Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction-

We’re continuing in our series Creation and Fall, a series that has taken us a few months, and we’re now moving from creation towards the fall.

We’re in the garden, both the man and the woman are there.

And we’re being introduced to a new character, the serpent.

If you have your Bible with you, please turn to Genesis, and we’re in chapter 3, the first 5 verses there.

Let’s look at our Scripture for today :

Let your Word, Father, be a lamp for our feet and a light to our path, so that we may understand what you wish to teach us and follow the path your light marks out for us.

To Be Like God

This is one of the key stories of Judeo/Christian belief - and yet it feels incomplete.

At this point we have in our story the Creation - all the animals, birds, fish, plants, trees, man and woman; and we have the Creator - God.

It feels incomplete because it does not tell us where evil comes from.

There is no mention of the devil that we so often put there.

In fact, nowhere in the entire story is the devil introduced in bodily form.

All we have is what was created by the Creator and that which was pronounced good.

In our passage this morning, we have humankind and we are introduced to the serpent - one of the animals God has created and as hard as it is for us to understand God pronounced the ENTIRE creation “GOOD”!

We’re not told where evil comes from, yet we see that evil takes place.

How? Through humankind, the serpent, and the tree.

Now, explicit characterization of actors in the story is rare in Hebrew narrative, so it seems likely that in noting the snake’s shrewdness the narrator is hinting that his remarks should be examined very carefully.

So in taking with Wenham’s advice let’s look at what the serpent says in the narrative:

“Did God actually say…?”

At first it seems so innocent, a simple question of all things.

The serpent does not question whether God had issued the command, but (as Bonhoeffer would put it,)

opens the eyes of the human being to a depth of which the human being has until now been unaware, a depth from which one would be in a position to establish or to dispute whether a word is God’s word or not.

This is the very question that all of us struggle with at one level or another.

One might say this is the key temptation for all those who profess to believe in and/or follow God.

Did God actually say…?

In speaking of this temptation Bonhoeffer writes:

The decisive point is that through this question the idea is suggested to the human being of going behind the word of God and now providing it with a human basis—a human understanding of the essential nature of God.

Should the word contradict this understanding, then the human being has clearly misheard.

After all, it could only serve God’s cause if one put an end to such false words of God, such a mistakenly heard command, in good time.

So now, we as humans are asked directly did we understand what God said, and we are bothered by that human communication conundrum of : Understanding what we think it was that was said, but not being sure if what we heard is what was meant.

We all do this in finding wiggle room to do what we want - “Mom didn’t say we couldn’t do… she only said not to....”

Let’s examine the question the serpent asked:

“Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”

The question is asked putting the prohibition in God’s mouth first, “You shall not eat...” That’s not how it was phrased.

If we go back to chapter 2:16 & 17 we read:

Now in verse 18 is where God said, “It’s not good for man to be alone...” and we discussed the creation of woman last week.

So this conversation, and indeed this command was apparently made prior to the woman being created.

Yet she seems to know it, in fact she even quotes it in the same positive that it was given:

We may eat - there is freedom there.

We also know God did set a boundary...

Verse 3

We see a subtle change in what was said.

A detail is added: “neither shall you touch it,...” Why?

None of us can say that we truly know.

I do know from my own experience how often we as humans in defending our point will add a detail, perhaps to give more credibility to our statement.

So if we are reading this narrative we can see the error that the woman has made, but that’s not what the serpent challenges.

Instead the serpent actually challenges the Word of God.

“God knows...” oooh, the temptation.

These words from the serpent subtly tempt the woman with the idea that God is not revealing everything to her that there is more to be revealed.

God is keeping secrets.

“your eyes will be opened,” God is somehow keeping you in the dark, but you could know and see much more than what you already see.

“you will be like God,” the woman knew she and the man were created in the image of God, surely this would make sense then that she should “be like God”, she must have misunderstood what the prohibition was for.

“knowing good and evil,” up until this time neither the man nor the woman had any knowledge of good and evil, there only was their relationship with God.

They did not understand that as good, it just was what was.

Three Lies...

There are three lies that the woman is convinced of in this conversation with the serpent:

This is a pious question and altogether innocent.

That God does not desire what’s best for her and thus somehow is not speaking plainly to her.

That we have the ability to sit in judgment on God’s word.

The truth:

This is not a pious question, it is, in truth, an utterly godless question.

If we ask it here, we have to ask it everywhere.

Bonhoeffer :

Did God really say …?—that is the utterly godless question.[11]

Did God really say that God is love, that God wishes to forgive us our sins, that we need only believe God, that we need no works, that Christ died and was raised for our sakes, that we will have eternal life in the kingdom of God, that we are no longer alone but upheld by God’s grace, that one day all grieving and wailing shall come to an end?

Did God really say: You shall not steal, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not bear false witness.…? Did God really say this to me?

Or does it perhaps not apply to me in particular?

Did God really claim to be a God of wrath toward those who do not keep God’s commandments?

Did God really demand the sacrifice of Christ—the God whom I know better, the God whom I know to be the infinitely good, all-loving Father?

This is the question that appears so innocuous but through which evil wins its power in us and through which we become disobedient to God.

Were the question to come to us with its godlessness unveiled and laid bare, we would be able to resist it.

But Christians are not open to attack in that way; one must actually approach them with God, one must show them a better, a prouder, God than they seem to have, if they are to fall.

I believe it was G.K. Chesterton who quipped that “Man was created in God’s image and he was very quick to return the favor.”

We are more ready to give to God our attributes than to clothe ourselves with God’s.

We know that this question is wrong, and it contains evil.

What is that evil?

It is that the question already contains the wrong answer.

It required the woman to sit in judgment on God’s Word instead of simply listening to it and doing it.

James picks up on this theme:

and then again later in Chapter 4 of the same lesson:

My hope personal desire is to be a doer of the Word and not simply a hearer.

In doing so though I must be a student of the Word applying it to my life.