Genesis 3

Everything that we see and experience today is not “very good.” What happened to the world? Why do we see oppression, poverty, and pain? How is it that death came into this world?

God did say something about death in Genesis 2 concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” That day came, and the futility and death that we see all around us is an indication that we are living in the day that God spoke of to Adam.

There was a crafty serpent involved in all of this. He spoke to the woman first and deceived her. He questioned the Word of God, and presented his own word as more reliable than the Voice of the Lord. Instead of executing judgment upon the serpent for insubordination to the glorious Creator God of the seventh day, the woman listened to the voice of an adversary, and Adam listened to the evil suggestion of his wife. The world has never been the same.

“You will not surely die,” this enemy claimed, and he suggested that God did not have their best interests at heart; that the Lord was trying to prevent them from experiencing all that life had to offer. Though the woman was deceived first, Adam was the one representative for all mankind. It was through him that sin entered the world. With sin came great misery and even death. More than just an isolated incident of human biological system failure, all of creation has fallen into a day of death.

That day of death includes a new awareness of nakedness and shame before Almighty God and one another. We long for better clothing than we can provide to cover our unrighteousness. We are lawbreakers. Where will we find an answer to our overwhelming guilt?

When God confronted the man and the woman after they had sinned, He came forward in the spirit of another day, a Day of Judgment that would now come upon the earth. That day broke into the world at this critical moment, and the man and woman were afraid, and they hid from the voice of God.

God spoke first to the man, then the woman, then the serpent, then back again to the woman, and then finally to the man. Notice the pattern. His message to the serpent is at the very center of this story, and it demands our careful consideration. But in the order that these words appear ...

God questions the man. The man blames the woman. The gift of God that was the divine aid that helped him in his aloneness has now become his problem. He does not own his own responsibility for sin. He can provide no real covering for his wife. He is afraid, and he is very ready to turn the gaze of a holy God away from his own guilt toward the one who is the weaker vessel.

God then questions the woman. She blames the serpent. She knows that she was deceived, and she is very aware that she ate what was forbidden. But she too will not own her fault.

God does not enter into debate or conversation with the serpent. He rebukes the dragon behind the talking animal in this amazing hidden jewel at the center of the chapter. Two points: First, the serpent will be defeated and brought very low. Did he think that he would be exalted up to the highest heavens? He will be cast down into the dust of the ground. Second, defeat will come through a descendant of the woman he deceived. There will be an offspring of the woman who will suffer in order to crush the head of this evil one under his feet. Who is this promised descendant of the woman? How will he have victory over the evil one? How will he overturn the day of death that has come into the world through the sin of man? We will have to wait for those answers. They will come little by little and in various ways. For now, we must believe that the victory of God through a new man is as sure as the Word of God itself. What He promises will happen.

In the meantime, the world has suffered horrible change. Paradise is lost for the time being, whisked away from the day of death that has so stained everything. God now announces both grace and judgment to the woman. There will be children, but there will also be pain in bringing forth the next generation and discord in what should have been a perfect marital relationship of love and service.

God then turns to Adam and speaks grace and judgment to him. There will be food, but there will also be difficult toil and a battle against the ground itself. The ground will seem to win, as man dies and returns to the dust from which he was made.

How can we live in the day of death? Adam believed the word of God spoken to Him on that day. This is the way for us now. The just shall live by faith. God promised not only death, but life, and a Savior who would win the warfare between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Don't miss the promise of life in this chapter. Adam did not miss it. That is why he called his wife Eve, the living one. New life would come, and Eve would be the mother of all living.

That life would come at a cost. Man would need a better covering than what he could sew together for himself. It would require the shedding of blood. These clothes given by God had a story to tell.

Heaven and earth seemed so much further apart at the end of that day of death than they did at its beginning. People of faith would have to wait for the second Adam to come. It was necessary for the Messiah, the Seed of the woman, to shed His blood for us and to win the war of the ages. The good Man has come. He has won for us a new day of true life. We hear His voice, and we believe.