The Story of a Tree, Part 2 & Mere Christianity + XNotes
Our congregation has around 150 children under the age of 12. And if you don’t know the children, you will connect children to certain people in the congregation because they look, act, walk, and talk like mom or dad. Children become reflections of their parents. Children may end up differing with them in some issue or another as grown adults, but you can’t escape mannerisms, modes of speech, and patterns.
When God made man in his likeness, there is an imitation theology that comes with that likeness. Even if you walk away from the Church, you will still reflect certain Christian etiquette. The renowned atheist Richard Dawkins, who grew up in the Church of England, says that he loves to live in a Christian culture, though he hates Christianity.
Life is Imitative
Patterns follow you around. If a father kisses his children, there is a high likelhood you will kiss your children one day. If they are impatient, you may also manifest some of that impatience. Life is imitative.
When God created man, man was to imitate God; to follow his patterns. If God was loving, he was to love; if God was patient, he was to be patient. Yahweh created Adam and Eve to be like him: faithful in every way. But the serpent wanted them to change the object of their imitation.
The serpent wants Eve’s allegiance. The deceiver wants her to follow the father of deceit (John 8:44). The Serpent wants her to imitate his patterns instead of Yahweh God’s. There is a marked change of strategy from the initial encounter, which I addressed in the first article. There is a tone change as the Serpent goes for the kill. First, there is manipulation. The cunning serpent speaks a little truth, and then goes into full-blown rebellion and utter contempt for the words of Yahweh:
But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely 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.”
The tone of argumentation now becomes confrontational. The serpent directly contradicts Eve’s first assessment of God’s commands in the Garden. The Hebrew emphasizes the serpent’s words. Literally, the devil said: “Not dying you shall die.” The argument is accusatory: “Death? What a ridiculous assumption to say Yahweh is going to kill you for this!”
The Assault on Women
Adam needed to come in and end this conversation. Adam’s failure is extensive here because women, as image-bearers, understand that they are to be protected and defended. False Adams have assaulted our own nation. Instead of protecting, we have sent our women to combat. Instead of protecting them, we have handed our young ladies to gender studies programs. Instead of protecting, we have placed women in the pulpit. Among the many biblical reasons why women should never be in the pulpit is because it is the man’s biblical duty to protect women in the Church as shepherds. From the beginning, the Scriptures point us to the fact that woman was made to be physically and intellectually protected from evil.
The atheist feminist Gloria Steinem wrote that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. In other words, the idea that a woman needs a man as a protector and provider is absurd. But this is precisely the point of the Garden scene. The Garden was a place of worship. Yahweh Elohim made Adam a worship leader and Eve a disciple of Adam. This is why God gave Adam the test to name the animals in the Garden. Naming the animals is a task of leaders. Adam succeeded, so God gave him another test: protect your bride from evil.
The Adamic Test
Here is Adam’s test. And now the serpent creeps into the garden and comes to Adam’s wife. This crafty serpent seduces Eve. At this moment—and I have argued that Adam was intently listening to this entire conversation between the devil and his bride—Eve should have turned to her protector and said: “Honey, is this right? Does this talking snake’s theology make any sense to you?” The husband is, after all, a wife’s shepherd. But this is not what Eve did. But more importantly, the greater responsibility falls on the husband to expel evil from the home. “He should have intervened to protect his wife, but he did not.”[1] Eve was trapped in an argument. Paul says in II Corinthians that Eve was deceived. Adam’s job was to jump right in without saying “excuse me” and either crush the head of the serpent or re-state precisely what the word of Yahweh says.
But Adam was the tolerant/subjective husband. “Well, I’ll let her eat first, and if she dies, I will consider whether it’s worth dying also.”
Now, the serpent’s words in verse 5 are true but taken out of context:
For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Yes, their eyes will be opened, but remember, we all become like what we worship. When you see the word “gods” in the Bible, it generally refers to rulers. In this case, the serpent did not want them to become rulers like Yahweh Elohim; the serpent wished them to be unfaithful elohims/rulers, naked of the glory-covering that true rulers wear.
God wanted them to become rulers and discern between good and evil. This is what it means to rule: to know good and evil and not confuse the two. But when Adam and Eve fell, their eyes were opened, and they became aware of evil, but they struggled to know what was good and what was evil. They were not as mature to discern because they allowed the Serpent to set the terms for the conversation about God. Now, of course, their natural eyes were already opened, but here, the context indicates that the opening of the eyes refers to their ability to judge rightly.
Imitating the Wrong Father
Imagine if every suggestion and idea you ever gave to someone was always right. Imagine that when someone came to you with a counseling question, you always gave the correct answer. Imagine that you, as a parent, always responded correctly to your children when they disobeyed. Imagine never falling for any temptation. This was the promise made to Adam and Eve. The promise was that their eyes would be opened, they would know good and evil, and be like God in the most precise form of imitation possible. But they chose to imitate the wrong father.
But then, we need to address the theological elephant in the room. What about the serpent’s contradiction to God’s statement about death? Was the serpent right? After all, when Eve ate, she was not struck down; neither was Adam. There is no Shakespearean performance of Eve’s death on Broadway. She didn’t physically die. Genesis 5 says that they lived another 930 years. So, we need to consider what kind of death God promised.
Types of Death
There are two main types of death Yahweh Elohim promised: one was a death from community and communion.[2] We need to remember that death in the Bible is not simply a reference to physical death. It has spiritual connotations also. The death they suffered was a brutal one. From that moment on, they would be expelled from the most perfect community ever known to man. The luxury, the tranquility, and the life afforded in Eden were the ideal headquarters for ruling. Eden was to become the center of the world to all the nations formed from this first couple. They lost it all. They lost that sacred place, which is a form of death.
Secondly, they died in their loss of communion with God. They existed in perfect harmony with the Triune God. They related to one another perfectly, a marriage without disagreements because neither disagreed with God's commands. A perfect home and perfect communion with their Creator and with one another. If you had all that and suddenly lost everything in the moment after a bite, biblically, that is considered death. This is the death that God promised them, the death that they understood shortly after they ate and conspired against God himself. This is what the devil does: he wants people to accept his proposal to leave the community and abandon communion with God as the source of all wisdom. He wins if he can get them to imitate someone else.
And so as a result, the following dreadful words appear in the text:
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise…
John picks up these temptations in I John when he writes that the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life are not from God. Eve acts like she is already a mature ruler. Notice that the sign of foolishness is the ability to make decisions that will change your life without consulting anyone. She could have asked her husband, or her husband could have interfered with the situation before she ate.[3] Eve made her assessment of the situation. She obeyed the desires of the flesh and the eyes and the pride that comes from disobeying God.
…she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
Notice that the sin here is not only in the eating but also in the touching. She took the fruit. She touched the fruit. Taste not. Touch not. She grasped for something that was not yet hers. We have a different picture of our Lord Jesus, who did not seize kingship when it was offered to him but waited until it was given to him by the Father.
Remember Adam? He was there the whole time, observing and analyzing the situation. The text does not say he argued with Eve or refused the fruit and only ate it after Eve asked him three times. There is no hesitation. He ate with her. He failed the test Yahweh Elohim had given him. Adam failed to protect his bride and even joined her. As a son, he did not imitate his father.
The garments and coverings were the responses of a man and a woman who failed to wait for their coronation. Sin led them to dress themselves rather than wait to be dressed by their Lord in glory.
How Now Shall We Then Live?
First, do not answer a fool. Fools want to suck you into the rebellion. Fools make rebellion look attractive. Fools are like serpents. They trick you into conversation and then swallow you up. Avoid conversation with evil. Be polite in refusing but fast in running. We should not assume the royal wisdom to discern good and evil without the help of other brothers and sisters. You need your community, so you need to avoid secrecy in your life.
Second, Husbands: protect your bride. Fathers: protect your daughters. Care for them. Treasure them. Praise them. Love them. Talk with them so that when they hear the voice of evil, they recognize it. Do not stand by listening in. Interfere, protect, provide, and crush the serpent.
The Bible is all about imitation. When you partake of the tree of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, and self-control will overflow. But if you partake of the tree undiscerningly, then every virtue can become a vice. Love can mean accepting the lifestyle of the LGBT community. Peace can become a form of fake piety. And patience can mean being tolerant of everything and everyone. The Bible is about imitation. We imitate God because when we do so, we produce the right fruit that benefits our lives and those around us. To eat from the Tree of Life is to bless the community and partake of communion with Yahweh God.
[1] James B. Jordan, Thorn, and Thistles.
[2] I have given a summarized version, but James Jordan lists other forms of death: Satan lied. When they ate of the tree they did indeed die. They died in several senses. First, they died in the sense that death is separation from God, for they hid themselves. Second, they died in the sense of being cast out of the garden, as lepers were to act as mourners, cast out of cities (Leviticus 13:45; Numbers 5:2-3; 2 Kings 7:3-4; 2 Chronicles 26:21). Third, it follows that they died to the Kingdom of God, as Samuel mourned for Saul, even though Saul was still alive (1 Samuel 15:35-16:1). Fourth, they died in being estranged from the world that was to be life to them (Genesis 3:17-19). –see Thorns and Thistles.
[3] If Adam had slapped the fruit from Eve’s hands before she ate, perhaps the punishment would have been less severe.
Notations
I am working through C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity for the third time in my life. You can find my detailed notes from 2007 under Bonus. Lewis offers an incremental apologetic that makes the case for a standard of right and wrong and then works from there. Every act is an “appeal to some kind of standard.” He calls this the “Rule of Decent Behavior.” Everyone affirms “that some moralities are better than others.”
X Files
On Wesley Huff/Joe Rogan Interview
On the accusation that the Church is only a spiritual entity concerned about spiritual things:
Nuntium
I am heading to Pichilemu, Chile, next week to deliver two lectures on Eschatology. It’s my first trip of the year, and meeting the saints and visiting Chile for the first time should be spectacular.
Uriesou T. Brito
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Greetings Pastor Brito. Have you considered that not once but three times God directly states that only in eating Adam would die? Touching is a good principal to resist temptation, but God never instructs that. The serpent also got it right telling eve to eat, but nothing about touching. So where would Eve get that info. Is it more likely that after being questioned by Eve, Adam himself told her not to touch, but then made the fatal mistake of telling her God said so, and not I said so?