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Text Comment
v. 20 Eve sounds like the Hebrew word meaning "life" or
"living." Some good men have argued in their commentaries that for Adam to call
his wife "Eve" at this point in the history, with the death sentence having been
pronounced, but no children yet present or on the way was an act of faith on his part.
v. 21 It is overly subtle to find here a reference to atonement (the killing of
the animals to get the skins). The idea is rather the first of a great many provisions
that God, in his mercy, will have to make for man in his fallenness. Our immediate needs,
as well as our ultimate needs are God's concern, and he has addressed them both here, the
ultimate needs already in 3:15, and now much better provision for their clothing than they
had been able to muster, themselves 3:7. God gave them a proper outfit.
v. 22 Knowing good and evil first hand, in experience, and now, especially, the
bitterness of evil that might make him want to grasp for the tree of life. Not that he
could somehow have grabbed life away from God and conquered death by a mad dash for the
fruit of the tree of life in the center of the garden. Genesis and the rest of the Bible,
and even the verses just before, do not permit that interpretation. But that would have
been his intention and by trying it, he would have made his case even worse; so God
prevents him from doing what his misery might incline him to try -- an act of disobedience
and rebellion against God from which there would be no return.
v. 23 In 2:5-15 we were introduced to the Garden of Eden as man's perfect home,
an environment that God had created especially for him and in which his life might come to
complete fulfillment and enjoy close and happy fellowship with God. Now, because of sin,
he is banished from that garden and forbidden to return to it.
v. 24 "drove out"; a strong image.
The entrance to the garden was from the east, so the guards placed there; remember that
the tabernacle and the temple -- other places representative of God's presence in the
world, were also entered from the east.
The narrative of the fall comes to its close with the account of the banishment of Adam
and Eve from the garden, an account loaded with powerful symbols that the rest of the
Bible employs in such a way as to indicate the terrible and hugely important meaning of
these few verses at the end of Genesis 3 We have here, in other words, not simply a
telling of what happened, but an interpretation of human life and history from that point
to this.
What is clear from the images employed is that we are to see the Garden of Eden as a
kind of archetypal sanctuary, a place where God's presence dwely in all its life-giving
power Man's banishment from the Garden, therefore, was a banishment from that divine
presence and all of the blessedness of life that went with it.
Cherubim were posted to guard the entrance of the garden, to keep man out. It is not
that man is going to find the way back to the garden and peace with God a difficult thing
[requiring the daring, strength, and perseverance you find in the heros of myths &
fairy tales. No, man's situation is not that], he cannot get back, God will not let
him.
Later, you may remember, cherubim were worked into the design of the great curtain that
separated the Most Holy Place from the rest of the tabernacle -- the Most Holy Place being
the place where the glory of God was represented as most immediately and powerfully
present. Further, cherubim in gold hovered over the ark of the covenant itself which was
placed in the Most Holy Place both in the tabernacle and in the Temple that Solomon built.
Remember no one could go into the Most Holy Place, past the cherubim on the curtain,
except the High Priest, and he only once a year and with the blood of the Day of Atonement
sacrifice.
These are extraordinarily powerful and plain symbols of man, separated from God because
of his sin and impurity, unable now to come into God's presence, unless by means that God
himself devises, means by which man's sin and guilt is overcome.
When we come to the New Testament and the death of Jesus Christ on the cross for our
sins, the same powerful symbols are employed to explain what happened and with what
result. We read in Matthew 27:51 that, when Jesus died, when the debt of our sins had been
finally paid, the curtain that separated the Most Holy Place from the rest of the temple
was torn in two from top to bottom. The way back to the presence of God had been opened.
Which is exactly what the author of the Letter to the Hebrews says:
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood
of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain...let us draw near to
God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to
cleanse us from a guilty conscience...
Banishment from God's glorious presence and all that that presence alone can
communicate to men and women -- that is the curse visited upon mankind because of sin. And
that is what is both effected and symbolized by God's driving Adam and Eve out of the
garden and preventing their return.
Now, we see here both aspects of this banishment already here in Genesis 3 and then in
the rest of the Bible and, and this is my point this morning, wherever we look in our own
lives and in the world we live in today.
I. The first aspect of this condition of life, banished from the garden and
prevented from
return, is the universal longing and restlessness of human life.
We were made for the Garden, for life of uninterrupted fellowship with God. You were
and I was and everyone around you was as well. We have capacities, powers, potentialities
that are little more than an ache inside us because they were given us that we might
experience Almighty God, the Holy One, up close and intimately in a way we do not
now. We were made to talk with God and enjoy God; we were made to experience the pleasures
and the satisfactions of a life lived in communion with God, in perfect purity of mind and
body. We were given minds with the capacity for deep thought and delicious understanding,
bodies capable of the hardest and most satisfying work together with the most exquisite
pleasures.
But all of this has now been corrupted, all of it cast adrift to seek some new purpose
in life, but whatever purpose we find is but the palest shadow of what we were made for
and draws from us only the smallest portion of what was once in us to give and to think
and to feel and to know. We were made for God and for a life with God and, as Paul very
simply describes the life of man in sin, he is now in God's world without God.
And so wherever we look we find hungry, longing, restless men and women. People who
want more and are seeking more, because, whether they know it or not, they were made for
more, so much, much more than their lives are now. And it matters not what the
circumstances of a person's life may be -- he always is looking for something else.
Put a cow in clover and it is content and will remain content. Place a man in a
material paradise and he is content only for a short time. Then comes that strange thing
we call boredom or restlessness, the longing for something else, something more. What he
does not know is that he is longing for what he had in the Garden and what he lost on
account of sin.
Like the stellar radiation that is measured now by powerful telescopes, the radiation
that is the echo of the origin of those stars in the far distant past -- or so many
believe -- so this longing, this restlessness, this wanting something more is the echo of
man's brief stay in the garden, of the life he was made for and built for and which, for
one brief shining moment, the life he actually lived in this world.
In his Preface to "Paradise Lost," C.S. Lewis wrote: "The things
which separate one age from another are superficial. Just as, if we stripped the armour
off a medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an
anatomy identical with our own, so...if we strip off from Virgil his Roman
imperialism...from Lucretius his epicurean philosophy, and from all who have it their
religion, we shall find the unchanging human heart, and on this we are to
concentrate."
And that is right. This longing, this restlessness, this unwitting but universal
testimony to the fact that human beings were made for more than they now know or
experience, this hunger for our true life, is the bottom condition of mankind and always
has been -- in all times and every place.
It is the assumption our Savior made and all great preachers of the Christian faith
have made after him. As Augustine so famously put it in his Confessions, "You
have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest
in you."
This is what is meant by the craving after happiness. That is what happiness is for a
human being -- it is the discovery of that life we were made for, built for, equipped for.
The life for which our hearts cry and our bodies crave. A life of true harmony in which
intellect, will, and emotion are in balance, fulfilling one another.
That man craves this -- whether he knows why or not -- explains why the gospel always
appeals to this craving. Jesus in his sermons told people how to find happiness. He begins
his greatest sermon with this..."Happy are those..." As Pascal put it in his
immortal Pensees:
All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they
employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding
it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the
least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of everyman, even of
those who hang themselves."
Augustine put it more directly still with regard to the gospel and the Christian faith:
If I were to ask you why you have believed in Christ, why you have become Christians,
every man will truly answer, "For the sake of happiness."
In other words, we want back into the garden; we want the life our first parents had
but lost and lost for us. We want the life we were created to live and which our natures
hunger for: life lived in the presence of God with all the blessing and satisfaction and
fulfillment and high purpose of that!
II. The second aspect of this condition, banished from the Garden and prevented from
return, is a determination on the part of now sinful man to get back to the Garden in his
own way.
Here is the other side of the story. Man is now a rebel. God anticipates the
consequence of that in v. 22 and closes the garden, to frustrate man in his effort to
reclaim the life that had been taken from him as punishment for his sin.
And the rest of the Bible will tell the tale of man's effort to get back into the
garden by his own wits, his own strength, his own devices. Whether it is the tower of
Babel, or the idolatrous worship of the ANE, or the urbane, sophisticated philosophies of
the classical world, or merely the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure or money or power, man
seeks to regain what he has lost but to regain it without the surrender of himself to
God, without repentance, without walking the way of faith in Christ.
Every man, religious or otherwise, unless God's grace should change him, is like John
Bunyan's Mr. Loth-to-stoop, who through some powerful pages of Bunyan's second great
allegory of salvation, The Holy War, is engaged in an effort to beat down God's
unalterable terms of salvation, to have his way back into the garden on his own terms
instead of God's, his own reduced and much easier terms that required no real stooping on
his part, no acknowledgement of his terrible guilt and terrible need, no repentance from
his sin-riddled life, no surrender of sovereignty to the Lord Christ, no requirement to
walk the straight and narrow way that those must walk who follow Christ in this world.
[Whyte, BC, iii, p. 109]
And in our day it remains exactly the same story. Anything and everything to regain
what has been lost, to find a way back into the garden except the blood of Christ
and bowing down to God.
From the elaborate religious systems of the world that allow a man to feign worship
while all the while imagining himself to remain in control of his own destiny; to the
rationalism of the unbelieving mind that arrogantly seeks what has been lost without
recourse to God at all; to the scientism of the modern world that supposes one can finally
discover the path back into the garden
by research and discovery --whether by the banishment of the curse through invention
and medical advance, or by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to find other life
elsewhere in the universe--, to the nudist who supposes that we can get back into the
garden if only we will live as Adam and Eve did at first, without their clothes, to the
psychologist who imagines he can take his clients into Eden!
Take, even, any story from the newspaper. The other day [Tacoma News Tribune,
Friday, May 10, 1996] the Tacoma paper had an account of six teenage boys from Fort Myers,
Florida, otherwise popular, successful high school students, one who had just landed a
college scholarship, who had inexplicably gone on a crime spree, multiple counts of arson
-- including an aviary outside a tropical theme restaurant which, after they set afire
they stood to watch the exotic birds burn to death--, armed robbery, and carjacking, and
which ended in the shotgun murder at his front door of a high school teacher who had
caught them as they prepared to vandalize and set fire to their high school. This was a
group of fellows, not a one with a criminal record, whose lives, in three short weeks,
spiraled into what the sheriff called a vortex of bloodlust and arson. "It was
consuming them. They couldn't get enough," he said.
What in the world were they thinking? What were they after? Why? But, of course, they
were after what everyone is after -- the Garden of Eden. The sound of the Lord God walking
in the Garden in the cool of the day, left an echo in their souls too. They were seeking
joy, fulfillment, satisfaction! But, like every other fallen man or woman, boy or girl,
they are determined to find a way back to that garden of their own making. And because
God's way, the way of Christ, the way of grace, the way of righteousness, is the good way,
the pure way, the true way, the beautiful way, human ways back to the garden will always
be, to one degree or another, false, impure, ugly, and destructive. This was simply a
particularly ugly and destructive effort to get back past the cherubim into the garden,
and it worked no better and did the same harm as all of man's other rebellious efforts to
circumvent the righteousness of God.
You see this double-sided reality of human life everywhere you look. Men restless for
more, wanting the life of the garden, but unwilling to have it on God's terms. That is why
human life is at one and the same time both so sad and so ugly, both a tragedy and a
terrible evil. No one will understand the human predicament who does not see human life in
both these terms at once: tragedy and evil, sadness and ugliness -- the inconsolable
longing for what has been lost, but the proud, arrogant, cruel, and utterly foolish
determination to get it back without God, indeed, in defiance of God.
It is why in the Bible we are taught to be so sympathetic to the human condition, to
feel such great sadness for man's loss, his unfulfilled ache -- and it is so unutterably
sad, everywhere you look in so many different ways at once, the difference between what
human life is and what it might be and what we know it should be and what it was made to
be -- for children, for adults, for the aged -- so sad! ...but, at the same time,
to be revolted by the evil of that same human life, the self-inflicted wound, the vanity,
the selfishness, the rebellion that makes human beings do anything and everything, no
matter how destructive of others or themselves, rather than to bend their knee to the God
whose nearness, whose smile, whose blessing contains absolutely everything they crave.
There is no more intolerant book in the world than the Bible. It says that the truth is
given, that it lies behind us in one name, one person, one event. There is but one way
back to the garden. But, this book alone, and the faith built upon it, Jesus Christ,
actually can and does get us back to the Garden. He is the only one who can, but he
really can take away the ache, fill the void, and satisfy the longing that drives every
human life.
And what is more, what is more wonderful still, in Christ, we don't just get back to
the Garden; in Christ we get more than Adam and Eve had in that wonderful place where they
walked with God. We get an indefectible life of joy in the world to come, a life
that can never be lost, and that life is more wonderful still because it was not simply
made for us, it was bought and paid for us by our Redeemer who loved us with an
everlasting love and has made our relationship with him, therefore, even more wonderful
than our first parents had who walked with God in those first days after the world was
made.
Or, as Isaac Watts said of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who opened the way for us through
the curtain, the curtain with the cherubim guarding the way to the presence of God:
In him the tribes of Adam boast
More blessings than their parents lost.
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