The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels (Gen. 3)

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical Theology from Genesis 3.

Hello. My name is Don Carson. You are watching the second in a series of 14 talks designed to help you discover what the Bible says. About a century ago, the Times of London, certainly at that point in history the most prestigious English-language newspaper in the world, hosted various fascinating discussions in its columns and on its editorial pages.

At one juncture, the editors invited a number of well-known writers and thinkers to contribute a piece on one designated topic, “What is wrong with the world?” Opinions were diverse and learned. G.K. Chesterton, proverbial for his clear-headed wit, weighed in with a simple letter to the editors to answer the question, “What is wrong with the world?” He wrote, “Dear Sirs, I am. Yours sincerely, G.K. Chesterton.” This talk centers on how the Bible would answer that question.

The second part, “The God Who Did Not Wipe Out Rebels” and the passage we will focus on especially is Genesis 3. You may recall I said at the end of the last hour that Genesis 1 and 2 set the stage for what goes wrong, and in general terms, of course, that was correct. What I neglected to say, however, is there is a particular element in chapter 2 that sets the stage for chapter 3.

That is, chapter 2 in verse 17 records one prohibition God gives to Adam and Eve. They are to enjoy the garden, all its fecundity. They are to work at it, enjoy it. It’s a place of delight, but they are not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is a prohibition, and if you do eat of it, you will die.

We’ll consider in due course why God bothered to give a prohibition. Wasn’t that sort of setting them up for failure? We’ll consider that in due course, but without that prohibition, we cannot possibly understand chapter 3. Let me begin by reading chapter 3 right through and then making a couple of comments about how to understand it and then work it through again. This is what the Bible says.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.” ’

‘You will not certainly 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 make your pains in childbearing very severe; 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 them 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.”

How shall we understand this chapter? In quite another part of the Bible, one we’re not going to have time to explore in detail, the account is told of King David who seduces a young woman next door, and when he is caught out he arranges to have her husband killed. So you have a powerful man and a weak man and the thing that is desired, in this case, the woman.

When the prophet Nathan is sent by God to confront King David for this cleverly concealed adultery and murder, because the king is at the end of the day an autocrat, Nathan approaches with a certain amount of care, and he tells a parable. “Your majesty,” he says. “Something has gone wrong up country. There’s a really, really rich farmer. Herds and cattle and flocks you wouldn’t believe, and next door is a dirt farmer. One little lamb. That’s it.

Well, he doesn’t even have that anymore. Some people came by to see the rich dude, and he went and swiped the one poor little lamb from the dirt farmer.” A very powerful man, a weak man, and something that’s desired. Initially, David doesn’t see the connection, but eventually he does, and he’s exposed, and he’s crushed by it and so forth.

You can see what the parable is doing. It’s getting to an analogous situation by telling something similar in an account: a rich man, a weak man, and that which is desired. Yet, if you compare the stories you also see differences. What’s desired in the first instance is a woman. What’s desired in the second instance is a lamb.

In the first instance, it’s the weak man who is killed so David can hide his sin. In the second instance, it’s that which is desired that is killed, the lamb itself. The stories are not parallel. If they were exactly the same, of course, it wouldn’t be an analogy. It wouldn’t be a parable. Sometimes when stories are told, they get the grist of the thing out there, but they may be sufficiently symbol-laden that you have to work your way through things.

Here we’ll see in due course this serpent may be the embodiment of Satan, or he may be the symbol for Satan, and the Bible doesn’t really care to explain which. It doesn’t care. What it does say about Satan can be delineated pretty precisely, but exactly what the communication arrangements were in Eden we cannot understand exactly. With that introduction, let me suggest four things that emerge unmistakably from this chapter.

1. The deceitful repulsiveness of that first rebellion

Especially verses 1 to 6. The deceitful repulsiveness of that first rebellion. We’re introduced to the Serpent. According to later Scripture, again the last book of the Bible, we’re told Satan himself stands behind the Serpent in some sense in Revelation 12.

Moreover, his smooth talk aligns him with another description of Satan where we’re told he goes about as an angel of light deceiving, if it were possible, the very chosen ones of God. A smart-mouth. We’re also told he was made by God. “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.”

In other words, the Bible does not set Satan up or the Serpent up as a kind of anti-God like matter and anti-matter with exactly the same power and potency and when they collide they explode and there’s nothing. There is not God and an equivalent anti-God. A bit like the light side and the dark side in the force, and you lean one way or you lean the other way. That’s just not the picture. The picture is even Satan himself is a dependent being, a created being.

This passage does not tell us how or when he fell. Elsewhere, he’s clearly part of the angelic number who rebelled against God. The angels had their own forms of rebellion we learn elsewhere, but none of that is described here. He just shows up. We’re told in our English versions he was the most crafty of the wild animals God had made.

I was brought up in French Canada and learned English in Canada and lived in Europe for many years, so my ears don’t always hear things exactly the way American ears hear things, but does the word crafty suggest to you surreptitiousness and sneakiness? Does it have negative overtones? It does to me, but the word that is used here in Hebrew can be either positive or negative, depending on the context. In many places it’s rendered something like prudence.

For example, in Proverbs 12, “A prudent man keeps his knowledge to himself.” It doesn’t mean a crafty man, sneaky little blighter. It means someone who is wise and prudent. Do you see? Again, Proverbs 14, “The prudent are crowned with knowledge.” It doesn’t mean the crafty are. I suspect the image, then, in the very first verse is of this being who was crowned with more prudence than all the others, but in rebelling it became craftiness. The very same virtue that is such a strength once twisted becomes a vice.

In any case, he approaches the woman. What the modes of communication were I have no idea. He does not begin by a denial or a direct temptation. He begins with a question: “Did God really say that? Did God really say you’re not to eat of the fruit in the garden?” Notice what he’s doing. It expresses just the right amount of skepticism, a slightly incredulous “Can you really believe God would say that?”

Like an employee, “Can you imagine what the boss has done this time?” Except that the person whose word is being questioned is the Maker, the Designer, God the Sovereign. In some ways, the question is both disturbing and flattering. It smuggles in the assumption that we have the ability, even the right, to stand in judgment of what God has said.

Then the Devil has made it worse by exaggeration. God did forbid one fruit. The way he frames the question, “Did God forbid you to eat any of the fruit in the garden?” which casts God as the cosmic party pooper. God basically exists to spoil my fun. I might want a snack, but God says, “No!” I want to do something, and God says, “No! No! No!” He’s just the cosmic party pooper. “Can you believe God said that?”

She replies with a certain amount of insight, wisdom, and grace, at least initially. She corrects him on his facts. She says, “God did say, ‘You must not eat from the tree that is in the middle of the garden,’ but we may eat from the trees in the garden …” His exaggeration is set aside, but then she adds her own exaggeration over against what the Devil says.

“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 …’ ” God hadn’t said anything about not touching it. It’s almost as if the prohibition to eat has gotten her sufficiently riled up that she has to exaggerate the meanness of the prohibition.

Then comes the first overt contradiction of God: “You will not certainly die.” The first doctrine denied in the Bible is the doctrine of judgment. It’s often the case, because if you can get rid of that one, then you’re free to do anything. There are no consequences. “Indeed, God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Here is the big ploy, the total temptation. The heart of the vicious deceitfulness in what the Serpent promises is partly true and totally false. It’s true, after all, her eyes will be opened, and in some sense she will see the difference between good and evil. She will determine it for herself. God himself says so at the end of the chapter.

After all, God says in verse 22, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” and yet, God knows good and evil with the knowledge of omniscience. He knows all that has been, all that is, all that will be, and all that would have been under different circumstances. He knows it all. She comes to know it by experience.

My wife is a cancer survivor. She has had a double mastectomy. They still watch her very closely. The oncologists know an awful lot about cancer from the outside. She knows cancer from the inside. God knows all there is to know about sin but not by becoming a sinner. She’ll find out about the knowledge of good and evil from the inside. It’s a total lie.

Indeed, the expression in Hebrew, “the knowledge of good and evil,” is often used in places where to have the knowledge of good and evil is to have the ability to pronounce what is good and pronounce what is evil. That’s what God had done, if you recall. He had made something; it was good. He made something else; it was good. He made the whole thing, and it was very good, for God has this sovereign, grounded-in-infinite-knowledge ability to pronounce what is good.

Now this woman wants this God-like function. God says, “It’s not good to eat that fruit; you’ll die,” but if she does, she’s pronouncing her own good and evil. She’s becoming like God claiming the sort of independence that belongs only to God, the self-existence that belongs only to God. To be as God, to achieve it in fact by outwitting him or to rebel against him is an intoxicating program! That means God himself will henceforth be regarded, consciously or not, at least as a rival and maybe as an enemy because I pronounce my own good, thank you!

I suppose we need to think a little bit more about this tree. What was the fruit? There is no text that says it was an apple, as if God really hates apples but is rather partial toward pineapples and pears. It’s not even necessary to suppose the apple is a kind of magical thing, such that by ingesting this particular fruit (whatever it is) suddenly a switch goes on in the brain, the chemistry changes, and now you suddenly start pronouncing good and evil. That’s not quite the point.

Regardless of what it is, it’s something that is an inevitable test. If God makes image-bearers and pronounces what is good and what is evil, he orders the whole system. Then to come along at any point and say, “No, I will declare my own good; what you say is evil I will declare to be good and what you say is good I will declare to be evil,” makes that thing the knowledge of good and evil. That’s why it’s called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It’s not the kind of fruit that is crucial. It’s the rebellion. It’s the standing over against God. It’s the de-Godding of God. It is, in short, idolatry.

It wasn’t sex either. Through the history of the Christian church, many people have argued the tree here is really a symbol for sex, but in fact, when God brings the man and woman together in this first marriage, he thinks it’s all very good. Long after this chapter toward the end of the Bible, one of the writers says, “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled …”

There’s nothing in the Bible that says sex is intrinsically evil, though like all of God’s good gifts it can be abused and distorted and twisted and perverted. No. This is not simply an invitation to break a rule arbitrarily or otherwise. That’s what a lot of people think that sin is, just breaking a rule.

What is at stake here is something deeper, bigger, sadder, uglier, and more heinous. It’s a revolution. It makes me God and, thus, de-Gods God. When the woman saw the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom, physically appealing, aesthetically pleasing, sapientially transforming, transforming by wisdom, she took some and ate.

For those of you who know the language, “take and eat,” which Christians recite at the Lord’s Supper, it’s impossible not to think that “take and eat” language, so simple the act and so hard the undoing as someone has said, won’t be connected with salvation and forgiveness and transformation until someone has died in our stead, but that’s much farther down the line. “… and she gave some to Adam, and he ate it.” Apparently, he was with her in all of this. Here’s the ugliness of the whole thing.

2. The initial consequences that erupted from this first rebellion

What there is, initially, is a massive inversion. God makes the man who loves his wife who comes from him, and together they are to be vice-regents over the created order. Instead, one of the created order (the Serpent) seduces the woman who hauls in the man, and together they defy God. There’s a massive inversion of the whole thing.

Of course, there’s death. It’s not too surprising. If God is the Creator and gives life, then if you detach yourself from this God, if you defy this God, what is there but death? He’s the one who brought it all into being in the first place. He didn’t bring it into being that it might be completely autonomous from him, so if one walks away from him, what is there but death? If you pronounce your own good and evil and decide for yourself what is up and what is down, then you have detached yourself from the God who made you, and there is nothing but death. What kind of death? Christians have wrestled with this one.

In the fourth century there was a Christian thinker by the name of Augustine who wrote, “If it be asked what death God threatened them with, whether bodily or spiritual or that second death [that is language that is used for hell itself], we answer, ‘It was all …’ [God] comprehends therein, not only the first part of the first death, wheresoever the soul loses God [that is, we die spiritually; we hide from God and become dead to God] …”

But the second part also, where our body returns to the ground and our very being before God is lost and condemned or even the ultimate death, “… the last of deaths, eternal following after all.” You cannot cut yourself off from the God of the Bible without consequences. Note the results that are immediately emphasized by the text.

We’re told in verse 7 their eyes were opened, they knew they were naked, and in consequence, they sewed fig leaves together for a covering. On one level the Serpent had kept his promise, but this new consciousness of good and evil, this determination to specify what is good and evil in our own little world is not a happy result. Its insight is demonstrable, but it results in massive and grotesque anticlimax. There is no pleasure, finally, but shame, guilt. Now they have something to hide, so they sew fig leaves, which are meant to be a bit silly. You can’t hide moral shame with fig leaves.

It’s also a way of saying there’s no way back to Eden. You can’t undo that sort of thing. If you commit a theft, you can return what you’ve stolen. In that sense, you can undo it, but the stain in your own being can’t be undone. If you commit adultery, you can’t undo it. If you or I defy God, we cannot undo the defiance. It can’t be undone. There’s no way back. We’re now covered in shame, so as a result there’s this broken fellowship with God in verses 8 to 10.

Instead of enjoying God’s fellowship, whatever it meant to say that God walked with them in the cool of the day, he met with them, and they enjoyed him.… Throughout all of Christian experience in every religion there have been elements of human experience that have tried to connect with God, to feel him, to enjoy some sort of mystical experience with the God of the gods or the other or the transcendent.

These people knew this kind of intimate connection with God their Maker in unsurpassed joy and the most intimate communion and delighted in it, and now it was gone. You catch some small, small glimpse of it if you’ve been married for 10 years in a really, really, really good marriage. Then you slip up and you sleep with somebody you shouldn’t sleep with, and you know it and your spouse knows it. You can’t look them in the eye anymore. There is shame. You hide. There are certain things you can’t talk about anymore.

That’s why throughout the Bible, in fact, sometimes human sin before God is described in terms of sexual betrayal. In one Old Testament writer, Hosea, about the eighth century before Christ, God is presented (it’s hard to believe) as the ultimate cuckold, the ultimate betrayed husband because his own people abandon him and chase other gods even though he has given them life.

There is broken fellowship with each other, too. It’s almost funny in a sad, degenerate sort of way. “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” “The woman you put here with me.… It’s her fault!” Not the last time some character has blamed his wife, but she’s no better. “Not my fault, God. I mean, that Serpent, he really fooled me.” One of the things that happens where there is this kind of rebellion, of course, is that you don’t take responsibility. You just duck.

3. The explicit curses God pronounces in the wake of this rebellion

(Verses 14 and following) There are three. “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.’ ”

There are some people who think this is a kind of fairy tale, what is called an etiological myth, a “just so” story, how the Serpent lost his legs. That’s what this story is really all about, you see. Once upon a time, snakes were really serpents and they all had legs, and this is how the Serpent lost his legs.” Is that what it’s about? Who knows? But I do know sometimes God picks up something that is already there and uses it in a new, symbol-laden way.

In the last hour this evening we’ll be introduced to this chap Abraham. Abraham is told to introduce circumcision to the men in his family and clan, but you must understand circumcision wasn’t invented by God or by Abraham; circumcision was practiced throughout the ancient Near East. It was not an unknown rite, but when God imposed it for reasons we’ll see shortly it had a new, special symbol-ladeness in the context of his relationship with Abraham.

It wasn’t a brand new phenomenon, but it had a new symbol relationship to reality. So also here. The snake may well have been scurrying along the ground, but now it becomes a deeply symbol-laden thing. The Devil himself is cast out and is rejected. A slimy thing rejected and running along the ground, as it were, and the symbolism of the Bible keeps along those lines.

The prophet Isaiah in late eighth century, for example, in the sixty-fifth chapter describes a day coming when “The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like an ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food.” Not because serpents are somehow less moral than lions, but in the symbolism of the day the Serpent was connected with the Devil, with all that was slimy and lowdown, disgusting.

When we’re told, “I will put enmity between you and the woman …” Between the Serpent and the woman. “… and between your offspring and hers …” this does not mean all women will hate snakes. I know some who do including my wife. My wife, whatever her many gifts and graces, was not called to be a herpetologist, but there are some women herpetologists.

This is probing at a level much beyond mere women and snakes. In fact, the text immediately goes on to say not only the women but the offspring. “… between your offspring and hers.” That is between all human beings and all snakes? In which case we couldn’t have any herpetologists. No, that’s not the point at all.

No. From the woman (from the human race) will come ultimately a seed, we’re told, that will crush the Serpent’s head. Did you see The Passion of the Christ, the Mel Gibson film? Oh, it had its strengths and its weaknesses, but did you see the opening scene where Jesus is in agony in the garden praying? In the context of his praying, a snake starts crawling over one of his limbs. Jesus stands up and suddenly slams his foot down on the Serpent’s head. The symbolism is right out of here.

By going to the cross, Jesus will ultimately destroy this Serpent, this Devil who holds people to sin and shame and guilt. He will go and crush the Serpent’s head by taking their guilt and shame on himself. This verse is sometimes called in Christian circles the protoevangelium. That is, the first announcement of the gospel, the first announcement of good news. It’s pretty doom and dark till now, but now this promise that from the woman’s seed (from the human race) will arise One who will crush the Serpent’s head.

In fact, that can be extended to Christians. In Romans 16, a letter written by the apostle Paul about the middle of the first century to Christians in Rome, he says, “The Lord will crush the Serpent’s head under your heel.” There is a sense, you see, in which Christians by living under the gospel, by being reconciled to God because of the gospel, are destroying the Devil and his work. Already a seedbed sewed countless years earlier in Genesis 3.

Then to the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe. With pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” The first categorical command that had been given to the man and the woman in chapter 1 had been, “Be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it.” But even this most fundamental of rites and privileges, part of their very being now becomes a pain-filled thing. The whole created order is out of whack. It’s bound up with loss.

“Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” That passage has been interpreted many different ways, as you can imagine. It is worth reflecting on the fact that the two verbs that are used (“Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you”) are used together as a pair in only one other place within the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).

Hundreds of pages, and it’s used in only one other place, namely in the next chapter, so if a first reader were coming along and reading this and saying, “Boy, I don’t have a clue what is going on here,” the reader only has to press on a few more verses and that reader will stumble across the same verbs again and say, “Aha! That makes sense.”

It’s in chapter 4, where we find out one of the sons of Adam and Eve, Cain, wants to kill the other son. We have the first murder, the first homicide. When the Lord is explaining to Cain why God is angry with him, he says to him in chapter 4, verse 7, “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 …”

Now the two verbs. “Sin desires to have you …” That is, to have you in the sense of control you, to manipulate you, to boss you around. “… but you must rule over it.” So also here, in the wake of the fall, the woman desires to have her husband, precisely now to control him, and he rules over her. That is, with a certain kind of brutality.

There is sin on both sides. She wants to control, and physically, he’s stronger than she is, and he regularly beats up on her. What we have now is the destruction of the marriage relationship itself because of sin in this world. Then you read on through the following chapters: the first homicide, the first double murders, the first polygamy, eventually the first genocide. On and on and on and on, all because at the very beginning someone said, “I will be God.”

Likewise Adam. “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it …’ ” That is, “You listened to her instead of to me.” At the end of the day, our prime allegiance must be to God himself. “… cursed is the ground because of you.”

That is, the whole created order of which you are a part is now not working properly. It’s under a curse, subjected by God himself to death and decay. “Through painful toil, as a result, 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.”

4. The long term effects that flowed from this rebellion

“The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” Now that’s interesting. They used fig leaves. If he uses garments of skin, then there has been the shedding of blood, a sacrificial animal. At this stage, there is no system of sacrifice (that comes later), a priestly system with sacrifices and prescribed animals and a tabernacle or a temple. We’ll come to that.

None of that’s in place, but God knows they need to be covered. They have so much shame to hide. He doesn’t say, “Take off those stupid fig leaves! If you just expose yourself and be honest with one another we can all get back together again and live happily every after.” There’s no way back!

He covers them with something more durable, but at the price of an animal that sheds its blood and is slain, the first of long trajectories of bloody sacrifices that reach all the way down to the coming of Jesus who was announced by one who comes just before him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

That is, by his bloody sacrifice, by his death we are covered over, our shame and our guilt addressed because he dies in our place. A lamb can’t do that. Here it’s just a picture of what’s coming, but it’s the first step of a whole institution of sacrifices that point us, finally, to the supreme sacrifice and what Jesus did to take away our sin and cover up our shame. Let me conclude. I want to reflect on how this fits into the Bible and into our lives.

First, Genesis 3 describes willful rebellion not sociobiology. One of the hard things a strict, materialistic Darwinism must face is where do morals come from? Where does meaning come from? Where do notions of right and wrong come from? In the last two or three decades there has arisen a field of scientific, philosophical endeavor now commonly labeled sociobiology.

One writer has entitled his book The Selfish Gene, in which he argues that because of the way we’ve developed along evolutionary lines, we have genes that protect us. Those genes which move us toward certain behavior are going to keep alive those people who have the genes that perform the behavior that is most advantageous to living. Those who don’t have this advantageous behavior will drop away.

Therefore, statistically, you will get a higher and higher percentage of those who have these kinds of genes that are nicely adaptive. That very selfish gene might learn somewhere along the line that cooperation with other people with similar genes is better than merely going it alone, so now you have a genetic predisposition toward working cooperatively and sharing, which might not fit some simplistic view of the survival of the fittest, but at the corporate level, as sociobiology, it makes a whole lot of sense.

That is to say, you can develop a whole bias toward certain behavior that you call good or evil just on the basis of the various selection of genes that time and experience teach you generation by generation. In other words, there is a systematic attempt today to explain notions of right and wrong purely at the genetic, naturalistic level.

I would be the last person to want to argue there is no connection between our morals and our bodies, between our wills and spirits and our heritage and background, including our genetic makeup. We are whole beings (all of them interact together), but it is very, very difficult to imagine people volunteering to sacrifice their lives for the sake of others, taking pain in their place.

A person in Auschwitz pretending he or she did the terrible deed that would get another hanged just to take their place. It’s hard to think of that as merely adaptive behavior, so that nowadays entire books and essays have begun to be written back the other way saying sociobiology cannot possibly explain this conduct and that conduct and the other conduct.

If you’re interested in such matters, I’ll be glad to give you more bibliography. There is a chap named Pete Lowman who wrote A Long Way East of Eden (you recall how when they left the garden they went east of Eden simply to show the account of the fall makes much more sense of the dilemmas and perversions and twisted livings in the world than any other explanation), or the sociologist Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals.

Secondly, Genesis 3 does not think of evil primarily in horizontal terms but in vertical terms. When we do think of evil finally, depending on who we are, we tend to think of evil at the horizontal level. Probably none of us here would want to deny that Auschwitz was evil. Probably we don’t want to deny that raping a little child is evil. Probably we don’t want to deny that operating a huge Ponzi scheme that rips people off billions is evil. We don’t want to deny that.

Certainly, the Bible has all kinds of pretty condemning things to say about horizontal evils, that is, evils amongst ourselves, but in the Bible what is said to make God angry most frequently is idolatry. It’s the vertical dimension. The person who is most offended here is God. It’s not that Eve is really ticked because Adam has blamed her.

Where the guilt is, in the first instance, is guilt before God. It’s in the de-Godding of God, so that, yes, you could read the prophet Isaiah who warns against vicious, money-grabbing owners who won’t pay fair wages, but pages and pages are devoted to idolatry. It’s the supreme evil. It is what makes all the other evils supremely evil.

Thirdly, Genesis 3 shows what we most need. If you’re a Marxist, what you need are revolutionaries and decent economists. If you’re a psychologist, what you need is an army of counselors. If you think the root of all malfunction and disorder is medical, what you really need are endless numbers of Mayo Clinics.

But if our first and most serious need is to be reconciled to God, a God who now stands over against us, who pronounces death upon us because of our willfully chosen rebellion, then what we need the most, though we may have all these other derivative needs, is to be reconciled to him. We need someone to save us.

You cannot make sense of the Bible until you come to agreement with what the Bible says our problem is. If you don’t see what the Bible’s analysis of the problem is, you can’t come to grips with the Bible’s analysis of the solution. The ultimate problem is our alienation from God, our attempt to identify ourselves merely with reference to ourselves, this idolatry that de-Gods God, and what we must have is reconciliation back to this God or we have nothing. It’s in that context that already this chapter looks forward to the coming of the woman’s seed.

I attended a funeral not long ago. A neighbor died of a brain tumor. On the card that was handed out at the door, we found these words from this neighbor: “May those that love us love us and those that don’t love us, may God turn their hearts, and if he doesn’t turn their hearts, may he turn their ankle, and we shall know them by their limping.” Cute. I couldn’t help thinking, “How tragic!” The man had just gone to meet his Maker, and his last words for us at the funeral were scoring points on people who didn’t like him. Still thinking at a horizontal level.

In the seventeenth century, the great thinker Pascal wrote, “What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!” He understood Genesis 1, 2, and 3.

A contemporary thinker writes, “We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler, Mozart and Stalin, Antigone and Lady Macbeth, Ruth and Jezebel.”

Shakespeare says of humanity, “What a work of art!” Arthur Miller in After the Fall says, “We are very dangerous. We meet … not in some garden of wax fruit and painted leaves that lies east of Eden, but after, after the fall, after many, many deaths.” Now you understand the plot line of the whole Bible. Who will fix that?