It doesn’t matter where you live. It doesn’t matter what type of government you
have. Every language, every culture,
even every religion, can’t avoid it. It’s
literally everywhere. Wherever you find human beings, bad things happen. You’ll find human beings doing awful things
to themselves; doing awful things to others, and doing awful things to the
world. Now in some places the level of
awfulness rises higher, but wherever you go, you’ll find awful things happening.
And yes, I know awful things happen in nature
generally. Animals eat each other. They fight.
But human beings do things other animals simply don’t. They murder.
They go to war. And deep within,
human beings feel an alienation from themselves, from each other, from even the
world around them that no other creature does.
Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
Or has something gone wrong with the human race? Because if something has gone wrong, then that
means, it can be corrected. It can be
made right again.
But if so, how did it go wrong to begin with? How can it be made right? In this story, one of the most tragic and
famous in human history, God shows you the way.
Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.
Human beings have a big problem, a fatal flaw. And it clearly has nothing to do with
environment or upbringing, because the flaw exists everywhere in everyone. Yet if that’s the case, where did it come
from? Is it simply naturally who you
are, the product of evolution? If so,
how do you overcome that? How can you
overcome something ingrained in you over millions of years?
Yet if it’s natural, why do human beings fight
against it so much? Why does every human
being have this urge to become something better than who they actually are? It’s because, human beings know. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. You were created for something more,
something better. But if so, how did it
go wrong? How does it keep going wrong?
In the words you just heard, God gives
you the answers.
This story doesn’t simply tell the tale of how two
people lost the life God intended for them.
It tells how every human being loses that life; how the same three lies that
trapped Adam and Eve continue to trap us.
But in those lies also lies the truth, the truth that if you let it,
will set you free.
So what are these lies? You find the first one right at the
beginning in the half-truth of the serpent’s question. The serpent asks, “Did God say, “You shall
not eat from any tree in the garden?”
Now, why would the serpent ask that?
It’s obviously not true, and Eve calls the serpent on it immediately. So why ask it? It’s because the question creates an
atmosphere.
You see. The Serpent asks this question as a sort of
sarcastic joke. Did God really say that
you can’t eat from the trees of your own garden? The serpent is making a joke at God’s
expense, but why? It’s not that the
Serpent wants to needle God. No, the
Serpent wants to needle Eve, to lead her to doubt herself, to doubt what she
knows to be true. That’s what irony and
sarcasm does. They poke holes in things
everyone assumes to be true. And that
can be a good thing. That’s why the
prophets used sarcasm. It’s why Jesus used it.
But it’s one thing to use sarcasm as a tool. It’s entirely something else to make it how you
live your life, to make it the air that you breathe so to speak.
And that’s what the serpent is trying to do, to
literally create an atmosphere of sarcasm to choke out the truth. And that sort of lie continues to live to
this day.
For example, if you tell certain folks about your
beliefs in the gospel or God or Jesus, they may respond something like
this. “Oh you really believe that,
huh? Ok, great, if that works for
ya.” But what are they really telling
you with their polite sarcasm? Sheesh,
I thought that you were smarter than that, but if you’ve gotta have a
superstitious crutch to get through life, cool.” And what do you do? You begin to doubt yourself, to feel the fool
even. But here’s the irony. Their sarcasm isn’t an argument. It’s an attitude. “Surely, nobody with any intelligence could
believe that.” Even so that attitude
with its knowingness, its false authority will shake your belief in ways no
argument could. Yet almost always,
behind the attitude, no argument even exists.
There’s nothing at all but an attitude.
That’s where the spirit of sarcasm always
leads. It leads to nothing. What do I mean? Well, what’s the point of seeing through
something? You see through
it in order to see what’s on the other side. I see through this window in order to see
the patio, right? But what if you see through
everything? What is there left to
see? Nothing. It’s what Oscar Wilde meant when he
said cynicism
knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. When
you breathe this air, it leads to a hollowed out life. Your sophistication just covers the fact that
inside you there’s hardly anything real to be found. Others
can often see that, but you can’t.
Why? Well, here’s the ultimate
irony. So focused you are on seeing
through all the purported falseness around you, you miss the very thing you
need to see the most. You miss seeing
yourself.
And that lie just prepares the opening for the next
one, which is more deadly still. What
belief does the serpent attack? Does the
serpent question God’s existence? No Does the serpent even question God’s power? No.
The Serpent questions God’s goodness.
He tells Eve. This God is holding
out on you. This God doesn’t want the
best for you. You can’t trust this God.
And in this lie, lies the taproot of the human flaw,
the fear that God can’t be trusted.
It’s the lie that afflicts everyone from the most rigidly religious to
those who detest religion completely.
How is that? Let’s say that you
have some incredibly religious person, who strives desperately to live the most
exemplary life possible. And on the
other hand, you have someone that runs away from belief in God, sees it as
something that limits their life; that holds them back. These two types usually hate each other. But they both believe the same lie. They both believe that God can’t be
trusted. They just respond to that lie
in different ways. One strives to run
away from God, believing that nothing God says leads to anything good or fulfilling. But the other tries to win God over with righteousness,
so that when the time comes, God will have no excuse but to let him in. So yes that person believes in God, but trust
God? No way.
And this is the lie that undermines everything. Erik Erickson, the famous
child psychologist once said that the main thing a child needs is not to be
dropped. He wasn’t simply talking about
a physical danger. He was talking about
an existential one. Children need to be
able to trust the dominant figures if their lives. If that trust isn’t there, it will undermine
their entire life, every relationship they have.
And that’s why the serpent attacks Eve there. If the serpent can undermine her trust in
God, everything else will follow.
After all, what do you do when you no longer trust
God? You look to something or someone
you think you can trust. You turn to
the final lie, to the lie of the tree. Oh,
you can’t trust God, but this tree, God created, the Serpent says. That you can trust. That will give you what you really need.
Why did God make a tree the big danger in the
garden? Why didn’t God say? If you lie or cheat or kill, then you
die. Wouldn’t that make more sense? No. Because then you would think that the essence
of your brokenness is breaking a rule, doing bad things. But the essence of your brokenness isn’t a
broken rule. It’s a broken belief.
God picks a tree because a tree, well, a tree is so
innocent. And ultimately, it’s not the
tree that destroys what Adam and Eve have.
It’s what they believe about the tree, what they believe it can do for
them. And that’s the essence of
everyone’s brokenness, of the evil that infects the human race.
What draws you away from God usually isn’t a bad
thing, it’s a good thing that you make into an ultimate thing. And when that happens, it opens you and this
world to all sorts of awfulness. For example,
having pride in your ethnic heritage can be a good thing. But when it becomes the source of all your
meaning, where you put your ultimate trust, You get racism. You get genocide.
Is there anything wrong with making money? No.
But if you make making money your source of security and meaning, ll
sorts of ugliness happens. Is there
anything wrong with loving your spouse or your kids? No. But if you say that if my spouse doesn’t love
me, or my kids fail, then I am nothing, then that is a prescription for pain
and heartbreak for you and the people you love. Most of the pain and devastation in your
life in the end doesn’t come from you doing bad things. It comes from the false beliefs you have
about your good things, from looking to them to give you what only God
can.
And what do these lies do for Adam and Eve? They certainly don’t make them more. No, instead they become so much less. They don’t only become alienated from
God. They become alienated from
themselves and from each other. The
first thing that Adam and Eve do after the tree is they cover themselves. They move from being naked and unashamed to
being the exact opposite. And when they
hear God coming, they hide. And when
God asks them why, Adam says that they were afraid. That is the first time that word appears in
the Bible, and that it appears here tells you everything. And out of that fear, Adam blames Eve, and
Eve blames the Serpent. And what is
blaming but just another way to hide from yourself, from others, from God. And from that day on,
human beings have
been hiding ever since.
But how do you escape? How do you break free of the lies? You look to the truth the lies tried to
cover. And to see that truth, God hasn’t
just left you with this tree. God has given you another tree. The stanza of a poem by the great poet,
George Herbert, shows you that tree. In
his work called the
Sacrifice, Herbert wrote these words.
O all ye who pass by, behold
and see:
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me:
Was ever grief like mine?
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me:
Was ever grief like mine?
Who is saying these words? Jesus is.
O all ye who pass by, behold
and see:
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me:
Was ever grief like mine?
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me:
Was ever grief like mine?
What breaks the hold of the serpent’s lies? It’s that tree. It’s seeing God in Jesus hanging on that tree
at Golgotha. In the face of that brutal
reality, God nailed to a tree, sarcasm loses its voice. At that tree, all doubts about God’s goodness
and trustworthiness fall away. After
all, if Jesus didn’t walk away from you in the agony of the cross, then he
never will. In the face of that
goodness, of that life given over for you, the lies get stripped away. And in the truth of what that tree shows
you, you will see the painful truth of your wrongness, but then you will see
the beautiful truth of the dying yet undying love that has made you right. And in that truth, you will see God’s goodness
and God’s love. You see the truth, the
only truth that sets you free. In the
name of the God who loved you, who died for you, and who can do more in even
the broken places of your life than you could ever ask or dream or
imagine.
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