‹ Back

Genesis 3:4. "But the serpent said to the woman, 'You will not die.'" 

 

This is not a randomly chosen verse this morning. I have been thinking a lot about today's first reading, Genesis 3:9-15, and I wanted to go back and re-read the interaction between the serpent and Eve. Someone in our gospel group yesterday pointed out that Adam was with Eve during this interaction, and lamented that he did not do anything to stop her or protect her. I never really thought about Adam being there and overhearing this conversation, so I reread the passage. It says that Eve ate the fruit, and "she also gave some of it to her husband, and he ate." Genesis 3:6. I guess the inference is that Adam was nearby, since if Eve had to go find Adam to give him the fruit, the story would have played out differently. For example, after Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they realize they are naked and make clothes for themselves (Genesis 3:7). If there was a lapse of time, Eve would have realized she was naked on her own, and maybe would have been too ashamed to even go find Adam.

 

In any case, when thinking about this conversation, I thought about how confusing it must have been for them. If Adam was there, he was probably more bewildered than he was thinking that the serpent was a danger from which Eve needed protection. It would have been confusing because up until that moment, Adam and Eve had never heard an untrue word. They were living in perfect communion with God - they only knew Truth. They did not even know lying was "a thing," just like they did not know they were naked - naked was just what they were, they didn't know there was another option. So when the serpent began talking to Eve, neither Adam nor Eve had any framework for processing possible untruths. They took the serpent's words at face value, because that was all they knew.

 

Satan started the conversation not with a lie, but with a question - “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?" (Genesis 3:1). If Satan had opened with a lie, something that directly conflicted with a truth they knew, perhaps they would have been a bit more wary. One well used means of beginning a persuasive argument is to open with a question. This forces your opponent to reveal and defend his position, which also tells you how well he knows it. Eve's answer revealed to Satan what God had told them - she said that that if they ate of this particular tree, they would die. (Genesis 3:3)

 

So far, so good - the serpent hasn't lied yet, nor has Eve. But now the serpent has information and a way in (things he wouldn't have had if Eve had just not engaged, more on that later). God told them they would die if they ate the fruit. But Adam and Eve have no experience of death or what it means. Knowing this, the serpent now does lie to them, saying "You will not die" and making God out to be the liar, giving them a reason why God would have lied to them (because the fruit will make them like God, and He does not want that).

 

Not knowing what a lie is, Adam and Eve seem to now be confronted with two competing realities - either they will die if they eat the fruit or they will not. How are they to know which is correct, how do they know what's real? Of course, they knew God perfectly, so they should have known that God would never lie to them and only wanted what is best for them. That is where the Fall came from: not trusting God, not believing Him when faced with a choice not to. But keep in mind: 1. they have never heard a lie before and did not know what lying was; 2. the tree was in the garden (Why? If it was not good for them, why did it exist?)*; 3. the fruit "was a delight to the eyes" (at least after Satan spoke to Eve, it was; she  apparently had never noticed this before. This may have been another lie of the devil - a glamour that made the fruit seem more desirable.) (Genesis 3:6); 4. they had not experienced death, so did not fully know what it meant "to die"; and 5. from Adam's vantage point, at least, Eve ate the fruit and nothing seemed to happen. (How often do we sin in some small way and nothing seems to happen, so we let ourselves think it must be OK - God must not really have said or meant that we were not to eat the fruit of that tree?)

 

All of this just goes to show how insidious and evil lying is, and how easily we, who were made for the Truth, can be deceived. Lying creates a false reality, one which directly contradicts God's actual reality and which may entrap others, especially if we have designed it to. It creates a path into sin and misery for otherwise innocent people who believe our lies. Human beings want to believe others because we were made to live in Truth. We especially want to believe when the fruit of that belief is "pleasing to our eye".

 

So I can't blame Adam for not defending Eve, I think he was too confused, having never heard a lie before. I do blame Eve (and Adam, if he was there) for engaging in conversation with a serpent, though. They knew they were the only ones created in God's image and likeness; the only earthly creatures capable of reason. They should have cut off that conversation as soon as it began, knowing that this serpent was an aberration.

 

We, however, do know what a lie is, and we know that Satan is the father of lies. We are to blame when we act on any statement or hold any belief that contradicts, or leads ultimately to the contradiction, of God's law. This very often means having to deny ourselves what we want (even if it is very pleasing to our eye), and it sometimes means trying to convince others to deny themselves what they want. It is not at all easy, but it is much better than falling into the trap of the liar.

 

*I have a lot of thoughts on why the tree was in the garden, as well, that I should try to flesh out later. (Like maybe the tree existed because in our unfallen future there was to come a time when we would be ready to eat from it, which leads me to the thought that maybe God always wanted to give us something even better than the Garden of Eden, which is what we are promised now, and the tree was the instrument of that either way.)

 

_____________________________________________________________________________________

(Note: The title of this post comes from the name of a Ricky Gervais movie, which takes place in a world in which no one lies until Ricky's character "discovers" how to. In one scene, trying to give comfort to his dying mother, he makes up the idea of an afterlife. I found it so ironic that Gervais, a "devout" atheist, would use the truth he refuses to accept as one of the major "lies" in the plotline of his movie).