Alan Dunn

You may be inclined to pity Adam as a poor victim, preyed upon by the devil and tragically cast into death and dismay. As tragic as the Fall is, we must realize however, that Adam acted in astounding wickedness. In his regal dignity as ‘image of God’, he willfully abandoned his responsibilities and blasphemously rejected his Creator Father. We should be morally disgusted by this man who irrationally introduced death into creation. Our revulsion of his cowardly sin should incite us to determine not to likewise abdicate our headship. Read Gn 3:1-6.

THE SERPENT’S ATTACK

The serpent slanders God by striking the man’s headship, particularly his stewardship of words. The fall of the devil is beyond the interests of our study, but we immediately learn that we are not to understand ourselves as fallen image-bearers apart from the ‘father of lies’. He utilized a creature to communicate deception and slander in the attempt to dislodge Adam from his position as head. God had ordered creation in an hierarchy with Himself as supreme, the man and woman as His image ruling over the animals and plants in a world without Satan. Satan would invert that order and place himself in supremacy, manipulating the plants and animals to commandeer the woman and destroy the man as image of God in a world without God.

To attack the man’s position as head, Satan usurps man’s possession of words. A talking snake assumes the place of head over the woman and redefines God’s law words. He incites a mutinous coup by casting aspersion upon the Creator Father. He would invert the created order by first perverting God’s words. He slanders the trustworthiness of God by questioning the veracity of God’s precept, hoping to bring man into rebellion against divine authority; by focusing upon God’s prohibition, hoping to get man to doubt God’s goodness; and by denying God’s threatened punishment, hoping to get man to doubt God’s justice. The strategy is simple: mistrust God and then begin to doubt and then deny and then disobey God’s words.

The assumption which the devil makes in tempting the couple is one upon which all idolatry is based: the denial of the Creator-Creature distinction. With murderous intent, Satan deceptively attacks man’s person as image of God. From the beginning, Satan was a liar and a murderer. He dialogues with the couple and entices them to believe that something is defective in creation. Indeed, being ‘image of God’ is deemed insufficient. Man should not content himself to be image of God, but should become divine. Man is here introduced to a ‘ladder of being’ view of reality. He is enticed to think that he has been unjustly positioned on a lower rung and, if the world was really ‘good’, man would be further up the ‘ladder of being’ and have the being of the Creator, not of the creature. Man is lied to and told that there is a moral defect in his creatureliness. He has a ‘metaphysical’ problem which can only be solved by redefining morality. It is not good that he should be mere creature. He should rather disobey God and make the creature divine.

The ultimate aim of Satan’s attack is evidenced in the lie of vs.4. Having instilled suspicion about God’s goodness and justice, he flagrantly asserts that man can sin and not be punished for it. That is the essence of the devil’s lie: that you can get away with sin and not be punished. This lie comes to man as a rival revelation which displaces the word of God. The demand is made: will we believe the true words of God or the false words of Satan?

THE WOMAN’S ANSWER

First, the woman was misplaced and wrongly positioned as the ‘spokesperson’. She is made vulnerable by getting out of place. Secondly, she was mistaken and mishandled God’s words. Compare Gn 2:16,17 with 3:2,3. Notice she omits ‘and’ and ‘freely’ and presents a constricted view of their liberty and abundant provisions. She has doubt about God’s goodness. She also omits ‘surely’ which minimizes God’s justice by trivializing His threat to execute punishment. She adds the words ‘or touch it’. Where did these words come from? Many suggest that they originated in the woman and then debate whether they constitute a commendable ‘pious fence’ or a contemptible impious complaint. Let me suggest that these words could have originated with Adam; that in the due exercise of his headship, he had enforced God’s law with domestic law. Having informed her of God’s Law words concerning the tree, he could have then added ‘so don’t you touch it’ in a legitimate exercise of his headship. If these are Adam’s words, then with Pharisaic legalism, she transforms man’s law into God’s law, which inevitably leads to the violation of God’s law. The woman is in a state of utter confusion. She stands fixated upon the fruit swirling in the conflict of rival definitions. She ineptly connects God’s definition with Adam’s definition, pollutes it with Satan’s definition and is then required to articulate her own definition! Adam, you recall, is “The Definer”. But he is abdicating his headship and his wife is totally confused! (cf. 1 Tim 2:14; Gn 3:13). Adam’s negligence rendered her vulnerable. Finally, she was misled. She is now suspicious of God’s goodness and justice. She minimizes the threat of His punishment: ‘lest you die.’ The possibility of death exists, but not its certainty. ‘You die’ trivializes the intensive ‘dying you shall die’ (Gn 2:17). She is now detached from Adam’s headship and afloat on a sea of suspicion against God. The serpent lunges with the lie composed of God’s own words plus the added ‘not’! He quotes God’s words, then denies them and plunges his murderous lie into his compliant victim!

THE WOMAN’S SIN

First, she redefined the fruit. She now ‘sees’ the fruit as signifying something other than what God defined it to be. She defines it as ‘good for food’. She incorporates God’s definition of trees in general (2:9) but ignores His definition of this tree in particular! She redefines ‘good’, emptying it of God’s meaning. She uses God’s words to justify breaking God’s commands! She then incorporates her own definition: ‘it was a delight to the eyes’. The lust which violates the tenth commandment is commandeering her judgment (cf. 1 Jn 2:15-17). She then incorporates the devil’s definition: it will ‘make one wise’. Secondly, she desired the fruit. The action of the heart precedes the movement of the hand. She seeks the ‘enlightenment’ of vs.5. The ‘wisdom’ of vs.6 refers to an abstract, speculative kind of knowledge. This differs from the ‘wisdom’ spoken of in Proverbs which connects truth to ethics and effects righteousness in practical living. But having believed the lie, she has destroyed the moral foundation of knowledge. She has abandoned the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom and seeks the wisdom of enlightenment, the knowledge of the unrevealed, secret things which she thinks God has unjustly hidden. Here is the origin of the ‘occult’, that quest for secret knowledge which can be had only in the experience of enlightenment. Once enlightened, she anticipates that she will become divine! Finally, we see what she did. With faith in the lie and a heart full of blasphemous greed, she acts. She ‘took from its fruit’. If the injunction against touching the fruit was Adam’s, we here see her violate the authority of her head. ‘And ate’: she violates God’s law (2:17). The serpent does not force the fruit down her throat. She acts in the integrity of her image-bearing dignity. She sinned.

THE MAN’S SIN

First, he abdicated headship. He relinquished his office and abandoned his wife to engage the serpent. God gave him authority to ‘subdue’ the earth (1:28). This is a military term describing the overthrow of an enemy. When that snake started talking, he had warrant to throttle it and silence the beast! But rather than act decisively and declare God’s words, he abdicated and allowed the devilish dialogue to ensue. Notice 3:6. He was ‘with her’! He failed to subdue the serpent, to stop the dialogue, to protect the woman, and to defend his Creator Father! Even after she ate, she apparently had more words with him (3:17) and he could have stopped it all then. But he did not. He failed. He submits to the woman’s rule. He listens to her voice (3:17). He follows her example: ‘also’ (3:6). He complies with her authority: vs.6, when ‘she gave’, he took. In 2:25 they were ‘the man and his wife’. Now he is profiled in terms of the woman: ‘her husband with her’. Secondly, he violated God’s law: ‘he ate’. We see the incomprehensible mystery of man’s created free will. In 1 Tim 2:14, Paul tells us that the man was not deceived. Knowingly, deliberately, he chose to sin! John Murray writes, “How could a being perfectly holy and upright become sinful? We cannot tell. It constitutes an insoluble psychological and moral problem. Every reason was against the commission of sin. It was in the deepest sense, an irrationality.” (Collected Works, Vol. 2, Banner, p.75) The London Baptist Confession of 1689 lays the blame squarely on the man: ‘Adam, who without any compulsion, did willfully transgress the Law of their creation and the command given unto them, in eating the forbidden fruit.’ (6:1) He acted in whole-souled rebellion and really ‘fell’! He effected a reversal of the moral and spiritual direction of mankind. This was not a morally neutral man veering off the straight path. This was a morally upright man turning about face and heading in the opposite direction: downward to death!

LEARN TO RECOGNIZE THE DEVIL’S STRATEGY

First, he’ll slander the character of God. Satan seeks to arouse suspicion against God. He entices men to accuse God of not being good. Consequently, many fail to ‘honor Him as God and give thanks’ because they have become convinced that God has done them an injustice. Do you harbor hard thoughts of God? Are you suspicious of His essential goodness? Are you yet ungrateful in spite of His kindness shown to you in innumerable ways? Beware of believing the devil’s slander.

Secondly, he likes to dialogue. Men may want us to dialogue about Scripture, but they need us to declare Scripture! Sinners need the light of the Word declared, not effeminate discussions which confirm them in their common blindness. Beware of that ‘dialogue’ which assumes and generates doubt about God’s Word.

Thirdly, he’ll try to convince you that you can sin and get away with it. Consider the fool of Psalm 10. In vs.4 we see a self-conscious atheist. Then in vs.11 he is trying to convince himself that this God, whom he says does not exist, will just not see his sin and won’t judge him for it. By vs.13, he has made a religion of his denial of divine punishment. Here he is praying and telling God that He will not require justice of him. His religion is premised upon the doctrine of an unjust God who will not punish sinners. This dogma did not originate in God nor in man, but in the devil. The idea that men can sin and escape punishment is present among men as a rival revelation which requires men to believe the lie and give themselves to idolatry. Believe God. Sin is indeed punished by death!

Fourthly, he’ll try to flatter you into thinking you can become divine. He does this by teaching men to view reality to be of one kind of ‘being’. ‘God’ is simply higher in degree in the same being which we all share, He is not of a different kind of being. But Scripture reveals that there are two kinds of being: the being of the Creator and the being of the created. False religion is promoted where men entertain defective views of creation and man is seen as defective in his original being. Our problem is then more metaphysical than moral. With the Creator-Creature distinction removed, ‘salvation’ becomes man’s attempt to climb to a higher state of being and thus become ‘one with God’. Various methods are available, most involving some mystical experience of so-called ‘enlightenment’. But this is all predicated upon a fundamental idolatry in which man, the creature, assumes deity or assumes the right to deify the creature. Paul indicts mankind for having ‘exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever, Amen.’ (Rom 1:25)

Fifthly, the devil attempts to accomplish all this by enticing men to abdicate their headship. He works to dislodge the woman from her place in relation to the man. He then to compels her to assume the man’s responsibility to lead. He can do all this only as men relinquish their headship and render the woman vulnerable by their selfish neglect of duty and dignity. Friend, where is your wife? Is she off dialoguing with the doctrines of demons being preached from the TV, radio, magazines and her ‘friends’? Are you neglecting her and exposing her to competing and destructive headships? As with Adam, so too with us brethren – the well-being of the world and the honor of God requires us to be true men of God. Rise up, O men of God!

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