After the Fall

Genesis 3:7-24. There is so much interesting stuff here, you guys. The first thing Adam and Eve (A/E) experience is shame, hiding their bodies and hide from God. Sin is already separating them from God. Pastors suggest that A/E covering themselves mirrors the way we hide our true selves from other people, which is a self-protection mechanism. We naturally want to maintain power and control in relationships, and it likely started here. This shows that sin is already separating A/E from each other and ruining humanity’s future ability to connect. Finally, Tim Keller points out that their nakedness is like our sense that something is wrong with us, our shame, our psychological dislocation, and our lack of ease with who we are. Keller says, “When our relationship with God was severed, our relationship with ourselves was severed.”

We try to cover ourselves with the fig leaves of success and good deeds. I’m so guilty of this, both in action and in fantasies. People have to love me because I’m the U.S. President, attractive, famous, funny, wealthy, heroic, honest, moral, intelligent, or a people pleaser! It’s all fig leaves compared with the glory of God that covers through Jesus. Shame was the symptom and the disease is sin, so the fig leaves didn’t work to hide A/E’s shame. They still had to hide from God, knowing deep down that their attempts were inadequate. You can’t fix low self-esteem by treating it, because that will just result in us gathering more fig leaves. Low self-esteem is a symptom. You have to go right to the real diseases (pride, measuring yourself against others, self obsession, not knowing who you are in God, and obsession with success). The cure is knowing God and becoming obsessed with looking at him over analyzing yourself and your failures. It’s seeing yourself and others through God’s eyes and trusting him.

When I was a kid, I thought that this passage meant human bodies are intrinsically shameful or dirty, and that earlier, A/E just didn’t know that. But it’s more a symptom of their spiritual nakedness and desire to not be known in their sin. Psalm 104:2 says that light is God’s garment. In Matthew 17, Jesus’ clothes became as white as light. Was God’s light clothing A/E before the fall, because they were made in his image? One commenter suggested that humans pass sin through sexual reproduction and that’s the reason we think the genital areas require more modesty and covering.

As usual, God goes looking for his humans and calls to them. John 1:18 and 1 Timothy 6:16 both say that no man has ever seen God. Was this Jesus then? When confronted, Adam blames Eve for everything. As noted last week, it is possible that Adam ate the apple out of a romantic impulse toward Eve. But he threw her under the bus before God, so if there was romance, there was no real love, which is unselfish and takes the blame (as we know from Jesus). His blaming Eve accused God as well, because God gave Eve to Adam. This one is defective, God! Obviously, it’s best to own up to things when you do wrong, like David did in 2 Samuel 12. It comes off as more mature than excuses. I’m still working on this.

God curses the serpent first, and watching the snake slither away on its belly must have freaked A/E out. It still freaks people out today, and we’ve seen it before. God told the serpent that it would eat dust. This is literally true for the animal, but it is also true for Satan, because eating dust is a picture of defeat in other parts of the Bible. Satan will always work really hard to top God and make us miserable, but in the end “light trumps dark every time.” (Quoting a shaman, haha).

Then there is the prophecy where the snake is crushed by a man’s heel. According to Keller, “The picture is of a family and into the midst of them comes a snake, quickly. It’s venomous and one man goes after the snake and stamps on it. Finally, he crushes the head and saves the family. In the process, the snake bites and kills him. The snake represents evil. One of the descendants of Eve is going to destroy sin and death itself but get a fatal wound in the process….The sword represents the wages of sin, the justice of God. The wages of sin is death. You can’t get to paradise unless you go through the sword. Jesus did.”

It’s possible that the prophecy about the snake points to the virgin birth, because it only mentions the savior coming from the woman and not the man. Does the sin curse only pass through man? God cursed the woman with multiplied sorrow, and this makes sense with how women were treated in society for thousands of years after that. As a gender, women had the choices of a common animal, but Christianity came into society and helped a bit by saying that women and men were equal before God (an idea Gnostics rejected, so can everyone just let the whole Gnostic thing go already? They sucked!).  

Also, God says that a woman’s desire will be for her husband, implying that while men desire women, women desire men in a different way. Is this the first part of girls committing to men more easily and men using women just for sex? It’s man’s turn, and he gets hard work. We know from God giving Adam work earlier and from God doing some work in creation that work is not evil, but before the curse, the ground only produced good things. After, there are weeds and it’s harder to get the good stuff. Work is less satisfying, more meaningless, and more tiring.

This was just supposed to be a man curse, God! I’m getting enough of it in law school. It’s like I get both genders’ curses. No fair, lol. With the fall, sin entered the world. Sin is a force, rather than just bad things people do. It’s a darkness that permeates everything and spreads like a disease, ruining everything it touches and bringing death. I’m not clear on whether these curses are added punishments from God or whether God was just describing what the effects of the fall would be. It ruined our relationship with nature too. Natural disasters and sickness are consequences.

God guarded the tree of life from A/E. God was probably being merciful in saving them from immortality as sinners. I know that would be a horrible fate, because I’ve read Anne Rice vampire novels. This life had been spoiled and tainted by the fall, but God had already planned the next realm and allowed death to run its course, for now. But death is wrong and we know it. It’s not supposed to happen. It’s not a natural thing, like in The Lion King where they sing The Circle of Life and dance around. No way. It’s evil. It’s evil when the dead person is 90 years old and it’s evil when they are children, and we all know it when we arrive at the funeral or face it. But death will taste dust too.

Why did God have this happen at all? I think it’s because a man who sought after God, learned through struggles, rejected Satan, and fought for God through life is better than an innocent man who doesn’t even know that without God he is naked. A man who has been saved and transformed by grace and has his eyes fully open to those implications is preferable to a creature who doesn’t know that this is the kind of God who can redeem anything. God is also a fan of free will, and we needed to have choices in order to have it. No one lived a full life without free will in the Bible.

I used to think God was too harsh in this passage, but you can see the New Testament God here. Notice that God questions A/E, despite knowing everything, but not Satan. He is teaching them. When they need clothing to protect them from the environment and their own shame, God still takes care of them, killing an animal in the process, which points to a sacrificial system. God clothes the poor and also hints that this is what his followers should do. It's agonizing to think about how it would feel to walk with this God and then not get to anymore.

Some people say the clothes indicated that A/E were saved because God promised a savior and them covered their same through a sacrifice. It may be a stretch, but I wouldn’t put it past God to redeem them right on the spot. We also see parallels to Jesus here (sorry, spoiler alert). A commentary points these things out: Sin brought pain to childbirth, and we were born again through Jesus’ pain. Sorrow was multiplied and Jesus was described as a man of many sorrows. The fall brought thorns, and Jesus wore a crown of thorns. The fall brought sweat through work and Jesus sweat blood before the cross. Finally, Jesus died, lost his human relationships, and was cut off from God, enduring the brunt of the curse.