Friday, October 4, 2019

In The Beginning. Day 12, The Fall, Part Three

In yesterday's passage the serpent told Eve that God lied to her, that she would not die if she ate the fruit, and that God only told her she would because eating the fruit would make her like Him.

Eve listened to these smooth words, began to doubt the goodness of God, and began to feel tempted. The longer she looked at the fruit and the longer she thought about the fruit, the more she wanted it. "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it." (Genesis 3:6a)

Have you heard anyone say, "There's no harm in looking."? This is blatantly untrue. There is a lot of harm in looking at anything that tempts us to sin. Eve is a good example of that. King David is a good example as well, for when he spied the wife of one of his elite soldiers taking a bath, he didn't look away. He kept looking at her, kept thinking about her, and ended up having her brought to his palace where he committed adultery with her and caused her to become pregnant. This led him down an even darker path because when he was unable to pass the baby off as the woman's husband's, he deliberately had him killed in a battle and took her for his own wife. Later David would say, "I will set no wicked thing before my eyes." (Psalm 101:3) He learned his lesson, but he learned it the hard way. Eve did too. It's not safe to keep looking at anything that tempts us to have sinful thoughts or to perform sinful deeds. The things that tempt me may not tempt you and vice versa, so it's important for us to be aware of our weaknesses and to avoid them as much as we possibly can.

Satan didn't force Eve to eat the fruit. She did it of her own free will. He merely got her to take a good look at it and to think about its supposed benefits to her. Satan can't force any of us to sin. He may plant the idea in our minds or he may entice us to take a long look at the wrong things, but the responsibility for our actions fall entirely upon us. Eve sinned because she was confused and deceived by the serpent's words, but now Adam sins knowing full well what he's doing. "She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." (Genesis 3:6b) The Scriptures indicate that Adam's sin was worse because he knew exactly what he was doing. The Apostle Paul explains to his friend and fellow pastor Timothy why he doesn't allow women to teach men in the church. He says this is because Eve was deceived and persuaded Adam to sin. Adam didn't sin because he was deceived; he sinned because of Eve's influence over him. (1 Timothy 2:11-14)

We don't want to misunderstand what Paul is saying. A godly woman is an extremely good influence on her husband in the home. Many a man has changed for the better because of the godly behavior of his wife. Married men usually want to make their wives happy by being better husbands, so they are eager to do the things they know will make their wives happy. A godly wife can make her husband more godly simply by encouraging him to do the things that please the Lord and her. Also, being married has a good influence on men in other ways. Statistics show that married men are generally more successful in their careers and that they tend to make more money than single men. Married men usually live longer than single men because their wives encourage them to take good care of themselves and to visit the doctor more often. So the Apostle Paul isn't saying there's anything wrong with a good woman having an influence on her own husband. What he was afraid of in the churches of his day is that women in his day weren't very well educated. Some had no education at all since it wasn't considered necessary for a woman to know how to read and write. If they couldn't read and write then they couldn't study the Scriptures for themselves. This made it more likely for a woman instead of a man to be deceived by hearing false doctrine. The woman couldn't cross check the false information with the Scriptures. Then, if an attractive and charismatic woman were allowed to teach a class where men were included, the men could be led astray by false doctrine without even realizing it. They might be taken in by her beauty and her smooth words to the point that they would not check the Scriptures to see if her doctrine is correct.

Why did Adam eat of the fruit? Perhaps he did it for love. Some scholars suggest that he didn't want Eve to be alone in the fall from grace. Or it could be that his love for her caused him to be unable to say no to her when she pleaded with him to join her.

I tend to think Adam found himself unable to stand up to her. He wanted to please her. He wanted to do what she asked of him. Whether his desire to please her stemmed from love for her, from physical lust for her, or from not having enough backbone to stand up for himself, I can't say for sure. But verse 6b indicates to us that he had a problem with standing up for himself, or for Eve, or for the principles God had laid down for him. Verse 6a says Eve gave some of the fruit to her husband "who was with her". Adam was standing there the whole time while the serpent engaged Eve in conversation and while the serpent tempted her to eat the fruit, but he didn't say a word!

In Genesis 2:15 we were told that God placed Adam in the garden and commanded him to take care of it. Why then did Adam allow this creature to attain the level of authority in the garden that it now holds? Why did Adam allow the serpent to beguile his wife? Why didn't he protect the one he referred to as his other half, as bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh? (Genesis 2:23) He could have quickly ushered Eve away from danger the instant the serpent started insinuating to her that God was  a liar, but he didn't. He could have rebuked the serpent, but he didn't. I can't say what was going on in his mind. It could be that in his thoughts he'd felt tempted for some time to eat of the fruit himself, but God had told him he'd die if he ate of it. Now that Eve has eaten the fruit and hasn't fallen down dead, this may be the final encouragement he needed to give in to his own temptation. We don't know whether Satan has been attacking his mind every time he passed by the tree. It makes sense that Satan would have attacked Adam first, since he was in the garden before Eve was created. But the attack was unsuccessful because Adam had been given direct orders straight from the mouth of God not to eat the fruit. But Eve was given the order from Adam, and for some reason this may have made her more vulnerable to attack. Adam might not have communicated God's instructions to her clearly enough. He may not have made the threat of death scary enough, considering no one had ever died before. Death was only a concept then, not a reality, and perhaps not a very clear concept at that.

Adam and Eve don't immediately die when they eat the fruit. But they bring death into a world that has never known death. Because of their fall from grace, their human bodies will someday die. The children they are going to bring into the world will someday die. The legacy of the fall continues on today, for every human being and every creature of the animal kingdom dies. Worse than all this, the sin of Adam and Eve separated them from their God. They no longer have the close relationship with Him that they once had. In tomorrow's passage we will see them hiding from God out of fear and guilt over their sin.





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