Well, we are continuing our story here. We picked up or we left off last lecture discussing the creation account, how Adam and Eve were created in a state of original holiness and justice to share and dogs on divine life. And now we're going to see this honeymoon phase of their nuptial union on the Sabbath day. That's all going to come to a screeching halt with this lecture when we discussed the fall from grace.
And we're only going to be looking at Genesis chapter three. So a whole hour on this one chapter. But boy, we could do a lot more than that. So what I'd like to do is to go back to chapter two quickly and look at this command that God gives to Adam, not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
So let's read that and then we can jump into breaking this down. Okay. So chapter two, verse 16 and just in context here in verse 15, this is when it says the Lord God, YAHweh Elohim took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to avoid it and to shamar it to till and to keep. And we look at all that last lecture.
And then here it says in verse 16, the Lord God commanded the man saying, you may freely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die. Okay. So let's unpack this here. This is the command that God gives to Adam, giving him a little bit of boundaries here as to what he can and cannot do.
And this is important because Adam is a free moral agent, right? He has an intellect and a will. That's what it means to be in the image and likeness of God as we discussed. He has an intellect and a will.
So he must be able to freely choose to love God and to obey him and obey his commands. So he's got to know the command and he's got to be able to freely choose it. And this is, this is really important. Right.
So in order to be God's child, Adam must freely love and love must be free to love all. We are not robots. We are not compelled to love God or to reject him. We have the ability to choose.
And this is, this is an awesome responsibility. It's a profound mystery, the mystery of free will to be able to freely choose to love and obey God or in that freedom we can choose to reject God. And that's what I was pointing out in the last lecture, right? We are created on the sixth day with the animals with the beasts, but we're called to the seventh day, this day of Sabbath rest that has no end and that symbolizes our eternal Sabbath rest and intimacy with God in heaven.
Right. So Adam has this ability to say, okay, I will freely choose to obey this command. And then there's this other point here that's, that's very, very key and crucial. Morality, what's right and what's wrong is God's prerogative.
It's not Adams. Adam does not get to choose what he can and cannot do. I mean, he can't choose to do it, but what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false. That depends upon God.
God is truth. God is holiness, right? God is love. And so morality means living in accordance with God's will in his design for us.
When God created us, he created us with a moral code. I mean, this is the natural law. We'll talk about this later on when we get to Exodus, but he creates us with this natural law, which are 10 commandments essentially, and we are designed to obey those laws. So that's God's prerogative and we can choose to obey.
We could choose to disobey, right? So this, this is the test of love. If Adam is a free moral agent, if love must be free to be loved at all, if Adam is not a robot that simply compelled blindly to just obey God as some sort of mere brute. Well, hey, this is, this is what it's all about.
It's a test does Adam love God and obey God above all else without a test. You really don't know whether love is freely chosen or not. This is true in every single marriage, right? So in a marriage, you got a husband and a wife and they say, I choose you above all else.
So for me, when I took my vows with my wife, I said, look, I choose you. I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. It doesn't matter how many other beautiful, attractive, smart, rich women I might meet in my life.
I choose you. So in a certain sense, this is, this is a test. If I do meet other beautiful, rich, smart women, I'm going to continue to choose to be faithful to my wife. And I'm not going to go run after these other women.
This is a test of love. And in a certain analogous sense here, this is the test that Adam must have as well. Okay. So God says you may not, you may eat of every single fruit, every single tree in the garden, have your pick.
Just walk around and eat whatever you want to accept for this one tree. That's the test. And if you eat of this tree, if you choose freely to rebel against my will for you, which is all good, all loving will, then you're going to die. And it's interesting that Hebrew says you're going to die the death or you're going to die die.
The Hebrew word for die is repeated twice. And there's a lesson there because rebellion against God will bring about two types of death. It will bring about a physical death, right? The death of the body, but it will also more profoundly bring about a spiritual death.
All right. And eternal death. So that's why I think it's mentioned here twice. If you rebel, if you eat of this fruit, you will die the death or you will die die.
Okay. So these are the high points here of this command that God gives to Adam. Now, let's see how this all unravels. Let's read, let's read a few verses here, chapter three versus one through seven.
Okay. Verse one, now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. 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 to the fruit of the trees of the garden.
The 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. Less 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 one good for food and it was two, a delight to the eyes and that the tree was three desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate and she also gave some to her husband and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked and that they sowed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. All right, pause here.
So we have this account of the rebellion of how Satan in the form of a serpent comes and attacks this harmony that Adam and Eve have with each other with God and begins a subtle attack on their relationship with God. Now we pointed out as well that in Genesis, there's all kinds of literary devices being used, figurative language and whatnot. But they are, Genesis is communicating eternal truths. So I want to point out before we dive into all this and unpack, I do want to read with you the Catechism paragraph 390 to see what it says here.
Because a lot of people will call into question this whole account of a serpent speaking with Eve and beguiling her and the whole fruit account, all this stuff. And so I think it's important to read paragraph 390 for context. And it says this, the account of the fall in Genesis three uses figurative language, but it affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of 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.
This paragraph really helps us to to begin a study of the fall of the fall from grace the right way. It does use figurative language. All right, those are the literary tools that we discussed many times already just in a few hours of this of this course. There are various literary tools, literary devices in use to communicate actual events that took place.
So an example would be the tree in the fruit. Was it an actual tree in an actual fruit that made up this sin? You can absolutely believe it. I don't see why not.
But on the other hand, it's not required of us in faith. It could be a simple literary device being used, but there there was this original test of their obedience. And this catechism reference tells us that revelation gives us the certainty of faith. Like we can we weren't there at the beginning.
We can't know the reason what happened at the beginning of time, but revelation tells us that there was this original fault committed by our first parents. Now, again, whether it was a literal tree or not is open for discussion could have absolutely been the case. I see no reason why, but it's important to keep in mind that there is some literary devices being used here, but it does describe actual events that took place with the command for obedience, the fall from grace, all this stuff. All right.
So let's let's look at what's the same strategy here is. What is he up to and how is he trying to convince Adam and Eve to rebel? Well, his strategy is to make them believe that God is not a loving father after all. And so a lot of time with you in the last lecture, really hammering that point home, how that God is a loving father.
He did not create out of necessity, but freely in a sheer plan of goodness. Right. If you remember the quote from the first paragraph of the catechism, that was the design all along. God is a loving father who establishes a covenant with mankind to make humanity partakers of his own divine nature.
All right. So Satan is going to call all of that into question. Satan is going to try to make Adam and Eve believe that God is not a loving father, but a tyrant, right? A tyrant who is holding back the very best of them, a tyrant that imposes arbitrary laws to keep them from having fun and doing what they want.
And Satan is going to try to make them believe that they can take back authority and control themselves, that they can be like God, but without God. Okay. This is the classic strategy. Satan is doing the same thing in our culture and he's done it in every single culture since make people lack trust in God and in doing that in pride, think that they can control things, that they can call the shots, that they can be perfectly happy without following God's natural law.
Okay. So this is an outright lie. And that's why I spent so much time in the last lecture, hammering home the point of the covenant that God wants us to be his children. So what Satan is doing is blatantly lying to them in order to get them to sin and rebel against God.
And Jesus says himself that Satan, well, let me just read this for you. John chapter eight verse 44 saying. He was a murderer from the beginning and has nothing to do with the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
And that's certainly true here. He's lying to Adam and Eve. He's talking specifically to Eve. I'll tell you about Adam's role momentarily, but he's lying to Eve flat out.
He's a murderer, a liar from the beginning of the father of lies. In Revelation chapter 12 verse nine goes even farther and calls him the deceiver of the whole world. Right. He's deceived everybody from the beginning of time to the last moment of time.
He's a constant deceiver lying to everyone in order to destroy souls. It comes to mind right now also the verse in first Peter chapter five, verse eight, where St. Peter says, be sober and watchful your adversary. The devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking for someone to devour.
I mean, this is just his nature. He wants to destroy souls. He's going to lie and murder in order to get this accomplished. Right.
And so this is what he wants to accomplish with Adam and Eve as well. God is to be mocked. He's not to be trusted. He's holding back.
So if we look at what Satan is actually saying here, he's undermining God's authority and twisting his command and making it seem petty and arbitrary. And the first thing that he does is does not call God by his sacred personal covenantal intimate name, YHWH. Right. YHWH does not use that intimate name.
He just calls God the generic Elohim. That's the word that Satan uses here. So again, there's no intimacy. It's just God Almighty who wants to hold back.
Next, he casts God's commands in a negative light. Now, originally when we looked at chapter two, verse 16 and 17, God says, you may eat of all trees except one. So very positive, right? You may eat freely, eat of every tree in the garden.
But here, notice what Satan is doing. Satan says, did God really say you may not eat of any tree? So you can see how it's being flipped here. Cast in a negative light.
God really said you can't eat of any tree in the garden. All right. How arbitrary, how utterly unjust this is. And this is trying to depict God in his negative light.
And Eve, you can see is beginning to fall into the trap. She's exaggerating the command by saying, no, we can't even touch this tree. And nowhere in chapter two, do we find any command of not touching the tree. It was simply don't eat of the tree.
And Eve is trying to make the command sound even more petty and arbitrary. We can't even touch it. So she's beginning to fall into the trap. And this is when Satan just goes in for the knockout, the KO, blatantly calling God a liar.
And that's what liars do. All right. The liar is going to call the truthful one, the liar himself. So you will not die.
That is blatantly contrary to what God said. God told Adam, the day you eat of it, you will die. You will die die. So Satan says, you will not die for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
And this is the moment when Satan is beginning to depict God as holding something back. He's a jealous God who doesn't want to give Adam and Eve the very best that they can control the shots and this expression to be like God, knowing good and evil has the connotation in the Hebrew as determining good and evil, right? You can determine what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad. This is what God is trying to hold back from you, Eve.
So if you just grab that fruit and eat that fruit, your eyes will be open and you can be like God. And again, this is the same strategy. Moral relativism, a relativism of all of its flavors is so rampant in society. And it's always been there.
It's been from the, from the beginning of the world and we're going to see later on in salivation history, it plagues Israel as well, doing whatever they want to do. And this is what we call the, the one and only quote unquote virtue in the modern world is that of tolerance, right? I am very tolerant of everybody else. So long as everyone lets me do what I think is right, we're going to be getting along just fine.
What's right for me is what's right for me, what's right for you, what's right for you. And so long as we don't judge each other, we're good to go. That's exactly what Satan is saying here. God is holding back from you.
You can be in control. The sad, sad, tragic iron lies because they're already like God. Don't forget God made male and female in his image and his likeness. Right.
The likeness is to be his children, divine sonship. God is not holding back from them. He wants to give them the very best. And what Satan is saying here is that you just simply need to grasp it, take it for yourselves.
And the biblical lesson is we need to receive the blessing of God, being patient, being humble, waiting on God's timing and not grasping at the blessing ourselves. This is going to come up this theme about grasping the blessing or receiving it patiently will come up in Abraham's life and life of Israel. It's a constant refrain. Okay.
So all this strategy here depicting God in a negative light, depicting God as a tyrant works. And so the catechism says here, catechism 397 and 398, it kind of squished them together. It says this, man tempted by the devil, let his trust in his creator die in his heart and abusing his freedom, disobeyed God's command. This is what man's first sin consisted of.
All subsequent sin would be disobedience towards God and lack of trust in his goodness. In that sin, men preferred himself to God and by that very act, sworn him. He chose himself over and against God against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good. Constituted in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully divinized by God and glory seduced by the devil.
He wanted to be light God, but without God, before God and not in accordance with God. So these two paragraphs summarize so well what I've been saying here, Adam and Eve let their trust in their creator die. They did not trust that God wanted to give them the very best. So in pride in preferring himself to God, sworn him.
He wanted to be like God without God right before God. This is the great tragedy. God wanted to give everything to Adam and Eve. They just simply needed to trust and they didn't.
And this is what happens with us when we send as well is the classic strategy. We are being convinced by Satan, by the world, by our own sinfulness. We can be happy without God and that's a flat out lie. It's the same lie that's been being spouted from the mouth of Satan and his minions ever since the beginning of time.
When we trust and love and obey God, that's when we will be happy.