There was a lot to like about this sermon, in my view. It started off dealing with the common detraction from the Christian gospel about suffering and the ‘God of love’. Of course, Genesis 3 tells us why we and indeed the whole creation suffer. The greater question for the detractor is, to my mind, why their question has any significance at all. If there is no God, then it’s hard to see how any transcendent values can exist, yet the question pre-supposes them. Confusingly, the question also seems to imply a universal reduction to material, which is void of values of any type.
Nor do I see any alternative to materialism upon denial of God. If an alternative entertains the ‘spiritual’ in some way, it ends up as a type of theism (for which the question of death is maintained).
I suppose one retort from the detractor would be that they don’t regard the question as significant, but they see in it a possible defeater for Christian theism. However, my point stands. If there is no God, then the question of values, upon which the question hinges, is entirely irrelevant in every way! Assertions to the contrary eventually fall into the lap of the theist construct, and undo themselves. If there were no god, how could any question about Christian beliefs, or any beliefs have any interest, because they would all be part of the same soup of randomness.
But, back to the topic:
The outcome of the fall was first seen in Adam and Eve seeking to hide from God (Gen 3:8), rather than embrace him: they seeing in their behaviour the undoing of what they had; the beauty of their friendship undone most profoundly, and shockingly for God, him seeing that now he had to seek man, rather than man being in community with him. The image is rendered corrupt and no longer constituted as the basis for communion and fellowship between God and man.
God seeking man is the first picture of God’s other-directed-ness towards man and his love showing in seeking the lost. God seeks man; God will bring the ‘serpent crusher’ (Gen 3: 15) and God covers man’s new vulnerability (Gen 3:20).
The great and moving irony of this is that as A&E seek to become ‘like God’ and know good and evil: right from wrong, God from not-God; they betray a base lack of trust in God and seek to be like him originating in a motivation that is contrary to him: seeking self, instead of the other-directedness that characterises the God who is love.
Overturning what God has provided, they have partaken in the antithesis of the image they bear, and it all falls apart. In verse 22 of Gen 3, I think God’s statement that they know good and evil, is not one of envy, or jealousy, but of sadness; that they have met that which will kill them: standing for self, cutting them off from life, by having opposed the image they bear. They know good and evil, not as being the creator who in self knowledge knows what he is not, but by participating in evil: knowing by doing, and discovering what is not worth discovering. They may no longer take from the tree of life, because the tree is in the garden of delight. They are now in the land of sweat and curse because they have rejected the delight. To live forever in evil would be perdition. God in his mercy cuts that off to instead bring redemption.
Predictably the idea of Adam listening to Eve per se was regarded as being Adam’s error (Gen 3:17). This was stated as ‘the failure of godly leadership’ as though this is anywhere discernable in chapters 1 and 2. It is not, in my view.
A&E are to be ‘one flesh’ a unity, together and beside each other; there is no ‘leadership’ in marriage, because it is a partnership of love, equals coming into a ‘one fleshness’. The creation of priority within the couple is the result of the fall (Gen 3:16c) because A&E are joint rulers over all living creation (Gen 1:26-28). It is only after the fall that a ‘ruling’ of any kind would occur between the couple; and this was a curse! In fact, Adam’s error was in listening to Eve in preference to God (vs 17c). As I stated in the blog on the study , Eve had primacy in the exchange with the serpent and in the presence of Adam (Gen 3:6b) *pre-fall*. There was no problem with this; the problem was with (a) Adam making no contribution to the situation, and (b) putting aside God’s word to him in preference to the exchange he’d witnessed between Eve and the serpent. Noting that Adam’s setting aside God’s command was in the face of the command being given to Adam directly by God, whereas Eve would have had it second hand.
Nevertheless I was pleased that the sermon reminded us that the Bible slates home sin to Adam, and not Eve, unlike the mistake of Christendom for much of its history. Paul also reminds us of this episode in 1 Tim 2:9ff, his reminder being, I take it, that Eve gave wrong teaching, not teaching per se: Adam listened to wrong teaching, Eve’s sex was irrelevant, according to Gen 3:17c.
The curse couplet in Gen 3:16c was properly explained as being a doublet of inversion: the two who were to be ‘one flesh’, a unity, would now be in a struggle of dissension: she would desire to overwhelm (him) (as sin for Cain: Gen 4:7), he would desire to rule (her) as appointed only for non-image-bearing creatures in Gen 1: nothing good in either direction. Restoration begins with redemption, of course, where the curse is opposed on the way to being undone in the new creation.
An interesting point about the curse is that every element of it undoes a specific aspect of the ‘very good’. See this blog entry for a quick look at this potentially fascinating comparison.
I was pleased to hear the sermon mention the significance of the genealogies in the Bible; from early Genesis to the New Testament, they take us along the path to the ‘serpent crusher’, culminating in Luke’s genealogy that takes us from Adam to Christ, who undoes that basic of fears; the fear of death.
Because the Bible is about real events and people, the genealogies are essential to underline the connection: this is not some myth off in the land of the imagination; but it is here and now. The dust is the stuff that clings to our shoes.
I would also add that the ‘chrono-genealogies’ add historical structure to the lists of names. Firstly, the names are important, because they establish the soteriological trace through real people. The dates (ages at sons’ births) root the lists in history; the history contiguous with our historical experience of God.
