Not Following Instructions – Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

A text – Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

¹⁵ The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, ¹⁷ but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

3 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” ² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, ³ but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” ⁴ But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, ⁵ for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” ⁶ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. ⁷ Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

A reflection:

One of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet is Dr. Dennis Olson, an Old Testament scholar who retired last year from Princeton Seminary. He can put deep and difficult theological points in common language. I want to use his words (in bold print) to comment on this week’s lesson from the Garden of Eden.

God does indeed create a “good” world but not a “perfect” world – one that’s closed, divinely-run 
We might like to think that the world was perfect from the start, but when God created each element, God called it “Good,” not perfect. God’s world was going to emerge and evolve, under God’s care.

In the Genesis 2 creation story, the human has work and responsibility from the very beginning 
When God creates Adam, he gives him work to do from the outset, tilling and watching over the garden. He also gives Adam boundaries – things to refrain from doing.  If he eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he will certainly die, God says very clerly.

The serpent in Genesis 3 is not Satan who invades God’s creation from the outside. The serpent is a very clever and talkative (!) animal “that the LORD God had made,” one of God’s own creatures who simply poses some questions and alternative explanations about God’s motivations for the humans to consider.  If Adam or Eve had wanted to, they could have refused the serpent’s suggestions. But neither of them turned their back on the fruit.

The central aim of Genesis 3 is to describe the mystery of sin, not to explain its origin. This Genesis tale describes the human capacity to break boundaries that God or anyone else sets for us.  It’s a mystery all of us wrestle with. The Apostle Paul, too – Romans 7: ¹⁹ “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

Perhaps this famous Adam and Eve story just explains that people could choose as they wished from the very beginning of creation, and sometimes those choices broke with God’s hope for them. I love the idea that rather than being a tale of what caused the first sin, it is a description of the mystery of our deep willingness to drop God’s instructions in favor of our own. It makes all our relationships way more complicated…and more interesting.

A prayer:

Lord God, thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us freedom of choice, even when it lets us disobey you. Help us to remember that your instructions to us are given for a reason, and when we fail to follow them, help us to remember that you love us anyway. Amen.