Summary
September 11, 2024 – Genesis 3:8-19
Summary
After Adam and the woman have rejected God’s command, ate the fruit and had their eyes opened to the shame of their nakedness, they fashion clothing from fig leaves to deceitfully conceal their nakedness (“subtlety”). At once, God manifests His intimate presence in the garden as the sound of Himself walking in the garden in the cool of day (early evening). Even though Adam and the woman have just committed a most catastrophic rebellion against His Word, our loving God comes forth to them in an observable, relatable form. To stem the contagion of sin, God always offers the opportunity to be forgiven, if we only embrace His will and repent. The Holy Spirit is invoked as a wind in the cool of the day, which Adam and the woman can embrace with humility to return to tranquility, or can reject and continue their descent into nightfall. Asking forgiveness at this point would be to embrace God’s Holy Spirit, while continuing to attempt to deceive God by not being truthful would be preferring their self-deception to the possibility of divine forgiveness.
Their minds have been distorted by the sin that they have embraced and its resultant guilt, so they attempt to flee the approaching Father by hiding behind their fig leaf garments and the trees in Eden. This foolish belief that they can conceal themselves from the omniscient eye of God confirms their conviction that they can still know as God knows. They are withdrawing from God and slowly dying as they descend into this sin-induced madness. By using the trees in Eden to conceal themselves, they further commit themselves to the false god of their reason divorced from fidelity, compounding their predicament.
God addresses Adam by name, which begins Adam’s recognition of his responsibility for his own fall. Critically (and fatefully), Adam chooses to maintain his pride rather than embracing God’s forgiveness, even when in direct conversation with God. He contrives a lie about being afraid due to his nakedness, which God then uses to elicit his admission that he has eaten from the tree. God guides the discussion in this way to encourage Adam to give up his self deceit and admit his own action in breaking faith with God. If this can be accomplished, Adam may redeem himself from his imminent ruin by accepting God’s loving assistance. Of course, he does not do this either. Rather, he blames God and the woman that God gave him, denying his own agency and denying the authority that God granted him in dominion over Eden. An important point: failing to assert legitimate, graceful authority when it is needed diminishes Adam’s likeness to God, thereby disqualifying him from dominion over and indeed even residence, in Eden. He has banished himself.
God then turns the dialog to the woman: she simply admits that her internal fascination with her emerging faculty of reason (subtlety) has subverted her obedience to Adam and to God. Had Adam supported her with graceful authority, this sin would not have propagated. She is the first victim in the long chain of sin that will trouble all their generations of descendants. Finally, God imposes judgement, revealing the fate that they have chosen in the sinful world outside of Eden.
As Adam and the woman, driven forward by their self-will, began their exit from the pleasant existence in Eden, their error and sin were masked by pleasant sensual experience. Only when the truth of their spiritual abandonment was revealed to them by God’s judgement, did the endless pain of their destiny become clear to their understanding.
Bible Study Notes
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