Trust and Obey over our Own Understanding

  Read Genesis 3

The other day someone asked me what I was doing for the fall.  I thought they meant the fall of civilization, so I started telling them how much ammunition and toilet paper I had stored. They meant fall as a season.  Oh, well, to me the season doesn’t change much as far as what I do, other than when we get to winter, I don’t get to walk into the office much.

To me, I don’t care who breaks out the pumpkin spice or when they do it. It’s not going in my coffee.

Today we will look at what has been labeled the fall of humankind—subtitled Sin Entered the Word, but there was no fall or sin without God already having a plan of redemption for our shortcomings.

We know the story.  Here is the truncated version.

God asked Adam if he ate from the tree that was off-limits.  Adam said the woman that you put here gave me the fruit.  The woman said that the serpent tricked me, and the serpent didn’t have a leg to stand on.

And the story of the fall begins with enter the snake. We don’t know if it enters stage left or stage right, but the serpent is surely center stage at the beginning of this chapter.

And it was not just a serpent.  It was crafty, skilled in argument and deception, and it talked.

We don’t get any chit-chat to begin this conversation.  The serpent gets down to business.

He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

Perhaps the serpent knew what God had said to Adam.  Maybe it heard a conversation between Adam and Eve as they were discussing what they would have for dinner. In any case, the serpent knew of the one thing that God had told Adam not to do. The serpent apparently also knew that God had told Adam that he could eat from any tree in the garden.  He just skipped over the single exception as he posed his question.

The snake didn’t say, go ahead.  It’s ok. The serpent let Eve do the deceiving herself.  “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The thought, the idea, and the doubt were not placed in Eve’s mind.  It was enticed out of her mind.

Look at the question.  Did God say this?

The answer should have been yes we could eat from any tree except that one right there and that should have ended the conversation. God said it.  I believe it.  Hit the road, Jack.  Adam and I are having avocados for dinner.

But, the woman chose to converse with the serpent.  There was something to this line of conversation that interested her.

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

We should remember that God gave instructions about this tree to Adam while Eve was still a rib. Adam obviously felt inclined to share this divine prohibition with Eve.

That was surely a good idea. We are talking about 50% of the people in this story who didn’t know of the prohibition; but where did the part about not even touching the tree come from?  Did Adam add that part?  Did Eve convince Adam that they needed extra safeguards? Were Adam and Eve the authors of the first OSHA manual?

Were the first two people that God created the very first Pharisees?  Did they add their own rules to God’s one and only prohibition?

The serpent’s question asked, “Did God really say that?”  The direct answer would have been, “God said we can’t eat from that tree or we will die.”

The conversation continued, “But surely you won’t die.”  It’s a statement in the form of a question.  Remember that the sender of a message can imply but only the receiver can infer.

An aside would have been appropriate at this point in the story so Eve could share her thoughts with posterity.

Would I die?  What is death? Why am I even standing near this tree that God put off limits and we added the prohibition about touching it? Should I not trust in the Lord more than my own understanding?

The serpent continued. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

As much as we don’t like the serpent in this story, what he said was accurate.

And so, we come to the intersection of trust and obedience to God and Eve’s own understanding.

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. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

The PowerPoint slide looked like this:

·       It’s good for food

·       It’s pleasing to the eye

·       It has the added benefit of gaining wisdom

Those first two were characteristics of every tree that God gave them for food—pleasing to the eye and good for food. So far, so good, right?

In 2022, you would also have to listen to 2 minutes of possible side effects after the 15-second commercial.  What am I talking about? Possible side effects include:

·       You and the serpent will be eternal enemies

·       Women will have real pain in childbirth

·       Your husband will rule over you

·       The man must work to produce food now

·       There will be thorns and thistles among your crops

·       You will work your whole life just to decompose and make more dirt when you are done

·       OBTW—you will be evicted from paradise

There was no commercial at that time, just the prohibitive command from God. Eve ate the fruit from the tree and then gave some to Adam and he ate it. Their eyes were opened and they noticed that they were naked.

Consider the thought process of the woman and the man.  The woman goes through her analysis and eats the fruit.  She then offers some to the man and he is like, “Yeah, ok,” and eats it.

Enter the Lord God walking in the cool of the day.  These two naked people in their makeshift clothing hid among the trees.  Their first response to having disobeyed God was to hide from him

God played along.  “Where are you?”

Imagine God walking along and he says, “Marco.”

Adam replied, “Polo.  Oh, I can’t believe I fell for that.” Adam and Eve were not experienced in hiding from God.  They had never done it before.

In their own understanding, Adam and Eve thought they could hide from God. OK, let’s read the actual account.

But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

I love Adam’s reply.

The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

The woman that you put here gave me the fruit.  The woman that you gave me. She gave it to me. That woman—yeah the one you put here.

God turned his attention to the woman. Adam is probably thinking that he is off the hook.

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

Remember, the analysis that Eve went through before she ate.

·       It’s good for food

·       It’s pleasing to the eye

·       It has the added benefit of gaining wisdom

But she rationalized what she did when she answered to God.  There really should be an aside here for God to tell eternity:  That dog don’t hunt.

Here’s the executive summary with which I began.

God asked Adam if he ate from the tree that was off-limits.  Adam said the woman that you put here gave me the fruit.  The woman said that the serpent tricked me, and the serpent didn’t have a leg to stand on, or at least he wouldn’t by the end of the chapter.

This chapter is sometimes titled the fall of man or mankind or humankind.  Some subtitles say, sin entered the world, but we should consider that our earthly nature was already present.

Tom would title this sin manifests itself or mankind chose its own understanding over trusting God.

We are of the earth and of God and our earthly nature understands us so well.  Our nature which comes from being made of the earth knows exactly how to appeal to us.  It doesn’t trick us.  It allows us to trick ourselves.

The words free will are never used here or elsewhere in the Bible, but we see man’s will surfacing in this chapter.  Both Adam and Eve chose of their own free will to disobey God.

They could not invoke the Flip Wilson defense.  What? The Devil made me do it.

The serpent asked the questions. Yes, he was crafty in composing his interrogatives.  The serpent challenged the understanding of these first humans, but both Adam and Eve went through their own thought processes and made their choices.

Don’t beat up these two people too much.  I doubt that any of us could have resisted the temptation to know something that only God knew. At some point—some may have held out longer than others—our own desire for understanding would have led us to take a bite of the forbidden fruit—to disobey God.

The chapter ends with an eviction notice for Adam and Eve and an angelic sentry posted so no one can approach the Tree of Life. It was likely a whole detachment of angels assigned to guard the tree.  They would be there for a good while. While God sent these two packing, he clothed them first.  He did not disown them. They still had their orders to multiply and subdue the earth.

Do not become discouraged or disheartened for we have the full biblical witness and we see the tree of life available to all who follow Jesus.  You just have to go from the alpha to the omega to get that part of the story.

For now, let’s not choose our own understanding when it conflicts with God’s instructions.  God has good plans for us.

For now, understand that if the premise is false, then everything thereafter can be proven to be true—at least it will appear so.  What’s that got to do with a snake in the garden?

If our premise is contrary to God’s instructions—I’m talking the full biblical witness again—then we can convince ourselves of anything, even the worst things.

For now, and forever, let’s try this.

Trust in the Lord with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.

Next week it’s sex, children, murder, and more children.  It sounds like a Netflix series but it’s chapter 4.

Amen. 

Because you listened to your wife...

 Read Genesis 3

God told Adam that the ground was cursed, that work would be hard now—you will sweat, and there will be weeds.  There will be thistles and thorns where you had known only a lush garden before.

OBTW—you will die and go back to the earth from which you came.

There was also a tree of life in the garden, but in this original game of Deal or No Deal, you chose the tree that also comes with death

Why did God do this? Why?  Don’t you wish we knew why?

Maybe we do.  What did God tell Adam?

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife…”

I think there is a 6–8-month Bible study in that statement alone. Here’s the whole statement before God listed the consequences.

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

Remember that Eve did some analysis upon prompting by the serpent. I will go so far as to say that the serpent while deceptive did not trick Eve.  Eve did her own analysis.

The fruit of this tree that God had put off limits and somehow, Eve noted that they couldn’t even touch it, was pleasing to the eye.  It looked pretty.

It was good for food.  If you recall in chapter 2, all the trees in the garden were pleasing to the eye and good for food. Why was this one off-limits?  What made it different?

Consider the name of the tree?  It was the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Knowledge sounds like something good.  It was a cousin of wisdom. Indeed that made this tree more desirable that the others that were just good-looking and tasty.

If she ate of the tree, she would be like God.  That would be a good thing, right? We are challenged to be imitators of God. Paul wrote that he was trying to be like Christ and his readers should follow his example.

Eve had a solid case for eating the fruit of the tree.

·       It was like the other trees—pleasing to the eye

·       It was like the other trees—good for food

·       It was more than the other trees—it offered knowledge or wisdom—something beyond what she had known so far

·       It was more than the other trees—she would be more like God

This was a reasonable thing that Eve did.  There was only one problem.  God had said “No!”  From the beginning, God’s ways and thoughts were higher than those of humankind.

And from the beginning, our own understanding—our finite understanding—would be among, if not the biggest temptation to do something that God said not to do. Our own understanding makes its debut in the fall of humankind.

God punished Adam because he listened to his wife—not about what to wear to dinner—but about something for which God had already given instructions.  The root of the sin took place in Adam’s mind.  He listened to something contrary to what God had said.

Had the counsel come from Uncle Bob instead of his wife, the fault would have been the same.  Adam—who had no uncles—chose to listen to and embrace some thought that was contrary to God’s instruction.

The sin manifested itself when Adam acted—when he ate the fruit.  Eve’s analysis seemed more extensive than Adam’s but we don’t know.  What we do know is that both chose their own understanding over obedience to God.

Did they trust God?  God gave them the ability to choose his ways or their own understanding.  God—being God—surely knew what they would choose.  As the chapter closes, the tree of life—which we will see again in Revelation—was guarded because Adam and Eve—humankind—had become like God in one way.  They knew good and evil.

 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

We see in this passage the presence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the words one of us. In one way, humankind had become like God.  We knew good and evil and could choose between them.

Father, Son, and Spirit also knew good and evil but their own understanding was higher than ours and they never ventured down the path of evil.

I think we have mislabeled this chapter the Fall of Man or the Fall of Humanity.  God didn’t kick us to the curb.  Humankind was not forever doomed. He gave us a route to being made right with him.  He provided Adam and Eve some more suitable clothing.  His command to multiply and subdue the earth was not revoked.

The first humans would just live day-by-day knowing good and knowing evil and having to choose moment-to-moment.   They—we—humankind would not know what it was to live in right standing with God until we received the free gift of salvation that came by grace.

Yes, there would be some temporary measures of atonement in the law that came through Moses, but we know that salvation—our redemption from sin—is by grace alone

For us, the knowledge of good and evil comes with struggle.  Remember that we are of the earth and we are of God.  God chose us to be with him forever.  We must choose to receive the gift of salvation.  Then we must choose to live a life worthy of the calling—the yoke of our Master—that we have received.

Our lives—because we have knowledge of good and evil—are struggles to trust in the Lord over our own understanding.  When our reasoning conflicts with God’s instructions, we must know that God has good plans for us.

Do we stop thinking for ourselves?  By no means!  God gave us a sound mind and expects us to use it. We should find a cure for cancer.  We should invent the most fuel-efficient vehicle ever.  We should be able to make change. We should put the sound mind that God gave us to work as we subdue—bring order to the world.

But…

And this is a big one. When what we understand is contrary to what God has commanded, then we must defer to God for he is the One who has good plans for us.

No matter how attractive the course of action that we understand is, if it is contrary to God’s directions, it is not the best choice. That’s where we come again to the full biblical witness.  Cherry picking leads us to our own understanding.  We must show ourselves approved in seeking God’s will by studying all of his word.

We can blame everything on the serpent, but if we do, we refuse to address the problem of desiring our own understanding more than what God has told us to do. 

We can do the Flip Wilson thing—the Devil made me do it—but we fail to address the root cause of the problem.  We must address our propensity to seek our own understanding over God’s ways. We have to deal with that to live fully.

Salvation is a free gift.  Desiring what God has in store for us is our work.  Leaning into God’s ways is our challenge.  Seeking God and his kingdom and his righteousness first—before all things—and that includes our own understanding—is our charge.

When it’s just the guys sitting around drinking coffee, then the lesson for this chapter is the world is a mess because Adam listened to his wife.  But when we decide to get serious about living this life to the full, we know our daily challenge is to choose God and his ways over our own understanding.

It’s pretty, good for food, good for knowledge, and makes us more like God, but God said no.  Four strong points against one little no. 

That’s our challenge.  Choose wisely.  Trust God.

Amen.

Can we obey God when we don't understand

 Read Genesis 2

 Let’s look at the trees in the garden.

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.  The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The trees were pleasing to the eye and good for food.  Remember those words for next week.  Think about it.  Adam could have been the first tree hugger.  Oh, beautiful tree, I love you.  You are pleasing to the eye and good for food. Let me give you a big hug.

Let’s get on with the tree story in Genesis.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.  And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

Adam didn’t have much life experience.  He didn’t even know about clothes.  Of course, he didn’t have a wife yet to tell him what to wear. He was walking around naked in the garden and God told him if he did this one thing that he will die.

Does Adam understand death?  Does Adam have a concept of what it is to die?  He hasn’t been to a single funeral.  How does he understand death?

All life struggles to live—it’s hard-wired inside us, but do we really understand death.  Even today, we struggle with death.  We live by faith that there is more life to come, but we struggle with death.

So, God told Adam not to do one thing or he will die.  Can Adam really weigh the consequences of this action?

So really, all that Adam had was a command to not eat from this single tree.  Adam has a Thou shalt not and that’s about it. I doubt that he really understands the consequences of disobedience.

Adam only has obedience to wrestle with. He probably can’t comprehend the consequences of disobedience.

If you don’t do your homework, you are grounded for three days—without your phone.  We can understand those consequences.

If you don’t make your car payment, your car gets repossessed.  We understand that.

If you don’t read, study, and work hard while you are in school, you don’t get an education.  I didn’t say that you don’t get a diploma. You don’t get an education. 

For some people, that education is almost as beyond comprehension as death was to Adam.  They can’t do simple math and make a budget.  They never learned how to think and make solid decisions, but I digress, at least for the moment. Let’s get back to the garden.

Adam probably did not understand the concept of death.  He surely understood the command not to eat of the tree. 

It begs the question:  Can we obey when we don’t understand?

I didn’t have to search much for the answer.  Trust in the Lord with…

We are directed to obey even when we can’t understand.  We have some things in common with Adam.

Everything that we know about death we take by faith.  We have been to some funerals.  We have been to visitations, but they have all been on this side of death, at least for us.

Everything we know about life after death comes by faith.

We have faith in the one who spoke everything into existence and gave us commands to do or not do something, that his promises are also true.

We have faith that there is life after death, even though we still don’t comprehend death. Yes, we know that they won’t be here next week.  Better take them off the fellowship team.

We understand that someone isn’t here anymore, but everything we know about death and life after death comes to us by faith.

God’s ways are so much higher than our ways.  God’s thoughts are beyond our comprehension, but we have the mind of Christ.

We can’t comprehend all that God thinks and knows and does, but we have been given enough to live as he wants us to live.  We can take the yoke of our Master and learn from him.

For us, that’s the same as not eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil when we can’t understand the consequences.

So, let’s trust in the Lord and in his commands and learn from Jesus our Master, even when, perhaps especially when we don’t understand all of the consequences of our actions.

Amen.