Easter 3
4 May 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
CONFLICT: LIFE EAST OF EDEN
From Creation to New Creation: The Biblical Story #2
(Genesis 2.4-11.9)
In the beginning God created the heavens and earth and every living thing that fills this vast universe, including you and me – formed in God’s image, made for relationship with God and others, called to partnership with God, a dominion of love, in taking care of the earth. That’s Genesis one.
In Genesis two, we see God forming the earth and the human creatures with God’s own hands out of the dust of the ground. The human creature – ha-adam in the Hebrew – is formed from the soil adamah, which we translate “Adam.” One rabbinic story suggests that God gathered soil from the four corners of the earth – white sandy soil, red Georgia clay, rich black earth, and fertile brown dirt – so that no one race or people could claim the first human as theirs alone. And into our dust God blew God’s own breath and we became a living soul.
God then plants a garden in Eden where God places ha-adam. And God soon realizes there is something “not good” about creation: It is not good, says God, that the human should be alone. To be human in the image of God is to be in relationship with others. So out of the ground God creates every animal of the field and bird of the air and gives them to the human to name. But no suitable companion could be found among these other creatures.
So God causes ha-adam to fall into a deep sleep, takes a rib from the side of ha-adam, closes up the wound, and from that rib God fashions a woman. The one human – ha-adam – is now two: ish (which is “man” in Hebrew) and isha (“woman”). God brought the woman to the man and when he saw her he said: Ah, this time, she is it! Bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh. Renita Weems says, “This is the first love song a man ever sang to a woman.” Love poetry born as the man laid his adoring eyes on the woman.
The word used to describe the woman ‘ezer, is often translated “helper,” but is better translated “partner” – which means “one who saves by completing.” So yes, Tom Cruise stole that famous line in Jerry McGuire from Adam who, in essence, said to Eve, “You complete me.” The only other time this word ‘ezer is used in scripture is to refer to God. So this is not a text for the subservience of women to men, but for their beautiful unity and mutual partnership. Though two persons, they become one flesh. Though naked, they are not ashamed.
And how we wish they could have lived happily every after. But that didn’t happen. Here begins the story of what theologians have called “the Fall” – the Fall of humanity from innocence into sin – the fall we all of us take. In the first eleven chapters of Genesis, we are given stories of how our fallenness takes different forms.
(1) There is the Individual Fall of Freedom seen in Adam and Eve, the tumble we all take. This form of conflict stems from the choices we make. God places us in a garden called Eden, a garden full of every tree desirable to the eye and tongue. We are placed in the garden to keep it and care for it. It is a place where God provides safe boundaries. Two particular trees in the garden are mentioned: the Tree of Life in the middle of the garden and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God says, You may eat freely of every tree in the garden, but not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for in the day that you eat of it you will die.
So picture yourself going into the grand opening of a huge grocery store. You’re told you can pick up anything in the whole store to eat for the rest of your life and it’s yours. Except on aisle 2 – there’s some food you cannot have. Now, human nature being what it is, there’s a likelihood you will suddenly forget about all the other food in the store and feel driven to go to aisle 2 just to see what this forbidden food is. If so, you’re beginning to understand what’s happening in the Garden of Eden.
A sly and crafty serpent appears to Eve in the garden. The serpent begins by planting seeds of distrust and doubt in her heart, driving a wedge between the woman and her God, suggesting to her that God really doesn’t have their best interests at heart with this prohibition. Eve is lured by the serpent and eats of the fruit. Adam does the same.
And here we see what happens to us when we step outside the loving boundaries God has provided. We do not instantly fall over dead. But a turning from God does bring a form of death to our unbroken union with God, which can feel like a far worse form of death. When we make choices outside the boundaries of what is good for us we hack away at our God-created life-giving identity, we refuse our limitations, and we act as if we are indeed the all-wise God. Though we are quite fine with prohibitions and commandments, boundaries and rules for others, we tend to distrust them for ourselves, believing they only keep us from pleasure and success. We ignore the protective fence God has given, and refuse to be responsible with our freedom. We want, as the old perfume ad once lured us, “A World With No Boundaries.” We want God’s garden without God.
Just as parents provide boundaries to keep our children from harm, so God wants to keep us from our sin’s harmful consequences. But when we choose to go outside the boundaries, the consequences of our choices lie waiting for us. We want to have it all. We want to experience the power and pleasure of knowing everything. And it is our undoing.
Then judgment follows. Judgment is not God’s punishment or God’s angry retaliation for our sin. Judgment is living life under the inevitable consequences of our choices. Judgment often comes first in the form of shame. When Adam and Eve step outside the boundaries God had set for them, they look at each other and see their nakedness and for the first time they feel exposed, they feel shame. So they hide their bodies from each other with fig leaves.
And we’ve been preoccupied with our bodies ever since, obsessed with looking thin and ageless, filled with the fear and shame of never looking good enough, trying desperately to hide our flaws. So when God comes walking through the garden, when we feel God drawing near, we try to run and hide from God.
Where are you? God calls out.
And Adam responds: “I heard the sound of your presence and I was afraid, because I was naked; so I hid.”
Who told you you were naked? God asks. Have you ignored my protective boundaries?
And Adam, like so many of us, always searching for a scapegoat, is quick to avoid responsibility and assign blame to some other person or group of people: The woman whom you gave to me, she gave me the fruit and I ate it. Adam puts the blame on God and Eve. And Eve blames the serpent. The original “devil-made-me-do-it” defense.
So what exactly is this thing we call “sin” that has now entered the picture? Is it a violation of the healthy boundaries God has established for us? Yes. But at its core, sin is a distrust that fractures our union with the God who made us and loves us.
What follows is banishment from the Garden. After we make certain choices, things cannot go back to the way they were. We live life “east of Eden.” And here’s how the writer of Genesis describes the natural consequences of our own unhealthy choices playing out:
We will be given the blessing of children, but child-bearing and child-rearing will be mixed with pain and sorrow.
We will have work, even meaningful work, but the work will be filled with struggle.
We will have relationships but they will be frustrated by brokenness and a distortion of desire – the desire to rule over each other. What God had designed to be a relationship of mutuality, equality, and joy is now contaminated by control and submission, domination and mistrust, abuse and manipulation. The submission of women to men is not God’s desire or intention, but a sinful reflection of our fallen humanity. Male and female are equally created and equally responsible, and we are equals in sin. However, if the sins of human history were tallied according to gender, speaking as a man, I would not want to know the results!
So here with Adam and Eve, we see the individual form of fallenness and conflict, which stems from our own free choices.
(2) We see a more dangerous Relational Conflict of Jealousy in the children of Adam and Eve as Cain murders his brother Abel. Sin creates a brokenness of relationship between God and humanity, siblings and spouses, parents and children and friends. When all of us are meant to be our brother’s keeper, our sister’s keeper. However, jealousy and anger can get the best of us, sometimes with murderous consequences. And the darkness and depth of our fallenness grow.
(3) Following Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, comes the story of Noah and the Flood revealing a Cosmic Conflict of Violence. A conflict so large and terrible it made God sorry that God had ever made the world, so sorry God decided to start over. What is it that filled God’s heart with such sorrow and regret? The Bible says it is violence – the evil of violence we do to one another, including our culture’s celebration of violence – that breaks God’s heart.
(4) And then at the Tower of Babel, we see the Global Fall of Pride. We see all around us forms of corporate, national, and global pride as we seek to make a name for ourselves, trying to build towers to heaven, setting up our own empires and kingdoms.
Our fallenness and conflict spans the landscape of individual freedom, relational jealousy, cosmic violence, and global pride.
These early Genesis stories are told in Jewish tradition as cautionary tales, reminding us that each person has two inclinations: a good desire and an evil desire. And we have the choice of acting by the good desire or the evil desire. Abraham Lincoln spoke of “the better angels of our nature,” urging us to let them hold sway. Because the choices we make sometimes carry irreversible consequences. These sacred stories of Genesis are cautionary tales we must take seriously. We ignore them at our own peril.
Christian tradition also reads these stories as lessons in grace. Even after our disobedience God would be gracious.
(1) God gave Adam and Eve children to love and coats of skin to clothe themselves. God does not want us living alone in shame.
(2) After Cain killed his brother, God placed a mark of protection upon him so that no one would harm him. God does not want us repaying life for life. It just makes the world more violent.
(3) Following the Flood, God sent a rainbow as a reminder of the covenant God made with Noah never to destroy the earth again.
(4) And from the Tower of Babel where all peoples were scattered with different languages, God did not abandon them but chose from among them the Hebrew people to be a light and blessing to the rest of the nations.
God is still the gracious provider, even in life lived east of Eden under the consequences of our sin.
The apostle Paul understood the Fall of Adam as the universal Fall of all humankind. As the church’s first theologian Paul said the only cure would come through a Second Adam who would redeem us from our fallenness. In Romans 5 Paul speaks of this New Adam and the New Creation. He writes: As one man’s trespass (Adam’s trespass) led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness (the incarnation of Jesus) leads to acquittal and life for all . . . Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.
This is the gospel: Sin abounds, but grace abounds all the more. Sin is strong but grace is stronger. We all live amid the damage of our sin, but by the grace of God we are being redeemed. We’ve all heard that dreadful phrase “fallen from grace.” But God’s good news is that we all, you and I, the whole human running race, have, by the mercy of God, fallen toward grace. We can come out of hiding and open our lives in honest confession before God and fall into the ocean of God’s infinite grace.
So will you trust yourself into God’s arms of love and grace, arms that want to heal your brokenness, wash away your shame, make you whole, and give you the power to live as you were created to live? Will you allow yourself to fall toward grace? The arms of God are open wide to catch you this very day.