I.
Let us retrace the steps leading up to the fall of the human race.
God had given the man a job to do and a law to keep.
His job was to dress and keep the Garden of Eden, while the law forbade him from eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The penalty for breaking this solitary law was death.
Three things can be said about this.
First, the law was given before the creation of the woman. It will be the man’s job to teach her this law. By definition, the giving of the law, along with this charge, made the man a prophet, or, what we call today, a preacher.
Second, the man is not ignorant of good and evil. The man knows very well that it is good to eat freely of every tree in the garden and that it is evil to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Third, God’s Word needs no interpretation. It was clearly understood by the man, and later, by the woman to whom he preached it.
It was and remains an infallible Word that God spoke.
Infallible means this Word cannot be wrong and that it cannot fail to accomplish what it says it will do.
God says in Isaiah that His Word:
“...shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”1
So, in our text today, “Do not eat” means do not eat and “you will die” means you will die.
Infallibility is something we live with every day, though we don’t always live by the infallible Word of God.
We live by infallible hopes, infallible dreams, and infallible science. Yet our hopes are dashed, our dreams go unfulfilled, and the science keeps changing.
Still, we steer our lives by the light of these fallible infallibles. Why?
Let us return to the Garden of Eden and retrace our steps.
II.
A new character, the serpent, is introduced in Genesis 3. The word serpent already lets us know that something is amiss. Serpent in Hebrew has the same etymology as magic and witchcraft.
This also tells us something about the forbidden tree.
The man, as I said, already has knowledge of good and evil.
The story of the fall of man is not about man’s need to evolve from primordial ignorance to enlightened understanding.
This is about man’s ambition and his lust for power.
Specifically, man wants to gain equality with God by wresting from Him the power to make his own rules, to become the source of his own truth.
Yet it is for God alone to decide what is good, and what is evil. The knowledge of how God determines the one from the other is not knowledge man is meant to have.
By now, the woman has also entered the story and so the serpent asks her, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
No. In fact, God did not say that.
What God said was, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden.”
The serpent has re-arranged God’s infallible Word to suit his own purposes.
His purpose is to tempt the woman into doubting her faith in God’s Word.
The woman replies, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”
Now, if you listened closely to the first reading, you may be thinking, “God never said, ‘nor shall you touch it.’”
Where did that come from?
The woman has added her own speculative words to God’s infallible Word. The text is silent as to why, but two things can be said about it.
First, the woman is not a prophet. Later on, when the pagan sorcerer, Balak, is asked to curse Israel, he is forced to say, “do I have power to say just anything? The word God puts in my mouth, that is what I must say.”2
Second, the serpent introduces doubt into the woman’s mind by way of a skeptical question.
“Did God say?”
Hypothetically, we can imagine the serpent continuing:
“Did God really say, ‘you shall not eat’? Have you considered the process by which God spoke these words and the process by which you received them?
“You heard them from the man, didn’t you? What do you really know about this man other than that he says he was here before you, and that, indeed, you came from him!
“Have you considered the words God did not say?
“My dear, whose voice are we not hearing? Can we assume from their absence that someone’s voice is deliberately being suppressed?
“My dear, have you not guessed?”
The serpent indeed proves he is subtle. He is introducing the possibility of interpretation. Yet the Word of God is already infallibly understood.
But the gambit works, and the woman begins to doubt. Biblical criticism did not begin in 19th century Germany. It began in the Garden of Eden.
III.
The serpent is successful in weakening the woman’s faith.
Up until now her faith had rested on the Word of God. The serpent introduces doubt, so that Word now requires interpretation.
Up until now she had understood God’s Word for herself. Now she needs an interpreter.
Next, the serpent converts doubt into rebellion. His interpretation will directly contradict God’s word.
God says, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
The devil (for that is who the serpent is) says instead, “You will not die.”
The devilish interpreter continues:
“What could God have meant when He said, ‘you shall die’? He has made you in His image. Certainly, He will not let His image die.
“Besides, what is death? Isn’t death part of life, the natural cycle of things?
“You have seen the seed fall to the ground and die only to grow into a mighty tree. Surely, you are more to God than a tree.”
Here the serpent is the type of every false prophet, every false teacher, and every Pharisee to come. (And dare I say a few popes and bishops as well?)
Centuries later, Jesus will say of those Pharisees:
“You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”3
The devil does two things, which everyone who follows him will also do.
First, he falsifies God’s Word. He makes it say the opposite of what it really says.
Second, he claims infallibility for his own words. “You will not die,” is an infallible statement except for the fact that it is a lie.
The woman’s ruin is almost complete. In fact, she falls before she takes the first bite.
She sees that the tree is pretty to look at and good for food. Rabbi Soloveitchik notes that these are esthetic categories, not ethical ones.4 Already she is outside of the law, behaving as an outlaw.
Finally, she gives some of the fruit to her husband, who was with her, and he eats.
Adam — who has been there the whole time, who did nothing to protect his wife, who, when he saw the serpent charming her, did not immediately rip off this rival’s head (like a jealous husband) and cast its writhing body from Paradise; Adam to whom God spoke His infallible Word and yet who failed to live by that Word — now follows his wife into rebellion against God and into certain death.
Thus, the fall of our race.
IV.
What happens next would be funny if it were not so pathetic.
Their eyes are both opened, but instead of the promised enlightenment, instead of the promised divinity and union with God (theosis), they look upon each other in shame.
The very first thing the man and woman do after they fall from grace is invent religion.
They atone by covering their nakedness with fig leaves.
But it is man-made religion.
It does not begin with confession. It does not begin with repentance. It does not even begin with sorrow for what they’ve done.
And so, the covering they make, the atonement their religion offers, is worthless. It won’t even keep them warm during the long winter that is coming.
Later, God Himself will cover them with animal skins, which means two innocent animals will have to die to pay for — to atone for — the crime committed by the man and his wife.5
Later still, an innocent man, the Son of God Himself, Jesus Christ, will have to die so that all of us who believe in Him may have our sins covered by His grace.
V.
There are those who recognize God’s Word and those who don’t.
Those who do recognize God’s Word understand that it is the principle holding everything together, that even bread is not bread without the Word.
It turns out that man does not live by bread at all, but by God’s Word entirely.
Satan continues to tempt us to doubt the plain meaning of God’s Word.
A telltale sign we are being tempted is when we oppose one part of God’s Word to another part. For instance, using “God is love” (1 John 4:8) to oppose the Bible’s prohibition against fornication.
When Eve was tempted, she added her own words to God’s Word. She allowed doubt to enter, which ultimately separated her from her faith.
When Jesus is likewise tempted, He does not add to God’s Word but correctly interprets it, using Scripture to interpret Scripture.
He uses one infallible to interpret another infallible.
He does not add to God’s Word, take away from God’s Word, or ignore the parts He doesn’t like.
But Jesus had to know God’s Word in order to use it to defeat temptation.
Which means we have to know it too when the time comes to face our own temptations.
Preached on February 26, 2023 at St. Peter’s Lithgow, Millbrook, New York.
Lent 1, Year A
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11
Joseph Dov Soloveitchik and Arnold Lustiger, Sefer Bereishis, vol. 1 (New York, NY: OU Press, 2013), 22.