When Everything Fell Apart

“Did God actually say?” Four words, and the whole world tilts. The serpent does not argue with God or deny him outright; he simply raises a question where there had been trust. He asks Eve to wonder whether God’s word can really be relied on, whether it means what it plainly says. Doubt is the seed, and he plants it gently.

Kent walked us through the serpent’s strategy on Sunday, and it has not changed in thousands of years. First he misrepresents what God said. Then he flatters our pride — you know better, this is yours to decide. Finally he whispers that God does not really mean it. The same three moves are still aimed at us, every ordinary week of our lives.

Kent called this the great dividing line of Scripture: either there is a God who is not us and has something to say about how we live, or every road simply leads wherever we please. The question underneath every temptation is the same one — who will we believe, God or somebody else? And if it is not God, it hardly matters who the somebody else is.

So listen for the question when it comes, because it will come dressed as reason, as freedom, as your own good sense. “Did God actually say?” is still the opening move. Answer it the way Eve did not: God has spoken, he made you, and he means what he says. Trust him before you can see the outcome, and the seed of doubt finds no soil.

The woman saw that the tree was good for food, a delight to the eyes, desirable to make one wise — so she took, and ate. Eve does not weigh what God said against what she wants; she simply goes with what looks good in the moment. And beside her, the verse notes quietly, stood her husband, who was with her, and he ate too.

Kent called this the first postmodern decision: feelings over facts, appetite over what God had plainly commanded. But he would not let Adam off the hook. Adam was right there. His sin was twofold — he fell for the lie, and he stood passive when he should have spoken truth and led. Passivity, Kent warned, is its own quiet kind of disobedience.

Every day sets the same choice in front of us. God says, listen to my voice; I made you, I know what is best, and it will go well. Another voice says, go with what you feel, God will understand just this once. The pull toward what merely looks good is relentless, and it rarely announces itself as rebellion until the fruit is already in our hand.

So catch yourself in the moment of reaching, and name the lie before you take the fruit. And where God has given you something to protect — a marriage, a friendship, a room full of people — do not stand by in silence. Respond to his voice today, even when another one sounds sweeter, and trust that his way, though costly, is right.

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” The serpent had promised their eyes would open to wisdom, that they would become like God. Their eyes did open — but not to glory. They opened to shame. The very first thing sin handed them was not enlightenment; it was the frantic urge to cover up, sew leaves, and hide.

Kent pointed to their nakedness as a good gift from God, given so a husband and wife could rejoice in one another without fear. Sin took that gift and stained it, turning something God had called very good into a source of guilt and hiding. That, Kent said, is what sin always does — it twists God’s good gifts into instruments of shame, and even bondage.

We know this in our own skin. The thing meant to bless becomes the thing we conceal. Intimacy, appetite, ambition, even our own bodies — good gifts, bent by a fallen world into places of secrecy and self-contempt. The eyes that were made to see God clearly now scan the room for somewhere to hide. This is the wound Genesis 3 names, without flinching.

But name it honestly, and you are already turning toward home. The shame you feel is not the final word; it is the ache of something that was meant to be whole. Do not sew fig leaves and manage it alone. Bring the hidden thing into the light of the God who is not surprised by it — and who is already moving toward you.

“But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” God is not asking for information; he knows exactly where Adam is crouched. The question is mercy in the shape of a search. The guilty pair ran and hid among the trees, and rather than leaving them there, God walks into the garden and calls out for the very ones who fled from him.

Kent lingered on something he had not noticed before: God could have scrapped the whole experiment and begun again with a new pair. He didn’t. As Alfie had said at the top of the service, before man ever went looking for God, God came looking for man. Even as sin and death entered the world, grace came walking in right behind it.

That is the pattern of the whole Bible, and it runs against everything we assume about God. We picture him waiting with folded arms for us to clean ourselves up and come crawling back. Genesis 3 shows the opposite. The offended one takes the first step. The Father comes down into the garden and calls the hiders by name, while they are still ashamed.

So wherever you are hiding today — behind performance, behind distraction, behind the sin you are sure disqualifies you — hear the voice still calling. “Where are you?” is not an accusation; it is an invitation. He already knows the worst, and he is coming anyway. Stop hiding among the trees, and answer the God who came looking for you first.

“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.” These words fall in the middle of the curse, spoken to the serpent — and yet they are the first promise of the gospel. One of the woman’s descendants will crush the enemy’s head. Grace is tucked inside the sentence of judgment.

Kent closed there, then went one step further to verse 21: to cover Adam and Eve’s shame, something innocent had to die. An animal’s skin, a substitute — a shadow of the cross thrown all the way back to the beginning. When Adam and Eve took that first bite, Kent said, Jesus packed his bags for Bethlehem. The remedy was promised in the same breath as the wound.

Paul draws the line straight in Romans 5: what the first Adam’s disobedience broke, the second Adam’s obedience reverses. Where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more. The story that begins in a garden with a bitten fruit ends on a hill outside Jerusalem, where the innocent one dies to cover the guilty — once for all, for Adam, for Eve, and for you.

So do not read Genesis 3 as only the day everything fell apart. Read it as the day rescue was announced. The same God who searched the garden set a plan in motion that would one day cost him his own Son. Whatever has fallen apart in your life this week, the promise still holds: a Redeemer has come, and he has crushed the serpent’s head.