Genesis 3:1-7: the danger of talking about God rather than to God

There are moments in time that define our lives.  There are choices we make that determine the struggles, obstacles, and challenges that we will face in the future.  For Adam and Eve the choice was between two trees.  They faced a decision: embrace their own will, or the will of God.  Would they actively rebel, or humbly submit? 

As is often the case, in the instance of Adam and Eve a third party enters the story and seeks to influence their decision.  What happened that would ultimately lead to Adam and Eve choosing rebellion over submission, to choosing their will over the will of God?

To put it simply, Adam and Eve lost perspective.  When our relationship with God shifts from the second-person to third-person perspective, trouble is sure to follow.  The theologian Walter Brueggemann makes the following astute observation: “Notice that the serpent engages in theology, without allowing for God’s presence, he talks about God, but not to or with God.”  Consider a relationship in which you currently find yourself.  Regardless of whether it’s a marriage, a friendship, or a familial relationship, imagine what would happen if you stopped speaking with that person, and only spoke about them.  Even if you were saying only nice things about your spouse, friend, or relative, how long could that relationship endure without the benefit of meaningful dialogue?  When the third party, the serpent, maneuvers his way into Adam and Eve’s thought-process, he subtly re-directs their speech so that it is no longer towards God, but simply about God.  Whereas Adam and Eve had been about using their language to bring order to the earth, the serpent uses language, both his and theirs to sow confusion and disorder.  By allowing their thoughts about God to surpass their dialogue with God, Adam and Eve allowed their perspective to change in a way that proved most damaging. 

This damaging change in perspective led to a disastrously myopic view of God.  The serpent makes a statement about God that is a clear distortion by describing God as stingy and bossy, rather than giving and beneficent.  Old Testament scholar Bruce K. Waltke would put it this way:

“Satan smoothly maneuvers Eve into what may appear as a sincere theological discussion, but he subverts obedience and distorts perspective by emphasizing God’s prohibition, not his provision, reducing God’s command to a question, doubting his sincerity, defaming his motives, and denying the truthfulness of his threat.” 

By distorting what God says, the serpent is able to claim knowledge of God’s thoughts and motives.  The serpent distorts God’s words enough to open up the possibility of circumventing them.  Rather than seeing God’s word as giving safe boundaries, Adam and Eve now see it as building barriers. 

Adam and Eve hear the possibilities spoken of by the serpent, that humanity could climb to a place where they were equal with God.  This seeming possibility causes their reach to exceed their grasp.  Gerhard von Rad describes the possibilities spoken of by the serpent as Adam and Eve understood them:

“The serpent’s insinuation is the possibility of an extension of human existence beyond the limits set for it by God at creation, an increase of life not only in the sense of pure intellectual enrichment but also familiarity with and power over, mysteries that lie beyond man.” 

This is where human ambition is transformed into sin.  Eve, and then Adam, acquiesces because they feel as if they lack something.  This something becomes necessary not because of its inherent necessity, but because of Adam and Eve’s inability to focus on anything but the very thing they do not have.  By this point the story is probably becoming uncomfortably familiar.  We see Adam and Eve creeping closer to the sin that will curse humanity.  We flinch because each one of us can vividly think of the time when we saw our own hand extended toward that thing that we most wanted, but least needed.  We remember how when we finally grasped that long-desired object or relationship, we lost our grip on so many other things that mattered deeply to us.  There is good news in the fact that despite our insistence on reaching out for things other than God, God never ceases to reach out for us.  With sin comes judgment, but even in the moment of judgment we see signs of God’s grace.  If there is shame and guilt in our fall, there is mercy, forgiveness, and love in the way that God picks us up.