Alright, let's begin lesson four with this quote that I really, really love from your suggested reading, your Catholic introduction to the Bialial Testament here, right on top of your notes I reproduced it for you. I think this is a great way to look at chapter three because chapter three really shouldn't be separated from one into it. It's this great plot, this great drama of our origins, the origin of creation, God's desire for us to be with him and the covenant, through the covenant on the Sabbath day, the Sabbath rest, within how that's destroyed, so we have the origin of sin and this origin of disobedience, so we really need to see one through three together. Okay, so let's look at this quote.
It says, a general theme of chapter three is the inversion of norms. Everything is turned upside down. And the theme, the inversion of norms, you find this all over the scripture of what you expect is what happens. You know, the mighty are brought down, the lowly are brought up, that's all called the inversion of norms here.
Well, it goes on. In the divinely established order of Genesis one through two, Adam, God's vice regent is to obey God. He is to communicate God's will to Eve, his spouse, and to gather they are to rule over the animals. That's one through two, that's the ways to design, that's how it should work.
Then it goes on, and in the course of Genesis three, the animal, the serpent, is going to rule over Eve. Eve is going to communicate the animals will to Adam and together all three will defy God. So it's the inversion of norms. Everything is turned upside down.
And that's what we're going to see over the course of this lesson, how this takes place, and really how God's designed for, and really his will for Adam and Eve to be his children, is completely thwarted and everything is broken. All right. So as before we go to chapter three, because all has to do with the discretion, the transgression, the transgression of God's will, in chapter two verse 16 through 17, if you remember, we have the command, do not eat of the fruit of the tree of an algebraic good and eat everything else, but you can't eat of that one tree. Okay.
So this is really important to keep in mind as we go into chapter three, why God gives this command? It is this command because, as we saw with all the discussion on what it means to be an image like this of God, Adam is a free moral agent. As a free moral agent, he must choose. Is he going to love God?
Is he going to obey God? Is he going to serve God? As God said, he must still keep the guard and we looked at those words. Is he going to embrace all of that?
Or is he going to rebel? Is he going to fight against God? So love must be free if it's going to be love at all. This is a profound truth.
In order for love to be real and true, it's got to be free because we're not robots. We're not brute beasts with just following our instincts, you know, where someone's in heat. Well, you got to take care of that. In the first place, we have free will.
We have an intellect and a free will. We're rational spiritual creatures to know the truth and to know the truth and to the good and the beautiful and to the will it to love it. So this is true like in marriage, a good example that is often used is that in any marriage or any friendship or that matter but in marriage, you know, this pouces have to come to this relationship freely. There can be no coercion, no forcing of any kind where a man says to his wife, I freely choose you or every other good looking rich talented woman on a face of the planet.
I choose you until death to us part. That is a choice that he makes at the moment of marriage declaring the vows and at every day of the married life. And you better believe this happens all the time in marriage. You know, there are other rich, beautiful, talented women or men out there but yet still nevertheless you choose to love your spouse.
Okay, that's what makes love free. That's what makes it beautiful. So this tree of knowledge of good and evil is there in the garden because Adam must choose. All right.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the consequences of eating of this fruit as we discussed last lesson is that if you eat of it, you will die the death. Okay. Now, as I said that the word die is mentioned twice. You're going to die die.
You're going to die the death. Some translators have it. That's important because it points out that this, the curses of this covenant disobedience, right? So basically symbolizes the blessings for obedience of this covenant, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents the curses.
If you take of that tree, you're going to die the death. You're going to die dies. So that means spiritually and physically you are going to die. All right.
So with that in mind, let's read now chapters three. So chapter three versus one through seven, let's do. And then we're going to unpack it here following the notes. All right.
Chapter three verse one. Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature the Lord God had made and he said to the woman, did God say you shall not eat of any tree of the garden and the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree, which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes and the tree was desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate and also gave some to her husband and he ate. And the eyes of both were open and they knew that they were naked and they sowed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. All right. That's verses one through three here.
We have this section of the Roman world two on your notes, Satan instigating, Adam and Eve tempting them to sin and to rebel against God. Now there's always a question here. Okay. You've got the story of the serpent and the tree and the fruit.
How much of that was it? It was a literal tree, a literal fruit. Did Satan really take the form of a serpent kind of on a possessive or appear at least in the form of a serpent and that very well may be the case. However, it doesn't strictly speaking have to be.
So in your notes you have Catechism 390 for you or the church says, the account of the fall in Genesis three uses figurative language. Okay. These are the literary tools we talk so much about figurative language, but affirms a prime evil event, a deed that took place in the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
Okay. So a couple of quick things before we unpack these verses. There is figurative language figurative imagery used being used here, literary tools to describe an actual historical event. The church does maintain as revealed truth that God created everything, created our first parents out of the need in a state of original justice and holiness and that there was this command that was transgressed and now humanity is in a state of spiritual exile.
We'll talk about all of that throughout this lesson or more in this lesson. This is revealed to us. We weren't there. We don't know.
This was however many years ago it was, but God reveals the truth of the story to us using these figurative languages figurative imagery. Okay. So was it a real spirit? Was it a real serpent?
A real fruit, a real treat? You can absolutely believe that 100% that's fine, but you could also say this is figurative and symbolic for the historical truth that there was a transgression of a command that brought in sin and suffering death. Okay. All right.
That being said here, let's look at the serpent. A lot to say about the serpent. The Hebrew word is nahash. You can see right here in your notes it's also in the commentaries I suggested for you.
It has a wide range of meaning throughout the Old Testament that could mean snake or serpent. It could mean Leviathan, sea monster. It could mean great dragon. It could mean all of these different things.
Really nahash in so many instances really just becomes especially here. It's this embodiment of pure evil, pure malice, of pure rebellion against God. Sin in every way. This is really what the devil is.
It's this pure embodiment of sin and of evil and fighting against God. Now it doesn't have to nahash to mean a serpent or a snake, but it could be something a little bit more menacing than this. For example, if you go to Revelation chapter 9, chapter 12 verse 9, you have this description of the great dragon that was thrown down. He is the ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.
He was thrown down to earth and his angels were thrown down with him, a third of the host of angels. A lot to say about that, but for right now the ancient serpent is now being described here as a great dragon. He is the devil. He is the Satan.
It's often actually interesting in scripture. Satan is known as the Satan because Satan means the accuser. He is the one who accuses us. It's really devious.
He tempts us to sin. We sin. Then he accuses us about how bad and how evil we are and how unworthy of God's love is. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This is just tactics. But he is the Satan. He is the accuser. Okay.
So the ancient serpent here in Genesis is being described and depicted in Revelation as this great dragon here that loses this sort of spiritual cosmic battle to a Saint Michael. So he is the deceiver of the whole world. John chapter 844, Jesus says he was a murderer from the beginning. He has nothing to do with the truth because there is no truth in him when he lies.
He speaks according to his nature. He is a liar and the father of lies. So pretty ugly descriptions of who this being, this angelic being who has fallen from grace is. He is this menacing dragon.
He is the accuser, deceiver of the whole world. A murderer from the beginning. A liar and the father of lies. He is absolutely horrific.
And all he desires is the destruction of humankind. This is why he is going to tempt Adam and Eve. But why would he do this? What is the motivation?
Why does he care? Adam and Eve are just doing their thing in the garden created by God and everything is harmony, Shalom, like we talked about. It is good. Why do you have to go destroy it?
Why do you have to be a big party pooper? Well he is motivated out of envy. The scriptures tell us in wisdom, chapter 224, it is through the devil's envy that death entered into the world. Now what is he envious about?
He is not envious about anything in humanity. He doesn't envy Adam in any way, shape or form because Adam and Eve are inferior to him. Satan is the, as originally was Lucifer, the angel of lies, the greats and angels. So I am saying, so he has nothing to envy about humanity because humanity is a material and spiritual being inferior to him.
He envies God. He wants to be like God. Now there is a lot to say about the whole story about Satan's fall. But basically he refuses to serve.
He refuses to obey God's command. That the angelic host would serve humanity in some form. He refuses to serve and he wants to be like God. He is envious of who God is.
He wants to be like God apart from God. This is the envy that the scriptures is talking about, as is clarified in the scriptures and tradition throughout the fathers. So he wants to be like God and then he, because he can't be like God, he wants to destroy anything that is like God and that includes man. Human beings were created an image like God and he wants to destroy it.
Okay? He is a liar from the beginning and a seaver of the whole world as we saw in Revelation 12 and John 8. Okay, so a couple things here. So he wants to destroy, he is, motivation is out of envy and we have God fine.
Destroy us because we are in God's image and likeness could. But this transition I think is really, really important on that point because in the end of chapter 2 verse 25 it says that the man and the wife were both naked and were unashamed. The Hebrew word for that is here in your notes is aromimim. Aromimim, they are naked and unashamed.
But then it says in verse 1 the circle was more subtle than the other creature and that Hebrew word is aromim. You can see the subtlety here, the play on words going on aromim. And that is important because Adam and Eve are naked and unashamed. They are in right relationship with God.
Friendship and harmony, original justice, original holiness, everything is going right. But that is where they are vulnerable. Remember God said to Adam you must shamar, you must guard the garden. They are vulnerable in their relationship with each other and with God.
And so Satan's arum, his subtlety, his craftiness is going to attack them where they are vulnerable in their nakedness. Okay? And their relationship with God, their purity, their holiness, their innocence. That is what he is going to attack.
So it is not just a segway from, at least in the Hebrew you can hear it really well from the end of chapter 2 to the beginning of chapter 3. He is really showing that Satan is going to attack them where their weak is, but also what is most valuable, what is most precious to them, which is this innocence and this purity, this harmony between themselves and between God and all of creation. So how is he going to do this? What is his strategy?
Well, as we are going to see here in an attack in a moment, he is going to make them believe that God is not a loving father at all. In fact, he is a tyrant. And he is imposing arbitrary laws to hold back the very best from them. That God doesn't want them to have everything.
That God wants to have something for himself. And he is going to restrict it from them. He is a tyrant. He is not a loving father.
He didn't create them in love. He created them for some sort of subservient way. Anyway, as you can see it there. So in other words, you need to be like God.
You need to have what he is trying to hold back from you. You could be like God. You have control like God does without God. And that's so interesting because this is what Satan wanted.
Satan wanted to be like God. Out of his own envy, he wanted to be like God. And this is going to be part of his strategy to convince Adam and Eve that they can do the same, that they can seize control from this tyrannical God who is holding back from them. Hope that makes sense.
You all with me? Okay. So how he's going to do this is God. He's going to undermine his authority.
He's going to twist his commands to make it seem like God is this eventual tyrant. So when Satan speaks in the original Hebrew, he uses the impersonal word for God Elohim. Now if you remember chapter one, you use it Elohim. Chapter two uses Yahweh, Elohim, the covenantal name for God.
But it's important here that Satan uses Elohim and not Yahweh, Elohim for a couple of reasons. One it's the devil. It's Satan. He can't utter the covenantal name that's impossible to him and his state of sin and viciousness and all the rest of it.
But he's also saying that because he is presenting God to them, not in the covenantal play, not as a loving God but as this distant transcendental God who is distant from them, who has no desire to be with them at all. So that's the kind of God that he depicts to Adam and Eve. Distant, separate, all powerful, holding back from you. Not Yahweh, not the God who loves you, who has given you to covenant with you, who brings you to the Sabbath day of rest and intimacy, not that God, but the distant God.
Then he casts the command in this negative light. Did God say you can't eat of any tree of the garden? You can kind of see how he's depicting God as this God who's holding back. You can't eat of any tree.
Now God did not say that. God said you can eat of every tree except for one tree in the midst of the garden. Everything in the Satan twists everything into a negative light. He can't eat from any tree.
How horrible is that, Eve? You can't do this. She's called Eve later on, but nevertheless we'll call her Eve still in this story. She says, we'll know we can eat of any of the trees, but we can't eat of that tree nor shall we touch it lest we die.
You can almost sense that she's falling into his trap. I see this petulance. We can't even touch the tree. Right?
So God never said any of that. It's an exaggeration of the command. God said don't eat of it. That was it.
But now they're like, we can't even touch it. We can't even look at it. You can't even smell it. Whatever it might be, it's the complete exaggeration of God's command in this sort of petulant way.
That's the most exaggerated and exaggerated way. Right? So she kind of falls into the trap. And this is where Satan really lays down the gauntlet.
He says, you will not die because she says no, if you touch it, you're going to die. He says, you will not die. That's a pretty bold statement here, really contradicting what God said in chapter 2 verse 17. You will not die, but he knows that there is where the picture is.
The strategy is to depict God as his revenge, not vengeful, but this tyrant holding back the best. He won't die because he knows that when you eat of it, you'll be like God, knowing good and evil. All right, lost to say here, you'll be like God, knowing good and evil. Now this is not knowledge in the sense of, like, I know what is good and I know what is evil.
There's more to it than that because the Hebrew has the implication of determining good and evil, calling the shot, saying this is right, this is wrong on your own. This kind of is like really the beginnings of moral relativism, right? Hey, what's right for me is right for me, what's wrong for you is wrong for you and just got to be tolerant of each other because we have our own truth. Moral relativism is rampant today.
The next 16 called it the dictatorship of relativism. But it's been around since the very beginning. It's part of Satan's original attack, his original strategy. And so I got this great quote from Pope John Paul II from your commentary recommended.
He says, tradition holds that Adam having surrendered trust in God committed a sin of pride and wanted to be like God, knowing good and evil. His desire was not to discern the difference between good and evil, but to determine what was good and evil for himself independently of God. So this is Satan's strategy. You can call the shots.
You can determine what's right and wrong. You can be the one in charge. You can be the one in control. In reality, humanity is a whole bit easier in this story and Adam right there with him, with her, I'll tell you in a moment.
Your creature, you can't say what's right and what's wrong and just say, this is it. God's moral, God's morality, God's moral truth, his holiness, his beauty governs all things. You can't change that as a creature. The pot can't say, do it this way.
You can't do it that. It doesn't work. So anyways, it's determining good and evil. Not just, I know what's right and I know what's wrong.
So that is what the strategy is. And then she says, okay, well, she is good for food. It was a delight to the eyes. It was a desire to make one wise.
She took of its fruit, ate it, and then gave it to her husband. Now, this is a nuanced explanation of what the sin is and how it really builds up to ultimately pride. Now, there are three things that she recognizes. The fruit is good for her food.
It was a delight to the eyes and desires to make one wise. This is what's known as the triple concuposense. Concuposense is a million dollar work. It simply means the inclination to sin.
And we all experience this inclination to sin, but it's really threefold. And John tells us in his first epistle, chapter 2, or 16, here in your notes, for everything in the world, the less of the flesh, the less of the eyes and the pride of life comes not from the father but from the world. Now, this threefold inclination to sin is what he's talking about. Now, when it says the less of the flesh, the less of the eyes, think of it more as desires, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes.
The less of the flesh or the desires of the flesh is really an inordinate desire for bodily pleasures of any kind. You can fill in the blank, but it's an inordinate desire. You can have ordered desires for bodily pleasures that are virtuous and that don't go overboard but an inordinate desire for bodily pleasures, that's known as the less of the flesh. That's when she recognizes, oh, it's good for food.
I got to eat that. I mean, of all the other trees, I got to eat that one. That's going to be good to eat. It's going to be delicious.
And juicy and all the rest of it. Okay. And in the less of the eyes or the desire of the eyes, John says, is this covetousness and really an inordinate desire for earthly goods? Again, can I order desires for earthly goods?
Because we need money and clothes and food. But a disordered, inordinate desire becomes a sin. It's the less of the eyes where we've got to have more and more and more and more and more. Beyond what's rational, beyond what's reasonable, we just have to hoard it and keep it and just stockpile it all.
Okay. All right. This is when she says, oh, it's a delight to the eyes. I got to possess it.
I got to covet it. It's not for me, but I want it. And then finally, where the rubber meets the road here is the pride of life. All right.
It says where she is really pride of life is the self assertion, all right, putting herself before God and above God. That's where it breaks the camel's back because she said the fruit would make them wise. That's that self-determination. It really builds upon each other.
You know, the less of the flesh, the less of the eyes, like I want it, it looks good. I'm going to eat it. It's going to be delicious. All right.
I don't care what God said. I'm going to determine what's right and wrong. I'm going to take it. So really the pride of life is the one that just tumbles over the whole thing.
And that's where they make their sin because they've got to have the fruit and they get the covet it and they've got to eat it. But she says, okay, so really builds up. And this is what the whole manipulation was all about. So their eyes are open.
They realize they were naked. They're shamed. They're cold themselves with these fig leaves, which incidentally fig leaves, I don't know this from personal experience, but apparently they're pretty itchy, right? So when they cover themselves with fig leaves, it's like the pinets starts immediately, okay?
Finglinging fig leaves all over your naked body is probably not a good thing. Well, in any case, everything I mean, the die is cast. All right. They say he manipulated the truth.
He says you will not die, but they're not dead. Well, they died spiritually and now death is entered into the world. Their eyes are indeed are open and they're light God in a certain sense, knowing good and evil, but it's a disordered way. Now they kind of they've tried, they made the attempt to say what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false on their own, apart from God.
And that's this disordered false knowledge. You can't do that against God. And it's all very ironic because if you remember from our discussion before, they were light God already. They were made in his image and likeness by gifts by grace.
And this is a great huge theme in scripture, by the way. God always wants to give us more than we could ever imagine. His grace and his gifts and his blessings are tremendous. We just simply have to wait for the blessing.
God desires to give us goodness, but often we grasp at the blessing. We take the blessing from him as we're impatient or we're selfish or prideful or whatever it is. So God already made them in his image and likeness and now Satan is saying, you can be like God, knowing good and evil, but not according to his design, not according to gift and not according to grace, but according to you grasping at that likeness, which of course it all explodes in their faces. So it's a sad irony, a tragedy, an ironic tragedy that they're trying to seize and grasp at something that is not owed to them in any way, shape or form as creatures.
But yet God wants to give them his own likeness anyway. So this is the destruction here. Now, let's now talk about Adam's guilt because Adam was certainly guilty when we said last week that he was created from the dirt of the ground, he's the first dirt bag of human history. But we can see it's true because he was there the entire time, standing there like a chump, doing absolutely nothing.
And let's look here at the Hebrew as he's failing to show Mar the garden. I'm Dr. Nick, thank you so much for watching this clip. I hope you enjoyed it.
If you did and you want to access the entire lesson and the entire course, come visit us over at scriptureintrion.com and join our community of students. You'll be able to access all of my courses and the audio library. And if you want to access all of my courses, you'll be able to access my live courses whenever I teach a new topic on scripture or the Catholic faith. God bless you.