Of course they will be offended. But that didn’t stop Jesus saying it, it didn’t stop the apostles saying it. Nor did it stop many of the great evangelists and Christian leaders throughout history saying it.
Do the comfortable middles classes of Sydney like being told they are, in the end, not really any better than the drug addict rotting in Long Bay Gaol? Does your average Oatley resident like being told that before God they might as well be a dirty man in a raincoat who abuses children? Of course they don’t.
But it’s true. And if people aren’t convinced they’re sinful, they won’t repent – they won’t see a need to repent. They won’t recognise the necessity of forgiveness.
That doesn’t mean you need to knock on every door and scream “you’re gonna burn” to everyone. They might think you’re peddling some sort of skin cancer message!
We can preach the reality of sin by using the ten commandments, for example. I don’t use the ten commandments because they are necessarily the best standard by which we should all measure ourselves this side of the cross, but because people are familiar with them. Not familiar with each of the commandments, to be sure – but familiar with the notion.
Have you kept all of the ten commandments? Do you know what any of them are? What about do not steal? Have you ever stolen anything?
No, they say.
Not even something small – a chocolate when you were a kid, some money from your parent’s wallet?
Well, maybe.
What do we call people who steal things?
Thieves.
And you admit you’ve stolen something – even if it was small?
Yeah, I suppose so.
So, you’re a thief?
Well –
What about commandment not to tell lies? Have you ever told a lie?
Yeah, doesn’t everyone sometimes?
What do we call people who tell lies?
A liar, I suppose.
So, you’re a liar then?
Well – maybe. But I’m not that bad.
Do you know that the Bible says that liars and thieves will be punished by God and not allowed into heaven? It doesn’t say only big liars and thieves. All liars and thieves. It sounds like you’ve got a problem with God.
With teenagers in my classes at school I use other analogies:
1. Exam, L-Plate
2. Glass of milk
People will be offended at this approach, as well. But people are offended by all sorts of things. If you’re preaching the whole gospel people will be offended. Get used to it. Jesus says it will happen.
The point in the end is clear. We’ve all got a problem with God. We all desperately need forgiveness. In Jesus, the seed, the offspring of the woman, we have the victory over sin and death. In him we have forgiveness, in him we have eternal life.
I want to close with a short passage from Revelation 22, because Genesis 1-3, and Revelation 21-22 are bookends to the Bible, they reflect each other, and they demonstrate how God’s plans to save the world are brought to fruition.
REV 21:22 I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25 On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. 26 The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. 27 Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life.
REV 22:1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
In Genesis Adam walks and talks with God in Eden – in Revelation we will see God face to face.
In Genesis God creates the sun and the moon to govern the day and the night – in Revelation there is no night because God himself is the light.
In Genesis, the Garden of Eden is the first temple of the LORD – in Revelation the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the Temple.
In Genesis the Tree of Life is in the garden, but Adam’s sin cuts humanity off from its life giving branches – In Revelation, the tree is in the middle of the city for the healing of the nations.
In the garden, Adam and Eve choose to sin and break their covenant with God – in Revelation there is no sin because nothing impure will ever enter God’s holy city.
In Genesis the serpent, the crafty animal, tempts Eve and she sins – in Revelation, that Ancient serpent who is called Satan is thrown into the lake of fire which is the second death.
In Genesis the sin of Adam brings a curse, death – in revelation, there is no longer any curse.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden and the way back is guarded – in Revelation the people of God will reign forever and ever.
