The serpent said to the woman, "You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." --Genesis 3:4-5
Our culture is a morass of misinformation. We believe whatever sounds good at the time, or whatever is repeated often enough, or whatever is spoken the loudest. In time, our cherished beliefs get crushed by reality. Truth sinks in, usually too late. Either that, or we die in blissful ignorance. Either way, there are consequences, in this life or the next.
I believe the Bible warns us of devious deceptions that can ruin our health, our happiness, and our holiness. We would do well to heed all its warnings. The Psalmist was right when he said, "Thy word have is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." If we walk in the light, we can avoid the pitfalls of the world. The problem is we enjoy walking in darkness. It's not necessarily that we are drawn to danger, at least not at first. It begins when we find that continually being in the light is exhausting: we must be vigilant, ever alert and watchful, attentive and observant lest we fall, and ever wakeful. We seek rest and respite, and in our relaxed state we get distracted by what lurks in the shadows. Our curiosity overcomes us, and we go to take a closer look. That's when temptation overcomes us, and we fall. Some of us seek redemption, and look back to the light. Others hide in the darkness, getting mired deeper and deeper into sin.
God gave the Law to sanctify His people, to keep them separate and holy. When they messed up, He gave them grace to come back into His presence after repentance and restitution took place. When Jesus came, He reflected God's redemptive plan by becoming sin for us, and bearing the punishment we deserved. "For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ." (John 1:17).
I believe you cannot know grace without knowing truth. "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths." (2 Timothy 4:3-4). Sadly, our religious culture centers on the grace of God, without giving heed to the truth that sin has consequences. Yes, Jesus came to forgive, but on more than one occasion, and to more than one person, He also said, "Go, and sin no more."
On the other hand, to preach the wrath of God without preaching the grace of God does a disservice to the hearer. Guilt and shame may call us to repentance, but without restoration we are still lost in our sins. This truth is illustrated in the Biblical narrative of Adam and Eve.
God had created a literal heaven on earth. Eden was a very beautiful place, a place where God dwelt among men. He brought all the animals before Adam to see what he would call them--God was engaged with Adam, interested in what he thought, encouraging the man's creativity. God regularly walked with them in the cool of the evening. He showed them how to work in the garden He had made for them: how to keep it, cultivate it, and gather a harvest from it. Yes, God had made it, and it was good, but He was showing them how to make it better still.
Then along came temptation as a serpent. Satan approached the woman, Eve, and asked her how she liked the garden God had made. Surrounded by every good thing, she was satisfied. But Satan asked if God was keeping anything from her. Had He set limits on what she could enjoy? Indeed He had--there was one tree from which they were forbidden to eat. Satan set about making that tree irresistible. To do that, he had to tell her three lies:
- You will not die;
- You can be like God;
- You must experience evil to truly know good.
It won't kill you.
Some scholars believe that Adam would have lived forever if he had not sinned against God. I have even heard it said that there were no carnivorous animals in Eden. Beasts that we know now as predators may have lived on fruit and berries until sin entered the world. We have no way of knowing how long Adam and Eve lived in the garden, in the presence of God, before the Fall. It could have been months, or it could have been years. I believe that as long as they lived there, no living creature experienced death.
Let me just say here that I believe in a literal six-day creation. I believe the Biblical story here is true. If you believe it is an allegory, you must admit that it loses some of its meaning. For example, if you believe that God did not create the world in six days, but instead set everything up for life to evolve on its own for twelve billion years or so, then the idea of God becoming engaged with His creation loses a bit of its luster. I mean, if God was present at the Big Bang, then went off somewhere and cooled His heels for a few billion years before coming back to check on things, at what point can we say that we are created in His image? If that Scripture is not true, then what other parts of the Bible must we ignore as not trustworthy? And most important, if man simply evolved from lower life forms, why would God come in the form of a man to become the supreme sacrifice for us? Why go to the trouble of redeeming us unto Himself if He could just allow us to obliterate ourselves off the planet for our sins? Wouldn't the Earth repopulate itself through the same evolutionary process? There is a lot of theology that becomes meaningless if God did not create us.
In any case, there was no death until Satan introduced it via sin. When Eve tried to argue with the serpent, she said something she did not fully understand: "We must not eat of it, nor touch it, lest we die." Satan used that to his advantage. With her naivete, Satan was able to convince her that death is better than life. You and I have the advantage of experience--we have seen enough people die to know that life is preferable. She only had her trust in God to keep her obedient. If God said death would result from disobedience, then He should know what He was talking about. Satan invited her to test the waters, to see whether disobedience was better than obedience, whether the God she knew was better than the god she could become (if the serpent's message was to be believed). He tempted her to see if in fact life was better than death.
We know now that it was all a lie. Life is better than death. The God of the Universe is greater than the gods we purport to be. Obedience is indeed better than disobedience. We know from experience. Adam and his wife Eve didn't know from experience, but they knew what God had told them. If they had kept strong in their faith in God, then sin and death would not have been allowed in. Losing faith in God demanded that death and other consequences must be enforced. God had spoken; there was no other way.
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