THE THREATENED COVENANT
The Bible does not give us many details about life in the Garden of Eden before the
temptation and fall of Adam and Eve. We are left to learn what they possessed mostly by
the account of what they lost. Nevertheless, there are some positive indications in the
record that are worthy of our attention.
BEFORE THE TEMPTATION
It was clearly an idyllic situation. Here were two people living in a specifically
prepared environment where ample provision for every need reinforced the beauty of their
relation to each other and to the God who walked and talked with them each day. They did
not know the text of Colossians 1:17, but they knew the truth that in Jesus Christ
"all things hold together." They could not have put it into our theological
terms, yet they knew that the fruits which met their physical needs did so in the will of
God who "upheld all things by the word of His power." God had blessed all these
fruits to them (with one exception), and they sensed that it was His blessing, not
something inherent in the chemical makeup of the fruits, that gave them life through the
fruit. So their eating was a form of communion with God. Adam’s relation to animals
evidently involved no fear, on his part or theirs. God brought them for Adam to give them
names. In Schmemann’s words, this means Adam saw the meaning and value God gave to
each of His creature. He knew them as coming from God and he knew their function and their
place in God’s world (For the Life of the World, p. 15). Adam blessed God for
what he knew; that is, he communed with God in this earliest of all human involvement in
zoological classification.
There was more to that early paradise. Adam and Eve knew they were different from the
trees and the animals. The dawning consciousness that nothing the among the animals
matched him, and the action of God in putting him to sleep and creating Eve from one of
his ribs, spoke unequivocally of their uniqueness in the midst of creation. They saw in
each other a specialness that was due to their being made in the likeness of God. That led
each to value in a love that was a human reflection of the mutual love within the Trinity.
Furthermore, each saw himself or herself a special because of the created capacity for
communion with the living God who met them regularly to express the delight He had in
these crowns of His creative work, and to receive from them the blessing which was the
beginning of the inexhaustible growth-potential that was their because of bearing His
likeness.
It is possible, I trust, without exceeding the bounds of permissible conjecture, to
describe the armament available to them for deflecting the attack they were soon to
encounter. The tempter promised pleasure. Up to this point Eve (and Adam too) had never, I
believe, thought of pleasure as coming from anywhere but God Himself. C.S. Lewis speaks of
pleasures (all pleasures, physical, emotional, spiritual, etc.) as "shafts of glory
as it strikes our sensibility" (Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, p.
90.). Up to this time for the original couple, the pleasure of the garden fruits had never
been thought of as coming from the fruit in itself, but only from the fruit as a channel
through which pleasure at God’s right hand reached them. Eating was a communion with
God, which, of course, is what the Lord’s Supper is speaking of. The tempter also
promised possession, but the whole garden, with one exception, was theirs. It was theirs
as God’s chosen stewards, but in the final analysis it was His. The tempter promised
a new level of being. To this point they were experiencing the "being" of
friendship with God. It had never occurred to them that there could be any other sort of
being.
THE TEMPTATION: PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS
Before considering the temptation itself, there are three items we should note. The
first is that the temptation came from outside humanity. There was nothing in Adam or Eve
as created that predisposed them to turn against God. They had every reason to resist the
temptation. But the source of solicitation was the devil himself, who is presented all
through the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation as the Great Serpent who is opposed to
God but who is finally defeated by Christ on the cross.
The second item is that the objective of the devil was far more than the mere breaking of
a rule. He wanted to shatter the covenant between God and His human image bearers. The
covenant defines the environment in which alone it is possible for humans to enjoy real
life. It is to human life what water in the fishbowl is to the fish. The devil’s goal
was to lure the humans into a declaration of independence, of autonomy, which would break
the covenant. So Henri Blocher says that the story could be better called the breaking of
the covenant than the fall of man, since the concept of a fall does not appear in the
Genesis narrative.
The third thing is that the temptation was in essence a thoroughgoing lie. What else could
it be, coming from him who Jesus calls the "father of lies"? (John 8:44). It was
not a lie merely by virtue of its contradicting what God had said and misstating the
consequences of disobedience. It was a lie in a much deeper sense. It offered humans
control over the creation (which they already had in their God-given dominion), but failed
to mention that in the process the humans would turn the creation into an idol that would
crush them. The sting in this offer was the suggestion that by declaring their autonomy or
independence from God they could achieve a lordship over creation that was impossible
under the covenant. It promised them liberty without bothering to mention that absolute
liberty is possible only for God and that what the tempted pair would be doing was
substituting the rule of a loving and gracious God for that of His worst enemy, and evil
and malignant fallen angel.
THE ELEMENTS IN THE TEMPTATION
The temptation itself, as described in Genesis 3:6 contained three parts. "And
when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and it was a delight to the eyes, and
that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did
eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat." As a missionary
friend many years ago explained it, the verse can be arranged in this way:
Good for food Something to enjoy
A delight to the eyes Something to possess
To be desired to make one wise Something to be
Here was a con game of cosmic proportions. Eve had never thought of pleasure as coming
from anywhere but the Lord Himself. The trees with their fruit, the animals and Adam
himself, were channels, not the original sources of pleasure. Now the suggestion is made
that by objectifying the creation she could make herself the master of her pleasures, to
have them when and as she would. One cannot but wonder whether Adam did not face the
temptation as much in terms of his relation to Eve as to the fruit. She was his only true
counterpart in the creation. Perhaps he could, by this declaration of independence, turn
her into a source of pleasure at his direction. The scam involved was that whenever humans
look to something in creation for what they should receive only from God, that something
becomes an idol which ultimately crushes its servants (Romans 1:25)
The second part of the temptation promised possession in a new sense. Looking was tempted
to move from window shopping to looting. Eve was perfectly free to possess anything in the
garden, with the one exception, but only as God’s handmaiden and within the
boundaries of the law of love to God and neighbor. Now arose the mirage that by declaring
independence, she could possess in a new way with obligations to no one but herself. But
for humans, possession is impossible apart from creaturehood. We can only own something
within God’s ownership of all things (Psalm 24:1). When we deny that, we end up being
possessed rather that possessing. Here again, it may be that Adam imagined he could
possess Eve in some fuller way than God had provided in His loving wisdom.
The third part of the offer was wisdom. But wisdom, according to Proverbs 8, is the means
whereby God made the world. It is Christ, the Word of God. So here was as suggestion that
god-hood was possible for Eve and Adam. It was reinforced in the words, " . . . ye
shall be as God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). The inference was that a
higher level of being or power was available through autonomy than God had provided in the
covenant. Perhaps this was the first hint, for Adam, of the desirability of
"macho". Here was the most powerful appeal of the temptation. Achieve a
self-concept based on your control of the creation, not on bearing the image of the
creator within the environment of the covenant.
THE ENDURING QUALITY OF THE TEMPTATION
These three elements of the temptation are not mere happenstance in the Garden story.
They seem to reappear throughout history and give us insight into the basic nature of sin.
They reappear, for example, in the temptation of our Lord as recorded in Matthew 4. The
suggestion that He turn the stones to bread was a proposal that He escape the discomfort
of His long fast by the pleasure of satisfying his stomach with bread. Hidden in the bait
was this implication: You think you are the Messiah. That’s absurd, but if you want
to prove it, do a miracle on these stones. Then you will know who you are. Jesus’
answer was that bread in itself does not satisfy hunger; God does. To suppose that bread
could meet his bodily need apart from God’s blessing would be to deny the bread as a
channel of communion with God, to objectify it as though something created had in itself
the power to meet human need. Christ would have none of it.
The temptation to throw Himself down from a part of the temple (probably from the wall
which stood above a high cliff), trusting the angels to care for Him, seems related to
""something to be." It was an appeal to give in to the oft-repeated demand
for a sign. Show that you are somebody, and the people will follow you! But Jesus will not
have his godhood established in people’s minds by a miracle. Modern culture,
schizophrenic in its alienation from God, shows its surrender to this temptation in one of
two ways. Either people assert the power and promise of science and technology to solve
our problems or they assert, with the New Age movement, that they are part of God just the
way they exist, sin included. Neither the arrogance of scientism nor the presumption of
the New Age claim to deity offers a level of being remotely comparable to that of bearing
God’s image within the covenant.
The other temptation, to possess the kingdoms of the world and their glory by performing
an act of reverence or service to Satan, clearly corresponds to the temptation to possess
something apart from the will of God. Once again, using the words of Scripture, Jesus
resists the temptation.
John’s description of worldliness in 1 John 2:16 touches the same three discordant
notes once more. "The lust of the flesh," something to enjoy; "the lust of
the eyes," something to possess; and "the vainglory of life," something to
be. This evil trilogy seems to run through the entire Bible and to describe the major
avenues through which we declare our sinful independence from God and experience the
promised judgement of dying. Each instance of supposing that we can get pleasure from the
creation instead of from God through it, that we can possess anything without being
God’s steward in the process, or that we can be wise apart from Him who made wisdom
from God to us (1 Cor. 1:30) is a replay of the original temptation. Christian growth is a
process of learning that temptations are always repetitious, but that God has indeed
provided a way of escape from them (1 Cor. 10:30)
CONCLUSION
Adam and Eve listened to the tempter and took the fruit. The consequence for them and
for us must wait for the next article. However, it may be worthwhile, in closing, to call
attention to the contrast between Christ’s path while here on earth and the path on
which our first parents were tempted to embark. They were tempted to seek pleasure,
possessions and power (being) by declaring their independence from God and trying to
dominate creation on their own. Our Lord’s life had true and lasting pleasure, the
"joy that was set before Him" (Hebrews 12:2), but only through the cross. He was
a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. He who owned the earth and its fullness (Psalm
24:1) was a man who didn’t even have a place to lay his head. He in whom all things
hold together (Col. 1:17) and who upholds all things by the word of his power (Hebrews
1:3) walked the byways of Galilee and Judea and submitted to the Roman cross in weakness.
Not pleasure but pain which recognized the real conditions of a sinful world. Not
possessions but poverty. Not power but weakness. As we who claim to be His people learn to
demonstrate His suffering, poverty and weakness in a world maddened by its lust for
pleasure, possessions, and power, we will experience the blessing which God longs to pour
out upon our witness and our life.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
Alta Vista
1719 NE 50th Street
Seattle, Washington 98105
Phone: (206) 524-2262
Fax: (206) 524-1837
