Last week we saw what the initial life Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden was like, as they learned what their
God-given mission, and that of their descendants, would be—(1.) to reflect God’s image, (2.) to rule over the whole earth, and (3.) to reproduce offspring to continue the mission.
However, at this point, this idyllic life in the Garden was completely destroyed! Satan, the fallen angel through whom sin had already entered God’s universe, approached Eve in the form of a beautiful serpent (not yet the ugly, slimy, slithering reptile). He asked her this question (expanded to underline his subtle message to Eve in Genesis 3:1-3): “Has that mean, old God told you that you cannot eat the delicious fruit of any of these many wonderful fruit trees in the garden?”
At this point, Eve was innocent, not sinful, but she was not righteous, either—we would say that she was “naïve”—susceptible to Satan’s innuendo as to how unreasonable God was. Her response tells us, as does 1 Timothy 2:14 in the New Testament, that she was deceived by this approach, and she took Satan’s bait.
First, she corrected Satan’s blatant lie. “God said we could eat of any of the trees except one”—and then she put words in God’s mouth He didn’t say—“but we not only can’t eat of its fruit, we can’t even touch it.” God had said nothing about touching the tree or its fruit. You can almost see the wheels turning in Eve’s mind—“I never thought about it before, but the serpent is right–that really was most unreasonable of God to make such a demand!”
Now Satan moved in for the kill—literally. “Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’” (Genesis 3:4, 5).
Satan was right. At this point Adam and Eve didn’t know right from wrong, good from evil. Being good by obeying some law that defined “good” was not a concern to them at all. They lived completely by faith in their Creator and in what HE SAID TO THEM!.
Satan’s temptation was to cast doubt in Eve’s mind as to the Creator’s love for her, His concern for her welfare, and whether or not she could trust Him to take care of her. Then he enticed her to move from this life of simple faith in God to a life of taking care of herself—making decisions for herself about matters concerning right and wrong, matters that did not concern her because they are in God’s sphere and not in man’s.
Satan’s temptation was to entice Eve to compete with God by doing His job for Him, to literally “be like God!” You know the story of Eve’s decision and Adam’s passive willingness to share in her tasty snack.
When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they did, in a real way, “become like God” as Satan had said. Their “eyes were opened” and they saw the world, for the first time, in terms of “good” and “evil,” just as does the Judge of all the earth. We call this event “the fall,” but in a real sense, it was not a fall downward, but a reach upward! It was man attempting to be what he was not, an attempt to assume God’s exclusive prerogative to distinguish and decide between good and evil, and therefore an attempt to be like God Himself!
So, you can see that the name of the tree from which they ate is very significant. The issue was not simply that Adam and Eve disobeyed God by doing what He had instructed them not to do, but by disobeying God and now being able to distinguish between good and evil they moved from a faith basis of operation–simply trusting God for everything, irrespective of any ethical code–to an obedience basis.
They didn’t just disobey, but for the first time, with opened eyes, now right and wrong became a concern, rather than just faith in what God said alone. They saw what they had done—disobey God—and they saw with their new insight into good and evil, that to disobey God was evil. They became aware, for the first time, of how little like God they really were!
Before they sinned, Adam and Eve couldn’t care less about not being holy and righteous like God. They were content with being man as God had made them. Now, however, since eating of the fruit of the tree, they felt a desire to be good as God is good and not to be evil—to be ethical and not unethical; to be moral and not immoral.
Before, they were content to be acceptable to God based on WHO THEY WERE: objects of His love, a love that creates the object of its affection. Now, their desire was to be acceptable to God based on WHAT THEY DID—”good” and not “evil.”
This fundamental change in their thinking was demonstrated by their attempt to cover their now-recognized nakedness, or lack of God-likeness, with fig leaves (Genesis 3:7). “I don’t want you to see who I really am—because I know that I am not good like God is good.”
Their modus operandi changed, and they became performers, recognizing good and evil and then trying to be good and not evil, rather than simply walking in transparency by faith in their Father and letting Him as the Judge be the One concerned with right and wrong.
We, too, made this species-altering paradigm shift “in Adam,” and came out of the womb spring-loaded to be performers, living by someone’s (or our own) law that we have decided is the measure of our conduct. Next week, we will begin to look at what God did at the cross to completely nullify this “reach upward to be like God” by Adam and Eve in the Garden.
