All religions teach the same thing, right? All roads meet at the top of the mountain — so we are told. I like to call that the Oprahfication of American religion: synthesize everything, try hard, be good, try harder, be gooder, and remember that God helps those who help themselves. The Bible tells a very different story, and one of its sharpest points of departure from the faiths of the world sits right here in Genesis chapter 3.
All Roads Don't Meet at the Top of the Mountain
The three Western religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — agree on at least one thing: there is a God, a Creator, and he is not us. The Eastern mystics say the opposite. All is one, God is all, God is in all; we are only sparks of the divine fire, drops of water rolling into the vast ocean of existence. The technical term for all of that is mule muffins. That's right, I said mule muffins — likely the only time that phrase will be uttered in a Presbyterian church in Miami-Dade. Nonsense. There is a Creator, he made us in his image, he gave us this uniquely suited planet and told us to steward it — and our first parents did well for a while, until the day they didn't. Genesis 3 is the sad, sad tale of our fall from innocence into rebellion and death. But it has a silver lining, and the text organizes itself around three questions.
Who Will We Believe?
The serpent — most commentators call it a manifestation of Satan, and I agree — is the consummate cynic. He doesn't want answers; answers might demand courage and commitment. He only wants to sow doubt. "Did God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?" Notice what he does. He misrepresents what God said (God named one tree, not all of them). He appeals to Eve's vanity — you're the queen of this garden, those are your trees, and doesn't that fruit look good in your hand? And then he flatly contradicts God: you will not surely die; he didn't really mean that. He takes the plain meaning of God's Word and twists it into its exact opposite. How often do we still hear people presume to speak from God's pulpits and do the very same thing? Beware. It is an old strategy. Who will we believe — God, or somebody else? And if it isn't God, it really doesn't matter who the somebody else is. Those roads all lead to the same place.
How Will We Respond?
We know what Eve did. She saw that the tree was good for food and a delight to the eyes, and she went with her feelings instead of the facts she already knew to be true. Here is the first postmodern woman — premodern, yes, but postmodern too — for whom absolute right and wrong have become negotiable. Her tribe continues to this day. But do not miss Adam. For years I imagined him off romping with the unicorns, arriving late to find juice running down Eve's chin. The text says otherwise: her husband was with her. The Hebrew is a single letter, imach, "with her" — not much to build a doctrine on, and yet every serious translation agrees he was right there. He was passive when he should have been active, silent when he should have spoken truth and broken the spell. So a word to the men: we are not made to be passive and reactive. And a word to the women: you are not meant to dominate your husband. Take it up with God — he put it in his book, and it has been there far longer than you or I. I look forward to your angry emails.
What Will We Experience?
What is the payoff for choosing our own voice over God's? Their eyes were opened, all right — not to godlike wisdom, but to shame. Nakedness, God's good gift meant to draw a husband and wife together, becomes something to hide. Our culture has raised that distortion to an art form and called it pornography, an $81-billion enterprise that follows us around in our pockets and enslaves the young and the not-so-young alike; at its worst it becomes human trafficking, tens of millions of people bought and sold in our own day, a crisis right here in Miami. And death — God said the day you eat of it you will die. They did not drop to the ground, but death entered the world, and they began to die intellectually, emotionally, relationally, spiritually, and one day physically. It was never supposed to be that way.
Right Behind It, So Does Grace
Here is the silver lining. God could have scrapped the experiment and started over with another pair. He didn't. They ran and hid in their shame, and he came looking for them — before man ever sought God, God sought man. And right behind sin and death, so does grace come rushing in. To the serpent he says: I will put enmity between your offspring and hers; he shall bruise your head. That is the proto-evangel, the first whisper of the gospel — a coming offspring of the woman who will reverse the curse. Then, when fig leaves won't do, God clothes them in animal skins; something innocent had to die to cover their sin, foreshadowing an innocent Substitute who would come thousands of years later. Paul says it in Romans 5: where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Any honest search for God will discover that he was searching for you first, and it will lead to a hill outside Jerusalem where the second Adam undoes what the first Adam did. Because when Adam and Eve took that first bite, Jesus packed his bags for Bethlehem.
