Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of imputed and original sin from Genesis 3.
Don’t you worry over someone who’s introduced as an expert in temptation and sin? I would like to begin by reading Genesis 3. Because you’re at a table, probably many didn’t bring Bibles. I will follow the chapter pretty closely, and tomorrow you’ll find it easier, I think, if you are following with your Bible. Let me take the time nevertheless to read this chapter.
I imagine there is no chapter of the whole Bible that is more universally despised in our culture than this one. Talking snakes, apples, all those little pencil-drawing cartoons of a naked man and naked woman with the hair and the foliage conveniently deployed … even we who are Christians are just slightly embarrassed by the whole chapter, aren’t we?
Yet I suggest to you that not only is this chapter important for our topic for the weekend but for the whole Bible. The reason is that we cannot possibly agree on a solution if we cannot agree on the problem. This chapter sets up the problem. Let me take the time to read it.
“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 from the trees in the garden, but God did say, “You must not eat 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 the livestock and all the 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 of 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.”
So reads Holy Scripture.
At one level I would want to insist with the apostle Paul that you can’t make much sense of how this chapter fits into the whole Bible unless you accept that Adam and Eve are historical figures. On the other hand, there is no doubt that there are symbol-laden elements in the chapter as well, and I wish I had time to unpack how you can tell the difference. I don’t. I will run through the chapter instead and draw your attention to some of them as we go. It will be useful to divide the text into four points.
1. The deceitful repulsiveness that characterized that first temptation.
We’re introduced to the serpent. Whether the serpent is an embodiment of Satan or a symbol for Satan, the text doesn’t say. I don’t know and don’t care. Certainly later on in Scripture, Satan is sometimes referred to under the guise of “that old serpent” or the like. Moreover, we cannot possibly know what kind of communication arrangements there were in the original creation. We cannot know that either.
What is said about the serpent right away, however, is very interesting. The serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. That is to say, the serpent is not pictured as a kind of anti-God. First there’s God, then there’s anti-God, like the two sides of the Force in a film of which most of us have doubtless heard. That is, there’s sort of one large entity out there (monism), and then there’s a good side and a dark side of approximately equal value.
Good and evil, then, in the physical order, are determined by how human beings stick to one side or the other. That is not the way evil is configured in Scripture. In Scripture, there is but one God and he is unequivocally good. So sin, instead of having some sort of ontological existence, some sort of independent existence that stands over against him, is pictured as rebellion. It’s first of all rebellion against this God. That’s the way the picture unwinds for human beings.
There’s even a hint of it with respect to this serpent. In the NIV which I’m reading, the New International Version, we read now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. Because I’m a Canadian, my ears don’t hear words always exactly the same way that other English speakers’ do, but to my ears, crafty sounds rather sneaky, under-the-table. Does it sound that way to you?
But the Hebrew word here is a neutral word. In the book of Proverbs, it’s often rendered prudent. In other words, the very same characteristic that could be turned toward what is prudent and skillful and wise can be turned toward what is sneaky, deceitful, disgusting, crafty, and manipulative, which is in line with what Scripture says later about even the angelic beings themselves being full of rebellion. In any case, he approaches the woman and begins with a question. He does not contradict what God says, he merely raises a question.
It entertains a possibility, expresses just the right amount of skepticism. It is slightly incredulous. “So then, has God actually said such and such?” In a sense, this is disturbing and flattering, for it raises a possibility now that we have the right to stand in judgment of what God says, to express our astonishment at what God says. We will now be the arbiters as to the validity of his speech. It smuggles in the assumption, without quite saying so, that God’s word is subject to our judgment.
Then this is followed by exaggeration, focusing on something that could be taken as a negative. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” But of course God had forbidden one tree. The attempt, of course, is to raise question about God on the one hand and to paint him in as negative and vicious, not to say cheap and malicious, a way as possible.
The woman replies, initially correcting his exaggeration. 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 then almost as if she herself wants to fasten on this one element that seems negative, she engages in a bit of exaggeration. “And you must not touch it, or you will die.” We begin to get a notion of what is signified by her response if we imagine for a moment what she might have said.
Supposing she had said instead, “Are you out of your little skull? I mean, just look at this place. This is Eden, for goodness’ sake. I’ve got an ideal husband and I’m an ideal wife. Moreover, we walk with God and know him. Everything is plentiful and good. We owe our very existence to this God. Of course he knows what’s best! He made us for himself and our delight is to know him and do his work and his word. You want me to stand in judgment of him? How can I do that? I’m his creature!”
But instead, while correcting his exaggeration, as it were, she betrays a little bit of frustration with this one restriction. Whatever the restriction is we’ll come to in due course. She betrays a little frustration with this one stricture, as if, “Maybe this God who has given me existence deep down is some sort of nasty soul who may extract some cheap glee out of keeping me down.”
Thus encouraged, the serpent pushes much harder. “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman, which is, of course, the first recorded contradiction of something God has said. The first thing to be denied is the doctrine of judgment. “You will not die. God says you will but you won’t.”
And indeed, historically speaking, it is not uncommon that aberrant movements first of all begin by saying, whether in the historical arena or at the end, that there is no judgment. Because once we eliminate judgment, sanctions, then of course it is much easier to challenge God’s authority across the board because there are no nasty entailments.
Now some say that at this point Adam and Eve were not really moral beings in a full sense. The assumption, however, of chapter 2 verse 17, where God had actually forbidden them to take from this tree, is that they can make this choice. They can see that there are entailments. But there is one sense in which they were gloriously naÔve.
Have you noticed how the previous chapter ends? “The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.” Of course at one level, in the narrative, it’s just talking about how many clothes they had, or didn’t. But the symbolism becomes pretty clear in the chapter ahead of us, as we’ll see. Can you imagine what it would be like not to have anything in your life of which you are ashamed?
I just have to raise the question and all of our minds go twitting off to all the things of which we are ashamed. You men, would you like your wife, mother, daughter, sister to know everything you think and say and do? Would you? You women, would you like your husbands, fathers, brothers, sons to know everything you think or say or do? I don’t just mean the lust. I mean all the little nurtured resentments, all the little nasty, muttered-under-the-breath “one-up-manships.” All the secretly nurtured scorecards we keep.
Besides, in many cases, really grotesque things we hope our loved ones never ever find out about. What would it be like never ever to have lied? Never ever to have been puffed up in arrogance? Never ever to have hated? Never ever to have had anything to be ashamed of?
That’s the point, of course. They’re naked. They don’t have anything to hide. They’re not ashamed. In that sense, at this point Adam and Eve are portrayed as naÔve. Gloriously naÔve, but naÔve. It is at this point, then, that the serpent makes his big ploy, the full temptation, and we begin to see its deceptiveness.
“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.” The repulsive deceptiveness of this particular temptation is bound up with the fact that what the Devil promises is partly true and totally false, if you’ll excuse the bad mathematics.
At one level, it is true. If they eat, at one level, they move into a larger moral framework. That’s what he hints at. “God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” and indeed at the end of the chapter, God himself suggests that the Devil was telling the truth. “For we discovered in the counsels of heaven,” God says in verse 22, “that man has now become like us knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life,” and so forth.
But at another level, it’s a total lie. God knows about good and evil as a function of his omniscience. We learn about good and evil by participating in the evil. A doctor knows about a disease out of the expertise he or she has gained in years of study. The patient knows about the disease by suffering the pain.
What promises to be an illuminating grasp of good and evil with a knowledge akin to gods turns out on closer inspection not to be the objective knowledge of an omniscient god who knows not only what has been, what is, and what will be, but even what might have been under different circumstances, is what philosophers call middle knowledge.
It turns out instead to be the knowledge of participation in that which is rebellion. And all this promised in fact out of the incentive to become like God, to be as God, to achieve godhood. In fact, in part, by outwitting him. That’s always an intoxicating program. Now here is perhaps where we need to think a little more about the nature of this tree. The fruit on it was not an apple. There is no mention of apples. As if God rather likes pears and pineapples but has it in for apples. There is no hint that God is merely being arbitrary.
Nor is it a symbol for sex, although many Christians down the centuries have suggested that is what is meant, but in fact God made the marriage before the Fall and even under the terms of the new covenant, Hebrews 13 insists that the marriage bed is honorable in all and undefiled. Like all of God’s good gifts, it can be dirtied, but it is not intrinsically evil. That sort of notion is not a biblical one at all.
No, the temptation, whatever the physical reality, was an invitation to move in to an experience that would illuminate God and evil experientially. It was an invitation not simply to break a rule but to engage in revolution. There is God and initially there are a man and a woman rightly related to him. Should they wake up in the night, their thought would go toward him. Because each was rightly related to him, they were rightly related to each other.
Their delight was in him, their imagination toward him, their unifying center this God who had made them. But now each one of us wants to think he or she is the center of the universe. That’s the nature of a revolution. It’s more than a mere defiance with respect to a particular rule. Now I want to be the center of the universe. Not physically, of course.
If I were suddenly to hold up your graduating class, whether high school or Annapolis or whatever it is, and say, “Look, there’s your graduating class,” where would your eye go first? Supposing you have a really good knock-down-drag-him-out argument with someone. A real humdinger. Gradually the blood pressure mounts and the argument comes to an end and you go away seething, thinking of all the things you could have said, all the things you should have said and would have said had you thought of them fast enough.
You replay this whole argument and you rerun it. As you replay it in your mind, who wins now? I’ve lost many, many arguments in my short life. I’ve never lost a rerun. The reason, of course, is because, God help me, I want to be the center of the universe. So do you. Out of this sooner or later comes all of the hatred and malice and racism and war and rape and abuse of families and all rest all because finally we say deep down, “I will be God.”
This tree, in other words, is not magical. What it does is illuminate the very nature of all that is rebellion. We read verse 6: “And when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food,” that is, physically appealing, “and pleasant to the eye,” aesthetically pleasing, “and desirable for gaining wisdom and mentally transforming, she took some and ate.” In other words, she followed her impressions rather than her instructions.
Here in fact is the heart of covetousness, wanting something forbidden under the simple guise, “I need it. I need it to make me happy.” She took it, we read, and ate. Someone has written, “So simple the act, so hard the undoing. God himself will taste poverty and death before take and eat become verbs of salvation.” Referring, of course, to the Lord’s Supper. And she gave some to Adam and he ate, presumably using the same or similar arguments, and they were in it together. Here, then, is the portrait of the first deceitful repulsiveness in a temptation.
2. The initial consequences that erupted from this first temptation (verses 7 to 13).
At one level, of course, there’s massive inversion that’s so implicit in the whole narrative. God was at the center, and Adam and Eve next. They were vice regents over the entire created order. Now, they’d listened to a creature of the created order, they’d gone back up, as it were, and defied God. There’s been a massive inversion.
Moreover, even in the fourth century, Saint Augustine raised the question, “If it be asked what death God threatened man with, whether bodily or spiritual or that second death, we answer, ‘It was all.’ God comprehends therein, not only the first part of the first death, wheresoever the soul loses God (that was immediately the effect as we’ll see) nor 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 that are immediately emphasized by the text. Verse 7: “Their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked and sewed fig leaves together for covering.” Of course, at one level, it’s rather quaint. It’s meant to be. It’s meant to be a bit stupid. A bit pathetic. But in the symbol-ladenness of the nakedness language, it’s a pregnant phrase. There is no going back to innocence. None.
Across the centuries, there have been various nudist groups. Some, of course, have just been excuses for orgies. But the best of them have had a certain kind of philosophy behind them. Their view was that if people could be naked and open physically then eventually there would be so much transparency in every domain of life that you would introduce a kind of utopia, a kind of transparent candor in all human relationships that would utterly transform and revolutionize society. Needless to say, it has never worked, which is another way of saying there is no going back to innocence.
There have been some Christians who have had the same sort of view. They come into small Christian groups, churches, Bible studies, fellowships, the like, and they want it all to hang out. They want it all to be exposed. “Oh, let me tell you how my third marriage broke up.” “Let me tell you the problems my husband and I are having.” “Let me tell you the reasons why I don’t like my wife.” Everything has always got to come out.
Whereas the Bible insists that love covers over a multitude of sins. Ephesians actually tells us there are some things so shameful they shouldn’t even be spoken about. This is not a culture noted for restraint in its speech. This is not to say, of course, that there are no times when sin should be exposed. The Bible list some where it should be exposed, especially, we’re told, in leaders, and in some cases disciplined.
But for so much of the time, what should go on is to repent of it, turn away from it, cover it over. Just don’t bring it out and look at it. That’s not socially or personally transforming. There is no going back to innocence. There is no way back. There is only a way forward in the Bible. A way forward finally to the cross, to One who will bear our sin, to One who will forgive our sin and cleanse us from within. But to that theme we’ll return in a moment.
There is broken fellowship with God. Verses 8 to 10. They hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden. What that was, in reality, how they communicated with God before the fall, the intimacy in knowing and walking with God as with a friend in this pre-Fall world. It just boggles the mind. But now they have to hide. It is God who pursues them, for they cannot possible find him. They do not want to do so.
When people really do begin to see what sin looks like in biblical terms and to see what God looks like in biblical terms, the initial instinct is to hide. God pursues them, so already there is grace. God might simply have destroyed them. His voice penetrates their concealment. His question, “Where are you?” is not so much soliciting information, as if he doesn’t know, as inviting Adam to come forth.
Then there is broken fellowship with other human beings. Adam is challenged and promptly blames his wife. Not the last time a husband has blamed his wife. She is no better. She promptly blames the serpent. They all have to blame somebody else. One of the effects of shame is to hide stuff.
This year my daughter had her first fender bender. She’s going up to college this summer. Normally she doesn’t take one of our cars to work but this particular day, she did because of our schedules. It was just an old rattle trap but she took it to work on a snowy day. She didn’t have that much experience with snow. In the parking lot she banged into somebody else. It was her fault. So she phoned.
“Tiffany, are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Dad.”
“You’re sure you don’t need to go to the hospital?”
“No, no, no, it’s not much more than a scratch.”
Now, it was a $750 scratch, but we’ll let that pass.
“What happened, Tiffany?”
“Well, Dad, my friends all say that if that car had had ABS brakes, I wouldn’t have had the accident.”
“Does that car have ABS brakes, Tiff?”
“No, but my friends say that if it had had ABS brakes, I wouldn’t have had the accident.”
“Uh huh. Do you think it’s possible that is it had ABS brakes, you would’ve been going faster because you would’ve been trusting your ABS brakes? The fact of the matter is that if you want to tell me, Tiff, that you were driving a little too fast in snowy conditions because you don’t have experience, I can swallow that. But granted that you knew the car didn’t have ABS brakes, granted that it was a snowy day, don’t tell me that it would have been all right if it had had ABS brakes when you knew that it didn’t. It’s called covering up. Go home, look yourself in the mirror, and say, ‘I blew it.’ ”
Now I want to know where my daughter got this propensity for hiding things. We do it all the time, don’t we? Hard to look ourselves in the mirror. That too becomes part of the corruption, social corrosion, of temptation and sin.
3. The explicit curse that was pronounced because of this temptation (verses 14-19).
The curse on the serpent. “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals. You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.” Of course it’s possible to imagine this creature was once some sort of reptile, but it’s not necessary to take it that way.
Do you recall for example when God introduces circumcision to Abraham? That becomes the foundation of the Abrahamic covenant. It’s not that nobody in that culture knew about circumcision. Half the people in the Middle East practiced circumcision. But when God introduced it to Abraham, it became associated with certain covenantal structures, with certain symbol-laden things. Do you see?
It’s not that the whole thing was invented out of nothing, but it became tied to something. So also here it may be that the squirreling and sliming along the ground now becomes associated with all that is low down and creepy. I don’t know. I do know, however, that the text goes on to say, “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.”
Even at the level of the symbol, most of us are not herpetologists who like to have pythons wrapped around our necks. Most of us, if we’ve travelled in the southwest and heard a rattler or been in swamp country and know what a water moccasin can do to you in about four seconds. We have a healthy respect for snakes.
I have friend who lived in India for a lot of years. When he first went out there, he already had his PhD. He looked about 17. He was one of these guys who was 25 or 26 but looked 17 and knew it. He therefore was always trying to act sophisticated. He was sitting on this veranda in India and trying to act very sophisticated as if he knew what was going on.
As he sat there studying and preparing his lectures on this veranda with somebody working at another desk just a few feet away who was also a friend of mine, he noticed this king cobra coming up beside him. It came up and the head starting going back and forth. My friend didn’t know quite what to do.
First time in India, he didn’t want to say, “Help.” He sort of sat there and sweat began to break out. He moved his chair over a little and finally said to Vern, “Excuse me, are you studying too hard? May I interrupt you?” Vern said, “Yes, go ahead.”
“Vern, what do you do when there’s a king cobra beside you?”
“Oh well, if that happens, you have to.… Don’t move!”
And then he went and got a spade and killed the thing and so forth. Most of us have a certain stance toward snakes that doesn’t welcome their presence. We don’t view them in the same category as Chihuahuas, for instance, or Cocker Spaniels or Persian cats. But at the level of the symbol-laden, there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?
The prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 65, looking to the future, says, “The wolf and the lamb will feed together. The lion will eat straw like the ox. But dust will be the serpent’s food.” As if all that is wound up with the realm of evil, with the realm of the Devil, will forever, always, finally be destroyed.
Finally, “He will crush your head, this offspring of the woman, and you will strike his heel.” Picked up in the New Testament in two different ways. At one level, it’s picked up to indicate the ultimate offspring of the woman, Jesus himself, who crushes Satan decisively at the cross but for his pain is struck in the heel, as it were, and dies. But it’s also picked up with respect to all Christians, this language.
For example, in Romans 16:20, Paul writes to the Roman believers there that, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” There is a sense in which this side of the cross and until Jesus comes again, Christians are in mortal combat with this serpent. Do you realize there have been more Christian martyrs in this century than in the previous 19 combined? And there have been more conversions in this century than in the previous 19 combined.
Still the serpent strikes our heels, and still by the preaching of the gospel, we crush its head until the ultimate victory. Then of course, both Adam and Eve are told that in the physical domain, there is curse. In her case, childbirth. In his case, the whole domain of work. The whole created order falls. There is a sense in which this is the domain of rebellion. It attracts the curse of God upon it. Now the law of the jungle prevails.
You remember Kipling’s poem. “Now this is the law of the jungle as old and as true as the skies and the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.” Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. It is still the domain of death. Paul speaks of it in different terms in Romans 8. “The whole created order groans in travail, waiting for the adoption of sons.” Anticipating finally a new heaven and new earth. This is the domain where we live.
So many marks of God’s beauty still upon it, so many marks of God’s curse still upon it because of our sin. Then their marriage is now up for grabs in some pretty painful ways. The woman is told, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Those two verbs that are used in the original are paired together in only one other place in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. That’s found in the next chapter, and it illuminates this text quite wonderfully. In the next chapter, you find your first case of murder, fratricide, a brother killing a brother.
As Cain, the older one, is being confronted by God, God says, “Why are you so angry?” Chapter 4, verse 6. “Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door.” Then we read, “Sin desires to have you, but you must master it,” the same two verbs. What’s the effect of the curse in human relationships? The woman desires to control her husband, and he brutalizes her. Both selfish, both out to control in one fashion or another.
4. The long-term effects that flowed from this first temptation (verses 20-24).
At one level, of course, they’re banished form the garden. That’s part of the point. On the other hand, there is the first sign of God’s grace. He not only covers them, he covers them now with the skin of animals. It’s not that this is a formal sacrifice like the sacrifices that run through the whole Old Testament. We’re not there yet. It’s the first step of a whole pattern in which God provides the coverage. He provides eventually the whole mosaic system and ultimately the lamb. The Lamb of God, who dies, the just for the unjust, to bring us to him. God pursues us, not the other way around.
Last fall, I was lecturing in Poland. Normally when I go somewhere to speak, to spare my poor family, I take the last plane out and first plane back. But this time I said to my wife and family, “If you don’t mind, I want an extra day,” and explained why. They said, “Fine.” So I went down to Auschwitz and Birkenau.
I’ve read enough about WWII, though obviously I’m too young to have been a participant in it, that I didn’t see anything at Auschwitz that surprised me, that I hadn’t read about. But yet there is something particularly powerful about being there just the same. I’m sure many people have been there. You come up to the gates, and in the ironmongery across the top as you go in from the street, there are the German words “Arbeit macht frei,” work sets you free. The place was full of vicious ironies.
It had originally been a Polish officers’ court, of course, so there’s still some of the brick buildings of the original compound, and off to the right where the officers were there’s a little courtyard where tens of thousands were shot. A torture chamber down in the basement of one of those buildings where there were cells where people were tortured. One particular one where successive generations of Christians had actually scratched out of the stone with their fingernails a picture of Christ on the cross.
In Auschwitz II, Birkenau, of course, they managed to blow up the gas chamber before the Red Army got there. Most of the shacks were burned. There are eight left; you can go and see. But in Auschwitz I, they didn’t have time. Some of the records are still there. You can still see the gas chamber where they put in 2100 people at a time and dropped in Zyklon B and killed them in 20 minutes, and the ovens that were there. They couldn’t quite manage the quantity of product.
You can still see the mounds of hair waiting to be shipped to Germany to be turned into fabric. Yet I think we’ve learned perhaps in some cases the wrong lesson from Auschwitz. We think of it constantly as the Shoah, the unique abomination. In some ways, of course, it was unique. It was so efficiently bloody, and they kept records.
But in this bloodiest of centuries, quite apart from the countless tens of millions killed in war, we’ve managed to bump off 20 million Ukrainians, 50 million Chinese, about a million and a half Armenians, I don’t know how many Rwandans, Hutus, and Tutsis; and then, of course, the Balkans. In any given week, there are some Christians who die in Indonesia. Then, of course, the slavery and murder that’s going on in Southern Sudan and on and on.
This is the bloodiest century ever. Yet you know what we have concluded in the Western world at the end of this bloody twentieth century? We have concluded that there is no such thing as evil. That evil is merely socially defined. That it all depends on your particular interpretive framework, on the cultural definition. God help us. Against that sort of standard, I find the Bible’s account of evil infinitely more believable. Evil is first and foremost doing what God forbids or failing to do what he commands. That’s what evil is, and that’s what gives it its odium.
About a year ago, I was preaching at a church in DC, and I was introduced to a woman. If I mentioned her name, some of you would know her. She’s editor of an important paper. She’s about my age, and up until about a year and a half ago, she wasn’t a believer. But she’d started a Bible study with Mark Dever, the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
She was a complete post-modernist by her own self-confession. None of this stuff meant anything to her. But it was sort of interesting, and Mark is a nice guy. Then she went to PNG, Papua New Guinea, on an assignment, and while she was there she heard the account of a priest who, I’m afraid, after working for 35 years in education in PNG was called out just before he was going home to retire. He was called out, in fact, in sodomy. Then it was discovered, of course, inevitably, that there had been hundreds of boys over 35 years.
This really grabbed her. To think of all the implications of this for their families, future marriages … you know the ramifications as well as I. She came back and told Mark about it. Mark said (we’ll call her Meg), “Meg, was it wicked?” She said, “We all know that most child abusers were themselves abused.”
He said, “Yes, we do know that. The Bible itself says that there are very few sins that are purely private. Most sins are social. The Bible itself says that the wrath of God is visited upon the third and fourth generation of those who hate me. Of course there are social entailments to sin. The question is not whether there are social entailments but whether it was wicked. Meg, was it wicked?”
The question would not escape her. Finally she woke up one night really constrained by this question. Was it wicked? She said, “It was wicked. It was evil. It was wrong.” Then it suddenly dawned on her that maybe therefore she was wicked and evil and wrong, and she became a Christian.
You cannot come to the Bible solution without coming to grips with the Bible’s analysis of the problem. It cannot be done. That’s true in the whole domain of temptation and of all of God’s responses to it.
Let us pray.
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 bled.
Astounding grace, that Christ should suffer death,
And know firsthand 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 and 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 ground,
But now I see the lost sheep has been found;
My guilt is forgiven. I gaze upon his face,
Exalting Christ and his astounding grace.
O Lord God, have mercy upon us and in a time and a generation when evil is so frequently democratized and relativized. Help us to perceive and share odium and the glory of the solution that you alone have provided. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
Papua New Guinea
