Dear friends,
As we come to the end of Genesis 3, we see the judgement of death brought upon the serpent, the woman, and the man. It is surprising in many ways, for it outlines the character of death while we are, apparently, alive. We have so limited death to that point of the end of life that we are not understanding our present life under the sentence of death.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Hello and welcome again to Two Ways News. This is Phillip Jensen speaking to my brother, Peter Jensen. Peter, have you considered your death lately?
Peter Jensen: More so these days. I am in my eighties, so I do think about it sometimes.
Phillip: Death is a fascinating topic that we rarely speak about. There is a very interesting book called A Brief History of Thought by Luc Ferry,1 a French philosopher. He writes:
Death is not as simple an event as it's ordinarily credited with being. It cannot merely be written off as the end of life, as the straightforward termination of our existence.
Only man is aware of death. Ferry notes that the Edgar Allan Poe poem, The Raven, suggests that death means everything that we do is ‘nevermore’. Death means everything is unrepeatable.
But here is where religion and philosophy diverge. Philosophy versus religion, faced with a supreme threat to existence: death -how do they work? For Luc Ferry, God saves. That's the presence of the idea of religion, “If you believe in him, God will save you.” I think he hasn't understood the gospel clearly. He then says, “Philosophy also claims to save us - if not from death itself, but from the anxiety it causes.” Both are in the activity of saving, both saving from death, but one is overcoming our fear and anxiety of death, and the other is overcoming death itself. But he says philosophy is all about death.
It's an interesting way of seeing philosophy and religion. It's a good book, in the sense that it treats religion seriously, unlike many of these books, yet he doesn't clearly understand the conquest of death. We've been dealing with Genesis, and the subject of death comes in the garden of Eden, in Genesis 2:17
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.
That's the first reference to death in the Bible. Yet so much of the Bible is about death. However, where philosophers see fear of death, we see in science today this fear of death. Peter, do you know much about Bryan Johnson, the multimillionaire involved in an anti-aging program?
Peter: I've read about it, but I didn't take that much interest in it.
Phillip: It's an attempt to reverse the aging process. But death, having been promised in the Scriptures, does actually come. So having sinned, what was promised comes true, as seen in Genesis 3:21-24
Peter:
And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
Phillip: There is death on the day on which they ate the fruit.
Peter: They ate of it, but the point is interesting: they didn't die. They were expelled from the garden, but they were still alive. I would have expected that they would have died instantly.
Phillip: I think they did. It’s like Mr. Ferry says, “Death is not simply the end of life.” Death is the very character and nature of life. This is the beginning of the subject of death, where death is brought into the world.
What is meant by the word ‘death’? We may limit death to our end-of-life experience, but that end-of-life experience is what changes the whole nature of life. Death means being cut off from the tree of life, and having been cut off from it, therefore, everything in life now becomes irreversible, and everything in life is heading in one direction. We don't now live in a state of life. We live in a state of dying. I've tried to explain it to people in a couple of illustrations, not the scriptures themselves. One is the idea of cut flowers: once you cut the flower, it is dead. You put it into the vase; it flourishes, but just wait and it crumples up and dies because it is already dead. It's like we're born in a crematorium queue. There's no way out of the queue. We do certain things, like play football or cards or go to a concert. But the queue is endlessly moving forward. Some of us race ahead; some of us try to hold back.
Once you are cut off from the tree of life, you have no life in yourself; you are dead. This judgement of death tells us about the nature of life. The fact of death tells us about the nature of humanity.
Peter: It's impossible to think that insects and animals have the same concept of death as we do. They don't have any idea of life beyond death. I know many people say that it doesn't happen. But I think that arises from fear that it may happen. Because the Bible itself says that death is judgement, and after death comes judgement. It's an indication of the importance of humanity, the image bearers of God. We are so important that we are worth bringing to judgement. Our death is a sign of the significance of the human being, because we are worth bringing to justice. That's what death is revealed to be. Hence, the expulsion from the garden helps us to understand what death is.
It's not just the decline of bodily functions and the end of it all. It means the end of a particular relationship with God. His bringing us to justice is a sign of the importance with which we are held. But it's also a sign that our relationship with God, which ought to be the fundamental point of life, has now been ruined. Death is judgement. We experience that judgement every day because we are not in relationship with our creator, which is what we were designed to be. Flowers dying is a good illustration of that.
Phillip: But it's caught between singularity and community. That is, I am going to die. You are going to die. But is the judgement upon humanity as a whole in the judgement on Adam and Eve?
Peter: There's a cutting verse in 1 Corinthians 15:22, “in Adam all die.” There is a reminder of the necessary relational element of being humans, not just with us and God, but also with each other. Death robs us of that relationship, makes us regret, and brings about deep grief. If you don't think there's anything beyond, I'm not sure how you can cope with grief.
Phillip: If there's nothing beyond, there's also the sense of meaninglessness in our life itself. The good, the bad, the rich, the poor, the wise, and the fool all alike have the same end (see Ecclesiastes). Then there's no point to what we do in life. So, death is a judgement upon humanity, but life and judgement after death raise many more issues about the way we live.
Peter: That's part of this fear of death, because you'd rather think there was nothing after death than judgement, and yet we all long for justice and trust there will be justice. We can all think of people in history whom we would want to say have come to judgement. But the minute we start pointing the finger at others, we need to recognize we're pointing the finger at ourselves as well.
One widespread belief in the ancient world was that of life after death, but it was spiritual life after death: the soul leaving the body, and the soul then passing on, perhaps into the atmosphere. It was a testimony to the belief in life after death, but the Bible has a different picture, not just of the spirit living on, but of the bodily resurrection of the dead. That fits into the whole picture of the Bible of the importance of creation, of material things, and of how God has created us. It is, in the end, far more powerful than the idea that the spirit leaves the body. We know that one of the difficulties with preaching the Christian gospel in the ancient world was teaching the death of the Saviour, but also, people regarded the resurrection as being ridiculous. Understandably, because after all, the body is your enemy in many ways. Think of all the things that go wrong in the body, and you can say, ‘I long to leave the body,’ but the Bible is better than that; it says you will be embodied in a new, resurrection body as Jesus was.
When we look at Genesis 3, what do we see about judgement?
Phillip: The judgement is death, and after death, there is the judgement, but the judgement is also in life. So we've been created: the man, then the woman, and the animals presented to the man. As sin came in, there was then the reversion of creation: the animal leading the woman, who led the man. So, God declares judgement firstly on the serpent, then on the woman, then on the man, but it's judgement in this world too. For example, what do you make of Genesis 3:14-15?
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.
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.”
Peter: If you see this, as I do, as a way of talking about Satan himself, then it's very powerful indeed. Later in the Bible, we hear that Satan is the prince of this world, that he is the god of this world, and that he is so powerful in this world that he holds human beings, in a sense, in his thrall. That is Satan. We need to take that spiritual element of life seriously. I'm not suggesting it would be wrong to think that we need to address Satan; we don't want to speak to him. Nonetheless, remember he is the father of lies. When we see lies triumphing and relationships being shattered because of lies, we can be sure that the evil one is part of that.
He also blinds the eyes of unbelievers so they cannot see the truth of the gospel. But the good news is that he, too, is a creature, and he will be brought to judgement. Then the extraordinary suggestion here is that the offspring of Eve will crush the head of the serpent while it strikes his heel. It's impossible not to see here a reference to the Lord Jesus, who is an offspring of Eve and who suffers as a result of what he does but triumphs over the evil one and brings us out of bondage.
Phillip: The second declaration of judgement is to the woman. It's her seed that holds this future salvation. But as Genesis 3:16 says
To the woman he said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”
At the very heart of her creation—to be the helper of the man, in the family life of being united to him sexually in reproduction—comes her judgement. It's a terrible statement. It's not declaring how God wants the world or how the world was created to be; it's the destruction of how the world was created to be. It's not just that she will have pain in the confinement. The wording here is much broader than that; it's in the whole area of her reproduction.
My dear wife Helen wrote an essay2 on this some time ago, thinking through what it meant to be under the judgement of God as a woman in this world, and where in the Bible you see it. She came up with about 10 different ways: Hannah, Sarah, Rachel, and others in their infertility; Rachel's pain in labour; Benjamin's premature birth; Job speaking about stillbirths; Rachel’s difficulties with menstruation; and references to miscarriage. There is maternal death during childbirth or the foolish son being a pain to his mother. There's the vulnerability that pregnant women and nursing mothers have, and there's even reference to menopause. The problems of women in their lifetime are very great. It's not to say that we shouldn't seek to ameliorate these problems with pain relief, but this is now the way of the world. Likewise, there’s the reference to her desiring her husband and him ruling over her. It's likely the same kind of concept that you have in chapter 4 about sin desiring Cain and him needing to master it. It's speaking of the breakdown of marital life and harmony. It's speaking of the danger, hostility, and violence in domestic relationships. It's not approving of it, as if to say, ‘Well, we should do nothing about it.’ We're saying, this is the way outside the garden. The man is also hurt, outside the garden, in Genesis 3:17-19 of the same passage.
Peter: Yes, it says
And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
It's a picture of a profound wrong between man and the created order. That which was created as his dominion is now distorted, twisted, and made complex and painful by the fundamental relationship with God being abandoned. So is our experience. We can see the beauty, magnificence, and fruitfulness of the world as it ought to be. But our dealings with the world are distorted. Human beings abuse the created order. It's very difficult to earn a living from it. “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken,” says the Lord to Adam. It's a pretty serious description, and one that's true about our own efforts to live in the world, which was originally designed for human beings who had not sinned against God.
Phillip: So, this living death that we're in is not a happy place in some ways. Pain and suffering are part of it. There is judgement now as well as judgement in the future. Death is already in the way we live as we head towards dying. What does exclusion from the garden really mean for humanity?
Peter: Who goes forth from the garden? The key element is that human beings are within themselves corrupt. As Romans 7:19 says, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” As Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
So we go forth, corrupted, sinful, and biassed towards evil. It doesn't mean totally evil by any means, but it does mean we have this inherent bias towards evil, which gets in the way. The human race, over the years, has done some wonderful things. But we find each one of them is tarnished. You can build great passenger planes, but you can also build warplanes.
We can believe in our own methods of salvation by educating people, by passing laws, and by spending money. Those things can help to a certain degree. But if you think that people are basically good and will usually do the right thing, you're fooling yourself.
Phillip: That’s the judgement of God in this world. The environment is now hostile to us, but you're saying it's also because we're in the environment that the hostility continues. So the judgement of God is in this world. Paul says, essentially, that God gives us up to be ourselves. He doesn't have to do more than that.
Peter: It's like the teacher who says, ‘You children are here to learn; do whatever you like. You ought to be here to learn. So if you want to learn, you can; if you don't want to learn, you can please yourselves.’ In a sense, God has given us up, and the result is the world we live in and the evil that is done by humanity. In a sense, it's our choice. It's our choice because we decided that we would have the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Phillip: This is the life cut from the garden, placed inside the vase. Life, which is so beautiful to see and yet so inevitably decadent within itself. This is the world as we know it, and Genesis 3 could be the end of the Bible because it's describing life as it is, except for Genesis 3:15, “He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel,” when there is an indication that death is going to be dealt with in some other way. That verse kicks off the other side of the judgement of God in death, which I'm sure we’ll discuss in another episode.
Luc Ferry, A Short History of Thought (Harper Perennial, 2011)
Helen Jensen, God’s Judgement on the Woman (Equal but Different, 2014) https://phillipjensen.com/resources/from-the-deans-wife/
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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