1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
8 And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
9 And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
13 And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
20 And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
1. The serpent tempts the woman to sin.
2. The woman takes the forbidden fruit and gives it to her husband.
3. They adapt fig leaves for clothing and hide themselves in the garden.
4. God curses the serpent, the woman, and the man.
5. God makes clothes for them and sends them out of the garden.
This is the book of beginnings, which explains the name given the book. Thankfully, we are not left ignorant of our history and our roots. We need only to look into the book of Genesis for the origins of creation, the origins of sin, and the origins of the first civilizations. Here is where we learn how God relates to man by way of covenant. We also find out about God’s will for our lives on earth regarding dominion, child birth, and clothing. Without these important revelations, where would we be?
The third chapter of Genesis explains how sin and evil entered the good world that God created. What makes this chapter so heartbreaking and devastating to each one of us is that Adam was acting as our representative when he sinned. According to Romans 5:1-10, sin fell on all mankind when Adam ate of the forbidden fruit. In a real sense, Adam’s sin was our sin. Even as we inherit two eyes, two ears, and two legs from our first father and mother, we also inherit a sinful nature. And this is the very root of all of the evil in the world. This chapter, then, presents our family history. It is extraordinarily relevant to every single person who has been born into the human line.
Make no mistake about it; sin is disobeying God’s rules. When we read about this first sin, we are provided with an understanding of what is going on in every disobedient child and evil tyrant in the world. This first sin marks the root of all murder, cruelty, sickness, pain, and death. The Bible tells us that God is not the author or source of sin, so all of the evil in the world can be traced back to sinful rebellion against God the Creator. This rebellion first appeared in Satan and the angels who revolted against God, and then it passed to mankind through Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden.
Verses 1–7. The story unfolded when an evil spirit, called Satan, entered the garden and began to tempt the woman. Apparently, evil spirits can enter the physical bodies of animals, as seen later in the Bible when demons possessed some pigs in the land of the Gadarenes (Mark 5:12,13). Evidently, the Devil chose to possess a serpent because of its cunning nature. Further references to the Devil as a serpent appear throughout the Word (as in Rev. 12:9), and pagan symbols often contain the imagery of a snake.
Satan rejected God as the only true God when he offered Eve the opportunity to be a god herself. By definition, a god both knows and determines what is good and evil. Thus far, Satan was correct. Yet, he offered several misconceptions of the truth. First, there can only be one God who both determines and knows what is good and evil for all of us. Second, Satan was denying God’s goodness and His ability to determine what was good for man. It is true that Eve would never have had an intimate knowledge of sin if she hadn’t actually sinned against God. In a similar sense, you would never know how good (or evil) it might be to stick your hand into a whirring blender unless you were to try it. But is an intimate experience with a blender worth the pain of a mashed-up hand? The Devil was suggesting that an intimate knowledge of sin and the evil consequences of it was a higher good than avoiding sin and evil altogether. He conveniently avoided mentioning how horribly unpleasant it is to stick your hand in a blender.
Well, as it turned out, Eve bought the lie and gave in to the temptation. She assumed that God didn’t know anything about blenders, and that He certainly did not know what was best for her. So she put herself in the place of God—as the one who must discern what is good and evil—and she chose to take a bite of the forbidden fruit. In essence, Satan taught Eve to mistrust the Word of God, and Eve failed to believe God. By eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Eve refused to trust God’s Word, His goodness, His wisdom, and His commitment to follow through on His sanctions.
There is one more important lesson to draw from this story of man’s first sin. When the Serpent approached Eve, he was turning God’s order of creation on its head, for you may remember that God created man to rule over the animals. But Eve took her cues from this animal, a serpent! Then she turned around and directed her husband to eat the fruit. From the beginning, God had intended the man to be the head of the woman (1 Tim. 2:12,13).
Verses 8–13. Instantly, Adam and Eve realized they were naked, and they covered themselves with fig leaves. Then they tried to avoid God’s all-seeing eye. Clearly, the loving, trusting relationship with God that had previously flourished was now destroyed. This is the basic psychological problem with every man, woman, and child. It is the problem of guilt. Man may attempt to deny his sin, but he cannot deny his guilt. Imitating the pattern of Adam and Eve in the garden, people continue to deny their guilt by trying to hide from God in a thousand different ways. Very smart men have put together complex philosophical systems and psychological explanations so as to generate doubts concerning God’s existence and the reality of guilt. Sometimes men run to opiates like alcohol, drugs, and entertainment so as to avoid thinking about these things.
When God asked Adam to explain his sinful actions, Adam turned around and blamed his wife. Eve turned around and blamed the Serpent. Blame-shifting is another classic response to guilt. This explains a great deal of human behavior everywhere around us, because, by nature, man will do anything and everything to avoid facing his own guilt and sin before God.
Verses 14–19. The Lord God’s response to this tragic event revealed both His justice and His mercy. Of course, He followed through on the covenant He made with man at the beginning. One day Adam would face physical death. His body would return to the dust. Interestingly, God also cursed the Serpent, sentencing him to move upon his belly, which must not have been how snakes moved about prior to man’s fall. Specifically for Adam, God ordained a hard life of misery and difficulty in his daily labors, something Adam did not experience before the fall. Also, Eve was cursed with added pain in child bearing, along with the challenges she would suffer in submission to a sinful husband in a fallen world. Consequently, the lot of women has never been very good throughout the history of the world. Although humanists have attempted their own “solutions” for this problem with the birth control pill, socialist governments, and no-fault divorce, time will prove these to be false solutions. With 50% of children born out of wedlock, fathers and covenant husbands disappearing, half of marriages ending in divorce, the abortion holocaust marring the consciences of these nations, and political freedoms declining, it is hard to say that humanist solutions have improved things. The woman of the 2020s will be far worse off than her predecessors were in the 1920s. There is only one way to address the curses of the fall, and that is found in Jesus Christ (Eph. 5:20-33).
Upon man’s fall into sin, the physical world changed in dramatic ways, such that it would be impossible to understand the pre-fall world based on current scientific paradigms. Environmentally, physiologically, and socially, the entire creation changed form. Completely different biological and physical laws took effect. Recently, certain fields of science such as biology, zoology, and geology have rested strongly on uniformitarian assumptions in order to interpret the past. From a biblical worldview perspective, these are the wrong presuppositions. It wasn’t until after the flood that God provided a basis for uniform physical laws (Gen. 8:21, 22), which then became the basis for our scientific work. Life after the fall would be difficult—full of stress, disappointment, pain, misery, and death. Yet God is merciful in judgment, and He included one short but significant and beautiful side note in verse 15, concerning His plan of redemption! Even as He cursed man, Yahweh God pitied these miserable fallen creatures by providing them this little glimmer of hope—the possibility of salvation for those who would believe. “The woman will birth a Child,” He said. The Devil would bruise the heel of the Child, but in the end the Child would crush the head of the Devil. This is what some theologians call the proto-evangelium, or the first revelation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In fulfillment of this great promise, the child of Eve was the child of Mary. The Lord Jesus Christ was the Son of God Himself, and He crushed the Serpent at the Cross. Some believe in God’s solution and some do not, but Christ, the seed of the woman, is the only hope for fallen man.
Verses 20–24. Following God’s pronouncement of the promise, Adam named his wife Eve, which means “Living.” Without Eve, there would be no more human life on earth and no possibility of the redemption spoken of in verse 15. Before sending them out of the garden, God provided Adam and Eve with more adequate coverings of animal skins. Here is the first record of death in the animal world, and here also is a living picture of blood atonement for our sins. We cannot cover our own guilt by our own sacrifices and our own good works (or our pathetic fig leaves), although today many people still attempt various forms of self-atonement. We must rely on God’s sacrifice. From the beginning, God provided a pattern of blood sacrifice. A completely effectual sacrifice came later at the Cross of Christ.
Finally, God sent the couple out of the garden, and placed angels as guards over the tree of life. Apparently, this mysterious tree had sustained physical life for Adam prior to the fall.
1. The temptation in this passage has been repeated billions of times, and men and women are still taken in by it. By nature, men want to be God. They want to be the one to make up the rules, and they do not want to submit to the definitions contained in God’s laws. When our minds and wills are brought into submission by the Holy Spirit of God, we desire more and more to submit to God as our ethical authority (the One who has the right to tell us what to do.) This is why it is important to study the law of God in the Old and New Testaments. This is also why we memorize the Ten Commandments and lovingly submit to God’s rule in our lives.
2. Wherever sin and evil predominate in a culture or country, we will usually find God’s created order of things being unraveled. Along with Adam, men abdicate their responsibility as heads in their homes, and women rule in family, church, and state. This abdication has produced a great deal of social chaos over the last two hundred years in the western world. Also, environmentalism displaces true dominion work, and men begin to worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.
3. Have you ever blamed your brothers and sisters for wrong things that you did? Can you honestly face your own sins, and say, “I did that, and I am guilty?” It is only when you can plainly say, “I have sinned and I am guilty before Mom and Dad, and before God,” that you are ready to bring your sins to Jesus for forgiveness. If you deny your sins, you will only grow hard in them. Unless you repent and turn to Christ, you will suffer the consequences of eternal death.
4. God’s great mercy was evident even as He pronounced His judgment on Adam and Eve. Eyes of faith will scan the text for God’s mercy in the midst of His judgment. Do not miss this. Hold to it with everything you are worth. There in the garden, God promised to send His Son Jesus, who would crush the head of the Serpent, and provide a covering for His people through blood sacrifice. According to Colossians 2:15, He accomplished this at the cross. Let us give thanks to God for His provision of marvelous salvation when we were caught in the most desperate of circumstances.
1. What are the themes of Chapters 1 through 3?
2. How was the created order turned upside down when man sinned in the garden?
3. What were the three curses that God placed on the serpent, the woman, and the man?
4. What was the great promise tucked away in verse fifteen?
5. What kind of clothes did God provide Adam and Eve? How is this significant?
1. Do we willingly confess our sins, or is there a great deal of blame-shifting going on in our family? What does it mean when people are constantly shifting blame to somebody else?
2. Is our family careful to study God’s law? Do we really know the laws of God? When was the last time that we made a moral decision based upon the principles of God’s Word?
3. In what ways have we actually experienced the effects of the fall in such things as child-bearing and our dominion work?