Transcript
Stephen: When you read the book of Genesis, chapter one, we have creation; everything is good, everything is perfect. But by chapter six, the world is a mess. You read that God saw the heart of man and "it was only evil continually". The whole world is just a wreck, and there's evil and violence all over the place. It begs the question, what went wrong? I think it's a fundamental question, what's going wrong with our world, how serious is it? But in terms of what we believe as Christians, Genesis 3 is right in the middle of those two chapters.
Joel: In Genesis 3, I think we can find so much really good stuff about what's going on with evil. What we'll find in Genesis 3 is that it presents a nuanced and profound view of reality, much more so than I've come across under any other worldview.
We're always trying to put the blame somewhere. Where has evil come from? Why have things gone wrong? We want to assign that to something, and then we can deal with that. What we find is that some people will say it's all based on external factors: our upbringing, our environment, the society that we live in, evil institutions trying to control us. Other people will say this is actually part of our biology; we're hardwired to think and to act in this way and don't really have a choice in the way we behave. Other people will see it as a spiritual problem, maybe people who are spiritualists or astrologers, but they'll assign all the blame, all the source of evil, to this one particular thing.
What we find in the Bible, and in Genesis 3 specifically, is that there's a sense in which all of those people are right, but there's another much more real sense in which they're all wrong because they've understood just a part and a fraction of reality. What we're going to see in Genesis 3 is that there is evil within me and there is evil coming from outside of me. There's both external and internal forces of evil working in the life of the individual.
Stephen: You've got first of all the serpent who appears and is clearly Satan. Revelation speaks about that old serpent, the devil. He gets on with his work, which is a tempting work. He tempts and deceives Eve. But then there's this other side of it, which is after he deceives and tempts her and plants these seeds of things, she then also looks. You have this verse which talks about her eyes looking at the tree, and there are these three things that are really appealing and alluring her: the sight of the tree and what it promises in terms of taste and wisdom and things like this. So what's going on there with the serpent, how does he tempt, what's there?
Joel: The temptation of the serpent comes in two forms, and it's good to note this because millennia have passed since this interaction and yet nothing has really changed; the schemes of the devil remain the same. There are two things that I see:
Number one, there's an attack on the character of God. Number two, there are false promises.
The attack on the character of God, this is the first thing he says, the oldest lie in the book: "Has God said?", "Did God really say that?", "Does God really mean that?", "Does God really have your best interests at heart?" He attacks the character of God to make Eve think God doesn't really have her best interests at heart.
Stephen: They're thinking that basically God's withholding something. Potentially, man could be more than God had actually created and there was something that he was holding back.
Joel: When you look at Adam and Eve, they didn't look at each other and say, "Let's commit horrendous evil, let's ruin our lives and everybody else's at the same time." That's what they did, but that's not what they said. They just said, "We want to be happy, we want to have joy and feel free in our lives." It seems that what God has said is in the way of that, so let's go against God's rules, let's disobey him.
That's the first way in which Satan tempts; he comes after, he attacks the character of God. The second thing is false promises. He says, "If you do this, you'll be like gods." He offers them something that in one sense is true because they do then understand experientially the knowledge of good and evil, but of course they've tried to exalt themselves to the position of God because sin is all about mastery, it's all about who is in control. They find that to be an empty and broken promise.
In the millennia that have passed since this, the way the devil comes at people has not changed. Ephesians 6 talks about the schemes of the devil. I think that's a corruption, a pollution, or an infection of the thought life to infect our minds, to turn us from the truth and believe the devil's lies that our lives will be better if we don't do what God says. So many people in the world have bought that lie.
Stephen: Today, those temptations don't always take the form of a serpent in front of us, but there's no end to the ways those lies and those questions can be dropped in our lives.
Joel: What you see is that while, and we've talked about this, it's important to understand, yes, there are external factors pressuring us to do wrong, but also rising within the human heart there is a response to that. The Lord Jesus said in Matthew 15 that out of the heart come forth evil thoughts, slander, murder, adultery, and so on. So every sin is an inside job.
Yes, the devil can entice us and appeal to us to do what is wrong, but only you and I can actually make the choice to go ahead and sin. We are free agents, we have free will, we have the ability to make moral choices and therefore the responsibility to bear the consequences of those choices.
Stephen: He's not dragging them to the tree, he's not compelling them to eat it. He plants the doubts and he gives the promises, but ultimately it's on the woman and then the man to follow their desires, to believe the lie and to disregard the promises and the truths and the commands and the character of God that they had already known.
