As Christians, we daily struggle with sin and temptation. In order to fight this, we need a strong understanding of how sin tempts us to turn away from the God who saved us. We find this knowledge in the Bible, even at the very beginning. Genesis 2 and 3 show us that the reason that Eve was deceived by the serpent is the same reason that we fall into sin under temptation in our individual lives today. Parallels between Genesis 2 and 3 demonstrate the heinous evil of the sin of Adam and of all sins since.
The Viciousness of the First Sin
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” is one of the most famous sentences in the Bible, opening revelation with the astounding summary of our transcendent God’s act of creation through the power of his Word. The chapter concludes with the proclamation: “And God saw all which he had made, and behold, it was very good.” Christians generally understand that creation was initially perfect and glorious.
So when we come to Genesis 2 in our reading plans, our eyes start to gloss more quickly over the page. Seeing a recap of creation day 6, zooming in on God’s process in creating Adam and Eve, we naturally kind of check out, being baffled by what to us as Westerners conditioned to movies and TV we consider hopelessly nonlinear story-telling. Or at least, this is how I usually approached Genesis 2 in my past Bible reading. Stories about rivers that nobody remembers and gold and the gum of certain trees sounds like needless exposition to many modern readers.
But to minimize the importance of the details of Genesis 2 is a gross misunderstanding of how the Bible was written. God actually shows an incredible economy of words in his descriptions of stories, history, and theology. When you come to Genesis 2:4–17, you have to find something more interesting than, “Oh, these are the details of day 6,” or, “Does this contradict Genesis 1?” This complementary second creation account bears its own important theology.
Genesis 1 has a way of emphasizing the transcendence of God; it proclaims that Elohim is transmundane, totally other. Hence the description of God speaking everything into being. On the other hand, Genesis 2 emphasizes the immanence of God; it describes Yahweh as operating on the earth, forming man from the dust of the ground, speaking to man and relating to him. This distinction, however, goes beyond the verbs used (“speak/spoke/create” vs. “form”). The mistake we make in reading the creation in Genesis 2 is that we assume it is “very good” in the same way as Genesis 1:31.
However, when God describes the goodness of the creation in Genesis 2, its emphasis is on the goodness of the creation to man. Notice in particular the description in verse 9, that God put in the garden of Eden “every tree that was desirable for appearance and good for food.” The implication is that he creates these trees for man. After all, God forms man from the dust of the ground in verse 7, then plants a garden and puts the man in it. Finally God plants the good trees. The following verses depict Eden as the source of the rivers that water a wide swathe of the surrounding world, emphasizing the goodness of the surrounding regions and their riches. In verse 15, Moses restates that God put man in the garden and adds that this placement is with the purpose to “serve (work) it and keep it.” The implication remains: the goodness of the whole earth, and particularly the best things of the garden, including every good and desirable tree, were made for man.
God, therefore, gave to man every good and perfect gift in the garden of Eden. There was certainly no reason for dissatisfaction.
But when you jump to Genesis 3, we see that Satan deceives Eve into believing that God is withholding good things. Not only does he hold up the knowledge gained through eating the forbidden fruit and becoming like God, he convinces Eve so that she “saw that the tree was good for food and that it was delightful to the eyes and that the tree was desirable for making one wise.” Notice, just as God gave man “every tree that was desirable for appearance and good for food” (2:9), so Eve saw that “the tree was good for food and that it was delightful to the eyes and that the tree was desirable for making one wise” (3:6). The parallel of Genesis 2 and 3 illustrates just how horrible the first human sin really is.
The viciousness of the first human sin lies in this: that having every good and perfect gift from God, Eve was deceived into thinking that God had withheld something better, and Adam willfully chose to buy into his wife’s thinking. They rejected the greatest generosity and insisted on having their own way, choosing something other than God’s plan for their happiness and fulfillment.
The Viciousness of Our Sin
Adam and Eve’s substitution of the forbidden fruit of the tree for the good gifts God had given them, however, has the same root issue as the heart of our sins when we give into temptation today. Believers: God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places (Eph 1:3). Just as God gave Adam every desirable and good tree, all the wealth of the perfect earth, so too God gives believers every good thing in heaven. And every time we sin, we make the same choice as Adam. We fall into the same deception as Eve.
Jus as Eve perceived the benefits of eating the forbidden fruit from the tree in the midst of the garden as better than obedience to God and accepting his perfect gifts, so temptation regularly tells us that sin is better than God’s spiritual blessings. It tells us that God has withheld better things from us. It tells us that fleeting earthly pleasures are better than whatever we have in Christ. When we fall to temptation, we perceive the world through the same lens as Eve when deceived by the serpent.
How much worse is our sin than that of Adam and Eve! Adam was given earthly things, a perfect earth yes, but we know how Adam fell and how the serpent deceived Eve. We know what Jesus has done to restore the creation through the redemption of his elect. We know what God has given us spiritually. But we sin anyway.
Part of the solution for our daily lives, then, is to recognize how temptation bends our perception, so that we see the heinous rebellion of Adam and Eve’s sin reflected and magnified in our own.
If you wish to kill sin, you must fight it at the level of how you perceive the world around you. You must recognize that God is the source of every good and perfect gift, that he withholds nothing good from you, and that he has given more than you can ask or think for your needs and desires. But discontent, pride, envy, self-pity, and numerous other vices will skew your perception of the world and do the devil’s tempting work for him. Reject, then, Eve’s erroneous perception of this world, and see the perfection God has created for you.
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