Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Redemptive History from Genesis 3
I suppose that there is no chapter in all of Holy Scripture that is more broadly despised in the culture at large than this one. A talking snake. An angel with a sword flashing to keep people out of the garden. All those little line-diagram cartoons with a naked Adam and a naked Eve. Leaves and her hair conveniently deployed to hide anything too personal, with a little snake twisting around in the background and an apple somewhere.
It’s all a bit of a joke, really, isn’t it? Yet I am increasingly persuaded that unless we come to grips with this chapter in the Bible, we’re not going to make much sense of the rest of the whole Bible. We’re not going to come to any agreement as to what the solution is if we can’t agree as to what the problem is.
This chapter sets out the problem. If what human beings need above all else is better health, then may God give us doctors. If what human beings need above all else is more economic justice, then may God give us economists. If what human beings need above all else is better government, then God give us better politicians.
If what we need above all else is the forgiveness of our sin, if what we need above all else is reconciliation with the God who made us, then we need a Savior. None of the Bible makes sense without this chapter. That’s certainly what Paul thought. He can set up his understanding of who Jesus Christ is in terms of a kind of running contrast between Adam and Christ.
For example, in Romans 5 we read, “Consequently just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all flesh, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.” Again in 1 Corinthians 15: “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.”
It’s very difficult to see how much will be left of what the New Testament says of Christ if we do not have a historic Adam and a historic fall. Nevertheless, having said that, I do not deny for a moment that there are symbol-laden elements in this chapter that have to be properly understood. I wish I had time to go through the principles by which we should properly understand this chapter. Instead, I’m simply going to expound the chapter in the time allotment that I’ve got. It may be useful to divide the text into four points.
1. The deceitful repulsiveness that characterized this first temptation.
Verses 1–6. We are first introduced to the Serpent. “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.” Exactly what the communication arrangements were in Eden, we cannot possibly know.
Whether the Serpent symbolizes the Devil or embodies the Devil, we cannot exactly know either. What is clear from later in Scripture is that the Serpent was certainly the locus by which Satan himself was manifest. In Revelation 12, Satan is described as “that old serpent.” We are told right away that this Serpent was not an independent or autonomous being.
We are told that: “He was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.” In other words, the Bible does not set things up as if there is a good person, God, and a bad person, the Serpent, or the Devil. These two sort of fight and then you hope the good guy wins. It’s not the way things are set up. That is the way things are set up in some religions of the world.
Indeed, there’s a great deal of popular religion in Western culture generally that assumes that sort of thing. There is, out there, the Force. Then there is the light side of the Force and the dark side of the Force, the good side of the Force and the bad side of the Force. Which side wins? It all depends on you sort of tilting the balance and being nice or being naughty.
That’s not the way the Bible sets things up. The way God sets things up is this. He made the whole show. You begin to have rebellion amongst the creatures that he himself made, whether in the Serpent or in his own image-bearers, human beings made in his image and likeness. If we do not see that, we will not come to grips with what the rest of this chapter has to say.
Indeed, this first sentence, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals.” It’s not suggesting that God made him a bit of a sneaky character. The word rendered crafty is often rendered in the Hebrew Bible prudent. For example in Proverbs 12: “A prudent man keeps his knowledge to himself.” Proverbs 14: “The prudent are crowned with knowledge.” Exactly the same word as here.
The same word can suggest conduct that in a noble or right or clean person is prudent. In a person that is already degenerate, that same capacity turns toward craftiness and scheming. Without explaining how this created being fell, nevertheless that’s the hint that’s already given. This created serpent was already beginning to be in rebellion and turning his prudence toward craftiness.
He begins with a question, not a contradiction. He merely entertains a possibility. He says to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” By raising a question, he merely injects the right amount of skepticism. A slightly incredulous, “Did God really say that?”
This is both upsetting and mildly flattering. It sneaks in the assumption without actually saying so that we may stand in judgment of God’s Word. “Did God say that? Well, let me think about that now. What is my valuation on this point?” Moreover, he follows his smuggled-in assumption with exaggeration. He says, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’ ”
Any Bible reader knows that in the previous chapter, God had forbidden only one tree in the garden. What Satan does is focus on the one thing that God forbade, exaggerate it, and make that the entire focus of attention in order to sneak in the assumption that whatever else God is, he’s an almighty killjoy. He exists to make life as miserable as possible for you.
Hint: therefore you have the right to rebel. “The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden …” She rebukes his exaggeration. He did not forbid everything. So far, she’s on the right track. “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.’ ”
God had forbidden them to eat it. He didn’t say anything about touching. Probably she’s now become a little sensitized and she’s beginning to wonder herself if maybe God is a killjoy so she ratchets up the negation. What might she have said? She might’ve said, “Are you out of your little skull? Take a look around! This is paradise! I’ve got a wonderful husband. He loves me.
There’s nothing wrong anywhere. This is so spectacular, and I don’t even have a long memory back toward anything. I don’t have any bad memories anywhere. Everything that I eat is good and the work is wonderful and the air is clean and God is the very center of my being; he’s my delight.
My husband and I, we walk with him in the cool of the day in an intimacy, for he is God. He made us. He knows everything. He knows what is wise. He knows what is good. I exist for his very pleasure, and you’re suggesting that he doesn’t know what he’s doing and I should stick it to him?” That’s what she should’ve said.
Instead, she wants to begin to entertain the possibility of standing in judgment of God. Thus encouraged, he comes back, verse 4: “ ‘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.’ ”
Now for the first time, Satan introduces a flat-out contradiction of what God says. The first doctrine to be denied is the doctrine of judgment. It is commonly so. If you want to escape the authority of God in Scripture, begin by denying any sanctions. Then it’s safe to rebel against him. Emphasize that he’s the God of love. Forget that his holy perfection demands retribution.
“You will surely not die.” Indeed, God himself is the liar. Not only is he the killjoy, he’s not really telling you the truth. “God knows that when you eat of this fruit 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. We need to think about it very carefully.
Some people have suggested that at this point, Adam and Eve were not really moral beings at all. That’s not the stance of Scripture. God has given them a command, chapter 2, verse 17. He has given them enough understanding so they have the capacity to obey it. Where they are nevertheless at this point is innocent.
In the last verse of chapter 2, we read: “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” Whatever this is saying about their wardrobe or lack thereof, the point is the symbol-ladenness of it. They are completely open to each other and feel no shame. What would it be like not to feel any shame whatsoever about anything you have ever said or done?
You men, would you like your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter to know everything that you’ve said and done and thought? You women, would you like your father, your husband, your brother, your son to know everything you’ve said or done or thought? Every little nurtured resentment and hatred, every unbridled lust, every little sluice of bitterness, and every uncontrolled temper? Would you? Let alone the bigger, obvious things that you can take a camera to. We have so much for which to be ashamed. That’s the truth.
It wasn’t always so. At this point, they were naked and unashamed. They had nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing. They were innocent. Now what the Devil is promising them is an advance on innocence. The heart of the deceitfulness of his temptation is that what the Serpent promised them was partly true and totally false. The truth is that in one sense, by succumbing to this temptation, human beings were opening up to some kind of deeper level of moral consciousness.
God himself acknowledges the point in chapter 3, verse 22. After the fall, “The Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.’ ” There is a sense now in which they have come to know good and evil. In that sense, they have become more godlike. They have opened up to a deeper level of moral consciousness. Yet it was all a lie, a big, vicious lie.
For God knows the difference between good and evil from the outside. He knows about the difference between good and evil from his omniscience. He knows not only all things that have been and all things that are and all things that will be, but even all things that would have been under different circumstances. He knows about good and evil.
These, his image-bearers, learn about good and evil from the inside. They learn about evil by being evil. In that sense, what Satan promised was a total lie. It is a lie so big as to overturn an entire worldview, an entire frame of reference. The incentive is to become like God, to refuse to recognize my place as a creature and become like God. That’s the motive.
To achieve it, in fact, by defying him. That is an intoxication vision. The result is that in the future, God will be regarded at least as a rival, if not as an enemy. Here is where we need to think very clearly about this tree and its fruit. The fruit was not an apple. No apple is mentioned. It is not as if pears and pineapples are okay, but God has it in for apples; he’s a bit arbitrary and whimsical when it comes to fruit.
Nor is it sex, although there is a long tradition in the history of the church that has tried to say that the apple here is a symbol for sexual malfeasance. It’s not that. There’s no hint of it. Quite the opposite. Sex has been introduced as something that is good. In the new covenant, likewise we read in Hebrews, chapter 13 that marriage is honorable in all and the bed undefiled.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with sex. Like all of God’s good gifts, it can be abused and is often abused, but there’s nothing intrinsically evil with it. No, no. This temptation was bound up with a move into experience that would illuminate good and evil experientially from the inside by defying almighty God.
Thus, the temptation was not simply an invitation to break a single rule, though it was that. It was an invitation rather to begin a revolution, to start thinking differently about where the center of everything is. In the beginning, there was God. Human beings made in his image rightly related to him. They woke up and thought about him. They loved him. They cherished him.
They were rightly related to each other because they were rightly related to him. Now with each human being wanting to be at the center of the universe, then God himself gets relegated to the second division. God now if he, she, or it exists, jolly well better exist to please me or, frankly, I’ll find another God, thank you.
And there is the beginning of idolatry, and because I am at the center of the universe, but you, you stupid twit, you think that you’re the center of the universe, pretty soon you start fighting me and I start fighting you. It is not long then before there is fratricide, in the next chapter, and rape and war and hate and lust and greed and animosity. All stemming from idolatry.
All stemming from the simple fact that we say, “I will be God!” That is what this sin really is. It’s a revolution against God, against the Maker, the glorious Maker whose world Adam and Eve are enjoying, whose presence they delight in. “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.”
This verse too illumines my first point, the deceitful repulsiveness that characterized the first temptation. The woman saw that it was good for food.; that is, physically appealing. She saw that it was pleasant to the eye; that is, aesthetically pleasing. She saw that it was desirable for gaining wisdom; that is, mentally transforming. She saw all these things and she made her own judgment. “This is good.”
Already we’re a long way removed from chapters 1 and 2. In chapters 1 and 2, God made something, and he said that it was good. He made something else, and he saw that it was good. He made the whole thing, and he saw that it was very good, for God alone is completely equipped to define what is good and what is evil.
But already this right the woman wants to arrogate to herself. She will define what is good and what is evil. Until we get to the horrid situation in the prophet Isaiah, who describes men and women who put light for darkness and darkness for light, who put good for evil and evil for good. Is that so uncommon in Australia? The woman follows her impressions instead of her instructions, her desire to be fulfilled instead of her desire to obey.
She wants to be like God instead of to love God. She takes some and she eats. 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.” She gave the fruit to Adam and he ate. Presumably the same arguments. Here is the reversal of all that God had made. So in the first place then, we read of the deceitful repulsiveness that characterized that first temptation.
2. The initial consequences that erupted from that first temptation.
Verses 7–13. At one level already, there is massive inversion. The way God had set things up, there was God, there was his pair of image-bearers made in his image, and there was entire created order over which God had placed them, but now the woman listens to the Serpent under her and Adam listens to his wife instead of to God. God rebukes him for that in verse 17.
Together they defy almighty God. There is a massive inversion. It is a strange sort of notion to achieve divinity by inverting everything that God has made. Moreover, there is also right away death. Saint Augustine in the fourth century in his very famous book City of God has some reflections on this passage.
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. 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.”
Oh, they died, all right. The immediate consequences stressed in the text are these. First, verse 7: “Their eyes were opened.” At one level, you see, the Serpent kept his promise. They now deepen the level of their moral consciousness, but from inside evil. It’s a bit like the patient with a disease. The doctor knows the disease from the outside.
The patient may not know much of the medicine, may not know much of the physiology, and may not know much of possible solutions, such as antibacterial agents. The patient knows the disease from the inside. This wretched pair, like you and me, knows sin from the inside. Thus the promised insight to have a deepened moral consciousness in some way turns out to be a massive and grotesque distortion, a hideous anticlimax.
Human beings want enlightenment at all cost. What they lose is the light of God. Far from making them rich and insightful, it now makes them pitiful and grotesque. Now so much torn up on the inside, they can’t even see that they’re lost. Just like a whole roomful of diseased people sharing the same disease may not see what it’s like to be healthy.
Moreover we’re told, “Because their eyes are open, they now know they are naked. They sew fig leaves together for a covering,” verse 7. In one level, it’s pretty sick, isn’t it? It’s a bit pathetic. Yet God himself suggests that they’re doing the right thing at this point. For in verse 21, he gives them garments to cover themselves, garments that are of a more permanent nature, as we shall see.
For the point of the fig leaves, in part, is this. Now they have plenty to be ashamed of and they start covering up. This side of the fall, there is no going back to innocence. None. None. Over the centuries, of course, there have been various nudist colonies. Some of them have merely been excuses for sexual orgies, but not all of them.
Some nudist colonies have had a certain kind of philosophy built into them. Their theory was that if they could have openness in the sexual arena, in the physical arena, then eventually the sheer openness in the physical arena would breed openness in other arenas. Eventually, they would produce a kind of open integrity, an open candor, an openness in every dimension in life such that we would get rid of guilt and subjective shame and things like that and we would be an open, good, honest people.
It has never worked. It never will, because there is no going back. We have eaten the fruit. We know what evil is from the inside. We ourselves now become evil. Standing over against God there is no return to innocence. We jolly well need to cover up. There are sometimes people even in the church who pursue a kind of spiritual nudism. They want everything to hang out.
No matter what the sin, no matter what they have done, they want it all out in the open and talk about this and talk about that and bring it up in the small group and with their prayer partner in the open confession meetings in the church. They want everything to all hang out all the time. Somehow they think this is a mark of spiritual maturity and will breed honesty and integrity among the people of God.
What rubbish! It’s not for nothing that the Bible says, “Love covers over a multitude of sins.” Ephesians says, “There are some things that shouldn’t even be spoken of.” It’s not that there are no sins that should be exposed. After all, the Bible does say that there are certain sins that are to be brought before the church.
The Bible lays out what they are and the reasons for making those sins examples. It does no good to let everything hang out all the time. It doesn’t breed integrity; it breeds a salacious mind. It breeds gossip. It breeds one-upmanship. It does not breed integrity, because there is no way back to innocence. None! None!
Then there’s broken fellowship with God, verses 8–10. “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.” First time. They have one sin and they hide from God. It is always the way. When we have defied God, we are not prepared to meet him.
The Bible is not a book about human beings climbing out of the primordial ooze and trying somehow to find God. The Bible is a book instead of human beings who have defied God and now spend their entire existence running from him, yet somehow drawn to him because they were made in his image, because there is still the stamp of God upon them.
If they don’t want him, they’ll find other gods or a distorted, twisted view of the true God. God pursues them, verse 9. “But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ ” Not because he doesn’t know. He’s not asking the question to get some information but to expose the futility and stupidity of trying to hide from God.
Already here there is grace, and it is only God’s Word that penetrates their concealment. “Adam answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ ” Here is the introduction of fear. The first fear in the Bible: fear of God. Not the reverential fear that is our rightful due. Here is fear of exposure and judgment before a God who has every right to condemn us.
Then there is broken fellowship with other human beings, verses 11 and following. “God said to the man, ‘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.’ ” Not the last time a man has blamed his wife. Mind you, she’s no better. She promptly blames the Serpent. Everybody has to blame somebody else.
I’ll tell you a story about my daughter that I wouldn’t tell you if she weren’t 10,000 miles away. She has learned to drive. She is about to go to university. This past winter, she drove in her first snow. Nasty bit. In a parking lot, she had a small fender bender. She was all right. There wasn’t all that much damage. “Well, Tiff, what happened?”
“My friends told me that if the car had ABS brakes, I would’ve been able to stop in time.”
“Did the car you were driving have ABS brakes?”
“No, but if it did have them …” That is, it’s my fault for not having a car with ABS brakes. “Tiff, if the car did have ABS brakes, do you think maybe you would’ve been going even faster because you would’ve leaned on them too?”
“No, no. I would’ve been careful.”
“Tiff, if you had driven a little more slowly in the parking lot, would you have avoided the accident?”
“Well, yes. But if I had had ABS brakes …”
“Tiff, you were responsible for driving under those conditions with that vehicle, not other conditions with another vehicle. You can tell me, if you like, that you don’t know much about driving in the snow yet. Fine. It’s about time you learned, but don’t make excuses. Go look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I blew it. I was going too fast. I didn’t know enough about driving in snow. It was my fault. I should’ve been more careful.’ ”
Then I ask myself, “Where does my daughter learn behavior like that?” Do you know what my crummy children have against them? They’ve got crummy parents. She’s a sinner, poor tyke. She comes from her parents, who are sinners. All with one accord: wanting to make excuses. These are the initial consequences that erupted from that first temptation.
3. The explicit curse that was pronounced because of this temptation.
Verses 14–19: “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.’ ”
God still remains sovereign. He’s not jeopardized by rebellion. His sovereignty remains undiminished. It is now merely focused in a different context. His first pronouncement of judgment is against the Serpent. Many Christians have thought that this suggests that serpents were at one point reptiles and became serpents at this point. That’s not inconceivable.
On the other hand, sometimes God introduces something that attaches a new symbol-ladenness to a thing. For example, when God imposes circumcision as the covenantal sign on Abraham, it’s not because circumcision was completely unknown in the ancient Near East. There were many, many tribes in the surrounding nations that practiced circumcision.
Circumcision, in the Abrahamic context and for the Jews that followed, was the covenantal sign, which called to mind therefore all of the covenantal strictures, first with Abraham and then from Moses on and so forth. So also here it may be that God now associates with this creature slithering in the dust that it’s a low-down, damned thing.
Yet there is more than that. There is a symbol-ladenness to all of this too. It’s the symbol-ladenness that’s picked up again and again and again in Scripture. Isaiah 65 looks forward to a new heaven and a new earth ultimately. “The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox …”
No more law of the jungle, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. No, no, not in the final state. “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.” There’s something more than that. Verse 15 includes what is sometimes called the protoevangelium. That is, the first announcement of the gospel.
“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.” Even at a merely material level, most of us are not great snake lovers. I know there are a few herpetologists around that like pythons around their necks and things, but most of us are not in that camp.
If you’ve lived in the southwest of the United States and you’ve heard the sound of the rattler, they’re not usually considered your best friends. There are some swamps with water moccasins where their venom will kill you in seconds. I don’t know the array of snakes in this country. I don’t particularly want to find out.
All I know is the second time I came to this country, they put me up in a small apartment. On the fridge door was a great big chart listing all the different kinds of spiders that can kill you. They said very helpful things. If you’re bitten by a nasty spider, try and catch it so that you can take it to the doctor so he will know what kind of antidote to give.
I thought to myself, “I think I’d rather have the snakes.” No, no, no. It’s beyond all of that, isn’t it? It’s beyond all of that yet. For ultimately, the seed of the woman that crushes the snake and is nevertheless given a venomous bite that kills him, that imagery finally comes to its ultimate fruition in Jesus Christ, but it extends beyond Jesus.
It’s applied in the New Testament to believers, for example in Romans 16:20. “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” We too are the offspring of the woman. Not in the definitive way in which Jesus crushes Satan; nevertheless, as followers of him, we do crush Satan ourselves.
So that the Lord Jesus in the days of his flesh, when he is training his own disciples, as the kingdom is beginning to advance and his disciples are beginning to preach the gospel and do wonderful things in his name, as they return with their first reports Jesus says, “I saw Satan fall from heaven.”
Here is God’s return upon the Satan. Here is God’s return by the gospel, by his emissaries and supremely by his Son, who is bitten in the heel, poisoned, killed, yet nevertheless by his death crushes the Serpent’s head. There is a final payback and death is undone. That is the way this links toward the rest of the Bible. This is not to be interpreted the way some liberals interpret it.
They interpret it as, they call it, an etiological myth, which basically means a “just so” story. Just so. “How the serpent lost its legs.” Just so. The Bible is talking at a level way beyond that sort of thing. Whether it was reptilian in the first place and lost its legs, I neither know nor care. What I do know is that God did not leave us condemned and damned under all of Satan’s trickery.
We are not written off, though God could have simply destroyed us, pronounced the death that was our due and done no more. With perfect justice he might’ve done that. Already even in his initial pronouncement of the curse on Satan himself, there is a sign of hope for the future that will unfold in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Then there is the curse on the man and the woman. Verses 16–18: “To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children.’ […] To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, “You must not eat,” 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.”
The designated functions they had from the very beginning, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and to work and till the ground, both of these now become painful, harsh things, difficult things. There are entailments to sin that now drag in the entire created order. Death is introduced. Thorns and thistles. Pain. Suffering. Shall God instead turn away and say, “You can defy me. I don’t really care. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t mind.” Would that make him more noble, more moral?
Instead he gives us to see that by our defiance of him there are entailments not only in our relationships with him and our relationships with one another, but in the entire created order until finally Paul concludes in his great chapter, Romans 8, the entire universe groans in travail waiting for a solution to this thing, waiting for the adoption as sons.
There’s curse upon their relationship. “Your desire will be for your husband …” He says to the woman. “… and he will rule over you.” The two verbs used there in combination are extremely rare. In the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, they are found in only one other place; namely, the next chapter.
In the next chapter, regarding Cain and Abel, we read God rebuking Cain because his sacrifice was not accepted and Cain’s nose was out of joint. He says to Cain, verse 6, “Why are you angry? 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. It desires to have you, but you must master it.”
There’s sin, desiring to have Cain, but Cain must overcome it. Same two verbs. Now in the light of the fall, the woman desires to have the control. The woman desires to have the man. She will try and manipulate and he will brutalize her. Six to one and half dozen to the other. Both corrupt. Both under the fall. Both under the curse. The very heart of an awful lot of marriages we see, including in some measure our own.
4. The long-term effects that flowed from this first temptation.
At the end of the chapter, there is this picture of the cherubim with a flashing sword, forbidding reentry into the garden. This means again there is no way back to innocence, no way back to eternal life, no way now that we can enjoy the presence of God forever. All the rules of the game are changed, as it were.
Last November I had to go and give some lectures in Poland. Normally when I go somewhere, I take the last plane in and take the first plane out so I can spend as much time with my family. That time, I asked their permission to take an extra day in the country, because my last lecture was down near KrakÛw, which is not far away from Auschwitz and Birkenau (Auschwitz II).
I’ve done enough reading of World War II that I wanted to see these places for myself. There was nothing I saw that was brand new to me, but there is a certain kind of impact that is emotionally gut-wrenching. To walk up to the gates for the first time, to see the ironmongery over the top. “Arbeit macht frei,” work sets you free. The place was full of ironies.
You walk inside and you see the brick buildings in the first place that had been built for officer training for the Polish army. It was a Polish barracks before it was taken over by the Nazis. You can go into the building on the right where the German officers had their offices. You can go into the building underneath, which were the torture chambers, including the one where successive generations of prisoners waiting to die had etched on the stone with their fingernails a picture of Christ on the cross.
You can go into the little area where tens of thousands of people were shot down. In Birkenau, in Auschwitz II, you can see these rows and rows and rows all perfectly aligned of paired smokestacks. Each pair of smokestacks represented a hut that was supposed to house not more than 600 people but often housed 1,200 or 1,500 in stacks and tiers.
Most of them were burned down. The Nazis were burning them or destroying them or bombing them out before the Red Army got there, but the last six or eight or so were preserved. You can still walk in them and see the latrines. You could imagine how secure they were in the winter. The big ovens of Auschwitz II were bombed before the Red Army got there, but you can still see the ovens at Auschwitz I.
You can walk through the gas chamber where they could kill about 2,100 people in 20 minutes using Cyclon B, a cyanide derivative. You can still see the mounds of eyeglasses ready to be sorted and the mounds of human hair ready to be shipped off to Germany in order to make fiber. It’s all there. In Western thought, the Holocaust has become, in some respects, Shoah, the unique event.
In some ways I have to say that’s the wrong lesson. In some ways it was unique, of course. There was a certain kind of efficiency in the killing. Careful maintenance of all the records. They tried to destroy them, but there were so many records they couldn’t destroy them all. You can still see them, pictures of every prisoner that came in and wasn’t immediately sent to the gas chambers. All there. All ticked off.
Yet in another sense, the Holocaust was not unique. Not in this bloody century. Maybe 20 million Ukrainians systematically starved to death by the Communists. Maybe 15 million Chinese under Mao. A third of the population of Cambodia. Endless ethnic cleansing and tribal genocide in Africa, now being nicely repeated in the Balkans.
Endless wars and hatred, besides all the small-scale crimes and rapes and hatreds. Not fewer than a hundred million people killed violently in this century, this bloodiest of all centuries. You know what we concluded in the Western world at the end of the century? There is no such thing as evil. It’s all culturally defined. I tell you frankly, I find the Bible’s account of evil a lot more believable than that one.
Yet also here there are the first lines of hope. Verse 20: “Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.” I’ve often wondered why that verse was included here rather than earlier on when their marriage was first consummated. I suspect, though I can’t quite prove it, there is a first hint that Adam understands that out of the progeny of the woman, out of all the living that he and Eve would produce, would come the only hope of this fledgling race.
Isn’t that what God had just said? From the offspring of the woman will arise a redeemer. “The Lord God then made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” One of the better commentators on Genesis writes, “It is unduly supple and a distraction to foresee the atonement here. God is settling immediate rather than ultimate needs, for both are his concern.”
I’m not convinced. It is true that there is nothing said here of a sacrificial animal. It is true that there is not yet here a picture of a lamb that is slain. That’s true, but this is part of a trajectory, part of a whole line that begins here that heads toward the cross. Here already this guilty pair, God provides an answer to.
He takes skins of an animal, which therefore dies, and he covers them over. It’s as if he wants to see them as clean. This in due course leads to more generations of sacrifices. Sacrifices under Abraham, sacrifices under Moses, sacrifices prescribed by God until one day there is the Lamb that was slain.
In God’s mind, from before the foundation of the earth, to take our sin in his own body on the tree, the seed of the woman. Already God is covering them over. Where are we today, we in the Western world with our polite company and our desire to make excuses and our religious pluralism? Follow the Bible’s storyline from here.
The next chapter you get fratricide, the first murder, a brother killing a brother. Then the sin becomes so violent and awful that God sends a flood to destroy most of the race, except for Noah and his family. Noah comes out of it and immediately gets drunk. Then the race multiplies again, and they want to build a tower to God to protect them from any further flood and to be “in your face” against God too.
God disperses the race, but mercifully he reaches in and takes out a man and his wife, their family, Abraham, a new covenantal people. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the patriarchs. Abraham is a good man, a friend of God, but he’s also a liar. Isaac turns out in some ways to be a bit of a wimp. Jacob is the deceiver.
The 12 … Talk about a dysfunctional family. One is sleeping with his father’s concubine. Where do concubines come from? One is sleeping with his daughter-in-law and 10 of them can’t decide whether they want to murder a brother or sell him into slavery. Eventually the people go down into slavery and God pulls them out. Are they delighted that God rescues them?
No, it’s as if God has to talk them into being rescued. No sooner are they across the Red Sea, a few months down the road, receiving the Law … You’d think that after all of those miracles, all of those spectacular displays of grace and power, they would trust the living God. While Moses is getting the Ten Commandments, they’re having an orgy in front of a golden calf.
So it goes on and goes on. When they finally get in the Promised Land, things descend in endless cycles of rebellion and sin and corruption and decay until you get to the last three chapters of the book of Judges, and you can scarcely read them in polite company, they’re so grotesque. Even the moral reasoning of the good guys at the end of Judges is corrupt.
“In those days, everyone did that which was right in his own eyes. There was no king in Israel.” When God finally does provide a king, a man after his own heart, a great and good king, he’s also a murderer and an adulterer. So the race descends. Need I go on? This is who you and I are. This is who you and I are.
We are not to think of the Nazis of some special breed of some especially evil people. Germany was the most educated nation in the Western world … sophisticated, learned, wonderful universities, the top of Enlightenment civilization. Just give us the right parameters and this damned race could do it again and again and again. But already God has provided a covering. That is what brings us to Easter.
Astounding grace, that God the Son should choose
to leave the 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 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, 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, a certainty of hell,
yet find in Christ my fears completely quelled.
Once I was blind. In shoreless wastes I drowned.
My guilt’s forgiven, the lost sheep has been found.
My guilt forgiven, I gaze upon his face,
Exalting Christ and his astounding grace.
Let us pray.
O Lord God, amidst the many, many pressures in our culture to relativize sin, to make ourselves seem less evil and more noble, to give ourselves excuses, forbid that we who stand under the Word should ever fall into those traps. Help us, even in the rejoicing of the Easter season, to understand truly what it was that drove the Savior to the cross. It was my guilt that nailed him there.
Grant, therefore, merciful God, that without excuse, with deep shame, we may come before him who loved us even to death and cry again with gratitude and worship, “You are the Lamb of God. You are the hope of our race. You are our mediator. You are my Redeemer. You are my Savior. I cast myself before you and trust you, my living God and risen Lord. Forgive me for Jesus’ sake.” We ask these great mercies in the name of your dear Son, our Savior. Amen.
