the PROBLEM

Genesis 3: Paradise Lost

Intro: You never know what you have until you lose it [Phrase in Cuba] and Paradise with God

The Fall

vv.1-5: The Conversation

Intro into this section:

Verses 1-5 describe the dialogue that leads to the descent of Adam and Eve, and verses 6, 7 describe the couple’s actual descent into the pit. The surprise here is that the initiator of the dialogue is a talking snake! And more, it is not a bad snake— because everything that God created he called “good.” Neither is it a good snake gone bad. Sin had made no entrance into the world at this point. Its description as “crafty” (or “shrewd”) does not imply evil. The word has the idea of being wary and of knowing when dangers lurk.

The Scriptures encourage the naive and simple to cultivate such an attitude (cf. Proverbs 1: 4), but if it is misused it becomes guile (cf. Job 5: 12; 15: 5; Exodus 21: 14; Joshua 9: 4). This is a snake, a naturally shrewd creature, under the control of Satan— and a natural tool. The New Testament identifies this serpent as the devil, referring back to this scene in paradise (cf. Revelation 12: 9; 20: 2). The snake’s designation as “more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made” may suggest that it was not a common part of the garden’s pet population and may also explain why Eve was not put off by its talking.

The Path of Peril and what is really being attack here,

The attack toward God’s Word [maybe explain the snake use of Elohim[Creator more distant] than Yahweh [Covenant name]

Eve: downward walk

diminished God’s word,

God had said in 2: 16, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden”, but now Eve leaves out the “every,” simply saying, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden”v.2 . Thus she minimized the provision of the Lord. Her inexact, unenthusiastic rendition of God’s word discounted his generosity. She was in tacit agreement with the serpent. Something bad was happening in her heart.

then added to his word,

look at this addition to God’s word: “But God [Elohim] said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it’” v3. God never said, “neither shall you touch it”! Eve magnified God’s strictness—“Just touch the tree, and zap!— you’re dead!” Her comment suggested that God is so harsh that an inadvertent slip would bring death.

and then softened his word.

Eve paradoxically softened God’s word by merely saying, “lest you die.” She left out the word “surely” (2: 17). The certitude of death was removed. So, in the extended sentence that makes up verses 2, 3, Eve, in a breath, at once diminished, added to, and softened God’s word. Her revisionist approach to the holy word of God put her in harm’s way. And it likewise does so today.

Kenneth Mathews points out: “The woman listens to the serpent, the man listens to the woman, and no one listens to God.”

Close with Frank Sinatra and the most requested funeral song I did it my Way, my way to death and judgement.

The word that brought life and make everything cannot be changed

The Confrontation

Initial Illustration: Arlo and the great Cover up oh boy the running from trouble.

‘In an instant the original couple passed from life to death, from sinlessness to sin, from harmony to alienation, from trust to distrust, from ease to dis-ease. It did not take a day. It happened in a millisecond! Adam and Eve, as our parents, were genetically, historically, and theologically every man and every woman. They are paradigmatic of all of us— not only in their original sin, but because the way they attempted to deal with their sin is the pattern with which we attempt to deal with it today. And the way that God dealt with Adam and Eve is the way he deals with us. So there the first couple were, in their ridiculous fig leaves, slouching around paradise lost. God then confronted them in a graciously gentle, remedial way. And in their confrontation, we see our confrontation’. [Hughes, R. Kent]

God seeks they HIDE.

Vs 8-10 But can we hide from God’s Presence

Psalm139

7 Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?

8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!

Hiding does not go well, ask Jonah that got in a Whale of a problem trying to hide, and for Adam and Even this hide and seek game does not end well let’s look at the text.

Found! it is time for excuses vv11-13

It is not my fault says Adam, it is not my fault said Eve, it is not my fault said the Serpent? So, whose fault is?

It is never our fault [Calvin and Hobbes strip]

But IT IS.

However, the fault stopped with Jesus. We see this so clearly on Calvary’s three crosses. Blameless Jesus hung between two blameworthy thieves. Christ hung as the innocent among the guilty. But on that hill a miracle happened. One of the thieves ceased cursing and began to listen. And before he died, he declared Jesus to be guiltless, saying, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23: 42). During the ensuing darkness of Calvary, that guilty man’s sins were lifted from him and placed on Jesus. His blame stopped when it rested on Jesus. The so-called buck of our guilt stopped with Jesus, the second Adam. Have you stopped passing the buck? Have you said the guilt for your sin is yours alone? And then, have you passed it on to Jesus?

Curse/Sin

The serpent is cursed but also the Devil is cursed:

14 The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. 15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

Jack Collins, “A Syntactical Note (Genesis 3: 15): Is the Woman’s Seed Singular or Plural?” Tyndale Bulletin, 48.1 (1997), pp. 139-148. [REALLY GOOD cited and will try to paraphrase in sermon]

‘What we have here is an astounding gospel prophecy because God’s curse upon the serpent turned into a word of grace, giving what has been recognized from the second century A.D. as the “first gospel,” the protoevangelium, when the post-apostolic fathers Justin Martyr and Irenaeus preached that the woman’s offspring (literally, “seed”) here referred to Christ who would crush Satan’s head. This has been the church’s position, with little variation, until the rise of modern biblical criticism, which views it as nothing more than a statement that there would be perpetual conflict between humanity and the snake population in which humanity would ultimately triumph. But we know such thinking is wrong, for several good reasons. Most tellingly, in 250 B.C. when Jewish scholars translated the Bible into Greek, giving the world the Septuagint translation, they interpreted the word “seed” (“offspring” in the ESV) as a single individual—“ he will crush your head.” The Septuagint translators, who could not possibly have had any Christian presuppositions, understood the seed of the woman to be a future individual who would deal a deathblow to the serpent. Later rabbinic commentators saw it otherwise, but not the original Septuagint translators. Recently Hebrew scholar Jack Collins examined every use of the word “seed” when it means offspring and found that when the word is singular (as it is here in Genesis 3: 15) it always denotes a specific descendant and that when it is an individual, the pronoun will be masculine. Thus, in the broader context of Genesis Collins argues that “it would be fair to read this as God’s threat to the snake, of an individual who will engage the snake in combat and win.”

And there is more, because when Christ came, he understood the “first gospel” in Genesis. He understood that he himself was the antidote to the serpent’s venom. In fact just prior to declaring “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3: 16) Jesus said, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (vv. 14, 15). As we were learning last week as we reflected upon that precise moment in which the serpent head was crushed.

Once again the order is inverted, corresponding to the order of the culprits’ collusion: the judgment oracles assign punishment to the serpent first (vv. 14–15), then the woman (v. 16), and then the man (vv. 17–19). In each instance the punishment will also correspond to the nature of the crime. Each oracle consists of a divine penalty followed by a description of the consequences—defeat. For the serpent the penalty is humiliation (v. 14a), and the consequence of his sin is his defeat by the woman’s “offspring” (v. 15b). For the woman the penalty is painful labor in childbirth (v. 16a), and the consequence of her sin is defeat in her conflict with her husband (v. 16b); and for the man the penalty is painful labor in agriculture (vv. 17–18), and the consequence is defeat in his conflict with the ground (v. 19). Dispute about whether the oracles are prescriptive or descriptive, especially the woman’s submission (v. 16b), is overplayed since it is apparent that the whole is shadowed by the tenor of retribution. The passage anticipates judgment for transgression since 2:17; and if 2:5–7 expects the denouement in 3:14–19 (see 2:5–7 discussion), the Eden narrative as a whole is built on this expectation.

God does not inquire further into the calamity by questioning the serpent; the tempter has nothing to learn from the Lord. He only has words of condemnation for the serpent, whereas the man and woman receive God’s continued concern and provision in the midst of their punishment. Curses are uttered against the serpent and the ground, but not against the man and woman, implying that the blessing has not been utterly lost. It is not until human murder, a transgression against the imago Dei, that a person (Cain) receives the divine curse (see 4:11–12 discussion).

K. A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26, vol. 1A, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 243.The promise of Grace

Promise/Hope

But before the Promise is delivered we need to see the consequences,

Read the portion of the consequences with a brief commentary beside it:

Childbearing.

Marriage.

Work

Earth

Exile

Marcus Dods, the brilliant nineteenth-century Scottish preacher and scholar, and principal of New College, Edinburgh University, makes these remarkably penetrating observations: It is also to be remarked that the clothing which God provided was in itself different from what man had thought of. Adam took leaves from an inanimate, unfeeling tree; God deprived an animal of life, that the shame of His creature might be relieved. This was the last thing Adam would have thought of doing. To us life is cheap and death familiar, but Adam recognized death as the punishment of sin. Death was to early man a sign of God’s anger. And he had to learn that sin could be covered not by a bunch of leaves snatched from a bush as he passed by . . . but only by pain and blood. Sin cannot be atoned for by any mechanical action nor without expenditure of feeling. Suffering must ever follow wrongdoing. From the first sin to the last, the track of the sinner is marked with blood. . . . It was made apparent that sin was a real and deep evil, and that by no easy and cheap process could the sinner be restored. . . . Men have found that their sin reaches beyond their own life and person, that it inflicts injury and involves disturbance and distress, that it changes utterly our relation to life and to God, and that we cannot rise above its consequences save by the intervention of God Himself, by an intervention which tells us of the sorrow He suffers on our account.

Christian tradition has referred to 3:15 as the protevangelium since it has been taken as the prototype for the Christian gospel. Historically interpreters have differed about whether “her seed” refers to an individual or is a collective singular indicating all humanity. The LXX version may be the earliest attested interpretation of “seed” as an individual. It translates the Hebrew zeraʿ (“seed”) with the Greek sperma, a neuter noun. The expected antecedent pronoun is “it [auto] will crush your head,” but the Greek has “he” (autos), which suggests that the translators interpreted “seed” as an individual. The Targums, Jewish pseudepigrapha, and later rabbinic commentators, however, generally viewed the “seed” as collective for humankind. Christian interpreters showed a mixed opinion.210 Justin and Irenaeus interpreted the woman of 3:15 as the virgin Mary by drawing a parallel with Eve. Greek Fathers, such as Chrysostom, viewed 3:15 as a depiction of the struggle between Satan and humanity. Still others interpreted “seed” as the church. Among the Latin Fathers, Augustine with others allegorized or moralized the verse, indicating a collective use. Others saw in it a specific reference to the virgin birth. This was aided by some Old Latin texts and the Vulgate, which had the feminine pronoun “she [ipsa] shall crush” rather than the masculine. It was Ambrose who first quoted 3:15 as not “her seed” but “the woman’s seed.” Among the Reformers, Luther took “her seed” as reference to both humanity in general and Christ in particular; Calvin demurred such a view and applied it as a collective, not to all humanity but rather to the church under the headship of Christ, which would prove victorious (quoting Rom 16:20).

Our passage provides for this mature reflection that points to Christ as the vindicator of the woman (cp. Rom 16:20). There may be an allusion to our passage in Gal 4:4, which speaks of God’s Son as “born of a woman.” Specifically, Paul identified Christ as the “seed” ultimately intended in the promissory blessing to Abraham (Gal 3:16), and Abraham’s believing offspring includes the church (Rom 4:13, 16–18; Gal 3:8). This is further developed in John’s Gospel, where the spiritual dimension is at the forefront. Jesus alluded to our verse when he indicted the Pharisees as children of the “devil” because of their spiritual apostasy (John 8:44), contrary to their claims to be the offspring of righteous Abraham (8:39). John used similar imagery when he contrasted God’s “seed” and those who are “of the devil” (1 John 3:7–10). This is heightened by his appeal to Cain’s murder of righteous Abel as paradigmatic of one “who belonged to the evil one” (3:11–15). Finally, the Apocalypse describes the “red dragon,” who is identified as “that ancient serpent” (Rev 12:9), opposing the believing community (i.e., the woman) and plotting the destruction of her child (i.e., the Messiah). Ultimately, “that ancient serpent” is destroyed by God for its deception of the nations (Rev 20:2, 7–10)

K. A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26, vol. 1A, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 247–248.Conclude with the Promise of Grace and the children book [As children return from Sunday School] from Sophie and the Heidelberg Cat.