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This particular episode is opening our eyes to what Adam and Eve saw when their eyes were opened through eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Welcome again to Two Ways News. We're looking today at Genesis chapter 3. Hello, I'm Phillip Jensen.
Peter Jensen: And this is Peter Jensen.
Phillip: Genesis 3:6-8 says
Genesis 3:6–8
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
Artwork loves nudity, and so there are any number of pictures of Adam and Eve with the modesty of fig leaves. But what is it that we see here in this passage? They accepted the lie of Satan; the woman was deceived, so the New Testament says, and her eyes were opened. What is this about their eyes being opened?
Peter: It wasn't that they were blind before, but they then had a view of the world that was not going to prove to their benefit. Her eyes were opened in the sense that Satan suggested that God's motive for not allowing them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a selfish motive. And the woman, now that it has been suggested to her that she could eat of it, with her open eyes, can see that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye. She's looking at it like that. She's not looking at it thinking it was forbidden to them; she's now looking at it, and her heart is moving and also desirous of gaining wisdom, which is what Satan has suggested, that they will now be like God, knowing good and evil and so good to the eye, desirable for the stomach, and a wonderful thing to help them to grow up, to be their own people, instead of living under the rule of God.
Phillip: I'm sure it's a false distinction I'm trying to draw here, but in a sense, she already sinned before she ate it.
Peter: You could even take it slightly further back in that she had a conversation with one who was a tempter, and she listened to that one and began to believe what he said as opposed to what she ought to have known God said.
Phillip: She was given the task in chapter 1 of Genesis to subdue the animals. It was an animal that she didn’t subdue but took advice from. Once she'd eaten it and given it to her husband to eat, their eyes were opened.
Peter: But sin is a heart matter, and the actual eating of the fruit has emerged from something going on in the heart first of all, which is true for us.
Phillip: What does it say about our relationship to sin? It is something that is within us as well as something we do.
Peter: Jesus points this out in Mark 7 and in the Sermon on the Mount when he says that murder is not just the act of murder. It is what goes on in the heart before you get to the act. You may not actually murder, but you have murdered in your heart, and so sin begins within. Human beings are now born with the evil within, which leads to the actual actions of sin, but sin begins from within our hearts.
Phillip: There's a technical word, ‘concupiscence.’ Is that what you're talking about when you're talking in terms of sin being within us?
Peter: It's a technical word because it's changed its meaning over the years. In the Anglican 39 Articles, ‘concupiscence’ is mentioned. In the modern world, if you're going to use the word at all, it means sexual desire, but false sexual desire. But in the 16th century Shakespearean English, it meant simply ‘an evil desire.’ And we don't use it that way anymore, but it's getting back to words in the New Testament. ‘Epithumia,’ for example, which refers to the stirrings of an evil desire within us. What the New Testament is saying is that those stirrings of the evil desire in us are themselves sin.
Phillip: But desire, ‘epithumia’ is the word, is just ‘desire.’ That's why you have to keep saying ‘evil desire,’ because some desires are good.
Peter: I think it's essential that we live with certain desires.
Phillip: But most of us don't use the word 'concupiscence' today. It's just one of those technical terms, though, that is capturing something that is an idea that we don't use either, that is, the evil is not just in the act. It lies before that, in the motivation and in the heart that is already desiring that which is evil.
Peter: It's like ‘covetousness’ in the Ten Commandments, “You shall not covet.” That's not something you decide to do. You're not going to go out one day and say, “Today I'm going to covet.” Covetousness arises spontaneously from within a sinful heart and is already condemned, even if it doesn't lead to anything.
Phillip: In the Ten Commandments, the very word ‘covet’ is the word ‘desire’ again, and what's wrong is that I covet that which is not mine. “You shall not covet your neighbour's house, wife, donkey,” or whatever it may be that is not yours.
Peter: So perfectly good things, such as desire, are twisted and corrupted by sin.
Phillip: She desires to make one wise. It is not a bad thing to be wise. That's a good thing.
Peter: It is a wonderful thing to be wise, and wisdom is exalted in the Bible. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. But ‘wise’ here means “like God, knowing good and evil.” And that was the wisdom she longed for, as her hand went out to pluck the fruit from the tree. That was the problem.
Phillip: But we are created, and she was created, like God, in the first place.
Peter: A very important point. What do you mean by that?
Phillip: Well, in chapter 1, male and female, God created them in his likeness and in his image. So she's already like God, but the likeness of God of chapter 1 is ruling the world under God, for God, in God's place, whereas this now is to be like God in the one area that God said not to be like him, namely, knowing good and evil.
Peter: So that our likeness to God, true though it is, has its limitations always. The limitations are symbolized in chapter 2 by the prohibition, which provides the boundary for human freedom. But it is a prohibition, and it is a reminder to us that we may be like God, but we are not God.
Phillip: What does it mean to “know good and evil”?
Peter: It is a phrase that isn’t immediately clear for us, but as we look at it in the light of other treatments in the Bible, it appears that to know the knowledge of good and evil is not just simply knowing what is good and what is evil, though that is involved, but determining what is good and what is evil and having the authority to say what is good and what is evil. In other words, human beings here are being tempted and indeed initiated into the very thing that God does. He says what is good and evil, and they are now being asked, tempted, to take that upon themselves and to begin to delineate what is good and evil in the world. That is something God does, not human beings. What a powerful temptation it is, and we would experience the same thing ourselves. We want to know, we want to say, what is good and evil, what is right and wrong.
Phillip: Does God do good because it is good, or is it good because God does it? This is the old Socratic kind of question: Is it about the importance of God being the one who determines good rather than the one who is under another god called ‘the good’?
Peter: My way of putting it is this—God is eternal. He didn't just spring into existence himself. He is eternal, and eternally he is good. And thus, from this good God comes that which is good. And so in a sense, the problem is a misunderstanding. It doesn't work because it doesn't take into account the character of God in his sheer goodness.
Phillip: There is no good that judges God. God is the judge of good, and it is his character that we now know is the good, but people want to take this role on for themselves; we want to take this role on for ourselves, that my character is going to be the determiner of what is good for me and my household.
Peter: You mentioned paintings of Adam and Eve in the garden; the story is looked upon by the unbelieving world as a sort of fun story. Who could possibly believe it? It's like a fairy tale; it's not a real story. I think you would say that it is the best explanation for the reality of the 21st century. It never goes away. It's actually true.
Phillip: The joke side of it is very strong. I looked at some images to put up in a PowerPoint presentation and only got apples, as if it were all about an apple. It was trivialized. The Enlightenment thinkers, the atheist thinkers, don't trivialize to the same extent because they want to say it was ‘the knowledge,’ ‘the tree of knowledge,’ full stop. Rather than ‘good and evil’ and not knowledge in the sense that you spoke about of determining what is good and evil, it was just ‘knowledge’ that God says humans mustn't know things. So, that reaction to censoring knowledge is not what the Bible is talking about. It's the sovereignty over morality. It is exactly what we need today because that's where people are at. We want to live in a world where self-determination and non-judgmentalism mean that I can do what I want to do and that I am the master of my fate and the captain of my soul to make my decisions for whatever life brings to me.
Peter: One of the things that we don't want to miss, given that Genesis 3 sounds to the modern world like a fairy story, is about when their eyes were opened and what they saw. What is that symbolically? What is it saying to us, which is powerfully true today?
Phillip: They can't face the truth, because once you know the evil within your heart, or once you have that within you, you can see what you could do to the other person, and worse still, what the other person could do to you. So they're naked and unashamed in their innocence. They're united in the one flesh, as sex in its unity, in its unashamed full freedom, which is now damaged. Now we've got a world where the image of Adam and Eve is part of the pornography of the world. Now we can see what evil can be done, what harm can be done to each other. The desperate solution is to hide and cover up. We cover up if sin has any chance of being found out. We cover up from each other, and we avoid revealing ourselves to each other properly. It's folly, but when you're in sin, folly becomes normality.
Peter: One of the brilliant moments in the story is when 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. It brilliantly says something.
Phillip: It is beautiful imagery that says something about a relationship and a friendship with God.
Peter: If you want to say relationship and friendship with God, you couldn't say that any better than saying he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
Phillip: We do like abstract language when concrete language often conveys information more powerfully to us.
Peter: What happened when they heard him?
Phillip: They hid, and what happens when he talks to them? I think next week we might look at that, but let's get back to the consequence now. Even if you took it as a myth, which I don't, but if you took it as a myth, it's a very powerful image of human character, human nature, and human relationships. We have an almost infinite number of laws because of this truth. Humans cover up and hide, and humans are not good. And yet, in our education systems, especially these days, in public communication, people were endlessly saying how they believe in the goodness of human nature.
The Tax Act of Australia runs to thousands and thousands of pages, which is totally unnecessary if we were really good people. If you're really good taxpayers, all you need is one sentence: Make your contribution to the welfare of society. But no, we have very clever people who are spending their time minimizing their tax because they don't want to pay it. The whole regulatory nature of our modern society fails because people are not good. It's only there because people are not good.
Peter: One of the interesting results of this belief in the goodness of humanity and yet things going wrong is the intense moralism. I doubt that we've ever lived in a more moralistic age. People are always chiding us and slapping us on the wrist for the naughty things we do. In the old days, it used to be called ‘wowserism,’ a good Australian word that has disappeared. But the moralists are always with us, ticking us off, telling us how we should live. The assumption being that we are good people, and therefore, why are we behaving like this? If only you spent enough money to fix the problem, or if you better educated people so that they know what's right and wrong, and therefore they will do it, or if you pass laws, that will make the problems go away. And so again and again, millions of dollars are poured into attempts to fix the problem. Well, the basic problem is the recognition that we are corrupted people.
Phillip: But the nature of that corruption is that we are moralists. It's not that we are disobedient to laws; it's that we keep on wanting to make up laws for ourselves. The lawbreaker is a lawbreaker, but the lawmaker is someone who places himself over and above the law. He is the determiner of what is and isn't. And he runs his own life his own way. That is the rebellion against God. We mustn't reduce ‘sin’ as a concept to breaking rules. We need to see sin as the concept of rebelling against God. It's an anti-God move. It's a sovereign citizen move.
Peter: Moralism is fundamentally sin.
Phillip: It is the expression of sin, because I'm not accepting what God says. I am telling the world, or myself at least, or my children, what they should or should not do, rather than listening to what God says.
Peter: Moralism is not merely laws and rules; it is also deciding what the good life is. ‘Here is what the good life is, children; I want you to live that good life.’ And so often it is not the good life; it is otherwise.
So I love the saying that went around, but I can remember it in a movie about a boy who did the wrong thing, and this lady chastises him and says, ‘You know, you've done the wrong thing,’ and then she remembers to say what the modern world says, ‘You're not a bad boy; you've just done a bad thing.’ In other words, you are a good boy, but you sometimes do bad things. No, what Genesis 3 is telling us is that the heart is deceitful above all things and corrupt. Who can understand it?
Phillip: Now, that's a tricky one, isn't it?
Peter: If governments don't recognize that, if schools don't recognize that, then we'll have all sorts of further problems.
Phillip: Absolutely, but in the child example, it is difficult because to consistently tell a child that they're bad is not necessarily helping them deal with this issue. So I can understand why the educationalists do not want to say, ‘You're not a bad boy; you've only done a bad thing,’ because to depress the young child by only ever saying that you are bad, and that you are in yourself bad, without a gospel message that gives you any chance for forgiveness, let alone redemption and transformation, that's not a helpful message either. But here is the response, the kind of outcome from the father of modern education, Rousseau, who believed in and taught the goodness of humanity. Rather than the truth which depresses - ‘you're bad’ - we now give the lie that confuses, - ‘you're good, and you're not bad at all; you're only ever good, really; you're a good person, deep down, through and through, utterly good.’ That's a lie, perpetrated by a man whose actions murdered his own children, and yet he's the father of modern education on how to raise children. It's a terrible state that we're in when we're trying to run society on a secular model that is untrue. Education built on untruth cannot be a good system.
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.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this talk by Phillip on the theology of box two of Two Ways to Live.
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