Chapter 3
CHAPTER 3
It wasn’t me
“Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me,
she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”
Genesis 3: 11-12
Through the parable of the Lost Son we have explored something of the nature of forgiveness and repentance. We have seen how God continually seeks a personal relationship with his people so that they will live in unity with him and with one another. However, the relationship between God and his human creation was broken by human disobedience. God sought to provide a way for that relationship to be repaired. So, in this chapter we revisit the ancient story of humankind’s fall from God’s grace. Then we will explore how God sought to heal the broken relationship.
Beginnings
We are already in chapter 3, yet we are going to be thinking about beginnings. In the first book of the Bible there is a story of creation. In fact, there are two, similar but not identical stories. The first is in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the other in Genesis 2:4-25. The word ‘genesis’ means beginnings. Genesis is not only the first book in the Bible but a book of beginnings, the beginning of the universe, of light, of life, and of human beings. As we read on through the book we read of the beginnings of family, community, and society, of art and farming, industry, and commerce. We read of the beginnings of relationships, some good and some not so good. There is the relationship between people, and the relationship between people and nature. Importantly we read of the beginning of God’s relationship with men and women.
The opening chapters of Genesis are not intended to explain the ‘how’ of these beginnings but ‘why’ and ‘who’. Given that there are two stories of the beginning in the first two chapters of Genesis this confirms the understanding that this book is not a workshop manual on how to create a world. It cannot be emphasised enough that it is a book about relationships, not a textbook on physics or biology.
Genesis affirms that God is unique. There is no hint (as in other ancient beliefs) that there are other gods each with limited powers, struggling among themselves for supremacy. There is one all-powerful God who, by his command, created the universe and all that is. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word for ‘create’ is used exclusively of God and never of humankind.
God is sovereign over all that exists. God is a God of life. He is a God of ‘life’ in every sense of that word. He brings life into being and commands that the life he has created is fruitful. By God’s blessing life will flourish in the air and in the sea and on land. God looked on all that he had created and saw that it was good.
The high point of God’s creative work is human life. Humankind is the only species made in God’s image.[1] God gave people his blessing and authority to rule over his creation.[2] With that came responsibility, for God gave humankind an instruction to serve the land and to keep it,[3] or to take care of it as we would say today.
It remained God’s land and it would exist beyond the span of a human’s earthly life. So, just like a landowner puts a manager, or steward, in charge of his property to look after it on his behalf, so humankind was appointed by God to act as a ‘steward’ of his creation and exercise dominion over creation in the same way God might exercise his own rule over his creation.
It is a familiar tale that God told both the man and the woman he had created that they could eat of the fruit of any of the trees in the garden except one, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If they did so they would die.[4] Eve was tempted by a snake to taste the fruit. She disobeyed God and succumbed to her temptation. She in turn persuaded the man to taste the fruit. He told God, it was not me, she made me do it. We can read about this in Genesis chapter 3.
Biblical scholars often refer to this passage as ‘The Fall’. It expresses human disobedience of God’s command, a blatant act completely contrary to God’s instruction. As a consequence, humankind fell from God’s grace. The man and the woman, Adam and Eve, are tempted and lured by the prospect of instant pleasure and apparent power of autonomy. By succumbing to the snake’s assurances, they put their own human judgment above God’s commands. “We know better than God”, is essentially what they are saying by their actions.
As a consequence of their disobedience, humankind was driven out of the garden. Adam and Eve continued to live, but it was a life of hardship and toil and nothing like the fullness of life and its intimate relationship with God they had enjoyed in Eden.
Perhaps it is because we are made in God’s image that we often set a punishment of exclusion for breaking rules. For example, a serious foul in football might result in a player being sent off, no longer part of the game. A crime may result in imprisonment, exclusion from society. (We will explore this further below.) Human faithlessness put human beings into a state of estrangement from God. However, God did not abandon his fallen creation but sought to restore it. Genesis 3:15 is a crucial verse. The snake, a metaphor for evil, will be crushed. A descendant of the woman will defeat the snake. This is seen as a promise fulfilled in Christ’s victory on the cross.
In Genesis 3:21, we read “the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” Even in his wrath, God shows compassion and continues to provide for human need. God cares. His care for his human creation is ongoing. He gives Laws, or rules and guidelines, to direct peoples’ lives and relationships, both with one another and with God himself, to help them create a good society. Despite people’s disobedience, God sought to make life on earth, fulfilling. As the Psalmist wrote, “how good and pleasant it is when people live together in unity!”[5]
Covenants
The reconciliation God sought with his people was formalised through a series of covenants. There are five key Old Testament covenants made between God and his people. The first is the covenant made with Noah. “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”[6] This is an example of a Royal Grant covenant; there is nothing that Noah or his descendants must do to ensure this promise is fulfilled, it is simply a promise God makes his people. The second is the covenant wherein God promised Abraham he would make his descendants a great nation. That nation would be led by God to inhabit a specific land God promised them, and through this nation all people of the earth would be blessed.[7]
The third covenant is the one God made through Moses and the giving of the Law.[8] This is the covenant which is central to understanding the history of Israel as God’s chosen people, freed by him from oppression in Egypt. God promised the nation of Israel protection and blessing. They were to follow God’s commands. Israel was to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation[9] and so completely devoted to God. They would draw other nations to God by the way they lived. Note that, like the father in the parable of the lost son we read in chapter 1, God was seeking to restore the relationship with his children (the nation of Israel).[10] We will return to this covenant shortly.
The fourth key Old Testament covenant is one God made through King David. God’s people had disobeyed the commands made in the previous covenant and so God made the Davidic covenant, again as a means to bring them back into relationship with himself. God promised that David’s kingdom will endure for ever.[11] Like the covenant made through Noah it was a Royal Grant covenant. The promise of an eternal kingdom was ultimately fulfilled in Christ, who is of the house, or lineage, of David.[12]
Moving to this fourth covenant takes us forward in time to around 1010-970BC. However, in our exploration of God’s forgiveness we need to go back another five hundred years or so and return to the covenant made through Moses on Mount Sanai and the giving of the Law. God reminded the nation that he had freed them from slavery in Egypt, miraculously fed them, and provided water for them, sustaining them in the desert. “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself.”[13] However, they would never enter the land God had promised, although their children would. The relationship between God and his people was not all that it might have been or that God wanted it to be. Those who had been freed from bondage and oppression in Egypt spent a generation, some 40 years, wandering the desert before entering the Promised Land. It is during this time God established a covenant with the Israelite people.
The Ten Commandments, as we call them, set out the principal requirements God placed on Israel for the establishment and maintenance of that covenant relationship. These commands were given for the benefit of their social behaviour and community relationships. They related to life, marriage, and property. Indeed, it took some time, forty days and nights, for Moses to hear all God was to tell him. When Moses returned to the people, he found they had made a golden calf as an object of worship (see Exodus 32) in direct contravention to what God had commanded.
In Exodus 32:30 we read, “The next day Moses said to the people, “You have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.” Notice the breach of the Law required an act of contrition, a recognition of sin committed, and a recommitment to God.
The Law of the Old Covenant, made through Moses, extended far beyond the Ten Commandments. For example, Deuteronomy 6:1-9 and Leviticus 19:13-18 provide a selection of the many laws and instructions, God gave his covenant people. These were designed to order their lives and enable them to live together in harmony, as God intended. ‘The Law’ or the ‘Torah’ in Hebrew also governed the Israelite’s relationship with God.
The Law was hugely important to the Israelite people. Devout Jews had small boxes, known as phylacteries, strapped to their wrists and foreheads containing the ‘Shema’ - the laws contained in Deuteronomy 6: 4-5. Another box, known as a mezuzah, that also contained a portion of the Law, they attached to the door post of their houses. This was commanded by the Law written in Deuteronomy 6:8-9, “bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates”.
Unlike our modern laws that seek to legislate in minute detail, Biblical laws were not a set of rigid rules but served as exemplary illustrations of justice that a judge could apply or modify according to circumstances. They were much more about setting a spirit of the law. However, the Pharisees were intent on keeping every letter of the Law.
Jesus was once chastised for healing a woman on the Sabbath, the Lord’s Day.[14] The Law stated no work should be done on the Sabbath. Jesus retorted, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?”[15]
The law given by God was a set of rules or guidelines to order life, just like the rules of football order the game; but have you ever seen a game without a foul or an offside? It is impossible to keep the rules. Similarly, with the rules of the road, have you never broken the speed limit or crossed a double white line? The rules are there to help us drive around in reasonable safety, they are for our own good but impossible to keep perfectly.
God had told Adam and Eve that to eat the forbidden fruit would bring death. Having given Moses the Ten Commandments, and many other rules for living, God underlined the death penalty for disobedience.[16] However, we saw that, although Adam and Eve, were ejected from the Garden of Eden, breaching the rules meant that the privilege of life would be removed, yet God showed mercy on Adam and Eve.
In his mercy God made provision for people to be able to confess their sin, to demonstrate their contrition, and desire to turn away from sin and back towards God.
Sacrifices
Leviticus 1:1-9 shows how our merciful God made provision within the Covenant for people to atone for their sin by making sacrifices.
There were several types of sacrifice. We can read about them in Leviticus chapters 1, 2 & 3. Each had a slightly different nuance. These involved:
The fellowship offering, which emphasised the need for restoration of relationships that sin destroys.
The sin offering, which recognised sin as dirt and pollution that needs to be washed away.
The guilt offering, which regarded sin as a wrong, or a debt, that required full restitution or repayment.
There was also a sacrifice of thanksgiving that involved the offering of grain, oil, flour, and incense.
Interestingly, the sacrifices involved all the things that sustained life, that fed the people. They were also offerings which were economically valuable in an agrarian society. Sacrificing them to God was a way of offering good and valuable things to him. We are told the aroma was ‘pleasing to the Lord’[17] implying God’s acceptance of the sacrifice.
A burnt offering was the major atoning sacrifice for sin. A key part of the ritual was that the person making the offering placed his hand on the animal. It is likely that this was an act of representation and substitution – the animal being sacrificed would bear the sin of the person making the offering and so die in his place and hence make atonement for him. The animal used in the sacrifice was to be ‘without blemish’ emphasising that only the best is good enough for God and a real cost to the sinner as he would be sacrificing a very valuable asset. In addition, the perfection of the animal reflected the perfect behaviour that the Law demanded.
The Law made provision for an annual Day of Atonement, known by modern Jews as Yom Kippur. It was the most solemn holy day of all the Israelite feasts and festivals. Leviticus 16 has a full account of the arrangements for this day.
The sacrifices referred to above were used to atone for sins that had been recognised; ones about which people were aware. However, there would have been many sins that went unrecognised; transgressions of the Law which in humankind’s fallen state, were committed inadvertently and unknowingly, or were such that people were unable or unwilling to acknowledge. These were regarded as creating intolerable contamination of a person and of society. The Day of Atonement was given for these unacknowledged sins for which no sacrifice had been offered, and for which there had been no atonement or cleansing. We read in the New Testament book of Hebrews that, once a year the priest would offer a sacrifice “for himself and for the unintentional sins of the people.”[18]
The final ceremony of the Day of Atonement, as far as the people were concerned gave us our everyday figure of speech, ‘scapegoat.’ The sins of all the people were placed on the goat which was sent into the wilderness. We reflected above on how serious or persistent fouls in a football match result in the person being removed from the game. It is interesting to note that often punishment requires a removal from society. That may be incarceration in prison, or simply a child being excluded from school. In the UK Houses of Parliament, some breaches of the House of Commons debating rules can result in a member of Parliament being excluded from the House for a number of days.
The scapegoat ritual was a symbolic act of cleansing. God not only forgave sin but cleared away its defilement removing it out of sight, out of mind, and out of memory. Just as a sacrificial animal would carry the imputed sin of the sinner and be killed in place of the sinner, so the scapegoat served as a further instance of penal substitution. The iniquity of all the people was laid upon the goat, who took it away into the wilderness and so cleansed the community enabling a fresh start.
Why sacrifices?
We have seen that God created life, so life is sacred. Blood was a symbol of life, for without blood an animal or person dies. Blood therefore had to be treated with respect. The whole of Leviticus 17 is about the prohibition on eating blood. The blood of an animal was completely drained before it could be eaten.
Crucially, God said, “the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.”[19] Many Old Testament passages speak of atonement in terms of sacrifice and offering the blood of an animal. The use of blood highlights the fact that the animal has given up its life and serves as a substitute for the person who had bought the animal to atone for their sin.
There are clearly, connections with the old sacrificial system and what Christ did for the sin of the world upon the cross. These connections will become apparent below. However, before we consider the sacrifice Jesus made, we need to reflect on the what the sacrificial system was intended to achieve.
Contrition, remorse, and repentance, not sacrifice
God instituted the sacrificial system as a means of helping people focus on living in accordance with the ways God desired. It is all too easy, as Adam found, to blame others for our wrongdoing. When that is our attitude, our sacrifices are meaningless. Sacrifices offered simply as a ritual cannot atone for transgression.
The purpose of sacrifice was not to kill an animal, nor was it that by performing these religious rituals sin would be absolved. The intention behind the sacrificial system was that the ritual served as an outward and physical (and costly) demonstration of an internal expression of contrition, sorrow, and repentance. The Psalmist understood the core meaning of sacrifice. In speaking to God he said, “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”[20]
We noted in chapter 2 (page 18) that when a husband and wife fall out with each other chocolates and flowers rarely mend the relationship. What is required is a genuine expression of love that acknowledges wrong, the hurt caused and a desire to change behaviours. (However, flowers and chocolates may act as an offering!)
The central point is that which we understood from the parable of the lost son. Through the sacrificial system God is seeking naham, sorrow, remorse, acceptance of guilt, contrition, and a desire to change and behave differently in the future. God is also seeking sub, a desire in the sinner to turn around and back to God and live in a loving relationship with his heavenly Father.
A sixth covenant
There is one more important covenant God made with his people. We read about this throughout the New Testament. Indeed, the word ‘Testament’ means covenant. We will explore this in the chapters below.
Points for reflection
1. The first of the Ten Commandments is, “You shall have no other gods before me.” What ‘other gods’ do you think that (i) our nation, (ii) your local church community and (iii) you yourself, put before the one true God?
2. With regard to Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and all God’s rules for our living well together, to what extent do you think you have them written on your heart, impress them on your children and talk about them with others? Do you wear them, metaphorically, and do they govern the conduct of your household?
3. From what we read in the Old Testament, people were able to simply go through the motions of the sacrificial rituals without it having any meaning within their hearts or impact upon the way they lived their lives. How easy is it for us today to ‘go through the motions’ of religion rather than focus upon our relationship with God?
4. What connections have you made between what you have read so far and what you know of Christ’s death upon the cross?
Prayer
Father God, you made each person and made us in your image. You seek a personal relationship with each and every one of us. Yet, we are people who have eaten from the fruit of the tree of good and evil. We follow our own paths and trust in our own judgment. Yet, you continually seek us out like lost sheep and seek to bring us home. You welcome us like the prodigal’s father and want to reinstate us within your family. Father God, we thank you that you want us to be members of your covenant community. Drive from us all that separates us from you. Heal us, make us whole, and renew us. We thank you for the new beginnings you give because you love us. Amen.
[1] Genesis 1:26
[2] Genesis 1:28
[3] Genesis 2:15
[4] Genesis 2:17
[5] Psalm 133:1
[6] Genesis 9:11
[7] Genesis 12:1-3
[8] Exodus 19-24
[9] Exodus 19:5-6
[10] Deuteronomy 14:1
[11] 2 Samuel 7:12-17
[12] Luke 2:1-7
[13] Exodus 19:4
[14] Luke 13: 10-17
[15] Luke 13:15-16
[16] Deuteronomy 8:1 & 19-20
[17] Genesis 8:21; Exodus 29:18; Leviticus 1:9, 13, 2:9; Numbers 15:3, 7
[18] Hebrews 9:7
[19] Leviticus 17:11
[20] Psalm 51:16-17 (NIV)