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Sin and the Fall

Genesis 3

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Imputed and Original Sin from Genesis 3


It is a great privilege for me to be here with you. I would not be so rash as to claim that these four addresses will encompass all that evangelicals believe, but I would like to think that we will hit some of the high points. We turn this morning to Genesis 3, and I shall begin by reading the entire chapter. This is what Scripture says.

“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 surely die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ 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.’ 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.’

To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’ To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, “You must not eat of it,” 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.’ 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.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

I suppose there is no chapter in all of Holy Scripture that is more widely mocked in the Western world than this one. Talking snake, cartoons with a little apple hanging down, a naked man and a naked woman with hair and foliage conveniently covering the necessary bits, and a lot of smart remarks.

In some circles, this is considered an etiological story. That is, one of these stories that explains how something came about. “How the serpent lost its legs.” But to take it as a serious piece of theological writing that must shape our faith.… Well, at that point it may be embarrassing even to some of us.

We can speak generally of the fall, but let’s not be too specific. Yet I am persuaded that unless we absorb this chapter carefully into our theological systems of thought, we will always end up compromising the gospel. The reason is that unless we have agreement on what the problem is, we will not gain agreement on what the solution is.

Now there is no doubt that at some level, the New Testament writers view this chapter as giving us important historical information. Yet at the same time, it is important not to read this chapter the wrong way. Let me give you an illustration. You recall the account of David’s gross sin reported in 2 Samuel 11.

There is a powerful man, King David, and there is a weak and (humanly speaking) inconsequential man, Uriah the Hittite. Then there is the thing of David’s desire, Bathsheba. So a rich, powerful man; an inconsequential foot soldier; and the thing that is desired. You recall the sin. It is gross.

After David has arranged through his chief military officials to have Uriah bumped off, then Nathan is called to confront the king. But, because David was an autocrat, Nathan the prophet confronts him with a story, a parable. He speaks along these lines. “Your majesty, it has come to my attention that upcountry there is a very well-to-do farmer, vast herds and flocks.

Next door is a dirt farmer. One poor little lamb, that’s all he’s got. Well, that’s all he had, but now it’s gone, too. Because some visitors came to visit the rich man, and instead of showing decent Near-Eastern hospitality by slaughtering one of his own lambs, he swiped the one poor little lamb of his neighbor!”

So once again you have a powerful figure, an inconsequential minor figure, and the thing that is desired, namely the lamb. The story speaks volumes. David is incensed. He still does not see the irony of his own words until Nathan points his finger at him and says, “You, O King, are the man!”

So the story that Nathan tells mirrors reality, but not perfectly. That’s the very nature of analogical language. It mirrors it closely enough that you see the point once the light comes on, but not perfectly. In both cases you have a rich, powerful man; an inconsequential person; and then the thing that is desired, but in the first instance, the thing that is desired is a woman and in the second, it’s the lamb.

In the first instance, the one who is killed is the middle member, the inconsequential man. In the second, it’s the third member that’s killed, the lamb itself. So you must ask yourself in these narratives.… At what point is the language here meant to be taken in a symbol-laden way? It is a fair question to ask. Now I wish I had time to unpack that sort of question methodologically. I don’t, but some of it will become obvious as we work our way through the text. It will be useful, I think, to divide the chapter into four parts.

1. The deceitful repulsiveness that characterized that first temptation.

Verses 1–6. In the first instance we are introduced to the serpent. Exactly what the communication arrangements were in Eden, we cannot possibly know in detail. Moreover, whether the serpent embodies Satan or symbolizes him is not a detail of the first importance. Certainly later in Scripture, the Devil himself is referred to as “that old serpent,” as in the Apocalypse, chapter 12. What is important to focus on is what the text says about the serpent.

First, this serpent was one of the wild animals the Lord had made. That is, this serpent figure, this demonic figure, is represented as God’s creation. What this rules out from the beginning is any sort of absolute dualism. A good principle and a bad principle. A good god and a bad god. A god and a devil.

Rather, this creature is full of rebellion but is, nevertheless, in the first instance, a creature. It is God’s creature and already under the rubric of what has been described in chapters 1 and 2. Namely, that everything that God made was good. God pronounced his, “It is good,” on all that he made. Yet now we find this creature in rebellion against God.

Second, this serpent was more crafty than any other creation. In English, the word crafty has negative overtones … sneaky, underhanded. Crafty. But in Hebrew, the word is neutral except for the context so that in the right context, the word can have a positive overtone.

For example, we’re told in Proverbs 14, “The prudent are crowned with knowledge.” Prudent, exactly the same word. Now the translators render it prudent with positive overtones precisely because you don’t want to the text to be saying, “The crafty are crowned with knowledge.” That’s not quite what Proverbs has in mind.

The point is that the word is neutral. It depends on the context. I suspect what the author is saying here is that this created being was mightily endowed by God, but already this mighty endowment was turned toward evil. It was turned toward that which was corrupt and crafty. Now Satan begins (we shall refer to him as Satan without being wrong) with a question, not a contradiction.

This question merely entertains a possibility. It expresses just the right amount of skepticism. A slightly incredulous, “Hmm, so did God really say that? Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” To put a question like this is both disturbing and flattering, for it invites human beings made in God’s image to stand in judgment of God.

“Can’t believe God said that. Can you?” It might be one thing to question our politicians or to question our media stars, “I can’t believe the Prime Minister said that,” but to question God? Moreover, the question is cast to make God into the cosmic party pooper. That is, the cosmic killjoy, the cosmic being who wants to deny all our fun.

“Did God say, ‘You mustn’t eat from any tree in the garden’?” Chapter 2, verse 17 pictures God as forbidding one tree. Satan exaggerates the prohibition in order to picture God as someone whose entire cosmic purpose is to say, “No! You can’t do that! No! You can’t do that!” like a paranoid parent whose only way of trying to shape the future of his children is to say, “No, you can’t do that. No, you can’t do that. No, you can’t do [something else].” God, the cosmic killjoy.

When the woman begins with her response, she begins wisely. She corrects the exaggeration, for a start. Verse 2: “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.’ ” Then it’s almost as if this tantalizing opportunity to stand in judgment of God is too much for her, so she enters her own gentle exaggeration.

“Well, God did say you mustn’t eat from that tree. In fact, you mustn’t even touch it or you will die.” But God hadn’t added that bit. It’s as if she has to side with Satan in some small degree at least. But you only see the real danger here, what is really going wrong, if you reflect for a moment on what she should’ve said.

What she should’ve said is, “Are you out of your little skull? This is Eden! I’ve got a husband who thinks I’m fantastic, and I think he’s pretty hot too. Everything around is good and right and clean. We walk with God in the cool of the day. He made us, and made us his vice-regents. He knows best. I didn’t make this garden. We’ve received it. We and we alone are his own image-bearers. Shall we stand in judgment of God? Would God have given us a prohibition of any sort were it not for our good? Shall we stand in judgment of God?” That’s what she should’ve said.

But instead, she has taken the first step toward the de-Godding of God, toward idolatry. Thus encouraged, Satan comes on stronger with a flat-out contradiction, the first contradiction of something God says in Scripture. The first contradiction is the contradiction of the doctrine of judgment. “You shall not surely die.”

It is not always the case, but it is often the case that when orthodoxy begins to go astray, it goes astray on the doctrine of judgment. For, after all, if you can remove the ultimate sanction, then there is less threat to go astray in a whole lot of other areas. “ ‘You shall not surely die. Indeed,’ Satan says, ‘God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ ”

Here is the Serpent’s big ploy, the total temptation. The heart of its vicious deceitfulness is that what the Serpent promises is partly true and totally false. It is like many lies from the Devil himself: partly true, yet profoundly false. The truth is that in one sense by succumbing to this temptation, human beings were coming to some expanded understanding and recognition of good and evil.

We know that is the case. God himself says so at the end of the chapter. Verse 22: “The Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.’ ” The point is the picture of human beings before the fall is that at one level they are naÔve, wonderfully naÔve. They do not know evil.

When we are tempted to sin, we are tempted to sin against the backdrop of our own memories of previous sins. They have no such memories. There is a sense, in other words, in which a certain moral consciousness is opening up into a new dimension. Yet we shall discover that it is quite unlike God’s consciousness of good and evil.

God knows about good and evil precisely the way he knows about everything. He is omniscient. He knows not only what has been, what is, and what will be but what also could have been under all possible worlds. It is what the Middle Ages philosophers sometimes called middle knowledge. God knows all things, but God does not know evil by becoming evil. God does not know evil experientially, but these human beings would come to know evil by becoming evil.

Indeed, there is something more to be said here. The particular expression “to know good and evil” recurs in the Old Testament in quite a number of passages. An author in Paris has argued convincingly that the expression means more than mere self-conscious awareness of moral categories; it means determining good and evil, choosing good and evil. It stretches into the domain not merely of consciousness but of choice.

What has the text said before? The text has said before that God made something and then pronounced it good. He made all things and then pronounced all things good. That is within God’s prerogative. He is God. But now by these human beings contradicting God they are making their own choices as to what will be good and evil. Thus, they are taking on themselves the prerogatives of God. It is part of the rise of idolatry. It is part of the de-Godding of God. The climax, in other words, is a huge lie. To be like God, to achieve this by outwitting him or taking on some of his exclusive prerogatives as God is an intoxicating invitation.

In other words, we are not to think of sin as mere breaking of a few rules. In the beginning is God, and there are his image-bearers who know him and love him. They wake up in the morning and their thoughts are toward him. They are rightly related to each other because each is rightly related to him. He is the center of their affection and adoration. They love him with heart and soul and mind and strength, for he is the center of their universe.

But now if I put myself in the place where I decide what is good and evil, if I put myself in the place where I become, by self-proclamation quasi-autonomous, I have de-Godded God. I am now the center of the universe. Now God (if he, she, or it exists) jolly well better serve me or I will find another god, thank you.

That’s the nature of idolatry. That means sooner or later you and I will be in conflict, too, because I am at the center of the universe, but you … you stupid person … you think you are the center of the universe. There is the beginning of fences and greed and lust and theft and racism and war and cruelty and power-seeking. All, all, all because, “I will be god.”

This is why we will never think deeply and profoundly about sin if we think of it merely as rulebreaking. Sin does involve breaking rules. It contravenes God’s gracious self-disclosure. Yet when you read through the Old Testament and ask just this one question, what is the answer? “What is it in the Old Testament which most repeatedly and forcefully is said to bring down the wrath of God?” It is idolatry.

“You shall have no other gods before me. The Lord your God is a jealous God.” There is a sense in which we sometimes try to show the relevance of Christianity to our cultures by appealing to the moral structure of Christian revelation and showing that this is for the good of society. That’s a fair argument. It is also a second-class argument. It is a derivative argument, for the first sins are not sins at the horizontal level.

The first sins, the fundamental sins, are those which de-God God. That is why David, after his horrible sins, can nevertheless write, addressing God and say, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” At one level, that’s profoundly untrue. There’s scarcely anybody that he hasn’t sinned against.

He’s sinned against Bathsheba. He’s certainly sinned against Uriah. He’s certainly sinned against the baby in Bathsheba’s womb now conceived. He’s certainly sinned against the military leaders. He’s certainly sinned against the covenant. He’s sinned against his own people. Judgment will fall upon them.

There is scarcely anybody that he hasn’t sinned against, but he has the cheek to say, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” But at the most profound level, that is exactly right. Sin takes on its odium. Sin takes on its heinousness. Sin takes on its profoundly eternal foulness with reference to rebellion against God, with reference to idolatry, with reference to the de-Godding of God.

A year and a half ago I was speaking at a missions conference in Montreal, which was the city where I was brought up. I’m a Canadian. At this conference, because it was bilingual, those of us who were speaking in the plenary sessions all had to be bilingual too, and one sermon was in English and one sermon was in French. Everything was simultaneously translated so that people would sit in the seats and switch on their little earphones for whichever language they wanted.

When you’re doing that, you’re supposed to slow down and you’re supposed to avoid puns and you’re supposed to avoid poetry and so forth, because it’s simultaneously translated. It’s not one sentence followed by a translation, another sentence followed by a translation. It’s going full-tilt the whole time.

At this point I was speaking in English and let slip without even thinking about it something about the de-Godding of God. I thought to myself, “I wonder what the translator is going to do up there in the booth?” I asked him afterwards, “What did you say? How did you handle that?” He said, “la dÈtrÙnement de Dieu,” or, “the dethronement of God.” One of my former PhD students who was with me said, “Oh, there’s a better way: ‘le chosification de Dieu,’ ” or, “the ‘thingamafying’ of God.” The turning of God into a thing.

He’s merely a peer. It’s the de-Godding of God. It is the heart of all idolatry. This is perhaps where we need to think a little more about the nature of this tree and its fruit. It was not an apple. As if pears and pineapples are okay, but God has it in for apples. It is not sex. Although in the history of the church, that interpretation has often been advanced.

After all, at this point, Adam and Eve are represented as married, one flesh already. Even after the fall, Hebrews reminds us that marriage is honorable in all and the bed undefiled. There is nothing intrinsically evil with sex. Like all of God’s good gifts, we may pervert it and twist it, but it is not intrinsically evil. To present sex itself as a temptation is simply to misunderstand the text. No, it was bound up, whatever the reality of the tree, with a move into experience that would illuminate good and evil from the inside by becoming evil.

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 is making her judgments about what is good. “When she saw that it was good in these various ways: good for food, physically appealing, pleasant to the eye, aesthetically pleasing, desirable for gaining wisdom, mentally transforming …” After all, what is forbidden may still be attractive. “… she took it and ate.”

This pattern of sin runs through every sin. It is to listen to the creature instead of the Creator. It is to follow one’s impressions instead of one’s instructions. It is to determine for ourselves what is good and evil instead of trusting the word of our Maker in this regard. It is to de-God God. “She took it,” we’re told, “and ate.” One commentator has suggestively commented, “It would take the coming and death and resurrection of the Messiah before the verbs ‘take’ and ‘eat’ would become verbs of salvation.”

2. The initial consequences that erupted from that first temptation.

Verses 7–13. There is massive inversion. Instead of God and his image-bearers exercising authority of the created order, Satan displays himself within the created order to seduce God’s image-bearers who now defy God.

As for the death itself, I still like the comment by Augustine the in fourth century in City of God, chapter 13. He writes, “If it be asked what death God threatened man with, whether bodily or spiritual or that second death, we answer, ‘It was all.’ ” He comprehends therein not only the first part of the first death, wheresoever the soul loses God, or the latter only, wherein the soul leaves the body, but also the second, which is the last of deaths, eternal and following after all. Note the results; they are horrible.

First, there is guilt. Verse 7: “Their eyes were opened, and they knew they were naked.” This is a reference to verse 25 of chapter 2. There we are told that the husband and wife were naked and not ashamed. This is not merely referring to the level of their undress, although that is presupposed, but to something more than that. They could afford to be completely naked before each other because they had nothing to hide. They were naked and not ashamed.

You men. How would you like your mother or your wife or your sister or your daughter to know absolutely everything you think? You women. How would you like your father, your husband, your brother, your son to know absolutely everything you think, everything you desire, every nurtured bitterness, every resentment, every lust. We have a lot to hide. We have a lot to hide, but originally they were naked and unashamed.

Now with the first objective guilt comes the first sense of shame and subjective guilt. Their instinct is to cover up. Nor is it a bad instinct. It’s a bit funny, fig leaves, for goodness’ sake. But it’s not a bad instinct. God himself says so. By the end of the chapter he provides them with more durable covering. They have become evil from within.

Four years ago, my wife came down with very serious cancer. After a pretty horrible year, she survived that year and thanks to God, she is still alive today. In one sense, she knows more about cancer from the inside than her oncologist.

That doesn’t mean she knows more about cancer’s chemistry and cancer’s biology and appropriate treatments and radiation levels and when surgery is called for and what the best antinauseants for the various forms of chemotherapy are. It doesn’t mean she knows all of that, but believe me, for certain kinds of cancer, she knows more than the oncologist, at the deepest level of experience.

So Satan has come along and said, “Would you like to have the knowledge of God?” We have said, “Yes, we would!” But instead of having the knowledge that an oncologist has, we have the knowledge of cancer. We learn about sin from the inside by becoming sinful, by de-Godding God, and now we are ashamed. We now have things to hide.

There are some people who think that the way back to innocence is by becoming completely candid again. One of the things these leagues tell us is that there is no way back to innocence. None. None. Throughout the history of the world there have been various nudist colonies. Some of them have merely been excuses for sexual orgies, but not all of them.

Some of them have had an entire philosophical theory behind them, believe it or not. The theory is that if you could be entirely open in one domain and make it work, eventually you could become entirely open in every domain and you would return to innocence. Of course it never works, because sin is far more slippery and deeper than that.

There are some Christians in the church who go in for what I call a kind of spiritual nudism. Every time they come together in a small group, they want to lay it all out, put out all their sins, talk about them, look at them all, confess them, go over them again and again and again. They think this is going to lead them to the apex of spirituality, that it will bring them healing, that it will restore them to innocence.

The Bible does tell us when certain sins are to be publicly confessed. Ephesians also reminds us that there are some things Christians shouldn’t even be talking about. In any case, there is no way back to innocence. None! There is no way back to innocence. None! There is only a way forward to the cross itself. So they find their eyes opened. They’re naked. They sew fig leaves. They’re ashamed.

Then there is broken fellowship with God. Verses 8–10. Now they do not seek God in the cool of the day. Now they hide from him. It is God who is seeking them. This is the first sign of grace as his voice penetrates their concealment and his words go after them when his presence and his glory would still be too much.

Adam, what does he do? Who has apparently been brought to the same sin, perhaps by the same arguments as his wife? He promptly blames his wife. “The woman you gave me …” This is not the last time a man has blamed his wife. She is no better. She has to blame the Devil himself. One of the sad things about guilt is that we try to duck responsibility for it. Do we not?

My daughter learned to drive the car and wasn’t a bad driver, a slightly lead foot, but not a bad driver. The first day that it snowed, she borrowed the car, and I said, “Tiffany, my dear, you are not used to driving on snow. Be careful. Leave a little more space. Use a little less speed. You need some experience.” “Yes, Dad. No problem.” The phone rang a short while later. “Dad, there’s been a small accident.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Dad, really.”

“Are you sure? No hurt, no bang or anything? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“No, no, Dad. It was just a little fender bender.”

“Was anybody else hurt?”

“No, no, no. It was just in the parking lot. Nothing was wrong.”

“Oh, that’s good. What happened?” Long pause.

“Well, my friends say that if we had ABS brakes, I wouldn’t have hit the other car.”

“Tiffany, do we have ABS brakes on that old clunker?”

“No, Dad.”

“Did you know that we didn’t have ABS brakes?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“If we had had ABS brakes, would you probably have been going even faster, thinking that they would look after you?” I wonder where she learned to make excuses like that? Whose daughter is she, anyway?

Even in little matters we find it so difficult to take responsibility for things, do we not? Making excuses, passing the buck. “The Devil made me do it.” There’s also broken fellowship with other human beings. Verses 11–13. These are but the initial consequences of sin. Then there is …

3. The explicit curse that was pronounced in the wake of this temptation.

Verses 14–19. I cannot expound this in detail, but let me draw your attention to its three-fold nature: the curse against the serpent, against the woman, and against the man.

First, there is the curse against the serpent. “Cursed are you above all livestock.” That is, the little word above suggests the curse is general, but it is peculiarly on the serpent. Then the broader curse is brought back a little later. “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.”

Now it is possible to read this text as if it is affirming that originally serpents were actually reptiles of some sort and all had legs and then in the wake of the curse all the legs fell off and they became what we mean by snakes. It’s possible to read the text that way all right. But it is not strictly necessary to read the text that way. Let me remind you of a parallel.

If you were reading the book of Genesis for the first time and read of the account of circumcision, first introduced to Abraham, you might be excused for thinking that circumcision was just invented for Abraham. It had never been known before. But in fact, circumcision was widely practiced in the ancient Near East. It was not invented for Abraham at all.

But when God gave the covenant of circumcision to Abraham and renewed it at Sinai, circumcision came to be associated with particular covenantal structures. It did not have those covenantal structures associated with it in the ancient Near East. The rite itself was already known and was practiced in a variety of ancient Near Eastern tribes.

But now it comes to have peculiar force, peculiar associative connection bound up with the covenant of God himself. So also it is quite possible now to understand the slithering on the ground as part of the curse. This is a low-down-in-the-dust animal. That symbolism is picked up in the prospect of the new heaven and the new earth in Isaiah 65:25, for example.

There we read, “The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent’s food.” You see a perpetual curse on this creature who is down in the dust and the dirt forever. What shall we make of verse 15, which is sometimes called the Protoevangelium; that is, the first announcement of the gospel?

“I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers.” Does this simply mean that human beings will not like snakes? Snakes won’t like human beings and human beings will not like snakes, which is why some of us have little dogs for companions or cats or the odd budgerigar, but not many of us have pythons in our living rooms.

Nevertheless, some people do. Some people are herpetologists. Some people like snakes. I don’t understand them very well. I’ve walked too much in the southwest of the United States where you walk and you listen for the sound of the rattle. Yeah, you’re careful. Or down in the southeast where there are water moccasins in the swamps. Snakes do not seem, then, to be our best friends.

Is that all that is meant here? Snakes won’t like human beings and human beings won’t like snakes? Oh no, it’s much more than that. It bound up again in part with fundamental notions of sonship, of kinship. For us, a son is determined by genetics, and so we resolve legal matters, for example, by checking out a father’s DNA to find out who really is the responsible party, and so forth. So in the first instance, father/son relationships are determined by genes.

But in a world that was pre-industrial, agrarian, a handcraft world, then the father/son relationship and likewise the mother/daughter relationship had a whole lot of other connections. In our world, relatively few sons end up doing vocationally what their fathers do. Let me ask you now. Take a moment.

How many of you are doing vocationally what your fathers did? Put up your hand. Look around, folks. Maybe five hands, seven hands. Do you see? What does that represent, 3 percent? Whereas in a handcraft or an agrarian world, pre-industrial revolution, 95 to 98 percent of all sons would end up doing what their fathers did, and daughters would end up doing what their mothers did.

If your name was Stradivarius, you made violins. If your father was a baker, you were a baker. If your father was a farmer, you were a farmer. Thus, you take on the family values, the family vocation. Your training, part of your education, your identity is bound up with the whole being of your father.

Out of this come a lot of Semitic idioms. “You’re a son of Belial,” a son of worthlessness. Jesus can use those same idioms, can’t he? He says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.” The idea is that God is the supreme Peacemaker, and if you make peace then so far also are you acting like God and show yourself to be a son of God. It does not mean you are a son of God in every respect, but in that respect you may be.

Likewise, with respect to the Devil, is that not what Jesus says in John, chapter 8? “ ‘Whose sons are you?’ ‘We’re the sons of Abraham.’ ‘Oh, no you’re not,’ he says. ‘Abraham rejoiced to see my day. Abraham was pleased to anticipate my coming, but you are trying to kill me.’ ‘In fact, we are really sons of God,’ they say. ‘Oh, no you’re not,’ he says. ‘You’re trying to kill me and you’re telling lies about me. This proves that you are the son of the Devil himself, for he was a liar from the beginning and he tried killing people from the beginning.’ ”

See Jesus is not denying their genes. He’s not denying that they are Jews. He’s not denying that at some level they are children of Abraham. He’s saying that at the level of what matters, the real children of Abraham are those that act like Abraham. Paul, likewise, insists that the real children of Abraham share Abraham’s faith.

So also here. Who are the real children of the Serpent? Who are the real children of the woman? What is introduced is a bifurcation in humanity itself, which ultimately leads to two cities, to two humanities, to two races. Thus you have in the book of Revelation, Jerusalem and Babylon, two cities.

If we all belong in one sense to the Devil’s offspring, the question is.… By what means do we become the woman’s offspring? The ultimate seed of the woman crushes this serpent’s head and is himself bitten on the heel and dies. Yet, you know the New Testament is applied not only allusively to Jesus but to Christians? Think of Romans 16. In Romans 16 we are told explicitly, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.”

Then there is the curse against the woman and the curse against the man. I do not have time to unpack those or to deal with the last point, covering verses 20–24. Let me conclude, rather, with this larger reflection.… Where does the biblical narrative go from here?

In the next chapter, you have the first murder, fratricide. In the following chapter, you have the pronouncement of death. “So and so lived so many years, and he died. So and so lived so many years, and he died.” That’s what God had said: “If you eat this fruit, you will die.” Then you find sin abounding so much that you face the judgment of the flood. Apart from Noah, a righteous man, a preacher of righteousness, who, after the flood, promptly gets drunk. Then sin multiplies again and you have Babel.

Then God calls a man, Abraham, to begin a new race. Abraham, a great man of faith, the friend of God, who is also a liar. His son Isaac was a bit of a wimp. The grandson Jacob was the deceiver. The great-grandchildren, the patriarchs, the Twelve Tribes … talk about a dysfunctional family! One is sleeping with his father’s concubine. Another is sleeping with his step-daughter. Ten can’t decide whether they’ll kill or merely sell into slavery the eleventh. These are the patriarchs of Israel!

Eventually God raises up a Moses to bring them into the Promised Land, but it’s not long before they prefer their garlic and leeks and slavery to freedom and faith and trust. Then by various disciplining agents, they enter into the Promised Land, and things seem to be going remarkably well. Jericho falls.

They become arrogant at Ai and 3,000 more die. Then they enter the Promised Land and it’s not long before you enter the period of the Judges. It takes only two or three generations for the consciousness of God in the covenant community to be lost. The people become debauched, end up with pagan idolatry all around them, succumb to all kinds of practices. God brings in judgment.

Eventually some cry to God. God raises up a deliverer and the cycle begins all over again. It spirals down and down and down until you get to the last three chapters of the book of Judges, and you can scarcely read those chapters in mixed company, they’re so disgusting. Even the good people are morally foul.

Repeatedly there is the refrain, “In those days, every man did that which was right in his own eyes. There was no king in Israel. O God, how we need a king.” When they cried for a king, they wanted a king for the wrong reasons, and we know how he turned out. So God eventually raised up a king, a man after his own heart, we’re told.

Good King David, a man after God’s own heart, who commits murder and adultery. One wonders what he would’ve done if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart. Two generations on, the dynasty is split. Two centuries after that, the northern tribes go into captivity. A century and a half after that, there is no Davidic monarch on the throne again.

Then after 500 years of various forms of struggle, eventually at the time of the Maccabees there is a possibility of putting a Davidide back on the throne. Is that what happens? No, the Maccabean guerrillas get back on the throne, instead. A century after that, in 63 BC, the Romans take over.

Are we better? Did you know that the twentieth century has been the bloodiest in human history? Apart from war, we have managed to kill, in the twentieth century, perhaps a million and half gypsies, a million and a half Armenians, a third of the population of Cambodia, perhaps 20 million Ukrainians, 6 million Jews, I don’t know how many Poles, I don’t know how many Africans, about a million Hutus and Tutsis, and 50 million Chinese. On and on and on.

About a hundred million human beings. Apart from war! Add to this lust, dishonesty, rape, greed, power plays, and we come to the end of twentieth century and we invent postmodernism and declare there is no such thing as evil. Now that’s evil.

I tell you, brothers and sisters in Christ, the account of the origins of evil and the analysis of what is wrong with our culture is far more profoundly taught in Genesis 3 than in Richard Rorty or in Michel Foucault or in Martin Heidegger. Far more profound! It’s realistic, and it begins with the de-Godding of God. Brothers and sisters in Christ, unless you believe this with your whole heart and teach it with your whole passion, you do not need Jesus Christ, or else you will have a perverted Jesus.

You will have a Jesus who fixes marriages, a Jesus who makes you feel better, a Jesus who teaches you to praise but not a Jesus who reconciles rebellious de-Godders with the God who stands over against them in judgment. For the good news of Jesus Christ is bound up with the reconciliation of guilty men and women full of idolatry to the God who made them and who stands in judgment against them.

Astounding grace, that God the Son should choose

to leave his Father’s glory and refuse

to clutch his dignity, exploit his right

and make himself a no-one in our sight.

 

The Word made flesh, the Son of God a man,

the timeless God clothed in a mortal span.

Now born a baby in a cattle shed,

transcendent God who suffered and who bled.

 

Astounding grace, that Christ should suffer death,

and know first-hand the grave’s cold, clammy breath,

that he the Prince of life, creation’s Lord

should take the curse which we could not afford.

 

He died our death. He buried all our sin.

He tore the veil. We boldly enter in.

He saw our bitter hates, our dreadful lust.

He bore our guilt and then declared us just.

 

Astounding grace, that I who could not hear

God’s warning judgments now should come to fear

impending death, the certainty of hell,

yet find in Christ my fears completely quelled.

 

Once I was blind, in shoreless wastes I drowned,

but now I see. The lost sheep has been found.

My guilt’s forgiven. I gaze upon his face,

exalting Christ and his astounding grace.

Amen.