The World's First Disaster (Genesis 3)

If the first two chapters of Genesis give us an understanding of how all things came about, chapter three gives us an account of how it all went wrong. It also holds out the hope of all things being put right again.

The story here is very obviously allegorical, at least to my mind – I have yet to encounter a real serpent that can actually talk.

Picture it. Adam and Eve (as she was soon to be named) enjoy idyllic surroundings and the company of God. Everything, except one thing that God clearly warns them is dangerous, is available to them. They want for nothing. They are happy. Then along comes a character with a question for them, 'Did God really say...?'

This is a question that we all face in our lives, in one form or another. For those of us who believe, it may well be 'Did God really say...?', or, 'Is it really all that wrong to...?' Sometimes, because of the legalistic, Pharisaical mentality that can pervade churches, the question is not always an unreasonable one... For those of us who don't believe, it is perhaps a more direct, 'Why don't you...?'

Anyway, Eve fielded the question (actually a distortion of the truth) well, correcting the questioner with the known facts: we can eat from any tree but not this one because if we do we'll die. The serpent then questions the facts and lowers the bar by posing an alternative outcome: You won't die; you'll become like God. (It is interesting to note that Satan (represented in the story by the serpent) is depicted later in the Bible as aspiring to be like God, and here places exactly the same option before God's Pride and Joy.)

Now, Eve knows God. She thinks he is more than cool. Wouldn't it be great to be like him? Listen to the cogs whirring... I can be like God if I eat this. I can make my own mind up about what is right and wrong, just like he does. It doesn't kill him. Why would it kill me? Deceived, and self-convinced, she eats.

We don't really know how long it took for the fruit (not an apple) to have an effect. She obviously did not drop dead on the spot. You can hear the next line of reasoning. 'Hey, Adam. I just ate this fruit. It tastes great! And look! I didn't die. God got this one wrong! Try some.' And so he does.

The first effect of knowing the difference between good and evil is guilt: knowing you did wrong and you cannot undo it.

• Try to cover it up . . . God pitches up.
• Better still, hide . . . Doesn't work.

The next effect of knowing good from evil is looking for someone to blame.

• Adam blames Eve.
•  Eve blames the serpent. 
• Poor serpent . . . No-one to blame.

The next effect is consequences. Your choices, whoever you may blame, remain your choices (and no-one had a gun to their heads here) and the consequences, whether good or ill, are yours too. Except they are not limited to you. The serpent is cast down to the dust; Eve (and all women ever since) gets to go through painful labour (all that knowledge needs a big head to hold it) and a damaged relationship with her man; Adam (and all of us ever since) has to struggle to meet their needs. Not only that, the whole earth feels the impact. On top of that, they get to die. Not immediately, of course, but inevitably. How so?

I seems the serpent was right. God now says, 'The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.' This is obviously, to God's mind, dangerous knowledge for a finite, created being. So dangerous that it has to be limited. Cut them off from the source, the Tree of Life, to which they hitherto had free access.

The rest, as they say, is history. We have made choices that have evil consequences ever since and the world still pays the price. Yes, we have made some good ones too but somehow...

Why did God put the tree in the garden in the first place? He could have saved a lot of bother if he hadn't. Maybe there is a sense in which the garden itself is allegorical of God in all his fullness. God wanted, and still wants, his whole self to be known by man, without hiding anything. He gave fair warning: 'This bit of me is dangerous for you. Trust me, not your own ideas. Don't go your own way, don't choose to be independent of me.'

Given the allegorical nature of the story, can we believe in a literal Adam and Eve? Well, the writers of the rest of the Bible did, and actually it is not so far fetched. The cells in our bodies contain organelles known as mitochondria. These all and always derive from our mother alone. Investigation of the DNA in mitochondria has allowed scientists to look far back into female human history and they have established that we all derive from just three human women. Beyond those three, there is one, just one, ancestral mother. Eve truly became the 'mother of all the living'.

What about the hope I mentioned at the start? Adam and Eve tried to cover their nakedness by their own efforts but it was not enough. God himself provided clothes made of animal skins, speaking of atoning blood sacrifice. Messiah and his sacrifice are foretold in type, the offspring of the woman who would crush the serpent's head and whose heel the serpent would strike.

The final restoration of all things lies in the future. For now, through faith in Messiah, we can know God in part, in the knowledge that our wrong choices are atoned for. We can realign our lives with his will and be guided in our choices by his perfect knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

One day, unlimited access to the Tree of Life will be restored.