And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where [art] thou?
9. Where art thou?] The Lord does not abandon, He seeks, the guilty. The question is one which the voice of conscience puts to every man who thinks that he can hide his sin from God’s sight.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
9 13. The Enquiry
The certainty of tone with which the following questions are put indicates either perfect knowledge or accurate perception, and reduces the guilty man to a speedy confession. The questions are put, not to obtain information, but to give opportunity for self-examination and acknowledgment of guilt. The endeavour of the man and woman to put the blame on others is a lifelike trait.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
Gen 3:9-12
Where art thou?
—
Gods question
I. The speaker is God; the person spoken to is the representative of us all.
II. The call is–
1. Individual.
2. Universal.
III. God calls in three ways.
1. In conscience.
2. In providence.
3. In revelation.
IV. His call is–
1. To attention.
2. To recognition of Gods being.
3. To reflection on our own place and position.
V. It is a call which each must answer for himself, and which each ought to answer without delay. (Dean Vaughan.)
An important question
Here God asks an important question: Where art thou?
1. Where are you?–are you in Gods family or out of it? When you are baptized, you are put into Gods family upon certain conditions–that you will do certain things; and it depends upon you how you live, because if you do not love God you cannot be Gods child.
2. Supposing you are one of Gods children, Where art thou?–near to thy Father or far from Him?–because some children are nearer to their fathers than others. Mary and Martha were sisters, and they were both Christians, but one was much nearer to Christ than the other. Mary sat at Jesus feet, Martha was troubled about many things. If we delight to tell Jesus everything, than we shall be near God.
3. Are you in the sunshine or the shade? If you follow Christ you will always be in the sunshine, because He is the Sun.
4. Are you in the path of duty? Are you where you ought to be? The path of duty is a narrow path sometimes a steep path. God could say to many of us, as He said to Elijah, What doest thou here?–thou art out of the path of duty.
5. How have you progressed? The surest way to know that we get on is to be very humble. When the wheat is ripe it hangs down; the full ears hang the lowest. (J. Vaughan, M. A.)
The first question in the Bible
This is the first question in the Bible. It was addressed by God to the first man, and likewise to you.
I. THAT GOD THINKS ABOUT YOU. A watchmaker sells the watches which he has made, and thinks no more of them. The same with a ship builder and his ships, a shepherd and his sheep. Some say that as these men have acted, so does God. He has made you, but He never thinks about you. This is an error. The text proves that He thought of Adam, and there are many things which show that He thinks of you. A mother thinks of her children, and causes the gas to be lighted for them when the shadows of the evening have come. For the same reason God sends forth the sun every morning. As He thinks about you, so you ought to think about Him; in the morning when you awake, often during the day, and always before you sleep.
II. THAT GOD SPEAKS TO YOU. He spoke to Adam. In what manner? Not like the severe slave holder, the stern master, the passionate father; but like a loving mother to her children. He addresses you also, though not exactly in the same way. Men have many methods by which they communicate their thoughts to one another. The telegraph; letters; signs; the living voice. As it is with men in this respect so with the Lord. He speaks to you in nature, in events great and small. By conscience, parents, teachers, ministers. Sometimes thoughts come into your minds directly from God. Think of the honour thus put on you. The Queen speaking to that little boy. This is nothing when compared with the great God speaking to the same boy.
III. THAT GOD KNOWS WHEN YOU ARE NOT IN YOUR RIGHT PLACE. More than all, Calvary. The Divine Father is there to meet you and save you. Have you never been there?
IV. THAT GOD WISHES YOU TO TELL HIM WHY YOU ARE NOT IN YOUR RIGHT PLACE. As He dealt with Adam, so He deals with you. To Him you are responsible for all your actions as well as your words. (A. McAuslane, D. D.)
The position of man as a sinner
I. A CHANGE IN MANS MORAL POSITION.
1. His one sin brought guilt upon his conscience, and anarchy into his heart.
2. This developed itself in a dread of God.
(1) This dread of God accounts for all malignant theologies.
(2) For atheistic speculations.
(3) For the prevalence of depravity.
(4) For the absence of a hearty enjoyment of life.
(5) For the little religious interest men feel in the works of nature.
II. A DIVINE INTEREST IN MAN, NOTWITHSTANDING HIS ALTERED POSITION.
III. THE IMPORTANCE OF MAN FEELING HIS MORAL POSITION. (Homilist.)
Where art thou?
1. The Christian ought always to be at his proper and assigned work. God fails not to mark every dereliction, to note every hour, every gift and power not given to the work of salvation.
2. The Christian ought ever to be in his proper place. He has his own place in the family circle, in the Church of Christ, in every sphere of Christian duty and enterprise, and in the world of guilt, misery, and ignorance around him.
3. The Christian ought ever to be in a state of mind to seek the Divine blessing. Sin cherished, Or duty neglected, not only loses us the favour of God, but what is, if possible, worse still, robs us of the disposition to desire or seek it.
4. The Christian ought ever to be where he can meet God in judgment without fear.
I. THE SINNER.
1. In his sins.
2. In the pathway of eternal ruin.
3. In a state of awful condemnation.
4. In a land of darkness and gloom.
5. Ever under Gods immediate eye.
6. In the hands of an angry God. (W. B. Sprague, D. D.)
The voice of God
I. THE VOICE HERE WAS DOUBTLESS AN AUDIBLE VOICE. And God has yet His voice. He can speak by awful providences; He can speak by terrific judgments; or He can speak by the still, small voice of love.
II. THE VOICE OF GOD IS ALWAYS A TERRIFIC VOICE TO THE SOUL THAT IS OUT OF CHRIST. The voice of God is the voice of a holy God–the voice of a just God–the voice of a faithful God. And how can an unpardoned, unjustified, and unsanctified soul hear that voice and not tremble?
III. HOW IS IT, THEN, THAT THE BELIEVER IN CHRIST JESUS CAN LISTEN TO THOSE WORDS, WHERE ART THOU? AND CAN HEAR THEM IN PEACE? What answer does he give? Where art thou?–In Christ. In Christ? Then there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. (J. H. Evans, M. A.)
Observations
I. TERRORS MAY PREPARE A MANS HEART, BUT IT IS ONLY THE WORD OF GOD THAT INFORMS AND SUBDUES IT.
1. That this is Gods ordinance, wherein He hath both discovered His will unto us, and annexed unto it the power of His Spirit, to subdue every thought in us to the obedience of Jesus Christ.
2. That it is the only means to bring unto God His due honour, by bearing witness to His truth in His promises, and to His righteousness in His laws, and to His authority in submitting to His directions.
II. THE WAY TO GET OUR HEARTS AFFECTED WITH WHAT WE HEAR, IS TO APPREHEND OURSELVES TO BE SPOKEN UNTO IN PARTICULAR.
1. Because self-love is so rooted in us, that we slight and make little account of those things in which ourselves have not a peculiar interest.
2. Because it much advanceth Gods honour (1Co 14:25), when by such particular discoveries and directions it is made manifest unto us that God oversees all our ways, and takes care of our estates in particular, which cannot but work in us both fear, and care, and confidence,
III. THOSE WHO ENDEAVOUR TO FLY FROM GOD, YET CAN BY NO MEANS SHIFT THEMSELVES OUT OF HIS PRESENCE. Let it then be every mans care and wisdom to take hold of Gods strength, to make peace with Him, as Himself adviseth us (Isa 27:5), seeing He cannot be–
1. Resisted (Isa 27:4).
2. Nor escaped (Jer 25:35).
3. Nor entreated (1Sa 2:25).
4. Nor endured (Isa 33:14).
IV. GOD LOVES A FREE AND VOLUNTARY ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF SIN FROM HIS CHILDREN, WHEN THEY HAVE TRESPASSED AGAINST HIM.
1. Because it brings God most honour, when we clear Him, and take the blame unto ourselves (See Jos 7:19), whereby every mouth is stopped, and His ways acknowledged, and His judgments to be just, in visiting mens transgressions upon them; and His mercies infinite, in sparing men upon their repentance.
2. It most justifies ourselves, when we condemn our own ways and actions 2Co 7:11), and are grieved in our own hearts, and ashamed of our folly, in the errors of our ways.
V. GOD IS FULL OF MILDNESS AND GENTLENESS IN HIS DEALING WITH OFFENDERS, EVEN IN THEIR GREATEST TRANSGRESSIONS.
1. To clear Himself, that the whole world may acknowledge, that He afflicts not willingly (Lam 3:33)..
2. Because the sin itself is burthen some and bitter enough to a tender conscience, so that there needs no mixture with it of gall and wormwood.
VI. THE KNOWLEDGE AND CONSIDERATION OF ONES ILL CONDITION IS AN EFFECTUAL MEANS TO BRING HIM ON TO TRUE REPENTANCE. VII. ALL THOSE THAT DESIRE TO GET OUT OF THEIR MISERY MUST SERIOUSLY CONSIDER WITH THEMSELVES WHAT WAS THE MEANS THAT BROUGHT THEM INTO IT.
1. There can be no means of removing evil but by taking away the cause of it, neither is there any means to take that away till it be known.
2. Besides, God can no way gain so much honour, as when men, by searching out the cause of the evils that befall them, find and acknowledge that their destruction is from themselves (Hos 13:9). Hence it is that the Lord oftentimes makes the judgment which He inflicts to point it out, either by the kind of the judgment, or by some circumstance of the time, place, instrument, or the like, by the observation whereof the evil itself that brought that judgment on us may be made manifest, especially if we take with us for the discovery thereof the light of Gods Word. (J. White, M. A.)
Lessons
1. Jehovah may suffer sinners to abuse His goodness, but He will call them to judgment.
2. The eternal God only, who is the cause of every creature, who hath made, and knows man, He will be Judge.
3. Adam and all his sons shall be made to judge themselves by the Lord.
4. God is not ignorant of the lurking places of sinners (Psa 139:1-24).
5. Gods inquiries are invincible criminations on sinners.
6. He that hides, cannot hide, and he that flieth, cannot fly from God.
7. Foolish sinners think themselves safe in hiding and flying from God, but God teacheth it must be by coming to Him.
8. Sin deals falsely in its speaking to the inquisition of God.
9. It is sin alone that makes Gods voice so terrible, which sinners would conceal.
10. Sinners pretend their fear rather than their guilt to drive them from God.
11. Sinners pretend their punishment, rather than their crime, to cause them hide.
12. Sin makes souls naked, and yet souls cover sin.
13. How hard it is to bring a soul to the true acknowledgment of sin! (G. Hughes, B. D.)
Gods first words to the first sinner –
1. Mark the alienation of heart which sin causes in the sinner. Adam ought to have sought out his Maker. He should have gone through the garden crying for his God, My God, my God, I have sinned against Thee. Where art Thou? But instead thereof, Adam flies from God. The sinner comes not to God; God comes to him. It is not My God, where art Thou? but the first cry is the voice of grace, Sinner, where art thou? God comes to man; man seeks not his God.
2. And while the text manifestly teaches us the alienation of the human heart from God, so that man shuns his Maker and does not desire fellowship with Him, it reveals also the folly which sin has caused. How we repeat the folly of our first parent every day when we seek to hide sin from conscience, and then think it is hidden from God; when we are more afraid of the gaze of man than of the searchings of the Eternal One, when because the sin is secret, and has not entrenched upon the laws and customs of society, we make no conscience of it, but go to our beds with the black mark still upon us, being satisfied because man does not see it, that therefore God does not perceive it.
3. But now, the Lord Himself comes forth to Adam, and note how He comes. He comes walking. He was in no haste to smite the offender, not flying upon wings of wind, not hurrying with His fiery sword unsheathed, but walking in the garden. In the cool of the day–not in the dead of night, when the natural gloom of darkness might have increased the terrors of the criminal; not in the heat of the day, lest he should imagine that God came in the heat of passion; not in the early morning, as if in haste to slay, but at the close of the day, for God is long suffering, slow to anger, and of great mercy; but in the cool of the evening, when the sun was setting upon Edens last day of glory, when the dews began to weep for mans misery, when the gentle winds with breath of mercy breathed upon the hot cheek of fear; when earth was silent that man might meditate, and when heaven was lighting her evening lamps, that man might have hope in darkness; then, and not till then, forth came the offended Father.
I. We believe that the inquiry of God was intended in an AROUSING SENSE–Adam, where art thou? Sin stultifies the conscience, it drugs the mind,so that after sin man is not so capable of understanding his danger as he would have been without it. One of the first works of grace in a man is to put aside this sleep, to startle him from his lethargy, to make him open his eyes and discover his danger. Adam, where art thou? Lost, lost to thy God, lost to happiness, lost to peace, lost in time, lost in eternity. Sinner, Where art thou? Shall I tell thee? Thou art in a condition in which thy very conscience condemns thee. How many there are of you who have never repented of sin, have never believed in Christ? I ask you, is your conscience easy?–is it always easy? Are there not some times when the thunderer will be heard? Thy conscience telleth thee thou art wrong–O how wrong, then, must thou be! But man, dost thou not know thou art a stranger from thy God? You eat, you drink, you are satisfied; the world is enough for you: its transient pleasures satisfy your spirit. If you saw God here, you would flee from Him; you are an enemy to Him. Oh! is this the right case for a creature to be in? Let the question come to thee–Where art thou?: Must not that creature be in a very pitiable position who is afraid of his Creator? You are in the position of the courtier at the feast of Dionysius, with the sword over your head suspended by a single hair. Condemned already! God is angry with the wicked every day. If he turn not, He will whet His sword: He hath bent His bow and made it ready. Where art thou? Thy life is frail; nothing can be more weak. A spiders line is a cable compared with the thread of thy life. Dreams are substantial masonry compared with the bubble structure of thy being. Thou art here and thou art gone. Thou sittest here today; ere another week is past thou mayest be howling in another world. Oh, where art thou, man? Unpardoned, and yet a dying man! Condemned yet going carelessly towards destruction! Covered with sin, yet speeding to thy Judges dread tribunal!
II. Now, secondly, the question was meant to CONVINCE OF SIN, and so to lead to a confession. Had Adams heart been in a right state, he would have made a full confession of his sinfulness. Where art thou? Let us hear the voice of God saying that to us, if today we are out of God and out of Christ.
III. We may regard this text as the VOICE OF GOD BEMOANING MANS LOST ESTATE.
IV. But now I must turn to a fourth way in which no doubt this verse was intended. It is an arousing voice, a convincing voice, a bemoaning voice; but, in the fourth place, it is a SEEKING VOICE. Adam, where art thou? I am come to find thee, wherever thou mayest be. I will look for thee, till the eyes of My pity see thee, I will follow thee till the hand of My mercy reaches thee; and I will still hold thee till I bring thee back to myself, and reconcile thee to My heart.
V. And now, lastly, we feel sure that this text may be used, and must be used, in another sense. To those who reject the text, as a voice of arousing and conviction, to those who despise it as the voice of mercy bemoaning them, or as the voice of goodness seeking them, it comes in another way; it is the voice of JUSTICE SUMMONING THEM. Adam had fled, but God must have him come to His bar. Where art thou, Adam? Come hither, man, come hither; I must judge thee, sin cannot go unpunished. (C. H.Spurgeon.)
I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself
The sad effects of yielding to temptation
I. THAT A YIELDING TO TEMPTATION IS GENERALLY FOLLOWED BY A SAD CONSCIOUSNESS OF PHYSICAL DESTITUTION.
II. THAT A YIELDING TO TEMPTATION IS GENERALLY FOLLOWED BY A GRIEVOUS WANDERING FROM GOD.
1. After yielding to temptation, men often wander from God by neglecting
(1) Prayer.
(2) Gods Word.
2. By increasing profanity of life.
III. THAT A YIELDING TO TEMPTATION IS GENERALLY FOLLOWED BY SELF-VINDICATION.
1. We endeavour to vindicate ourselves by blaming others. This course of conduct is
(1) ungrateful;
(2) ungenerous;
(3) unavailing.
2. By blaming our circumstances.
IV. THAT IN YIELDING TO TEMPTATION WE NEVER REALIZE THE ALLURING PROMISES OF THE DEVIL.
1. Satan promised that Adam and Eve should become wise, whereas they became naked.
2. Satan promised that Adam and Eve should become gods, whereas they fled from God. (J. S. Exell, M. A.)
The wanderer from God
I. WHERE IS MAN?
1. Distant from God.
2. In terror of God.
3. In delusion about God.
4. In danger from God.
II. GODS CONCERN FOR HIM.
1. His condition involves evil–God is holy.
2. His condition involves suffering–God is love.
III. GODS DEALINGS WITH HIM.
1. In the aggregate–Adam, the genius.
2. Personally. Where art thou? (W. Wythe.)
The dawn of guilt
I. A CONSCIOUS LOSS OF RECTITUDE. They were naked. It is moral nudity–nudity of soul–of which they are conscious. The sinful soul is represented as naked (Rev 3:17). Righteousness is spoken of as a garment (Isa 61:3). The redeemed are clothed with white raiment. There are two things concerning the loss of rectitude worthy of notice.
1. They deeply felt it. Some are destitute of moral righteousness, and do not feel it.
2. They sought to conceal it. Men seek to hide their sins–in religious professions, ceremonies, and the display of outward morality.
II. AN ALARMING DREAD OF GOD. They endeavour, like Jonah, to flee from the presence of the Lord.
1. This was unnatural. The soul was made to live in close communion with God. All its aspirations and faculties show this.
2. This was irrational. There is no way of fleeing from omnipresence. Sin blinds the reason of men.
3. This was fruitless. God found Adam out. Gods voice will reach the sinner into whatever depths of solitude he may pass.
III. A MISERABLE SUBTERFUGE FOR SIN. The woman, etc. And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, etc. What prevarication you have here! Each transferred the sinful act to the wrong cause. It is the essential characteristic of moral mind that it is the cause of its own actions. Each must have felt that the act was the act of self. (Homilist.)
I. THE SENSE OF GUILT BY WHICH THEY WERE OPPRESSED.
Sad results of disobedience
1. There were circumstances which aggravated their guilt–they knew God–His fellowship–were perfectly holy–happy–knew the obligations–knew the consequences of life and death.
2. They felt their guilt aggravated by these circumstances. Their consciences were not hardened. Their present feelings and condition were a contrast with the past. In these circumstances they fled. They knew of no redemption, and could make no atonement.
II. THE MELANCHOLY CHANGE OF CHARACTER WHICH HAD RESULTED FROM THEIR FALL.
1. Our moral attainments are indicated by our views of God–progressive. The pure in heart see God. Our first parents fell in their conceptions of God–omnipresence. Whither shall I go? etc. This ignorance of God increased in the world with the increase of sin Rom 1:21-32). This ignorance of God is still exemplified. The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. He may worship outwardly; and there are gradations of the foolish–some shut God within religious ordinances–some exclude Him.
III. THAT THEY HAD LOST THEIR COMMUNION WITH GOD.
1. One barrier interposed was guilt.
2. Another barrier was moral pollution. (James Stewart.)
Hiding after sin
I. ADAM REPRESENTS THE AVERAGE SINNER. A man may do worse than Adam–hide from God after outraging Him by sin. Sense of Gods presence, awfulness, greatness, still intact in soul.
II. THEY HID THEMSELVES. An instinct; not the result of a consultation. Two motives:
1. Fear.
2. Shame. The greatness of God was the measure of Adams fear; his own lost greatness was the measure of his shame.
III. AMONGST THE TREES OF THE GARDEN.
1. Pleasure.
2. Occupation.
3. Moral rationalism.
IV. ADAMS CONDUCT WAS FOOLISH AND IRRATIONAL.
1. Attempting the impossible.
2. Flying from the one hope and opening for restoration and safety. (Canon Liddon.)
Hiding from God
As the account of Eves temptation and fall truly represents the course of corruption and sin, so the behaviour of our first parents afterwards answers exactly to the feelings and conduct of those who have forfeited their innocence and permitted the devil to seduce them into actual sin.
I. Any one sin, wilfully indulged, leads to profaneness and unbelief, and tends to blot the very thought of God out of our hearts.
II. Much in the same way are backsliding Christians led to invent or accept notions of God and His judgment, as though He in His mercy permitted them to be hidden and covered, when in truth they cannot be so.
III. The same temper naturally leads us to be more or less false towards men also, trying to seem better than we are; delighting to be praised, though we know how little we deserve it. Among particular sins it would seem that two especially dispose the heart towards this kind of falsehood;
(1) sensuality;
(2) dishonesty.
IV. When any Christian person has fallen into sin and seeks to hide himself from the presence of the Lord, God is generally so merciful that He will not suffer that man to be at ease and forget Him. He calls him out of his hiding place, as He called Adam from among the trees. No man is more busy in ruining himself, and hiding from the face of his Maker, than He, our gracious Saviour, is watchful to awaken and save him. (Plain Sermons by Contributors to Tracts for the Times. )
Two kinds of retreats
I. THE SINNERS RETREAT.
1. Complete thoughtlessness.
2. The occupations of life.
3. The moralities of life.
4. The forms and observances of religion.
II. THE SAINTS RETREAT. I flee unto Thee to hide me–
(1) from the terrors of the law;
(2) from the hostility and hatred of men;
(3) from the trials and calamities of life;
(4) from the fear and tyranny of death. (A. Raleigh, D. D.)
Hiding places
I. Note here the anticipative sentence of the human conscience pronouncing doom on itself. The guilty rebel hides from the Divine Presence.
II. The inexorable call which brings him immediately into the Divine Presence.
III. The bringing to light of the hidden things of darkness. The soul has many hiding places. There are–
(1) The hiding place of self-complacent propriety;
(2) the hiding place of the reasoner;
(3) the hiding place of theological dogmas. But the true hiding place for the soul is Jesus. (W. Hay Aitken, M. A.)
The unconscious confession
I. ADAMS HASTE TO MAKE EXCUSE WAY A PROOF OF HIS GUILT. The consciousness of evil leads to self-condemnation.
II. ADAMS CONFESSION OF FEAR PROVED HIS GUILT. If a child dreads its parent, either the child or the parent must be wrong.
III. ADAMS MORBID MORAL SENSITIVENESS PROVED HIS GUILT. The worst kind of indelicacy is in being shocked at what is natural and proper. Conclusion:
1. Sin cannot escape from God.
2. Sin cannot stand before God.
3. Sin may find compassion from God. (A. J. Morris.)
Observations
I. ALL MEN MUST APPEAR BEFORE GOD, AND ANSWER ALL THAT THEY ARE CHARGED WITHAL, WHEN HE COMES TO JUDGMENT.
1. That God by His power can enforce and draw all men before Him, and to confess Him too, no man can deny (Rom 14:11).
2. Besides, it is fit that God should do it, for the clearing of His justice, both in rewarding His own and punishing the wicked and ungodly, when every mans work is manifest, and it appears that every man receives according to his deeds (Rom 2:8). Of this truth there can be no clearer evidence than the observation of that judgment which passeth upon every man in the private consistory of his own conscience, from which none can fly nor silence his own thoughts, bearing witness for him, or against him, no, not those which have no knowledge of God or His law Rom 2:15).
II. ALL MEN BY NATURE ARE APT TO COLOUR AND CONCEAL ALL THAT THEY CAN AND THAT EVEN FROM GOD HIMSELF.
1. Because all men desire to justify themselves, and are by nature liars Rom 3:4), and therefore easily fall into that evil to which their nature inclines them.
2. The want of the full apprehension of Gods Providence.
III. ONE SIN COMMONLY DRAWS ON ANOTHER.
1. Any sin committed weakens the heart, and consequently leaves it the more unable to withstand a second assault–as a castle is the more easily taken when the breach is once made.
2. And sins are usually fastened one to another, like the links of a chain; so that he who takes hold of one of them necessarily draws on all the rest.
3. And God in justice may punish one sin with another, and to that end both withdraw His restraining grace from wicked men, that being delivered over to the lusts of their own hearts they may run on to all excess of riot, that they may fill up the measure of their sin, that Gods wrath may come upon them to the uttermost, and many times for a while withholds the power of His sanctifying grace from His own children.
IV. GODS WORD IS TERRIBLE TO A GUILTY CONSCIENCE.
V. IT IS A HARD MATTER TO BRING MEN TO CONFESS ANY MORE THAN IS EVIDENT IN ITSELF.
VI. MEN MAY BE BROUGHT MORE EASILY TO ACKNOWLEDGE ANYTHING THAN THEIR SIN.
VII. NO MEANS CAN WORK ANY FARTHER THAN THEY ARE ACTED AND CARRIED ON BY GOD HIMSELF. (J. White, M. A.)
Conscience
I. In briefly adverting then to the fact THAT IT IS THE VOICE OF THE LORD WHICH AWAKENS CONVICTION, LET US ATTEMPT TO ASCERTAIN EXACTLY WHAT IS INTENDED BY SUCH AN EXPRESSION. In the case of Adam it was, of course, the direct and audible voice of the Lord whereby he was aroused. There is no doubt that that voice had struck home to his conscience long before it fell upon his ear–as is prevent by his sense of nakedness, which he pleaded as an excuse for his concealment; but that conviction of sin which drove him to the shade of the foliage immediately after he had eaten the fruit, and before the Lord called him from his hiding place, was but the echo of the Almightys previous warning, In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. If it was the voice of God which awakened conviction in Adam, how does He make that voice heard by us? Is there not a steady monitor within us, and which at times the most hardened of us cannot stifle–which is constantly telling us, thou shalt surely die–which is ever reminding us that Gods law requires perfection, absolute and unblemished purity, without which we cannot enter into His rest–which also shows us our own hearts, and forces us to bear them to the standard of Gods law (a light in which we see in every part of ourselves the elements of eternal perdition and utter ruin)–which proclaims death to us at every step–which haunts our rest, disturbs our thoughts, distracts our minds, and terrifies our souls with the unceasing warning, thou shalt surely die?
II. THE EFFECT PRODUCED BY THE VOICE–FEAR. I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid. There are two kinds of fear–the one generally termed reverence, or, as it is scripturally called, godly fear,–the other dread, or terror, induced by fear of punishment The former always results from a suitable attitude before God in the contemplation of His majesty and power, and forms one of the most indispensable and becoming attributes in the character of the true disciple of God. The latter is an infallible indication of the absence of the Spirit from the heart, and of the consciousness of guilt without the wish for, or hope of, a remedy. It was this fear which engendered the slavish obedience of the Israelites, and induced that dogged and sullen compliance with the laws demands which characterized the spirit in which their services were rendered. A fear which urges nothing more than a bare fulfilment of a demand from a sense of coercion and compulsion, cannot fail to beget a spirit of enmity against its object. Hence it is that our churches are filled with unwilling worshippers, and the altar of Jehovah is insulted with constrained oblations.
III. The next consideration suggested by the text was, THE MISERABLE AND HUMILIATING SENSE AWAKENED BY THE CONVICTION OF SIN–NAKEDNESS. It is a feeling which manifests itself under three aspects–bringing with it a sense of ignorance, of a want of righteousness, and of impurity. We may be extensively versed in what this world calls knowledge–may be widely acquainted with the works of philosophers and poets,and may even be deeply read in the Oracles of God; able to descant with subtilty and power upon the doctrines of revealed truth; but no sooner does the abiding conviction of sin break in upon us, than these attributes, upon which we once rested a hope of preference before our less favoured brethren, become only as so many scorpions to sting us with the reproach of baying abused them, and leave us under a sense of ignorance even in the possession of the gifts of knowledge. But it is not only upon such as these that the sense of ignorance accompanies the voice of conviction. It creeps over those who, without worldly as well as spiritual knowledge of any kind, have never felt their ignorance before. There are many who, while they are of the night and know nothing, think there is nothing which their own strength is not sufficient to perform, and that there is no degree of excellence to which they cannot of their own power attain. When conscience speaks to such as these, the helplessness which they feel partakes largely of this sense of ignorance. They look back upon that career of self-sufficiency during which they have been arrested, like awakened sleepers upon the visions of a dream; and yet, amidst the realities to which they have been aroused, they feel a need; but know not where to turn for help. Our helplessness under conviction of sin is increased by a feeling of our want of righteousness being super-added to this sense of ignorance. Self-dependence is the invariable accompaniment of an ungodly life. Ungodliness itself consists chiefly, if not entirely, in a want of faith in Christ; and if this want of faith in Him exists, our trust must be reposed elsewhere; we either consider ourselves too pure to need a Saviour, or else we trust in future virtue to redeem past transgression. When the floods of conviction all at once break down the sandy barriers of self-trust behind which we have sought to screen ourselves, one of the principal elements in the sense of helplessness resulting from it is a void within ourselves which we find widening more and more as conviction becomes the stronger. It brings with it, too, in an equal degree, a feeling of impurity. Before conviction has firmly fastened hold upon the mind; when, as it were, its first strivings for audience are all that can be experienced, it is apt to be checked by the trite expedient of comparing our own godliness with that of others. But such specious delusions are all overthrown when conscience has us completely in its chains. It leads us to measure ourselves, not by a relative standard, or by the contrast we present to our brethren around us; but by the contrast we present to the requirements of that law which demands perfect purity; a purity to which we feel we can never attain, and a law whereby we know we shall be ultimately judged. We look within, and see ourselves stained with every sin which that law condemns, and we feel that the very lightest of our transgressions is sufficient to crush us beneath its curse. It is in vain that we make future resolves. But, terrible as the situation of a mind thus disturbed may seem, it is in a far more enviable condition than that which is reposing in the lap of sin, and saying, Peace, peace, when God has not spoken peace.
IV. But it will be necessary now to glance at the next head of discourse, namely, THE VAIN EXPEDIENT FOR ESCAPE MENTIONED IN THE TEXT. I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. This attempt at personal concealment on the part of our first parents, furnishes a striking example of the deceitfulness of sin. The supposition that the mere shade of the leaves could conceal them from the eye of God would have appeared to their reason, while unwarped by sin and shame, as preposterous and absurd; but now that the taint of guilt was on their souls they were ready to believe in the efficacy of any miserable subterfuge to cheat the omniscience of the Almighty. In like manner does sin lead its victims now from one degree of dissimulation to another, commending the mask of hypocrisy in its most attractive forms, and deluding the sinner into every species of sophistry, from which the purer mind would instinctively recoil. A more rigid observance of Divine ordinances is often resolved upon as a means of propitiating the monitions of the conscience. A mare serious and attentive demeanour is likewise assumed. A closer vigil kept upon the words and actions. And determinations are made to conform more literally to the demands of the Divine law. Such resolves in themselves are admirable, and, inasmuch as they evidence a dissatisfaction with present godliness, are highly commendable. But in what spirit and for what reason are these reforms undertaken? Is it a glowing desire for the promotion of the glory of God; a zeal for the advancement of His kingdom; and an anxiety for the spread of His cause which animates us? Are these high resolves prompted by an indignant sense of our ingratitude to a merciful and beneficent Creator, and a childlike desire to return to Him from whom we have departed? No, my friends. It is from no contrition for past unthankfulness towards the giver of every good and perfect gift that these resolves are made; but their fulfilment is set about from a sullen and constrained sense of compulsion to satisfy the exorbitant demands of a hard taskmaster whose laws we hate, and whose sway we would fain be freed from; they are undertaken in our own strength, and prompted by a slavish fear of death. We have before seen that this servile dread, though productive of great apparent submission and obedience, generates enmity instead of love in the heart. It is only the light of revelation which can dispel that enmity, and shed abroad that love in the soul. (A. Mursell.)
Hidings
I. Let us contemplate THE SINNER HIDING HIMSELF. For is not this flight and concealment of Adam among the trees of the garden like a symbolical representation of what sinners have been doing ever since?–have they not all been endeavouring to escape from God, and to lead a separated and independent life? They have been fleeing from Divine Presence, and hiding themselves amid any trees that would keep that Presence far enough away.
1. One of the most common retreats of the sinner is that of complete thoughtlessness. What countless thousands of human beings have fled to this retreat; and how easily and naturally does a man take part and place with all the nations that forget God! We have said complete thoughtlessness; but it is not complete. If it were, there would be no conscious hiding, no more flight; the forest would then be so deep and dense that no Divine voice would be heard at all, and no Divine visitation of any kind felt or feared. But it is not so. Now and again a gleam of light will come piercing through. Now and again a voice from the Unseen Presence will summon the fugitive back.
2. The occupations of life furnish another retreat for man when fleeing from God. Man works that he may be hidden. He works hard that he may hide himself deep. The city is a great forest, in which are innumerable fugitives from God, and sometimes the busiest are fleeing the fastest; the most conspicuous to us may be the farthest away from Him. Work is right–the allotment of God, the best discipline for man. Trade is right–thedispenser of comforts and conveniences, the instrument of progress and civilization; and from these things actual benefits unnumbered do unceasingly flow; and yet there can be little doubt that the case is as we say. These right things are used at least for this wrong end–as a screen, a subterfuge, a deep retreat from the voice and the presence of the Lord.
3. The moralities of life form another retreat for souls hiding from God. Some men are deeply hidden there, and it is hard to find them; harder still to dislodge them. This does not appear to be an ignominious retreat; a man seems to retire (if, indeed, he may be said to retire at all) with honour. Speak to him of spiritual deficiency, he will answer with unfeigned wonder, In what? And if you say again, In the keeping of the commandments, he will give you the answer that has been given thousands and thousands of times since the young man gave it to Jesus, All these things have I kept from my youth up. Not perfectly, not as an angel keeps them, but as well as they are usually kept among men; and what lack I yet? So fair is the house in which the man takes shelter. So green is the leafage of the trees amid which he hides. He does not profess to be even afraid, as Adam was. He hears the Voice, and does not tremble. Why, then, should it be said that he is hiding? Because in deep truth he is. He is attending to rules, but not adopting soul principles of life. He is yielding an outward and mechanical compliance to laws, but be has not the spirit of them in his heart.
4. The forms and observances of religion constitute sometimes a hiding place for souls. Men come to Gods house to hide from Him. They put on the form of godliness, but deny its power. They have a name to live, but continue dead. They seem to draw near, but in reality are yet a great way off. They figure to themselves an imaginary God, who will be propitiated and pleased by an outward and mechanical service–by the exterior decencies of the Christian life–when all the while they are escaping from the true God, whose continual demand is, My son, give Me thine heart. Ah, the deceitfulness of the human heart! that men should come to God to flee from Him! Yet so it is, and therefore let a man examine himself, whether he be in the faith or merely in the form; whether he have a good hope through grace, or a hope that will make him ashamed, whether he be in the very Presence reconciled, trustful, and loving, or yet estranged, deceiving himself, and fleeing from the only true Shelter. For we may depend upon it that in all these ways men do fly from God. And God seeks them, for He knows they are lost. He pursues them, not in wrath, but in mercy; not to drive them away into distance, condemnation, despair; but to bring them out from every false refuge and home to Himself, the everlasting and unchanging shelter of all the good.
II. And many do turn and flee to Him to hide them. Adam is the type of the flying sinner. David is the type of THE FLEEING SAINT (Psa 143:9). Here we have the very heart and soul of conversion, I flee unto Thee. The man who says this has been turned, or he is turning.
1. I flee unto Thee to hide me from the terrors of the law. He alone can hide us from these terrors. But He can. In His presence we are lifted, as it were, above the thunders of the mountain; we see its lightnings play beneath our feet. He who finds his hiding place with God in Christ does not flee from justice; he goes to meet it. In God, the saints refuge justice also has eternal home; and purity, over which no shadow can ever pass; and law–everlasting, unchanging law–so that the trusting soul goes to meet allthese and to be in alliance with all these.
2. I flee unto Thee to hide me from the hostility and the hatred of men. This was a flight that David often took, and, in fact, this is the fleeing mentioned in the text. Deliver me, O Lord, from mine enemies. I flee unto Thee to bide me. Believer, if you have Davids faith you have Davids Refuge. The Name of the Lord is an high tower, into which all the righteous run and are safe.
3. I flee unto Thee to hide me from the trials and calamities of life. A storm comes to a ship in mid-voyage. She is driven far out of her course, and is glad at last to find shelter in some friendly port. But there would soon have been shipwreck in the fair weather. The sunken rock, the unknown current, the treacherous sand, were just before the ship. The storm was her salvation. It carried her roughly but safely to the harbour. And such is affliction to many a soul. It comes to quench the sunshine, to pour the pitiless rain, to raise the stormy wind and drive the soul away to port and refuge, away to harbour and home within the circle of Divine tranquillity–in the deep calm of the everlasting Presence.
4. I flee unto Thee to hide me from the fear and from the tyranny of death. This is the very last flight of the godly soul. It has surmounted or gone through every evil now but one: The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death. (A. Raleigh, D. D.)
Terrors of conscience, and remedies
There is no cure for the terrors of conscience but from God.
1. Because these fears are seated in the soul, and are awakened there by the voice of God. I heard Thy voice, said Adam. It is the voice of God in the mind that makes it so terrified: no created being can strike fear or convey comfort into the conscience.
2. The fears of the mind, being supernatural and spiritual, can admit only of a spiritual remedy. All outward applications will never cure inward distempers: the sickness of the mind can only be cured by Him who seeth into it. Jesus only can raise and comfort those whom the terrors of the Almighty have cast down and dejected. His peculiar work and office it is to release us from the terrors of conscience. He is entitled to the merit of doing it; He was made acquainted with fear, with trouble, with amazement, with agony of mind, that He might merit comfort for us under our fears. Christ is the end of the law for comfort, by conferring pardon; which pardon He is more fitted to give by reason of that compassion which is in Him; that pity and tenderness with which He is moved toward all that are under any kind of want, or sorrow, or misery. Another way to lessen our fears is to maintain our peace with God by such a regard to His law as will not suffer us to persevere in any known sin. For the conscience can never be at rest so long as wilful sin remains in the heart. The man who is at peace with God fears no evil tidings, his heart is fixed. I add this further rule: acquaint thyself much with God, and then thou wilt be less afraid when He visits Thee. If He be new and strange to thee, every appearance of Him will be fearful; but if thou art acquainted with Him, thou mayest then be confident. Next to this, nourish a voluntary religious fear of God in the heart, and that will prevent those other violent and enforced Years which bring torment. Feared He will be; all knees must bow to Him, all hearts must yield to Him; therefore a devout fear is the best way to prevent a slavish dread. The humble spirit that bows itself shall not be broken. Above all, take care to be of the number of those to whom His promises are made–that is, the Church. To them it is said, they shall dwell safely, and none shall make them afraid.
1. In much pity and tenderness, like as a father catches up a child that is fallen, yea, like as a father pitieth his own children, so is the Lord merciful to them that fear Him. He taketh pleasure in the prosperity of His servants, and loves to see them in a comfortable condition. For a small moment, saith He, have I forsaken thee, but witch great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy upon thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.
2. They are assured also of His care over them, lest they should be swallowed up and overwhelmed with grief and fear. Hear His words: For I will not contend forever, neither will I be always wrath; for the spirit should fail before Me and the souls which I have made. I will restore comforts to him and to his mourners. God brings His servants seasonably out of their distresses; because in them they are unfit and unable for any service. I have now only to observe that all these things are contrariwise with the wicked. No relief in their extremity, but fear and anguish. (W. Jones, M. A.)
Divine vision
Adam forgot that God could see him anywhere. Dr. Nettleton used to tell a little anecdote, beautifully illustrating that the same truth which overwhelms the sinners heart with fear, may fill the renewed soul with joy. A mother instructing her little girl, about four years of age, succeeded, by the aid of the Holy Spirit, in fastening upon her mind this truth, Thou God seest me! She now felt that she had to do with that Being unto whose eyes all things are naked, and she shrank in terror. For days she was in deep distress; she wept and sobbed, and would not be comforted. God sees me, God sees me! was her constant wail. At length one day, after spending some time in prayer, she bounded into her mothers room, and with a heavenly smile lighting up her tears, exclaimed, Oh, mother, God sees me, God sees me! Her ecstasy was now as great as her anguish had been. For days her soul had groaned under the thought, God sees me; He sees my wicked heart, my sinful life, my hatred to Him and to His holy law: and the fear of a judgment to come would fill her soul with agony. But now a pardoning God had been revealed to her, and her soul exclaimed exultingly, God sees me, takes pity on me, will guide and guard me. (W. Adamson.)
Afraid of God
So there is a consistency in sin: they who hid themselves from one another hid themselves from the presence of the Lord. Sin is the only separating power. Goodness loves the light. Innocence is as a bird that follows the bidding of the sun. When your little child runs away from you, either you are an unlovely parent or the child has been doing wrong. Adam was afraid of the Lord (Gen 3:10). Afraid of Him who had made the beautiful garden, the majestic river, the sun, and the moon and the stars! How unnatural! Instead of running to the Lord, and crying mightily to Him in pain and agony of soul, he shrunk away into shady places, and trembled in fear and shame. We do the same thing today. We flee from God. Having done some deed of wrong, we do not throw ourselves in utter humiliation before the Lord, crying for His mercy, and promising better life; we stand behind a tree, thinking He will pass by without seeing us. This sin makes a fool of a man as well as a criminal–it makes him ridiculous as well as guilty. It makes its own judgment day. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Who told thee that thou wast naked?–
The moral sense
What is significant, as I think, in the Bible narrative, is that the moment when man hears the voice of God in the garden is the moment when he feels himself estranged from Him; he is not happy in the presence of his Maker; he shrinks from Him, and seeks any covering, however feeble, to hide him from his God. And he who looks across the page of history, and seeks to read the secret of the human soul, will find everywhere, I think, this same contrariety between mans duty and his desire, the same consciousness that he has not performed the work God has given him to do. For what can be told as a truer truth of the human story, than that man has high desires and cannot attain to them; that he is living between two worlds, and is often false to what he knows to be most Divine in himself; or, in a word, that he has tasted of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and yet that between him and the tree of life stands a flaming sword which turns every way?
I. THE HUMAN CONFESSION. It is not a little strange, upon the face of it, that man, who is the lord of the physical world, or counts himself so, should be visited by a haunting sense of failure. Why should he be ashamed of himself? Why conceive a Power needing propitiation? Why waste his time in penitence for sin? What is sacrifice–that venerable institution–but an expression of the discordance between man and his environment? We know we are sinners; we cannot escape the chiding of conscience.
II. THE DIVINE INTERROGATION. Whence comes, then, this sense of sin, this longing for holiness? It is a testimony to the Divinity of our human nature. If the prisoner sighs for liberty and flight in the prison, the reason is that the prison is not his home. If the exile gazes with yearning eyes upon the waste of waters which parts him from his native land, the reason is that his heart is there beyond the seas. And if the human heart here in the body sighs and yearns for a perfectness of love and a joy Divine, the reason is, it is the heir of immortality. (J. E. C. Welldon, M. A.)
Gods question
Who told thee that thou wast naked? or how is it that this nakedness is now a cause of shame to thee? Wast thou not clothed with innocence, with light, and with glory? Didst thou not bear the image of thy God, in whom thou gloriedst? Didst thou not rejoice in all the faculties which He had given thee? Why, then, art thou despoiled, covered with shame, and miserable? Hast thou sullied the garment of innocence and purity which I bestowed upon thee? Hast thou lost the crown with which I adorned thy brow? Who, then, hath reduced thee to this state? Who told thee that thou wast naked? Adam is confounded and speechless before his Judge. It is necessary, then, to deepen the conviction which he feels in his troubled conscience. It is necessary to give him a nearer view of the evil which he has committed, by putting to him a still more home question. It is necessary to set full before his eyes the mirror of the Divine law. Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? My brethren, what instructive lessons does this simple question contain! Let us pause here for a moment, and direct our thoughts to this important subject. And, first, remark that God, in order that He might be justified even when He condemned, with a condescension which was intended to redound to His own glory, pronounces no curse, nor even a sentence of condemnation upon man, until He has first convicted him in his own conscience. But this condescension of the Lord towards man was also intended to subserve the happiness of the creature, by leading him to repentance, and, through repentance, unto salvation. The Lord, by the question which He puts to Adam, confronts him with His holy law. Man, the sinner, will then no longer be able to withhold the confession of his guilt, under the plea of ignorance. I commanded thee, saith his Judge, thou knewest thy duty, the full extent of thy responsibility, even the tremendous sanction of the law and the penalty of its violation. If, then, Adam perish, it is his own fault. But the Almighty, in reminding man in so solemn a manner of the command which He had given him, designed not merely to lead him to confess that he had sinned knowingly and willingly, and that he had made no account of his awful responsibility, but also to show him the real nature of his sin. Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? I gave thee a command, hast thou violated it? This is sin–the violation of the law of God, disobedience, rebellion. That sin would have been the same, in point of nature, whatever had been the object of the command. For us, as well as for Adam, for every responsible being, sin is simply that which is opposed to the Divine law. (L. Bonnet.)
Hast thou eaten of the tree?–
Observation
I. MANS FROWARDNESS CANNOT OVERCOME GODS LOVE AND PATIENCE.
II. GOD CAN EASILY, WITHOUT ANY OTHER EVIDENCE, CONVINCE MEN BY THEMSELVES.
III. GOD SEES US EVEN WHEN WE SEE NOT HIM, AND TAKES NOTICE OF ALL OUR WAYS, AND OBSERVES THEM. Let all men walk as in Gods presence, always beholding Him that is invisible (Heb 11:27), as sitting in His throne of majesty and power, and observing the ways of men with those eyes which are purer then to behold evil. This is indeed the only way–
1. To give unto God the honour due to His glorious attributes.
2. To keep our hearts low that we may walk humbly with our God, as we are required (Mic 6:8).
3. To make us watchful in all our ways, that we may do nothing that may provoke the eyes of His glory (see Exo 23:21).
4. To encourage us in well-doing, when we know we walk in the sight of our Master, who both approves us, and will reward us, when our ways please Him (Psa 18:24), and takes notice of a cup of cold water bestowed in His name upon any of His children (Mat 10:42), or the least faithful service performed by a servant to his Master Eph 6:6), and will defend and stand by us while we do Him service (Exo 23:22-23).
IV. GOD ACCEPTS OF NO CONFESSION TILL MEN SEE AND ACKNOWLEDGE THE SIN OF THEIR ACTIONS, AND THAT TOO AS IT IS SIN.
1. Because without such a confession, God hath neither the honour of His justice in punishing sin (wherefore Joshua requires Achan to confess his sin, that he might give glory to God, Jos 7:19), as David doth Psa 51:4), nor of His mercy in pardoning it.
2. We cannot otherwise be in any state of security after we have sinned, but by suing out our pardon; which if He should grant, without our condemning and abhorring of our own evil ways, it would neither further our own reformation, nor justify God in pardoning such sins, as we have neither acknowledged, nor grieved for at all.
V. MEN MUST BE DEALT WITHAL IN PLAIN TERMS BEFORE THEY WILL BE BROUGHT TO ACKNOWLEDGE AND BE MADE SENSIBLE OF THEIR SINS.
1. Because the heart is never affected with sin till it be represented unto them in full proportion, but it may appear shameful and odious.
2. Because all men being by nature lovers of themselves, do all that they may to maintain their own innocency, and therefore endeavour what they can to hide sin from their own eyes, as well as from other men, as being unwilling to look upon their own shame.
VI. WHOSOEVER WILL CONVINCE A MAN OF SIN MUST CHARGE HIM PARTICULARLY WITH THE VERY ACT IN WHICH HE HATH SINNED. VII. IN SINFUL ACTS OUR HEARTS OUGHT ONLY TO BE FIXED UPON OUR OWN ACTIONS, AND NOT UPON OTHER MENS SOLICITATIONS AND PROVOCATIONS THEREUNTO.
1. Because of the proneness of our own hearts to shift off the evil of our actions from ourselves, if possibly we can.
2. And while we do this, we harden our own hearts, and make them insensible of our sins, which affect us not, when we think the evil proceeds not from ourselves, but charge it upon other men that provoke us.
3. Other mens provocations cannot excuse us, seeing it is the consent of our own hearts and nothing else that makes it a sin.
VIII. THE BREACH OF GODS COMMANDMENT IS THAT WHICH MAKES ANY ACT OF OURS A SIN.
1. Disobedience is not only an injury to God, but an injury to Him in the highest degree, wherein His authority is rejected, His wisdom slighted, His holiness despised, and His providence, and power, and justice, both in rewarding and punishing not regarded.
2. Disobedience knows no bounds, no more than waters do that have broken down their banks. (J. White, M. A.)
She gave me of the tree and I did eat.
Adams mean excuse
1. Adam, we find, was not content to be in the image of God. He and his wife wanted to be as gods, knowing good and evil. He wanted to be independent, and show that he knew what was good for him: he ate the fruit which he was forbidden to eat, partly because it was fair and well-tasted, but still more to show his own independence. When he heard the voice of the Lord, when he was called out, and forced to answer for himself, he began to make pitiful excuses. He had not a word to say for himself. He threw the blame on his wife. It was all the womans fault–indeed, it was Gods fault. The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
2. What Adam did once we have done a hundred times, and the mean excuse which Adam made but once we make again and again. But the Lord has patience with us, as He had with Adam, and does not take us at our word. He knows our frame and remembers that we are but dust. He sends us out into the world, as He sent Adam, to learn experience by hard lessons, to eat our bread in the sweat of our brow till we have found out our own weakness and ignorance, and have learned that we cannot stand alone, that pride and self-dependence will only lead us to guilt and misery and shame and meanness; that there is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved from them, but only the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (C. Kingsley, M. A.)
A tardy and reluctant confession
Here is, it is true, a confession of his sin. It comes out at last, I did eat; but with what a circuitous, extenuating preamble, a preamble which makes bad worse. The first word is, the woman, aye the woman; it was not my fault, but hers. The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me–It was not me; it was Thou Thyself! If thou hadst not given me this woman to be with me, I should have continued obedient. Nay, and as if he suspected that the Almighty did not notice his plea sufficiently, he repeats it emphatically: She gave me, and I did eat! Such a confession was infinitely worse than none. Yet such is the spirit of fallen man to this day. It was not me . . . it was my wife, or my husband, or my acquaintance, that persuaded me; or it was my situation in life, in which Thou didst place me! Thus the foolishness of man perverteth his way, and his heart fretteth against the Lord. It is worthy of notice, that God makes no answer to these perverse excuses. They were unworthy of an answer. The Lord proceeds, like an aggrieved friend who would not multiply words: I see how it is; stand aside! (A. Fuller.)
Observations
I. NO MAN CAN BEAR OUT SIN BEFORE GOD, HOWSOEVER HE MAY FOR AWHILE OUT-FACE IT BEFORE MEN.
II. WHEN MENS SINS ARE SO MANIFEST THAT THEY CANNOT DENY THEM, THEY WILL YET LABOUR BY EXCUSES, TO EXTENUATE THEM WHAT THEY MAY.
III. A MAN, IN THIS STATE OF CORRUPTION, RESPECTS NONE BUT HIMSELF, AND CARES NOT ON WHOM HE LAYS THE BURTHEN, SO HE MAY EASE HIMSELF.
IV. SEDUCERS ARE JUSTLY CHARGEABLE WITH ALL THE SINS COMMITTED BY THOSE THAT ARE SEDUCED BY THEM. Beware, then, of that dangerous employment, to become a solicitor, or factor in sin, and tremble at the very motion of it, and avoid carefully the society of such agents–
1. Who carry the mark and character of Satan, who is styled by the name of the tempter, and is the father of all that walk in that waver seducing.
2. Show themselves much more dangerous enemies to mankind than murderers, who destroy only the body, whereas these lay wait for the soul Pro 22:25).
3. Proclaim war against God, whom they fight against, not only by their own sins, but much more, by making a party against Him, by drawing as many as they can procure, to be companions with them in their evils.
4. And therefore are above others, children of wrath, reserved unto them by the just judgment of God, in a double proportion, according to the measure of their sins acted by themselves, and furthered in other men by their procurement.
V. IT IS USUAL WITH MEN, WHEN THEMSELVES HAVE COMMITTED THE SIN, TO LAY THE BLAME OF IT IN PART EVEN UPON GOD HIMSELF.
VI. IT IS A USUAL PRACTICE WITH MANY MEN TO CAST GODS BLESSINGS IN HIS TEETH WITH DISCONTENT.
1. Because, many times, common blessings suit not with mens private ends and desires, so that we judge many things, which are blessings in themselves, to be crosses unto us.
2. Because our unthankful hearts, being not satisfied in all that they inordinately desire, scorn that which they have as a trifle, because it answers not to the full of what is desired.
VII. MEN MAY EASILY BY THEIR OWN FOLLY TURN THE MEANS ORDAINED BY GOD FOR THEIR GOOD INTO SNARES FOR THEIR DESTRUCTION. Let it warn every one of us to use all the helps and blessings which we receive from God with fear and trembling.
1. Purging our own hearts carefully, for to those which are defiled nothing is pure (Tit 1:15).
2. Sanctifying unto ourselves the blessings themselves, by the word and prayer (1Ti 4:5).
3. Using all things according to the rule laid down to us in the Word, and referring them to the end for which He gives them, His own glory, and the furthering of our sanctification, that He may bless us in those things, the fruit whereof returns unto Himself at last.
VIII. IT IS VERY DANGEROUS TO EMBRACE ANY MOTION PRESENTED UNTO US WITHOUT EXAMINING THE WARRANT AND GROUND OF IT. (J. White, M. A.)
Adams admission, not confession
He makes no direct and honest answer to God in freely confessing that he had eaten; yet he cannot deny the deed, and therefore, in the very act of admitting (not confessing), he casts the blame upon the woman–nay, upon God, for giving him such a tempter. Here let us mark such truths as these.
1. The difference between admitting sin and confessing it. Adam admits it–slowly and sullenly–but he does not confess it. He is confronted witha Being in whose presence it would be vain to deny what he had done; but he will go no father than he can help. He will tacitly concede when concession is extorted from him, but he will make no frank acknowledgment. It is so with the sinner still. He does precisely what Adam did; no more, till the Holy Spirit lays His hand upon his conscience and touches all the springs of his being. Up till that time he may utter extorted and reluctant concessions, but he will not confess sin. He will not deal frankly with God.
2. The artfulness of an unhumbled sinner. Even while admitting sin, he shakes himself free from blame; nay, he thrusts forward the name of another, even before the admission comes forth, as if to neutralize it before it is made. How artful! yet how common still! Ah! where do we find honest, unreserved acknowledgment of sin? Nowhere, save in connection with pardon.
3. The self-justifying pride of the sinner. He admits as much of his guilt as cannot be denied, and then takes credit to himself for what he has done. He is resolved to take no more blame than he can help. Even in the blame that he takes, he finds not only an extenuation, but a virtue, a merit; for he fled because it was not seemly for him to stand before God naked! Nay, even in so much of the blame as he takes, he must divide it with another, thus leaving on himself but little guilt and some considerable degree of merit. Had it not been for another, he would not have had to admit even the small measure of blame that he does!
4. The hardened selfishness of the sinner. He accuses others to screen himself. He does not hesitate to inculpate the dearest; he spares not the wife of his bosom. Rather than bear the blame, he will fling it anywhere, whoever may suffer. And all this in a moment! How instantaneous are the results of sin!
5. The sinners blasphemy and ingratitude to God. The woman whom Thou gavest me, said Adam. Gods love in giving him a helpmeet is overlooked, and the gift itself is mocked at.
6. The sinners attempt to smooth over his deed. The woman gave me the fruit, and I ate of it; that was all. Giving, receiving, and eating a little fruit; that was all! What more simple, natural, innocent? How could I do otherwise? Thus he glosses over the sin. (H. Bonar, D. D.)
Excuses
Say not thou, says the son of Sirach, it is through the Lord that I fell away; for thou oughtest not to do the things that He hateth. Say not thou, He hath caused me to err. This is just what Adam and Eve did say. When accused of disobedience they retorted, and dared to blame God for their sin. If only Thou hadst given me a wife proof against temptation, says Adam. If only the serpent had never been created, says Eve. Very similar are most of the excuses we make. We blame the gifts that God gives us rather than ourselves, and turn that free will which would make us only a little lower than the angels if rightly used into a heritage of woe. A man has a bad temper, is careless about his home, and is led to eat the forbidden fruit of unlawful pleasures. When his conscience asks him, Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? he answers, Its all my wifes fault. She provokes my temper by her extravagance, carelessness, and fondness for staying away from home. She does not make my home home-like, so I am driven to solace myself with unlawful pleasures. The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And wives are not less ready to make the conduct of husbands an excuse for a low tone of thought and religion. They ask how it is possible for them to retain their youthful desire of serving Christ when their husbands make home wretched and sneer at everything high and holy. Easy it is for others to be good, but for myself I find that a wife cannot be better than her husband will allow her to be. How often is ill health pleaded as an excuse for bad temper and selfishness! If we are rich, we allow ourselves to be idle and luxurious. If poor, we think that while it is easy to be good on ten thousand a year, it is impossible for us to resist the temptations of poverty. Is a man without self-restraint and self-control? He thinks it enough to say that his passions are very strong. In the time of joy and prosperity we are careless and thoughtless. When sorrow comes to us, we become hard and unbelieving, and we think that the joy and the sorrow should quite excuse us. Again, evil-doers say that no man could do otherwise were he in their position, that there is no living at their trade honestly, that their health requires this and that indulgence, that nobody could be religious in the house in which they live, and so on. If God wanted us to fight the good fight of faith in other places and under other circumstances, He would move us; but He wishes us to begin the battle where we are, and not elsewhere. There subdue everything that stands in conflict with the law of conscience, and the law of love, and the law of purity, and the law of truth. Begin the fight wherever God sounds the trumpet, and He will give you grace, that as your day is, so your strength shall be. As long as people say, I cannot help it, they will not help it; but if they will only try their best they will be able to say, I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me. On comparing the excuses which we modern sinners make with those attributed in the text to the first sinners, Adam and Eve, we find one circumstance characterizing them both. We, as well as they, virtually say, that only for difficulty and temptation we would be very good. And yet how absurd it would be to give a Victoria Cross for bravery in the absence of the enemy. We would all laugh if we heard a man greatly praised for being honest and sober when in prison, because we would know that it was impossible for him to be anything else. It is just because the Christian life is not an easy thing that at our baptism we are signed with the sign of the Cross, in token that we shall have to fight manfully under His banner against sin, the world, and the devil. (E. J. Hardy, M. A.)
Adams vain excuse for his sin
We have here the antiquity of apologies: we find them almost as ancient as the world itself. For no sooner had Adam sinned, but he runneth behind the bush.
I. First, we will anatomize and dissect this excuse of Adams.
II. Next we will look into ourselves; take some notice of our own hearts, and of those excuses which we commonly frame.
III. And then, to make an exact anatomy lecture, we will lay open the danger of the disease, that we may learn to avoid what was fatal to our parents,, and, though we sin with Adam, yet not with Adam to excuse our sin. Of these in their order.
I. And the man said, The woman, etc. I told you this was no answer, but an excuse; for indeed an excuse is no answer. An answer must be fitted to the question which is asked; but this is quite beside it. The question here is, Hast thou eaten of the forbidden tree? The answer is wide from the purpose, an accusation of the woman, yea, of God Himself: The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. I have eaten, by itself, had been a wise answer; but it is, I did eat, but the woman gave it, a confession with an extenuation; and such a confession is far worse than a flat denial. His apology upbraideth him, and he condemneth himself with his excuse.
1. For, first, Mulier dedit, The woman gave it me, weigh it as we please, is an aggravation of his sin. We may measure sin by the temptation: it is always the greatest when the temptation is least. A great sin it would have been to have eaten of the forbidden fruit though an angel had given it: what is it, then, when it is the woman that giveth it? What a shame do we count it for a man of perfect limbs to be beaten by a cripple! for a son of Anak to be chased by a grasshopper! (Num 13:33); for Xerxes army, which drank up the sea, to be beaten out of Greece by three hundred Spartans! Certainly he deserveth not power who betrayeth it to weakness. The woman gave it me, then, was a deep aggravation of the mans transgression.
2. Again: It is but, The woman gave it. And a gift, as we commonly say, may be either taken or refused; and so it is in our power whether it shall be a gift or no. Had the man been unwilling to have received, the woman could have given him nothing. The gods themselves have not strength enough to strive against necessity; but he is weaker than a man who yieldeth where there is no necessity. The woman gave it me, then, is but a weak apology.
3. Further yet: What was the gift? Was it of so rich a value as to countervail the loss of paradise? No; it was the fruit of the tree. We call it an apple: some would have it to be an Indian fig. The Holy Ghost vouchsafeth not once to name it, or to tell us what it was. Whatever it was, it was but fruit, and of that tree of which man was forbidden to eat upon penalty of death (Gen 2:17). An evil bargain is an eyesore, because it always upbraideth him with folly who made it. And such a bargain here had our first father made. He had bought gravel for bread, wind for treasure, hope for a certainty, a lie for truth, an apple for paradise. The woman, the gift, the gift of an apple–these are brought in for an excuse, but are indeed a libel.
4. Further still: To aggrandize Adams fault, consider how the reason of his excuse doth render it most unreasonable. Why doth he make so busy a defence? Why doth he shift all the blame from himself upon the woman? Here was no just detestation of the offence, but only fear of punishment.
5. In the last place: That which maketh his apology worse than a lie, and rendereth his excuse inexcusable, is, that he removeth the fault from the woman on God Himself. Not the woman alone is brought in, but The woman whom Thou gavest me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. Which indeed is a plain sophism: that is made a cause which is not a cause, but an occasion only. It is a common axiom, That which produceth the cause, produceth also the effect of that cause; and it is true in causes and effects essentially co-ordinate. But here it is not so. God, indeed, gave Adam the woman; but He gave him not the woman to give him the apple. He gave her for a companion, not for a tempter; and He gave her not to do that which He had so plainly forbidden.
II. And now I wish that the leaves of those trees among which Adam hid himself had cast their shadow only upon him. But we may say, as St. Ambrose doth of the story of Naboth and Ahab, This history of Adam is as ancient as the world; but is fresh in practice, and still revived by the sons of Adam. We may therefore be as bold to discover our own nakedness as we have been to pluck our first father from behind the bush. We have all sinned after the similitude of Adams transgression, and we are as ready to excuse sin as to commit it. Do we only excuse our sin? No; many times we defend it by the gospel, and even sanctify it by the doctrine of Christ Himself. Superstition we commend for reverence, profaneness for Christian liberty, indiscretion for zeal, will worship for obedience. To come close home therefore, we will stay a little, and draw the parallel, and show the similitude that is betwixt Adam and his sons. We shall still find a Mulier dedit to be our plea as well as his. Some woman, something weaker than ourselves, overthroweth us, and then is taken in for an excuse. We all favour ourselves, and our vices too; and what we do willingly we account as done out of necessity of nature. If we taste the forbidden fruit, we are ready to say, The woman gave it us. Again: it is some gift, some proffer, that prevaileth with it, something pleasant to the eye, something that flattereth the body and tickleth the fancy, something that insinuateth itself through our senses, and so by degrees worketh upward, and at last gaineth power over that which should command–our reason and understanding. Whatsoever it is, it is but a gift, and may be refused. Further: As it is something presented in the manner of a gift which overcometh us, so commonly it is but an apple; something that cannot make us better, but may make us worse; something offered to our hope, which we should fear; something that cannot be a gift till we have sold ourselves, nor be dear to us till we are vile and base to ourselves; at the best but a gilded temptation; an apple with an inscription, with an Eritis sicut dii, upon it; with some promise, some show, and but a show and glimpse, of some great blessing; but earthy and fading, yet varnished with some resemblance of heaven and eternity. Lastly. The Tu dedisti will come in too. For, be it the world, God created it; be it wealth, He openeth His hand and giveth it; be it honour, He raiseth the poor out of the dust; be it our flesh, He fashioneth it; be it our soul, He breathed it into us; be it our understanding, it is a spark of His Divinity; be it our will, He gave it us; be it our affections, they are the impressions of His hand. But, be it our infirmities, we are too ready to say that that is a woman too of Gods making. But God never gave it. For, suppose the flesh be weak, yet the spirit is strong. If the spirit be stronger than the flesh, saith Tertullian, it is our fault if the weaker side prevail. And therefore let us not flatter ourselves, saith he, because we read in Scripture that the flesh is weak; for we read also that the spirit is ready (Mat 26:41); that we might know that we are to obey, not the flesh, but the spirit.
III. And thus ye see what a near resemblance and likeness there is between Adam and his posterity; that we are so like him in this art of apologizing that we cannot easily tell whether had most skill to paint sin with an excuse, the father or the children. Adam behind the bush, Adam with a Mulier dedit, is a fair picture of every sinner; but it is not easy to say that it doth fully express him. But now, to draw towards a conclusion, that we may learn to cast off the old man, and to avoid that danger that was fatal to him, we must remember that we are not only of the first Adam, but also of the second; not only of the earth, earthy, but also of the Lord from heaven: and as we have borne the image of the earthy, so we must also bear the image of the heavenly (1Co 15:47-49). We must remember that we are born with Christ, that we are baptized and buried with Christ, and that we must rise with Christ; that the woman was given to be in subjection, the flesh to be subdued by us, and the world to be trodden under our feet; that we must not count these as enforcements and allurements before sin, lest we take them up as excuses after sin; that we must not yield to them as stronger than ourselves, that we may not need to run and shelter ourselves under them in time of trouble.
1. To conclude: my advice shall be–First, that of Arsenius the hermit: Command Eve, and beware of the serpent, and thou shalt be safe; but, if thou wilt be out of the reach of danger, do not so much as look towards the forbidden tree.
2. But, if thou hast sinned, if thou hast tasted of the forbidden fruit, if thou hast meddled with the accursed thing, then, as Joshua speaketh to Achan, My son, give, I pray thee, glory to the Lord God of Israel, and make confession unto Him (Jos 7:19). Run not behind the bush, study not apologies; make not the woman, who should help thee to stand, an excuse of thy fall; nor think that paint nor curtains can hide thy sin from Him whose eyes are ten thousand times brighter than the sun (Sir 23:19), and in whose bosom thou art, even when thou runnest into the thicket of excuses. No; Give glory to God, that God may seal a pardon to thee. Open thy sin by confession to God, and the mercy of God will hide it: condemn it, and judge thyself for it; and thy excuse is made, thou shalt never be judged for it by the Lord: lay it open before the Lord, and He will blot it out forever. (A. Farindon, D. D.)
The resistance of temptation
You will observe how in this expression Adam directs attention to Eve as the more guilty of the two; as, if it had not been for her, had she not pressed and persuaded him to eat, that awful and fatal fruit would have remained untouched; as if she, the first to disobey, had urged him on, she leading, and he only following; she daring to pluck, to eat, and to give, and he only consenting to receive what she had taken. And no doubt he stated the case as it really was; the guilt did not begin with him; Eve led the way; her foot first crossed the forbidden line. But the question for us to consider is this: Did this defence, strictly true as it was, and in some sort placing with justice the greater blame on her, free him from condemnation in Gods sight? Nay, however it was that he came to sin, sin was condemned in him; the sentence was passed, in all its awfulness, that he should die; there was no lesser death, no milder punishment decreed against him. When Eve enticed, it was his part to have withstood, to have resisted all the beguiling words; it was his to have refused the fruit, to have held back his hand, to have kept his hold of the commandments of God; concession to her was sin; and whether or not the greater blame was his, there was blame enough to bring down upon himself the awful vengeance of the Lord, and the awful decree of death. And should we not dwell upon this point, and see how, when Adam pleaded his wifes first step in sin as the cause and excuse for his, Gods wrath fell upon him as well as her? For in this, as in all former times, men often weave the same flimsy web of self-defence, and think to screen themselves behind others who have led them into sin, to lighten their load of iniquity, and to blunt the sharper edge of the sword of punishment. The young, when pursuing youthful sins, point to the young already before them on the same sinful course, saying, See you not that it was always so, that I am but as the young have ever been, that I am only doing what has been done by those before me? The middle-aged, busied with the world, and in their worldly dealings showing a sharp, a grasping, an unscrupulous spirit, wanting in all that is generous, simple, and high-minded, point to what they call the ways of the world, shelter themselves behind the customs of the age, the habits of other men, the examples that are around them, saying that others gave them of this low standard of morals, these sharp ways of dealing, these lax principles, and they did eat; that they did not of themselves begin thus to deal, thus to push their way; that they even wish things were different, but that they found the world a pushing world, and that they only followed in the train, doing what others did, and following in the lead. But what is the use of such defences of ourselves? How will this bear the light? How do we clear ourselves by such means as this? If it be sin to tempt, it is also sin to yield; if it be sin to give of forbidden fruit, it is also sin to take; if it be sin to Suggest evil counsel, it is also sin to follow it. It is this very point that the ease of Adam urges on us all. It may be our part to hear evil counsel, to have evil friends, to live in an atmosphere of evil principles, to be offered in some form other forbidden fruit, to see others eating of it themselves; but are we at once to be led by the evil friend, to act on the evil advice, to imbibe the evil principles, to yield to the evil ways which others tread? Nay, we are called to the very opposite course; we are called to resist evil, to quit ourselves like men, to endure temptation, to drive off tempters, to bear witness to our Saviour, to confess Him in the world by opposing the spirit of the world. Yes, this often is our part, and to this we are called by God, to bear witness to the truth, to be surrounded by tempters and temptations, wrong views, wrong ways of going on, wrong habits, unchristian conduct, unchristian patterns, and, amid all this darkness of the world, to see by faith the true and narrow way, not to be beguiled, but to steer our vessel straight. We each, in one sense, stand alone. Every man has his own appointed course, to which the Spirit leads him on; from which, if he would be saved, he must not swerve to the right hand or to the left, whatever influences may be at work on either side. (Bishop Armstrong.)
False excuses for sin
The first thing which strikes us, on the perusal of this passage, is the extreme readiness and proneness of man to urge an excuse for sin, and to shift the blame from himself upon some other person or thing. One of the commonest grounds on which men rest their apology for irreligion and laxity is a defective education. They were not trained in youth to the way wherein they should go; parents did not teach it, did not walk in the way before them. Others, again, are thinking to throw the fault of their disobedience or their sinful habits upon the circumstances in which they are placed, upon their profession or trade, upon the maxims and habits of society, upon the companions with whom they must associate. And it is undeniable that many strong temptations are thus presented. But this can by no means justify a yielding to sin. Not a few there are who account for the frequency of their offences from an untowardness of disposition and temper, from the violence of passion, or from bodily infirmities; and there are allowances to be made on these grounds; but no free pardon, no license hereby for sin. (J. Slade, M. A.)
Mans readiness to invent excuse for sin
A traveller in Venezuela illustrators the readiness of men to lay their faults on the locality, or on anything rather than on themselves, by the story of a hard drinker who came home one night in such a condition that he could not for some time find his hammock. When this feat was accomplished, he tried in vain to get off his big riding boots. After many fruitless efforts, he lay down in his hammock, and soliloquized aloud, Well, I have travelled all the world over; I lived five years in Cuba, four in Jamaica, five in Brazil; I have travelled through Spain and Portugal, and been in Africa, but I never yet was in such an abominable country as this, where a man is obliged to go to bed with his boots on. Commonly enough are we told by evil-doers in excuse for their sins that no man could do otherwise were he in their position; that there is no living at their trade honestly; that in such a street shops must be open on a Sunday; that their health required an excursion to Brighton on the Sabbath because their labours were so severe; and so on, all to the same effect, and about as truthful as the soliloquy of the drunkard of Venezuela. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
The Lord God called with a loud voice: Thou whom I have so highly obliged, whither and wherefore dost thou run away from me, thy Friend and Father, whose presence was lately so sweet and acceptable to thee? In what place, or rather in what condition, art thou? What is the cause of this sudden and wonderful change? This he asks, not that he was ignorant of it, but to make way for the following sentence, and to set a pattern for all judges, that they should examine the offender, and inquire into the offence, before they proceed to punishment.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
And the Lord God called unto Adam,…. The Jerusalem Targum is, the Word of the Lord God, the second Person in the Trinity; and this is the voice he is said to have heard before:
and said unto him, where [art] thou? which is said, not as ignorant of the place where he was, nor of what he had done, nor of the circumstances he was in, or of the answers he would make; but rather it shows all the reverse, that he knew where he was, what he had done, and in what condition he was, and therefore it was in vain to seek to hide himself: or as pitying his case, saying, “alas for thee” u, as some render the words, into what a miserable plight hast thou brought thyself, by listening to the tempter, and disobeying thy God! thou that wast the favourite of heaven, the chief of the creatures, the inhabitant of Eden, possessed of all desirable bliss and happiness, but now in the most wretched and forlorn condition imaginable; or as upbraiding him with his sin and folly; that he who had been so highly favoured by him, as to be made after his image and likeness, to have all creatures at his command, and the most delightful spot in all the globe to dwell in, and a grant to eat of what fruit he would, save one, and who was indulged with intercourse with his God, and with the holy angels, should act such an ungrateful part as to rebel against him, break his laws, and trample upon his legislative authority, and bid, as it were, defiance to him: or else as the Saviour, looking up his straying sheep, and lost creature, man: or rather as a summons to appear before him, the Judge of all, and answer for his conduct; it was in vain for him to secrete himself, he must and should appear; the force of which words he felt, and therefore was obliged to surrender himself, as appears from what follows.
u , “hei tibi”, Oleaster.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
The man could not hide himself from God. “ Jehovah God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? ” Not that He was ignorant of his hiding-place, but to bring him to a confession of his sin. And when Adam said that he had hidden himself through fear of his nakedness, and thus sought to hide the sin behind its consequences, his disobedience behind the feeling of shame; this is not to be regarded as a sign of peculiar obduracy, but easily admits of a psychological explanation, viz., that at the time he actually thought more of his nakedness and shame than of his transgression of the divine command, and his consciousness of the effects of his sin was keener than his sense of the sin itself. To awaken the latter God said, “ Who told thee that thou wast naked? ” and asked him whether he had broken His command. He could not deny that he had, but sought to excuse himself by saying, that the woman whom God gave to be with him had given him of the tree. When the woman was questioned, she pleaded as her excuse, that the serpent had beguiled her (or rather deceived her, , 2Co 11:3). In offering these excuses, neither of them denied the fact. But the fault in both was, that they did not at once smite upon their breasts. “It is so still; the sinner first of all endeavours to throw the blame upon others as tempters, and then upon circumstances which God has ordained.”
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? 10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
We have here the arraignment of these deserters before the righteous Judge of heaven and earth, who, though he is not tied to observe formalities, yet proceeds against them with all possible fairness, that he may be justified when he speaks. Observe here,
I. The startling question with which God pursued Adam and arrested him: Where art thou? Not as if God did not know where he was; but thus he would enter the process against him. “Come, where is this foolish man?” Some make it a bemoaning question: “Poor Adam, what has become of thee?” “Alas for thee!” (so some read it) “How art thou fallen, Lucifer, son of the morning! Thou that wast my friend and favourite, whom I had done so much for, and would have done so much more for; hast thou now forsaken me, and ruined thyself? Has it come to this?” It is rather an upbraiding question, in order to his conviction and humiliation: Where art thou? Not, In what place? but, In what condition? “Is this all thou hast gotten by eating forbidden fruit? Thou that wouldest vie with me, dost thou now fly from me?” Note, 1. Those who by sin have gone astray from God should seriously consider where they are; they are afar off from all good, in the midst of their enemies, in bondage to Satan, and in the high road to utter ruin. This enquiry after Adam may be looked upon as a gracious pursuit, in kindness to him, and in order to his recovery. If God had not called to him, to reclaim him, his condition would have been as desperate as that of fallen angels; this lost sheep would have wandered endlessly, if the good Shepherd had not sought after him, to bring him back, and, in order to that, reminded him where he was, where he should not be, and where he could not be either happy or easy. Note, 2. If sinners will but consider where they are, they will not rest till they return to God.
II. The trembling answer which Adam gave to this question: I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, v. 10. He does not own his guilt, and yet in effect confesses it by owning his shame and fear; but it is the common fault and folly of those that have done an ill thing, when they are questioned about it, to acknowledge no more than what is so manifest that they cannot deny it. Adam was afraid, because he was naked; not only unarmed, and therefore afraid to contend with God, but unclothed, and therefore afraid so much as to appear before him. We have reason to be afraid of approaching to God if we be not clothed and fenced with the righteousness of Christ, for nothing but this will be armour of proof and cover the shame of our nakedness. Let us therefore put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and then draw near with humble boldness.
Fuente: Matthew Henry’s Whole Bible Commentary
9. And the Lord God called unto Adam. They had been already smitten by the voice of God, but they lay confounded under the trees, until another voice more effectually penetrated their minds. Moses says that Adam was called by the Lord. Had he not been called before? The former, however, was a confused sound, which had no sufficient force to press upon the conscience. Therefore God now approaches nearer, and from the tangled thicket of trees (185) draws him, however unwilling and resisting, forth into the midst. In the same manner we also are alarmed at the voice of God, as soon as his law sounds in our ears; but presently we snatch at shadows, until he, calling upon us more vehemently, compels us to come forward, arraigned at his tribunal. Paul calls this the life of the Law, (186) when it slays us by charging us with our sins. For as long as we are pleased with ourselves, and are inflated with a false notion that we are alive, the law is dead to us, because we blunt its point by our hardness; but when it pierces us more sharply, we are driven into new terrors.
(185) “ Ex multiplici arborum complexu.”
(186) “ Vitam Legis.” The life or power of the law. — See Rom 7:6.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
PART THIRTEEN:
THE BEGINNING OF PHYSICAL EVIL ON EARTH
(Gen. 3:9-24)
Recapitulation
1. Aldo J. Tos writes interestingly as follows (ABOT, 61): The account of the Fall is an artistic presentation of the psychology of temptation. If we compare the various steps that were involved in that primeval drama with the moments involved in an individuals personal temptations, we can say with all honesty: The author knew what he was talking about. Tos then proceeds to designate these steps as follows: 1. Temptation makes its appearance (Gen. 3:1); 2. Delay occurs (Gen. 3:2-3); 3. The person is fooled (Gen. 3:4-5); 4. Desire is aroused (Gen. 3:6 a); 5. Sin is committed (Gen. 3:6 b); 6. Effects are felt (Gen. 3:7); 7. Remorse is experienced (Gen. 3:7-8); 8. Tension results (Gen. 3:9-10).
2. As stated heretofore, by physical evil is meant disease, suffering, death (of the body), etc. Leibniz, the German philosopher, classified evil in three categories, namely, moral evil (sin), physical evil (suffering,) and metaphysical evil (finitude). Can we reasonably attribute evil to any subhuman creature or event? For example, catastrophes in nature, such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, epidemics, and the like: surely these are neither good nor evil in themselves; obviously, they are per se amoral. The same is true of plant and brute creatures: their activities can hardly be said to be either moral or immoral: it is clearly evident that they are incapable of moral responsibility, and hence of moral action. To the extent that such factors affect human life adversely, they can be said to bring physical evil on human beings, although they are themselves involved in no guilt in so doing. A great deal of sheer wumgush (mere mental mush) has been parroted in recent years about alleged cruelties in nature (including cruelties to animals). Tennyson, for example, wrote (In Memoriam) of Nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine, etc. Man, if he lives up to the ideal of manhood (humanity that is truly humane), is certainly obligated to treat animals without cruelty insofar as it is possible for him to do so. Animals, however, do not have rights, for the simple reason they have no capacity for understanding what either right or obligation means; hence we do not haul animals into court and charge them with crimes. They lack the prior deliberation, freedom of action, and voluntariness of action, all of which are necessary to produce the human act. Again, animals do not have the capacity for suffering cruelties such as man has: in the brute, memory is short-lived, as a rule, death usually occurs quickly, and real mental anguish apparently is nil. The fact that one species must feed upon another is a part of the order of nature, not a violation of it: in the case of every living thing, individual disease and death have their respective causes. Order is natures first law because it is ordained by the Will of the Eternal Lawgiver. (If anyone doubts this, let him jump off a twenty-story building!) As the nuclear physicist and Nobel prize winner, Arthur Holly Compton, once put it: A God who can control a universe like this is mighty beyond imagination.
3. It should be re-emphasized here that the origin of evil cannot be a matter of human speculation: the facts in the case lie wholly outside the areas of human science and philosophy. It must be evident to any thinking person that because sin could have originated only in disobedience to divine law, God, therefore is the sole source of truth respecting this important problem. (People are prone to speculate about the origin of evil: why do they hardly ever give any thought to the fact of the source and the existence of the good?) The problem of evil is not a matter for human (philosophical) speculation to resolve: it is, rather, a matter of fact based on revealed truth. Philosophers should not scorn the story of mans first disobedience as related in Genesis, for two reasons: first, the account is the only one that is in harmony with universal human experience, and second, because philosophy has nothing whatever to say on this subject that has equivalent reasonableness and reliability.
4. Another fact should be re-emphasized at this point, namely, that the content of the opening chapters of Genesis in re creation, temptation and sin, and the beginning of redemption, has a universality in relation to human experience that is not to be found in any other source. These chapters are no more Hebrew in coloring than they are Persian, Egyptian, Chaldean, Chinese, German, or American, etc. The notion that the events narrated in these chapters are to be understood as Hebrew mythology is not a reasonable one, and cannot be supported by appeal to the relevant evidence.
9 And Jehovah God called unto the man, and said unto him, Where art thou? 10 and he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. 11 And he said, who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? 12 And the man said, the woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. 13 And Jehovah God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
1. The Inquest (this felicitous subhead is borrowed from Skinner, ICCG, 76).
(1) Note that their eyes were now opened (Gen. 3:7), not the physical eye, but the eye of conscience: not sight, but insight. They now knew they were naked: not that God had told them sothey knew it intuitively; and this knowledge brought with it a sense of guilt and shame, and in true human fashion they tried to cover their shame by running away and hiding themselves, But this attempted concealment only served to make their act, including the shame itself, even more shameful. There is no possibility of recovery from the guilt and consequences of sin by trying to hide it or to hide from its aftermath; the only possible way to recovery is by catharsis: by an out with it to God. Nothing short of this will drain the burden of guilt and shame from the sin-sick soul (Pro. 28:13). It is far better for a person, when something obtrudes itself that is not right, instead of trying to hide it or change it or even embrace it, to go to his spouse and declare it, or to his neighbor and straighten it out (Mat. 3:6; Mat. 18:15-17; Jas. 5:16), or to his God and talk it out with Him. Note Gods promise to His saints, 1Jn. 1:9 : the only method by which the Christian can obtain forgiveness daily is by open confession to God in prayer.
(2) Note again the fatherly motif. We have here one of the most illuminating instances of anthropomorphism in the Bible (following closely on the equally significant instance of it in Gen. 2:7, the picture of the Divine inbreathing of spirit into the lifeless corporeal form of man, constituting him a psychosomatic unity). Anthropomorphism means explaining God in terms of human experience. Albright (FSAC, 265): It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the anthropomorphic conception of Yahweh was absolutely necessary if the God of Israel was to remain a God of the individual Israelites as well as of the people as a whole. . . . For the average worshiper, it is very essential that his God be a divinity who can sympathize with his human feelings and emotions, a being whom he can love and fear alternately, and to whom he can transfer the holiest emotions connected with memories of father and mother and friend. In other words, it was precisely the anthropomorphism of Yahweh which was essential to the initial success of Israels religion. . . . All the human characteristics of Israels deity were exalted; they were projected against a cosmic screen and they served to interpret the cosmic process as the expression of Gods creative word and eternally free will. (a) Note well Gods questions: Adam, where art thou? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you should not eat? (This last added to remove the pretext of ignorance, Calvin). Not that God did not know the truth about these matters: of course He knew. Adams absence was clear evidence that something had gone awry: the fact is that he was hiding, not in humility, not through modesty, but from a sense of guilt. God knew all this: nothing is ever concealed from Him, (Heb. 4:12). Hence His queries were like those of an earthly father seeking to bring his erring child to a confession that would remove the guilt and shame of wrongdoing, make forgiveness possible, and so lead to the restoration of a fellowship that had been disrupted. The questions were fitted to carry conviction to the mans conscience (cf. Act. 2:37) and effect in him a change of heart. But Adam was already too far gone from his Heavenly Father (cf. Heb. 12:9).
(b) The Father must now seek the Man who was not there, as he had been previously, when He called. Like every other call of God, the call was only for mans sake, even as the laws of God invariably contemplate and seek, not His own good, but mans good. Lange (CDHCG, 231): The Good Shepherd seeks and finds the lost sheep; the sinner must seek and find God; the relation must be an ethical covenant relation. Delitzsch: This wordwhere art thou?echoes throughout the whole human world, and in each individual man. Lange adds: That is, in a symbolical sense, the passage denotes every case of a sinner seeking the divine home. (c) Why did God call to Adam in view of the fact that Eve had been the first to sin? Of course, the Woman here is included in the generic sense of man, i.e., mankind. The call here, however, was directed to the individual man, The reason is clear, namely, that Adam as the head of the household (1Co. 11:8-9, Eph. 5:23) was answerable for Eves act of disobedience, even though he himself had been ensnared by it (2Co. 11:3, 1Ti. 2:13-14): the ethical arraignment for the complaint against the wife proceeds through Adam (Lange). As a matter of fact, Adam, the supposed stronger of the two, was probably the more responsible because of this fact,
2. The Uncovering of Guilt. (1) Note the mans evasiveness. Gods first question did elict an admission of a sortcold, unfeeling, reluctant, half-hearted (Gen. 3:10); certainly not a full and free confession, that which Yahweh was seeking, which would have merited forgiveness. (2) Gods second question elicited only sheer effrontery on Adams part. His reply was saturated with all the impudence of a rebellious spirit (Gen. 3:12). (3) We have here a vivid example of the Freudian defense mechanism which goes under the name of projection. (Incidentally, the Bible is the worlds best textbook on psychology.) Adam did not admit any personal responsibility or guiltnot a bit of it! Said he, The Woman you gave me got me into this mess. Somehow I get the feeling that he emphasized the you in this impudent reply, as if to say, You, God, gave this Woman to me; in the final analysis, You are the one to bear the brunt of the responsibility in this business! What unmitigated gall! (4) Note that the Woman followed the example set by her spouse: she passed the buck to the serpent: the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. That is, Dont blame me; blame the old snake that seduced me! A forced confession, lacking even a semblance of contrition!
(5) And the tragedy if it all is that from that day to this, the posterity of Adam and Evethe whole human racehas been walking in their footsteps (Rom. 3:23). Mans favorite vocation throughout the ages has been that of passing the buck. He blames, and keeps on blaming, the Unconscious, the Subconscious, the hormones (in ancient times it was the humors), pre-natal impressions (Dianetics), an unpleasant childhood, or perhaps a mental block, for his derelictions. There are thousands who pass their responsibility on to some elusive non-entity which they designate Fate, Fortune, Destiny, etc. Other thousands are still blaming Adam: the old Adam in me. And multiplied thousands in all ages even blame God for their misfortunes: Why did God take my child from me? etc. The fact is they bring the greater number of their misfortunes on themselves. But their delusion of projection allows them to indulge orgies of self-pity while they put the blame for their misfortunes and frustrations on others. The last thing that man seems willing to do is to march up to the judge, and say to Him, Yes, I did it, with my own little hatchet. Yet this is precisely what a man must do if he hopes to drain off the burden of his guilt (cf. the story of the Prodigal Son, Luk. 15:17-19). Men will go to any extreme, it seems, to avoid saying, I have sinned. This is catharsis: and this is the necessary first step on the road to reconciliation and restoration to fellowship.
Bowie (IBG, 506): Oscar Wilde said once, I can resist everything except temptation: and underneath the wry humor of that there is sober fact. Many people act as though no one could reasonably be supposed to resist temptation, But stop the sentence in the middle. The woman tempted me, and. . . . And what? There is the crux of human character. Temptation is an element in every human life and comes to everybody. But it is always possible to end the sentence in another way. This and that tempted me, but I was not persuaded. That is the sort of answer made by souls who are not paper to be scorched by fire but iron to be purified and hardened by it. The fact that evil is possible is no alibi for choosing it. Again (ibid., 507): We know as well as Adam that alibis will not work. The God we must meet at the end of the day will not be put off by references to other peoples sins or by complaints about the universe. When He speaks it will not be in terms of they, or it, but you.
(6) The forbidden fruit turned sour, as it always does when one puts inordinate desire above the right and good. When illicit indulgence of physical appetite takes over, the result is certain to be moral corruption and physical decay (Gal. 6:7-8, Rom. 8:6-8). When inordinate desire and quest for illicit knowledge takes over, the product is bound to be a spirit seared by false pride and facing the inevitable doom of incarceration in Hell with the Devil and his ilk. Hell will be populated with people who have traveled this egoistic way: the sure way to insensibility to God and all Good (Rom. 2:4-11, 2Th. 1:7-10). This writer learned long ago from personal observation and experience that this consuming thirst for illicit knowledge is a thousand times deadlier to the human spirit than perhaps any other form of motivation. (Cf. the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, slothall personified in Spensers great poem, The Faerie Queene. Note that pride stands at the head of the list: and what form of pride can be more destructive morally than pride of intellect?) See JB (17, n.) concerning the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: This knowledge is a privilege which God reserves to himself, and which man, by sinning, is to lay hands on, Gen. 3:5; Gen. 3:22. Hence it does not mean omniscience, which fallen man does not possess; nor is it moral discrimination, for unfallen man already had it and God could not refuse it to a rational being. It is the power of deciding for himself what is good and what is evil and of acting accordingly, a claim to complete moral independence by which man refuses to recognize his status as a created being. The first sin was an attack on Gods sovereignty, a sin of pride. This rebellion is described in concrete terms as the transgression of an express command of God for which the text uses the image of a forbidden fruit. These comments are especially helpful: they point up the fact that mans first sin wasin essencebut a repetition of Satans pre-mundane rebellion. We are reminded here of the words of Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher: When man broke away from the spiritual moorings of his life, he tore himself from the depths and went to the surface, and he has become more and more superficial. When man lost the spiritual center of being he lost his own at the same time. Man is not the principle of his own origin, nature, or destiny.
14 And Jehovah God said unto the serpent, Because. thou hast done this, cursed art thou above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: 15 and I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel, 16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy conception; in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. 17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou, eat of it all the days of thy life; 18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat of the herb of the field; 19 in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground: for out of it thou wast taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
1. The Threefold Penalty: That Pronounced on the Serpent (Serpentkind). Whitelaw (PCG, 65): The cursing of the irrational creature should occasion no more difficulty than the cursing of the earth (Gen. 3:17), or of the fig tree (Mat. 11:21). Creatures can be cursed or blessed only in accordance with their natures. The reptile, therefore, being neither a moral nor responsible creature, could not be cursed in the sense of being made susceptible of misery. But it might be cursed in the sense of being deteriorated in its nature, and, as it were, consigned to a lower position in the scale of being. The use of such phrases as all cattle and every beast of the field (Gen. 3:14) proves the reality of the curse upon the literal serpent. Was this a flying serpent (cf. Isa. 27:1)? Or, was it a creature temporarily endowed with the power to stand upright? Some have thought so. Some have held that this creature underwent some kind of transformation of its external form; others, that the language of the curse here signified that henceforth the creature was to be thrust back into its proper rank, recalled from its insolent motions to its accustomed mode of going (Calvin). Upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eatit was doomed henceforth to wind about on its belly, and so its food would be mingled with the dust of the earth. Dust shalt thou eat describes a condition of shame and contempt: to eat the dust or to bite the dust is a phrase which even today expresses humiliation and degradation.
(2) Gen. 3:15. Here we have a twofold oracle: (a) a direct prognosis of the natural enmity that should exist henceforth between mankind and the serpentkind: generally speaking, when a man sees a snake, he feels an impulse, spontaneously it would seem, to crush it beneath his heel; (b) a prophetic reference to the spiritual warfare which has been waged from that day to this between the Old Serpent, the Devil, and the Seed of the Woman. This oracle could well have pointed forward to the age-long conflict (-i-) between the Devil and the whole human race (Joh. 14:30, 2Co. 4:4), (-ii-) between the Devil and the Old Covenant people, the fleshly seed of Abraham (Job. chs. 1, 2; 1Ch. 21:1; Zec. 3:1-5), (-iii-) between the Devil and the New Covenant elect, the ekklesia (called out), the spiritual seed of Abraham (Gal. 3:27-29, Eph. 3:8-11, Jas. 4:7, 1Pe. 5:8-9). On the principle so frequently emphasized in the present textbook, namely, that any Scripture, to be understood fully, must be harmonized with Bible teaching as a whole, undoubtedly this oracle referred in its primary sense to Messiah, Christ, the Seed of Woman in a special and universal sense. Rotherham tells us (EB, 36, n.) that most of the ancient translators rendered the original word here, not as bruise but as crush. He writes: The same word is used here in the two clauses. Most of the ancient translators render it by crushingKalisch. Cf. Rom. 16:20, where the Greek word syntribo, meaning to shatter, crush, is used. In The Jerusalem Bible, it is given thus: I will make you enemies of each other, you and the woman, your off-spring and her offspring. It will crush your head, and you will strike its heel. The JB adds (19, fn.) an interesting comment: It is the first glimmer of salvation, the proto-evangelium. The Greek version has a masculine pronoun (he, not it will crush . . .), thus ascribing the victory not to the womans descendants in general but to one of her sons in particular: the words of the Greek version thus express the Messianic interpretation held by many of the Fathers. The Latin version has a feminine pronoun (she will crush . . .), and since in the Messianic interpretation of our text, the Messiah and his mother appear together, the pronoun has been taken to refer to Mary; this application has become current in the Church (that is, the Roman Catholic Church). In view of the fact that Redemption is the essence of Gods Eternal Purpose, and since this Redemption is actualized, on the Divine side, by Messiahs death and burial and resurrection, and since, furthermore, Jesus of Nazareth is the only Person who ever appeared in the world of whom it is specifically (and authentically) testified (by inspiration of the Spirit) that incarnately He was made the Seed of Woman exclusively, for the specific purpose of making possible, through His own death and burial and resurrection (1Co. 15:1-4), this Redemption, for all men who accept the terms, it surely follows that the sublime oracle in Genesis must be understood as referring especially to Jesus as Gods Only Begotten, Messiah, Christ, Redeemer of mankind (Cf. Gal. 3:16; Gal. 4:4-5; Mat. 1:18-25; Luk. 1:26-38; Joh. 1:1-14; Joh. 1:29; Joh. 3:16; Joh. 17:4-5; Col. 1:12-23; Col. 2:9; 1Pe. 1:18-21; Rev. 12:7-12; Rev. 19:11-16; Rev. 20:1-3, etc. Refer back to Part XI supra.) (c) Skinner (ICCG, 81) suggests, in this connection, what he calls the more reasonable view of Calvin, namely, that the passage (Gen. 3:15) is a promise of victory over the devil to mankind, united in Christ as its divine Head (cf. 2Co. 5:18-21; 1Co. 15:20-28; Eph. 2:1-10; Eph. 3:8-12, etc.).
(d) Incidentally, controversy as to whether the Hebrew almah and the Greek parthenos should be translated young woman, maiden, or virgin (cf. the Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Parthenos, Athena the Virgin, on the Athenian Acropolis) is purely academic. The language of Matthew and Luke with reference to the conception and birth of Jesus is too clear and positive to justify any such controversy (Mat. 1:18; Mat. 1:24; Luk. 1:34-35). Besides, translation as young woman or maiden does not in any wise exclude the fact of virginity. Cf. also Paul, in Gal. 4:4. It is frequently parroted about that Paul never taught the Virgin Birth. But Paul certainly emphasized our Lords pre-existence (Col. 1:13-17; Col. 2:9). And it must be recalled, in this connection, that Luke was Pauls traveling companion throughout the latters ministry (2Ti. 4:11), and it is Luke, the beloved physician (Col. 4:14) who gives us clearly and positively the facts of this mysterious case. If the Apostle did not accept the Virgin Birth why on earth did he not set Luke right about the matter? (Luke certainly means to tell us, Luk. 1:3-5, that it was the Holy Spirit of God who created the physical nature of Jesus in the womb of the Virgin.)
(3) Thus it will be seen that in the oracle of Gen. 3:15 we have the first intimation of Redemption. This is the one optimistic note in the context of gloom, decay, and death. In this spiritual conflict of the ages (often designated The Great Controversy), the Old Serpents seed will strike or bruise Messiahs heel (Mat. 23:33, Joh. 8:44, 1Jn. 3:10), signifying a mean, insidious, vicious, yet generally unsuccessful, warfare (the heel is not a particularly important part of the anatomy); whereas the Seed of the Woman shall ultimately crush the Old Serpents head (the ruling part of the person and personality), signifying the ultimate complete victory of Christ over all evil (Rom. 16:20, 1Co. 15:25-26, Php. 2:9-11, Mat. 25:31-46, Rom. 2:4-11, 2Th. 1:7-10, 2Pe. 3:1-13, etc.).
(4) The Bible is the most realistic book in the world: it deals with man just as he is: it never deceives him. It tells him bluntly that he is in sin, in a lost condition, and in danger of perishing in Hell; at the same time, it offers the Remedy (Joh. 1:29, 1Jn. 1:7), and the means of applying it (1Co. 1:21; Rom. 1:16; 1Co. 15:1-4; Act. 2:38; Rom. 2:8; Rom. 10:9-10; 1Pe. 4:17). In character delineation, not for one moment does it turn aside to hide the sins and vices of the men and women who, so to speak, walk across its pages. On the contrary, it faithfully depicts their vices as well as their virtues, whether reprobates or saints. The Bible pictures life just as men live it and have lived it throughout the ages: it is pre-eminently the Book of life. At the same time, it is, from beginning to end, unfailingly optimistic. Not even the breath of an intimation that evil might possibly triumph in the end, occurs in it; rather, it is expressly declared, again and again, that the ultimate victory of God and the Good is certain, (Isa. 46:8-10; 1Jn. 5:4; Mat. 24:29-31; Mat. 16:27-28; Joh. 5:28-29; Joh. 16:33; Joh. 11:25-26; Rom. 8:37-39; Php. 2:9-11; 1Co. 15:20-28; 1Co. 15:50-58; 2Co. 5:1-10; Rev. 7:14; Rev. 21:1-7; Rev. 22:1-5). In striking contrast to Oriental cults, which are uniformly pessimistic, viewing life as illusion (maya) and salvation only as escape from it, the Bible is always optimistic, presenting life as a divine gift (Gen. 2:7, Rom. 6:23) and mans greatest good, and salvation as the flowering of the Spiritual Life in Christ (Col. 3:3) into timeless fellowship with the living and true God (Exo. 3:14, Joh. 4:24, 1Co. 13:9-12, 1Jn. 3:2, Rev. 14:13). This ultimate victory is implicit in the Genesis oracle. Our God has spoken: His counsel will stand, and He will do that which He pleases, declaring the end from the beginning (Isa. 46:8-11): The Seed of the Woman shall, in the Day of the Consummation (Act. 3:20-21), crush the Old Serpents head. This is the very heart and soul of the Eternal Glad Tidings (Rev. 14:6, Luk. 1:10-14, Rom. 1:16, Rev. 20:7-14).
Note well, in this connection, that the Gospel is said to have been in the mind of God from the beginning, from before the foundation of the world (Isa. 46:9-11; Rom. 8:28-30; Eph. 1:3-14; Eph. 3:8-12; 1Pe. 1:10-12; 1Pe. 1:18-20). Note also the progressive unfolding of this Messianic anticipation. It is rightly said (1) that from Adam to Abraham we have the Gospel in Gods Eternal Purpose (Gen. 3:14-15; Gal. 4:4; Isa. 7:14; Mic. 5:2; Mat. 1:18-25; Luk. 1:26-38; Joh. 1:1-4; Joh. 1:18; Joh. 17:5; Php. 2:5-11; Col. 1:3-18; Rev. 13:8; Rev. 17:8; Rev. 19:11-16; Rev. 20:10-15); (2) that from Abraham to Isaiah we have the Gospel in promise (Gen. 12:3; Gen. 22:18; Gen. 26:4; Gen. 28:14; Gen. 49:10; Num. 24:17; Mat. 1:1; Joh. 8:56; Gal. 3:8; Gal. 3:16; Gal. 3:26-29); (3) that from Isaiah to John the Baptizer we have the Gospel in prophecy (1Pe. 1:10-12; 2Pe. 1:21; Act. 3:19-26; Act. 7:51-53 : there are more than 300 prophetic statements in the Old Testament, covering practically every detail of the life of the anticipated Messiah, all of which were fulfilled in the birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, thus identifying Him as that Messiah; indeed it could well be said that the biography of Jesus could be constructed in advance from these predictions; see any Bible Concordance, Dictionary or Encyclopedia for the list of these prophecies and their corresponding fulfilments; see also Lesson 87 of the last Volume (III-IV in one binding) of my Survey Course in Christian Doctrine, published by the College Press, Joplin); (4) that throughout the incarnate ministry of Jesus, the Only Begotten, we have the Gospel in preparation (Heb. 2:3; Mat. 3:2; Mat. 12:28; Mat. 16:13-20; Mat. 24:14; Mat. 28:18-20; Mar. 1:14-15; Luk. 10:1-10; Joh. 20:21-23; Act. 1:1-8); (5) that beginning with the first Pentecost after the Resurrection we have the Gospel in fact. Obviously, the facts of the Gospelthe death, burial and resurrection of Christ (1Co. 15:1-4)could not have been proclaimed as facts until they had actually occurred. This proclamation first took place on the Pentecost following the Resurrection, the great Day of Spiritual Beginning, the birthday of the Church (Act. 2:1-4; Act. 2:14-47; Act. 3:12-26; Act. 11:15).
2. The Threefold Penalty: That Pronounced upon the Woman (Womankind).
(1) It should be noted that whereas the serpentkind (Gen. 3:14) and the ground (Gen. 3:17) were put under a divine curse, neither the Woman nor the Man were similarly cursed (anathematized), probably in view of the fact that both were to be included in the possibility of redemption that was to be proffered by divine grace for all mankind, and indeed for the entire cosmos (Joh. 1:29; Joh. 3:16; Act. 3:18-21; Act. 4:8-12; Rom. 8:18-23; Eph. 3:8-12; Heb. 5:9; 2Pe. 3:8-13; Rev. 21:1-7; Rev. 22:1-5).
(2) The penalty pronounced upon the woman, and hence on womankind, was twofold: (a) wifely sorrow was to be intensified, particularly in childbirth, and (b) henceforth the woman (wife) was to be subordinated to the man in the conjugal relationship. Apparently the former penalty was to be the natural consequence of the inroads of sin on the human body (cf. Exo. 20:5-6, a statement of the consequences of sin, the first statement of the law of heredity in our literature), Sin brought sorrow into the world, and continues to do so: the multiplication of sins results only in the multiplication of sorrows: both are innumerable evils. Skinner (ICCG, 82): The pangs of childbirth are proverbial in the OT for the extremity of human anguish, (Cf. Isa. 21:3; Isa. 13:8; Jer. 4:31; Mic. 4:9; Psa. 48:6.) Where there is no sin, there is no pain, no grief, no fear. Nor should we overlook the fact that implicit in this penalty is the portent of the many mothers hearts which have been broken by the neglect, the waywardness, the carelessness, the rebelliousness of sons and daughters: e.g., as in the story of Mother Eve and her son Cain. M. Henry (CWB, 11): The Woman shall have sorrow, but it shall be in bringing forth children, and the sorrow shall be forgotten for joy that a child is born, Joh. 16:21. The sentence was not a curse, to bring her to ruin, but a chastisement, to bring her to repentance (cf. Heb. 12:4-13). Lange (CDHCG, 238): Henceforth must the woman purchase the gain of children, with the danger of her lifein a certain degree, with spiritual readiness for death, and the sacrifice of her life for that end.
(3) As for the subordination of the woman to the man in the conjugal relation, I find no evidence that mans rule was intended to be a tyrannous one: as a matter of fact the ideal relation of husband and wife is essentially reciprocal, as already described in Gen. 2:18; Gen. 2:23 (cf. Eph. 5:22; Eph. 5:25). Although woman was created as mans counterpart, the helper mate for his needs, hence neither as his superior nor as his inferior, still and all, her position was one of dependence on him. But when she permitted sin to come into the world, it became necessary for her to be subordinated to her husband in the conjugal relation: two co-equal authorities would hardly be conducive to order and peace in the family. (Womans unenviable position in O. T. times is indicated by such passages as Gen. 34:12; Exo. 21:3; Exo. 22:16; Deu. 22:23-24; Deu. 24:1; Hos. 3:1-2, etc. In the New Testament, such passages as Mat. 19:3-9; 1Co. 11:2-3; 1Co. 14:34-35; 1Ti. 2:9-15, have frequently been misapplied (cf. 1Co. 11:4-5). In the last-named texts the Apostle is saying that for women to speak out in the worshiping assembly in such ways as to create disorder, and so bring the criticism of the pagan community upon the church, is disgraceful, and so it was: it should be noted that he uses the word aischron, shame, disgrace, not the word hamartia, sin. Insofar as the relative standing of male and female spiritually, that is, in relation to God, New Testament teaching is clear: male and female are one in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1, 2Co. 5:17-20, Gal. 3:28, Rev. 22:17). However, it is just as clearly stated in the New Testament as in the Old, that under no circumstances it is permissible for the woman to usurp dominion over the man, not even in the church fellowship (Eph. 5:22-33, 1Ti. 2:12-15): to this extent the language of Gen. 3:16 still holds good, even though public opinion gives woman a much higher social status today than she had in older times. To sum up: Christianity places woman upon the same level with man as regards the blessings of the Gospel, yet teaches expressly that she is subordinated to man in the marriage relationship, thus putting the stamp of approval on the original penalty pronounced on womankind.
(4) It should be noted that in the Genesis account of the conjugal relationship of Adam and Eve there is not the slightest intimation of the matriarchate, nor of polyandry (one wife with two or more husbands at the same time), on Eves part, Similarly, there is not the slightest intimation of polygyny (one husband with two or more wives at the same time) on Adams part. (Polyandry and polygyny are the two forms of polygamy), As a matter of fact, the creation here of a type of relationship between Christ and His Bride, the Church, made it essential that Adam have only one wife, as Christ has but one Bride, one Church, and that the Woman be subordinate to the Man in marriage, as the Church is put under the exclusive authority of Christ, her sole Head (Rom. 5:14; 1Co. 15:45-49; Eph. 1:22-23; Eph. 4:4; Eph. 4:15; Eph. 5:23-24; Col. 1:18; Col. 2:10; Rev. 19:7; Rev. 21:2; Rev. 21:9; Rev. 22:17).
3. The Threefold Penalty: That Pronounced Upon the Man (all Mankind).
(1) JB (19, n.): The punishment is appropriate to the specific functions of each: the woman suffers as mother and wife, the man as bread-earner. To this fall from the original condition there is added death, Gen. 3:19, and the loss of intimacy with God, Gen. 3:23.
(2) This judgment pronounced upon the Man was fundamentally a declaration to him that the earth at large lay beyond the boundaries of Eden, and that, following his expulsion from Eden, he would be compelled to pass under such a penalty by virtue of being outside the Paradise of his original innocence. That is to say, (1) he would be in a world of thorns, briars, and thistles, etc., constantly reminding him of his fallen state; (2) that he would be in a world of toil (dog-eat-dog competition) where he would have to earn his living in the sweat of his face; and (3) that he would be in a world of death, in which his body would necessarily return to the dust from which it was originally taken (in our day, dust, of course, is simply the corporeal man, the body, made up of the physical elements). Cf. Gen. 2:7; Ecc. 12:7; Rom. 5:12; Rom. 8:18-23; Heb. 9:27. This threefold penalty would be an ever-present reminder of his fallen state; of the fact that the world (the moral world, and the physical) is under the judgment of God, under the curse of sin (Psa. 103:13-14, Joh. 3:16-18, Gal. 3:10-14, 2Pe. 3:1-7, Rev. 22:3). No human being in his right mind could deny that this threefold penalty is in full force today, and that it has unfailingly been so throughout the sordid pages of human history from the very beginning.
(3) Simpson (IB, 7): From now on mans relationship with nature, like his relationships with God and his fellow men, is in disorder. Hence the vitiation of his power of moral discernment, of his ability to put first things first (Mat. 6:33, Col. 3:2, 2Co. 4:18), to distinguish properly between the apparent goods and the real goods of life. Moreover, along with the birth of conscience, the problems of rights and duties now arise. (Right is moral power; might is physical power. These should never be confused, and certainly should never be identified, either in ethics or in jurisprudence.)
(4) Note that the judgment to come upon man was to come upon him from the ground. Man was not cursed, but the ground was cursed: indeed the ground was cursed for mans sake (Gen. 3:17). Adam had work to do in Eden: he had been divinely enjoined to dress and to keep it, that is, the ground (Gen. 2:15). After expulsion from the Garden, he was ordered to till the ground from whence he was taken (Gen. 3:23). Cornfeld (AtD, 15): Many interpreters have assumed that work is a part of the curse for mans sin. The curse is actually in the niggardliness of the soil or the fruitlessness of his labor. Even to fallen mankind, honest labor is a great blessing, a positive antidote for worry, self-pity, temptation, vice and crime. An idle brain is the devils workshop. Work may be a curse, of course, when it is meaningless, when it is done under compulsion for ends which the worker hates and against which he inwardly rebels. But it is a great blessing when it proceeds from incentive, from freedom so that a man feels that the best in himself has a chance to find expression instead of being frustrated by the compulsion that drives him to uncongenial tasks. In mature people the hidden instinct which turns back with a childs nostalgic longing for irresponsibility and undiscipline still thinks of freedom from work as a kind of paradise (IB, 111112). But man could never be happy living the life of a grasshopper floating downstream. I am reminded here of the good deacon who was asked what he would do if, after the Judgment, he should find himself in Hell. Well, said he, after a moments reflection, one thing is sureI would not sit down and do nothing. At least Id get busy and try to start a prayer-meeting. Similarly, we can hardly conceive of Heaven as a place of sheer inactivity. Someone has said: To live is to act; to act is to choose; and to choose is to evaluate. Life, if it is anything at all, is activity, Will Durant has advised us well: Do some physical work every day. Nature intended thought to be a guide to action, not a substitute for it. Thought unbalanced by action is a disease. In the words of Henry van Dyke:
This is the gospel of labour,
ring it, ye bells of the kirk!
The Lord of Love came down from above,
to live with the men who work;
This is the rose that He planted,
here in the thorn-curst soil:
Heaven is blest with perfect rest,
but the blessing of Earth is toil.
(See also Angela Morgans poems, Hymn to Labor, and Work: A Song of Triumph; from the latter these stirring lines) :
Work!
Thank God for the swing of it,
For the hammering, clamoring ring of it!
Passion of labor daily hurled
On the mighty anvils of the world!
Oh what is so fierce as the flame of it,
And what is so high as the aim of it!
Thundering on through dearth and doubt,
Calling the Plan of the Maker out.
Work, the Titan; work, the friend,
Shaping the earth to a glorious end;
Draining the swamps and blasting the hills,
Doing whatever the spirit wills;
Rending the continent apart
To answer the dream of the master heart . . .
Thank God for the world where none may shirk!
Thank God for the splendor of work!
(5) Thorns and thistles, etc. Lange (CDHCG, 239): As a natural species, thorns and thistles must have existed before; but it is now the tendency of nature to favor the ignoble forms rather than the noble, the lower rather than the higher, the weed rather than the herb. Thus is indicated the sickliness of nature, the positive opposition of nature to man . . . there comes in a tendency to wildness or degeneracy which transforms the herb into a weed. Again: In place of the garden-culture, there is introduced not agriculture simply, but an agriculture which is, at the same time, a strife with existing nature, and in place of the fruit of Paradise, is man now directed to the fruit of the field. It is a well-known fact that nature, if uncultivated, if left to her own resources, tends to deteriorate rather than to advance; set out tomato plants, for example, this year, and cultivate them, and the fruit is excellent; let the seed from this years fruit fall into the ground, however, and produce fruit in volunteer fashion, and the product is always inferior. This subhuman deterioration of species in a natural state is pointed directly toward the fact of mans moral deterioration: we all know how easy it is to get down to wallowing in the gutter morally, and how much genuine commitment and perseverance it takes, on the other hand, to climb the straitened (narrow, restricted) Way that leads to life (Mat. 7:14); that is, to develop morally and spiritually, to enhance the richness of the inner man and his appreciation of the higher values of life, such as faith, hope and love (1Co. 13:13).
(6) Thou shalt eat the herb of the field. Job 19 : You shall eat wild plants; RSV, the plants of the field. Is this statement intended to sharpen the contrast between fallen mans food and the fruit of Paradise Lost? Is it a warning to man that henceforth he would have to eat plants of the kind which had originally been designed to be sustenance for brute animals only (Gen. 1:30)? Does it mean that man was to continue to be a strict vegetarian? (cf. Gen. 1:29-30)? Or was it a presage of the fact that all forms of animal life mustand dodepend on plant photosynthesis for their very existence? The thought is intriguing, is it not? Surely, all truth is present always to the Spirit of God, He who has given us the Bible!
4. Death: Mans Last and Most Terrible Enemy (1Co. 15:25-26).
(1) Death is described in Scripture under three general terms, as follows: as a sleep (Psa. 13:3; Dan. 12:2; Mat. 9:24; Joh. 11:12-14; 1Co. 15:6; 1Co. 15:20; 1Th. 4:14; obviously, the language of appearance: there is no more thoroughly authenticated fact of psychic phenomena today than the fact that the subconscious in man never sleeps, that is, in the sense of being completely inactive at any moment: cf. William Jamess stream-of-consciousness psychology); as a change (Job. 14:14), literally, a renewal, relief, release; hence, a transition, translation, transfiguration: cf. 1Co. 15:50-54, 2Co. 5:1-9, 1Th. 4:13-17); and as a Divine appointment (Heb. 9:27-28, cf. Col. 1:5, 2Ti. 4:8 : an appointment that every son and daughter of Adam cannot avoid: cf. Act. 17:30-31; Rom. 2:5-6; Rom. 14:10; 2Co. 5:10; Mat. 25:31-46; Rev. 20:12).
(2) According to Scripture teaching, the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23); the genealogical tree of evil is, in the order named, Satan, lust, sin, death (Jas. 1:13-15): not only physical death, the separation of the spirit from the body and the consequent dissolution of the physical frame (i.e., its resolution into its original physiochemical elements (Gen. 2:16-17; Gen. 3:19; Gen. 5:5, etc.; Joh. 19:30; Heb. 9:27), but also spiritual death, the second death, eternal separation of the human spirit from the living and true God (Deu. 5:26, Psa. 42:2, Mat. 16:16, Act. 14:15, 1Th. 1:9, Heb. 12:22, Rev. 7:2), the Source of Life (Gen. 2:7; 2Th. 1:7-10; Rev. 2:11; Rev. 20:14; Rev. 21:8). Whatever else the word hell may signify in Scripture, it does signify the complete loss of God and of all Good (Mat. 5:22; Mat. 5:29-30; Mat. 10:28; Mat. 25:41). Obviously, death in this twofold sense is indicated in the penalty enjoined and executed on Adam and his posterity, all humankind.
(3) Gen. 2:17; Gen. 3:19. Universal physical death is clearly indicated in this penalty: this is evident from the oft-repeated phrase in ch. 5, and he died. This phase of the penalty was to come upon the earthly part of man (1Co. 15:47) from the very ground out of which this part of himthe bodywas taken; that is, the part made up of the physiochemical elements, but in archaic language adapted to the infancy of the race, dust (Ecc. 12:7; Job. 10:9; Job. 34:15; Psa. 103:14). In our time, of course, what Scripture calls dust we call matter, and it is significant that our word matter derives from the Latin materia, which in turn developed out of the word mater, mother. It is indeed significant that throughout human history the concept of Mother Earth (Terra Mater) has played such an important role in mans thinking and living. Gen. 2:7Yahweh Elohim formed man of the dust of the ground, etc. That part of him which is physical, corporeal, material, that is to say, his frame, is of the earth, earthy; and this is the part which goes back to the dustthe primal elementswhence it came. But Yahweh did not stop with the framing of the physical man: he then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (an infinitesimal part of His own being): Hence, man is more than dust, more than bodyhe is a psychosomatic unity. Obviously, this is the fundamental truth which Genesis would impress upon us concerning the nature, origin, and destiny of the person. Since the body part came originally from the universal stock of the Stuff of things (the German, Der Stoff, is more meaningful than the English word matter), it is the part which goes back into this primal Stuff. Hence, Gen. 3:19dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
(4) I see no reason for assuming from the Genesis narrative of the Creation that the Man was made by nature immune to physical death. I must disagree with Whitelaw here, who writes (PCG, 46): Adam, it thus appears, was permitted to partake of the tree of life; not, however, as a means of either conferring or preserving immortality, which was already his by Divine gift, and the only method of conserving which recognised by the narrative was abstaining from the tree of knowledge; but as a symbol and guarantee of that immortality with which he had been endowed, and which would continue to be his so long as he maintained his personal integrity. It is true, of course, that as a consequence of his eating of the Tree of Knowledge, the Man forfeited the privilege of immunity from physical death. However, this does not necessarily mean that he was created immortal. (We avoid confusion here by remembering that incorruption, immortality, etc., in Scripture have reference to the structure and destiny of the body: cf. Luk. 20:34-36; Rom. 2:7; Rom. 8:11; Rom. 8:23; 1Co. 15:20-58; 2Co. 5:1-9; etc.). On the contrary, it seems evident that Adam was constituted mortalin the human sense of the termfrom the beginning, and that he was given the privilege of partaking of the Tree of Life the fruit of which was designed to be the means of counteracting his mortality. It will thus be seen that Adam could have maintained his innocence, and by perfect obedience to the Will of God could have grown into holiness, in which case we may well suppose that even his body would have become transfigured and translated to Heaven (cf. Gen. 5:24, 2Ki. 2:11), without the intervention of physical death as we know it. Moreover, when he did transgress the law of God, it became imperative that he be expelled from the Garden, and that the way of the tree of life be kept (guarded, Gen. 3:24), so that in his state of rebelliousness he might not gain access to its fruit and so renew his youth; that is to say, in order that the inherent laws of mortality might work out their natural course in his physical constitution (cf. Gen. 2:22-24; Gen. 5:5). (See my Vol. I, Part IX, pp. 509ff., of the present work). This is indicated by the literal rendering of the penalty as originally pronounced with respect to eating of the Tree of Knowledge (Gen. 2:17): in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die, or, dying, thou shalt die. We have already noted (Vol. I, Part IV) the variations in the meaning of the word day in Scripture, and especially in these first few chapters of Genesis: and here the wording indicates a process of some duration, not an instantaneous event. This is in harmony with our knowledge today: science tells us that the human body undergoes complete cellular transformations about every five years; that, as a matter of fact, from the moment of birth the life process sets in which is certain to terminate in death (Psa. 23:4, Heb. 9:27). Nor can this life process, this flux or flow of the River of Life, be reversed (Rev. 22:1): it flows in one direction, and in one only.
(5) Skinner (ICCG, 83). The question whether man would have lived forever if he had not sinned is one to which the narrative furnishes no answer. Cf. Gen. 3:22in this passage the live forever has reference to the Mans living forever in a state of alienation from God. Simpson writes (IBG, 512513): There is no suggestion here that man would have lived forever had he not eaten of the forbidden fruit. Rather, the implication is that man would have regarded death not as the last fearful frustration but as his natural end. The fear of death is a consequence of the disorder in mans relationships, as a result of which they are no longer characterized by mutuality but by domination. He goes on to say that man tries to build up relationships with others and on others to try to fill the need for security which he experiences. From the fear of death, however, he cannot escape. For in the depth of his soul he knows that the structure of relationships which he has created to protect himself is fundamentally without substance. In the end it will crumble and he will be compelled to face the fact that he had always tried to denythat he is man and not God. Mans disordered relationships and his fear of death are inextricably bound up together, the consequence of his alienation from God. As a matter of fact, the very essence of the stories of Adam and Eve, of Cains murder of his brother Abel, and of the Tower of Babel, etc., is the fact of mans repeated attempts to play God. This has been mans chief occupation throughout his entire history, and he is still at it. (Cf. Captain Ahab in Melvilles Moby Dick).
(6) Death, however, in Scripture has a far more tragic meaning than that which is signified by the resolution of the corporeal part of man into its original elements. In its deepest sense it is the separation of the soul from God, the Source of all life (Exo. 3:14, Gen. 2:7, Joh. 11:25-26, Act. 17:25). This kind of death, spiritual (as distinguished from physical) death is clearly indicated in the penalty pronounced on humankind at the beginning. Throughout Scripture death is regarded only secondarily as the cessation of animal life, but primarily as the privation of life in the sense of favor with God and consequent happiness. It is the turning from confidence in God to confidence in the creature. It is the schism that occurs between Creator and creature that is caused by the latters disobedience, i.e., by sin. The only remedy for this kind of death is reconciliation in Christ (Joh. 1:29, 2Co. 5:17-21), and reconciliation is the essence of true religion. Lacking this reconciliation, as a result of rebelliousness, neglect, wilful ignorance, etc., this kind of death, spiritual death, becomes in the end eternal death: this is the second death, eternal separation from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might. (Cf. 2Th. 1:7-10; Pro. 14:12; Dan. 12:2; Mat. 7:13; Mat. 8:22; Mat. 10:28; Mat. 23:33; Mat. 25:30; Mat. 25:41; Mar. 9:44; Joh. 5:29; Joh. 6:53; Rom. 1:32; Rom. 2:8; Rom. 5:15; Rom. 6:13; Rom. 6:23; Rom. 8:6; Rom. 9:22; Eph. 2:1; Eph. 4:18; Col. 2:13; 1Ti. 5:6; Heb. 6:1; Heb. 9:14; 1Jn. 3:14; Jas. 4:12; 2Pe. 2:17; Rev. 2:11; Rev. 19:20; Rev. 20:6; Rev. 20:14; Rev. 21:8). Note Psa. 23:4the valley of the shadow of death. That is, physical death, the dissolution of the corporeal frame, is not real death; rather, it is but the shadow of eternal and real death, the complete separation from God and all Good, in Hell, the penitentiary of the moral universe (Isa. 9:2, Mat. 4:16, Luk. 1:79, Mat. 25:41).
R. Milligan (SR, 5261) summarizes this phase of the subject most convincingly. He writes as follows (referring to the language of Gen. 2:17): The words life and death are both representatives of very profound and mysterious realities. Hence, it is not a matter of surprise that men of a visionary and speculative turn and habit of mind should have formed some very strange and absurd notions and theories concerning them, Some, for example, suppose that life is equivalent to mere existence, and that death is equivalent to annihilation. But this is absurd 1. Because there is existence where there is no life, Minerals exist, but they have no life. 2. Because there is also death where there is no evidence of annihilation, as in the case of trees, flowers, etc. Indeed, there is no satisfactory evidence that any substance is ever annihilated, whether material or immaterial. It is evident, therefore, that life is not mere existence, and that death is not annihilation. But it is easier to say what they are not than to define what they are. Some of the necessary conditions of life, however, are very obvious. . . . Be it observed, then, that one of the essential conditions of life is union, and that one of the essential conditions of death is separation. There is no life in atoms, and there can be no death without a separation from some living substance. . . . To give life, then, to any substance it must be properly united to some living and life-imparting agent. And to work death in any substance it must be separated from said agent by the destruction of its organization or otherwise. Thus, for example, the carbon of the atmosphere is vivified by being united to living vegetables and animals, and by being separated from these life-imparting agents it again loses its vitality. The number of living and life-giving agents is, of course, very great. God has made every vegetable and every animal a depository of life. But, nevertheless, he is himself the only original, unwasting, and ever-enduring fountain of life. See Psa. 36:9, Joh. 5:26, 1Ti. 6:16. And hence it follows that union with God in some way and by some means is essential to all life, and that separation from him is always death. Act. 16:25. . . . Whether inanimate objects are united to God in more than one way may be a question. But that mans union with his Maker is supported by various chains or systems of instrumentalities, seems very certain. Through one system of means, for example, is supported his mere existence (Heb. 1:3). Through another his animal life is continued, with an immense train of physical enjoyments; and through still another is maintained his higher spiritual lifehis union, communion, and fellowship with God, as the ever-enduring and only satisfying portion of his soul. Psa. 73:25-26. And hence it follows that there are also different kinds of death, and that a man may be alive in one sense and dead in another. See Mat. 8:22, Joh. 5:24, Eph. 2:1-7, 1Ti. 5:6, 1Jn. 5:12. Milligan goes on to say that animal or physical death, the separation of spirit and body, was obviously not the only death implicit in the language of Gen. 2:17. He concludes: But that spiritual death, or a separation of the soul from God, is the chief and fundamental element of this penalty, is evident from several considerations: 1. In no other sense did Adam and Eve die on the same day that they sinned. But in a spiritual sense they certainly did die at the very time indicated (Gen. 3:8). They then, by a common law of our nature, became enemies to God by their own wicked works (Col. 1:21). 2. Spiritual death seems, a priori, to be the root of all evils; the prolific source of all our calamities and misfortunes. Reunion with God implies every blessing, and separation from Him implies the loss of everything. Hence we find that this kind of life and death is always spoken of in the Bible as that which is chief and paramount (Mat. 10:28, Joh. 11:26). 3. This is further evident from the fact that the first and chief object of the Gospel is to unite man to God spiritually. . . . 4. It seems that by eating of the fruit of the Tree of Life, Adam might have escaped physical or animal death (Gen. 3:22). (From this last statement we must dissent. The language of Gen. 3:22 clearly indicates that it was by partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Life the Man was to renew and perpetuate his youth physically; that his banishment from the Garden was to prevent his doing this and so counter-acting forever the laws of mortality inherent in his constitution, to the end that natural or physical death should occur in due course in the world outside Eden.)
From all these considerations it follows naturally that, just as the Bible teaches, the Second Death will consist, not in the separation of the human spirit from the body, but in the eternal separation of the unforgiven (unreconciled to God in Christ, 2Co. 5:17-21) living soul (Gen. 2:7) from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might (2Th. 1:7-10). Cf. Mat. 25:41; Mat. 25:46; Rev. 2:11; Rev. 20:6; Rev. 20:14; Rev. 21:4).
From a correlation of the teaching in the second and third chapters of Genesis concerning various aspects of the Fall, it seems clear that both physical and spiritual death, both as described above, have descended on all mankind as a consequence of sin (Rom. 3:23). Death, whatever form it may take is in the world because sin is in the world. Rom. 6:23the wages of sin is death. Jas. 1:13-15, the genealogy of evil is Satan, lust, sin, death, in the order named. (Rom. 5:12; Rom. 7:14; 1Co. 15:21-26; 1Co. 15:50-57; Heb. 9:27-28).
The Son of God was manifested to take away sin, to destroy the works of the devil (1Jn. 3:5; 1Jn. 3:8; Mat. 1:21; Joh. 1:29; Heb. 2:14-15; 1Co. 15:3; 1Co. 15:20-28; 2Co. 5:1-5). Redemption in Christ Jesus is complete redemption, that is, redemption in spirit and soul and body (1Th. 5:23), redemption both from the guilt of sin (Eze. 18:19-20), and from the consequences of sin (Exo. 20:5-6, Rom. 8:23). (Note the Biblical emphasis on the universality of death: Ecc. 3:2; Ecc. 12:7; Gen. 3:19; Rom. 3:23; Rom. 6:23; Rom. 5:12-13; Rom. 8:23; Joh. 8:44; Heb. 2:14-15; Heb. 9:27; Jas. 1:13-15, etc.).
20 And the man called his wifes name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. 21 And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them. 22 And Jehovah God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: 23 therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. 24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden the Cherubim, and the flame of a sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
5 The Immediacy of the Penalty embraced the following:
(1) The setting in of the process of mortality inherent in the constitution of man from the beginning (i.e., by creation).
(2) The birth of conscience, with the sense of separation from God (schism) and the feelings of guilt and shame which accompanied it.
(3) Immediate expulsion from Eden. (a) Holiness cannot fellowship with iniquity: God has no concord with Mammon (Luk. 16:13perhaps gain personified) or with Belial (2Co. 6:15evidently another name for Satan). (b) This banishment was necessary also, in order that, as stated above, man might not renew and perpetuate his youth, in his fallen condition, by partaking of the Tree of Life at will and so counteracting the operation of the mortal process inherent in him by creation; in a word, that physical death might take place in due course as an essential phase of the punishment for sin. (The same reasoning applies whether eating of the Tree of Knowledge was a real act of eating some kind of real fruit, or whether the eating of the forbidden fruit is to be taken as symbolic of someanyparticular act of disobedience to God. In either case, sinmans own sinhad come between him and God. It is too obvious to be questioned that we have here a picture of what happens in every life when the age of discretion (and consequently of responsibility) is attained.) (c) Schonfield (BWR, 171): The Sacred Tree representing life renewing itself is one of the most ancient religious symbols found all over the world. (Could this be a prevue, so to speak, of the necessary role of plant photosynthesis to all forms of animal life?) Schonfeld again: But here there is a direct reference to a prophecy of Paradise Regained found in a book written perhaps 200 years earlier, where it is said of the Messiah:
He shall open the Gates of Paradise,
And remove the threatening sword against Adam.
He shall grant to the Saints to eat from the Tree of Life,
And the Spirit of Holiness shall be open then.
Testament of Levi, xviii.
(d) Maimonides summarizes as follows (GP, 16: Our text suggests that Adam, as he altered his intention and directed his thoughts to the acquisition of what he was forbidden, was banished from Paradise: this was his punishment; it was measure for measure. At first he had the privilege of tasting pleasure and happiness, and of enjoying repose and security; but as his appetites grew stronger, and he followed his desires and impulses . . . and partook of the food he was forbidden to taste, he was deprived of everything, was doomed to subsist on the meanest kind of food, such as he had never tasted before, and this even only after exertion and labor, as it is said, Thorns and thistles shall grow up for thee (Gen. 3:18), By the sweat of thy brow, etc., and in explanation of this the text continues, And the Lord God drove him from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground whence he was taken. He was now with respect to food and many other requirements brought to the level of the lower animals; comp. Thou shalt eat the grass of the field (Gen. 3:18). Reflecting on his condition, the Psalmist says, Adam unable to dwell in dignity, was brought to the level of the dumb beast (Psa. 49:12).
(e) Note especially the devices which Yahweh used to keep the way of the tree of life. (-i-) Cherubim were stationed at the east of the Garden. Archaeology indicates that these were symbolic winged creatures. Figures of winged creatures of various kinds were rather common throughout the ancient pagan world, such as winged lions, bulls, sphinxes, or combinations of a lions body and a human face, etc. (Cf. Ezekiels four composite living creatures seen by him by the River Chebar, ch. 10). In Hebrew thought, however, the word cherub seems to have indicated an angel of high rank (e.g., LuciferDay-starwho became Satan: cf. Isa. 14:12-15): hence, cherubim (plural) apparently were figures symbolic of angels and their ministrations (Heb. 1:14). They are uniformly represented as occupying exalted positions, and as functioning to guard, to veil, or to denote attributes of, the Deity. They have been explained as symbolic creatures specially prepared to serve as emblems of creature-life in its most perfect form, that is, perhaps, as symbolizing the good angels. They were caused to dwellsomeone has saidat the gate of Eden to intimate that only when perfected and purified could human nature return to Paradise. (-ii-) Note also the flame of a sword (flaming sword) which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. Is it not obvious, by comparison with Rev. 22:2, that the Tree of Life, however literally it is to be defined, is essentially a symbol of the Word, the Logos, both personal (as the Messiah Himself), and as impersonal (in the form of His Last Will and Testament: cf. Joh. 1:1-14, Heb. 11:3, Psa. 33:6; Psa. 33:9), the Mediator, the connecting link that alone binds fallen man back to God and so prepares and qualifies him for final Union with God, Life Everlasting? (Cf. Joh. 3:13-15; Joh. 3:36; Joh. 1:51; Gen. 28:12; 1Ti. 2:5; Heb. 12:24; 2Co. 5:18-21). Is not the Flaming Sword to be recognized as the symbol of the Logos, which is the Sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:17); the word of God which is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, etc. (Heb. 4:12)? (-iii-) As keeping the Way of the Tree of Life, these instrumentalities testified to the fact that God was still keeping watch, not alone over the Tree of Life, but also over the guilty pair who had been banished from their Edenic environment into the world at large, and indeed over their progeny from that day to the present. The Way of the Tree of Life was closed for many centuries, until, in fact, Jesus came announcing, I am the way, and the truth, and the life (Joh. 5:40; Joh. 11:25-26; Joh. 14:6).
(4) Mother Eve. Her generic name was Woman (Gen. 2:23); her personal name, Eve, i.e., living, life. This is obviously a prolepsis: there is no indication that she was the mother of anyone at the time Adam named her. (See Genesis, Vol. I, pp. 541546). Note that this is the first use of the word mother in Scripture.)
(5) Coats of Skins. Thus we have the divine law established at the beginning, that apart from the shedding of blood there is no remission (of sins, Heb. 9:22). As fallen creatures, death stood between God and man; hence it became necessary to offer, at once, a substitute life. But the life is in the blood (Lev. 17:11); therefore blood had to be shed. In all likelihood this was the beginning of animal sacrifice, although we have no specific mention of this institution until in the next chapter, in the story of Cain and Abel. Thus it was that, at the very beginning, God sought to impress upon the Man and the Woman the fact of their fallen state by removing from them the garments of leaves (Gen. 3:7) which they themselves had woven to cover their physical nudity, and clothing them in skins which He prepared for them through the shedding of blood, symbolically to cover their spiritual nakedness.
(6) The expulsion from the Garden actualized the immediacy of the threefold penalty: permanent aspects of it were executed in the world at large through the operation of physical and moral law. The great Milton has given us a vivid portrayal of the feelings of our Mother Eve as she cast the last, long lingering look on the groves of Paradise Lost:
O unexpected stroke, worse than of death!
Must I thus leave thee, Paradise! thus leave
Thee, native soil, these happy walks and shades,
Fit haunts for gods! where I had hoped to spend
Quiet, though sad, the respite of that day,
Which must be mortal to us both! O flowers
That never will in other climate grow,
My early visitation, and my last
At evn, which I bred up with tender hand,
From your first opening buds, and gave you names,
Who now will rear you to the sun, or rank
Your tribes, and water from the ambrosial fount?
6. The Lost Chance of Immortality. This is a phrase common to Biblical exegetes of a certain persuasion who would identify immortality with survival only, either because they are ignorant of, or refuse to accept, the Scripture doctrine as fully revealed in the New Testament, namely, that immortality (a) is not mere survival (b) but the phenomenon of the redemption (ultimate transmutation and glorification) of the body, and (c) one of the rewards of obedience to the Gospel, and hence promised only to those who live and die in the Lord (Psa. 116:15; Rev. 14:13; Joh. 11:25-26; Rom. 2:7; Rom. 8:23; 1Co. 15:35-58; 2Co. 5:1-9; Php. 2:5-11; 1Th. 4:13-17). This is always what happens to those who neglect or reject New Testament teaching, who fail to consider the teaching of the Bible as a whole, on any given subject. The members of this school would have it that human immortality was in some sense a threat to the sovereignty of God; thus they insist on accepting and perpetuating the Devils own lie to Mother Eve, that she, by partaking of the forbidden fruit, would be as God, knowing good and evil, For example, Cornfeld writes (AtD, 17) with reference to Gen. 3:22-24 : This then is the legendary reason why mankind does not live forever in Eden and must toil over the face of the earth. Original man was expelled from Eden because the divinity saw him as a dangerous rival, trying to rise halfway to divinity. The element of disobedience in the text is only circumstantial. It is not the main consideration in the story. Man, indeed, does not die, as threatened. Instead God is threatened with mans immortality. This would make man quite divine, which would be contrary to the order of nature and the cosmos. So God placed the Cherubim to bar the approaches to the Tree of Life. After this man can appreciate his true condition: that the good earth is the place where his life will be played out. He understands that he can never dream of immortality. But he will return to the ground in death, for from the ground he was made. (This last statement is contradicted by such Old Testament passages as Gen. 2:7; Psa. 23:4; Job. 14:14-15; Job. 34:14; Ecc. 12:7; cf. also Luk. 23:46, Act. 7:59). This writer goes on to discuss what he calls the lost chance of immortality in the myths of antiquity, citing as examples the Babylonian tales of Adapa and Gilgamesh (ibid, pp. 1921). However, this interpretation of the Genesis account is completely negated by the teaching of the Bible as a whole. The fallacies implicit in it are the following:
(1) The ambiguous use of the term immortality. The Greek original is athanasia, which means literally death-lessness (1Co. 15:53-54, 1Ti. 6:16). (The kindred Greek term is aphtharsia, usually rendered incorruption or incorruptibility (Rom. 2:17; 1Co. 15:42; 1Co. 15:50; 1Co. 15:53-54; 2Ti. 1:10). Apparently aphtharsia and atbanasia are used interchangeably in the apostolic writings.) In English, deathlessness and immortality have become equally ambiguous terms, and this ambiguity seems to pervade all human literature on the subject. Obviously, however, that which is truly mortal is truly corruptible (i.e., subject to change and decay), and this is a quality which can be predicated only of corporeality; hence we must conclude that the part of man which is corruptible and mortal, and which can by Divine power (Rom. 8:11) be made incorruptible and immortal, if we are to speak precisely, is the body. But, according to Scripture, man is more than body (Gen. 2:7; Ecc. 12:7; Job. 27:3; Job. 32:8; Mat. 26:41; Luk. 23:46; Joh. 19:30; Act. 7:59; 1Co. 2:11): he is body vitalized by spirit, the Breath of God. Hence immortality must be distinguished from mere survival; in Scripture the term has reference exclusively to the destiny of the body. (See my Genesis, Vol. I, pp. 439444). On this general subject, three views have been advanced in the past, as follows: (a) the ancient Egyptian view, that the physical body would be revived and united with the soul following the judgment of Osiris; hence, mummification, also burial of food, flowers, ornaments, and even a few slaves, with the corpses of the nobility: the hoi polloi, to be sure, were not considered of sufficient worth to rate such attentions; (b) the Oriental notion of survival in some kind of bodilessness, as absorbed into what has been called the ocean of undifferentiated primal energy; and (c) the Biblical doctrine, that the physical bodies of the saints (the righteous, the justified, the redeemed) shall ultimately be transmuted into spiritual (ethereal) bodies adapted to their needs in the heavenly world (Rom. 8:18-24, Php. 3:20-21, 1Co. 15:35-57, 2Co. 5:1-10). The Bible gives us no information as to the destiny of the bodies of those who shall suffer eternal separation from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might: 2Th. 1:7-10).
(2) A misconception of the constituent elements of human nature per se, as it came from the handiwork of the Creator. As stated several times heretofore, and repeated here for emphasis, according to Gen. 2:7, man, naturally, is a spirit-body (in scientific terms, a psychosomatic) unity, He is imperishable spirit, tabernacled in a corporeal frame (2Co. 5:1-10). Following the Judgment, the saints will continue to be imperishable spirits, but clothed in celestial (spiritual, ethereal), rather than in terrestrial, bodies, As such they will still be living souls (Gen. 2:7; Gen. 46:27; Act. 2:41; Act. 27:37; Rev. 6:9; Rev. 20:4). In Scripture this transmutation process (metamorphosis) is designated variously as glorification (Dan. 12:3; Joh. 7:39; Mat. 17:1-2; Act. 9:3-4; Act. 22:6-8; Act. 26:12-15; Rom. 8:29-30; 2Co. 3:18; 1Co. 15:45-49), as glory and honor and incorruption, eternal life (Rom. 2:7), as the putting on of immortality (1Co. 15:54). From these considerations it follows that the statements quoted above are erroneous in that they deal with the human being as the product solely of earthy or physical elements (cf. 1Co. 15:47), and disregard completely the fact of the imperishability of the interior (or real) man (2Co. 4:11-18). Note the last sentence: Man will return to the ground in death, for from the ground he was made: this is materialism pure and simple!
(3) Failure to take adequate account of the Divine Attributes, namely, (a) Absolute Justice (Psa. 85:10, Isa. 9:7) which demanded sanctions appropriate to the sustention of the majesty of the Divine Law which man had violated, and so to vindicate the Divine Will by which the Law was established; (b) Absolute Goodness, which would have been impugned had God chosen to create man in His own image and then leave him hopelessly lost in a world of sin, suffering, and death, and thus doomed to live on a level but little higher than that of the brute (cf. Psa. 8:1-9, Rom. 2:4); and (c) Divine Love (grace, compassion, mercy) which was poured out in such a sacrificial manifestation as to prove to all intelligent creatures (both angels and men) Gods desire and hope to bring the rebel backof his own volitioninto reconciliation and fellowship impaired by sin (2Co. 5:17-21, Joh. 17:3, 1Jn. 1:3-4, 2Pe. 3:9). To this end God gave His Only Begotten as the Supreme Sacrifice, gave Him freely for us all (Rom. 8:32, Joh. 1:29, 1Pe. 2:21-25, Heb. 12:2). God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world (i.e., mankind). Why not? Because the world (mankind) was, and is, under Divine judgment. Hence, God sent the Son into the world, that the world should be saved through him (Joh. 3:16-21).
(4) Rejection of the New Testament fulfilment of the Old Testament preparation, hence of the entire Remedial System. The excerpt quoted above ignores the Plan of Redemption as if it had never existed in the Mind of God (Eph. 3:1-12; Eph. 2:1-10). Divine Justice could not, in the very nature of the case, tolerate rebellion in either angels or men, for that would be putting a value (premium) on sin; nor could Divine Love suffer the man, rebel though he was, and is, to be lost, to perish in Hell forever, without making the Supreme Effort to win him back. Hence, God did for man what man could not do for himself: He provided the necessary Atonement (Covering) for sin and vindicatory sanction for sustaining the majesty of the Divine Law (cf. Psa. 94:1, 1Th. 4:6, Heb. 10:30, Rom. 12:19in these various passages it is vindication, not vengeance (i.e., revenge) that is signified: true law never seeks revenge), the Divine Act which was at the same time a demonstration of His ineffable love for the one whom He had created in His own image (Rom. 8:35-39), the demonstration designed to overcome the rebellion in mans heart, and thus make it possible for God to be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Christ Jesus (Rom. 3:26). And the Logos Himself, for the joy that was set before himthe sheer joy of redeeming lost souls who would be persuaded to enter into covenant relationship with Himtook upon Himself flesh and blood (Heb. 3:14-15), endured the cross, despising shame (Heb. 12:2), and being found in fashion as a man, humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross (Php. 2:5-11). Finally, the Holy Spirit Himself, throughout the present Dispensation, condescends to enter and to indwell every obedient soul committed to the Mind and Will of Christ (Joh. 7:37-39; Rom. 5:5; Rom. 8:27; Act. 2:38; 1Co. 3:16-17; 1Co. 6:19-20; Gal. 3:2) as the seal of his participation in the duties and privileges of the New Covenant (2Co. 1:22; Eph. 1:13; Eph. 4:30) and the earnest of his attaining the inheritance of all the saints in light (Col. 1:12), the inheritance incorruptible and undefiled . . . reserved in heaven for them (1Pe. 1:4). These numerous Scriptures clearly reveal the fallacy of associating the Genesis account of the Fall with Babylonian folklore from which the sublime, doctrines of grace, faith, redemption, and the Spiritual Life, are conspicuously absent. To avoid this fallacy, however, one must correlate the Mosaic account with the teaching of the Bible as a whole. To fail to do this invariably results in the distortion of the truth. The plain truth is, in the light of Scripture in its entirety, that man has not lost the chance of immortality at all. Moreover, if human immortality is a threat of any kind whatsoever to the sovereignty of God, why, then, did God in His Eternal Purpose make provision for it as a natural reward of the Spiritual Life (Col. 3:4, Rom. 14:17)? For example, in Rom. 8:29-30, we are told explicitly that all those whom God foreknows, calls, justifies, and glorifies (in His Eternal Purpose: there is no past, present, or future, with God; only the eternal now), these He foreordains to be conformed to the image of His Son (again, in His Eternal Purpose). That is to say, it was only through the Sons Divine Begetting (Luk. 1:35), Supreme Sacrifice, and Resurrection (as the first-born from the dead) that life and immortality have been brought to light through the Gospel (Rom. 8:11; Rom. 8:29; 2Ti. 1:10; 1Ti. 1:17; 1Ti. 6:16; 1Co. 15:20; 1Co. 15:23; Col. 1:18; Heb. 12:23); that all of Gods elect shall in the finality of the Cosmic Process attain glory and honor and incorruption, eternal life (Rom. 2:7).
All the evidence available, either from Scripture teaching or from human experience, seems to make it obvious that man was mortal from the beginning, that is, created mortal; and that as long as he had free access to the Tree of Life, he had the means of counteracting his mortality. But what was this Tree of Life? Was it an actually existing tree, bearing real fruit, of a kind such as we now apprehend by sense-perception, fruit specifically designed to renew physical youth and vigor? There is nothing incredible in such an interpretation. If God provides food to renew mans physical strength, as we know that He does (Mat. 6:11), why should it be thought incredible that He should have prepared a special kind of food to renew and preserve mans physical youth? According to this view, the means provided for this purpose was the fruit of the Tree of Life, and Adam, though mortal by creation, had this means at hand always to counteract his mortality. Thus had he maintained his innocence, and by unswerving obedience to the Will of God had grown into holiness, we may suppose that his body would have been transfigured and translated to Heaven without the intervention of physical death (its resolution into its physical elements). Moreover, when he did transgress the law of God, it became imperative that he should be expelled from the Garden, and that the way of the tree of life should be guarded, in order that in his state of rebelliousness, he might not gain access to its fruit and so renew his youth; in a word, that the inherent laws of mortality might work out their course in his physical constitution (Gen. 3:22-24; Gen. 5:5). It seems that in view of the possibility of his making the fateful choice of transgression above obedience (1Jn. 3:4), Divine Wisdom had already prepared the whole earth for his occupancy and lord tenancy, as the stage on which His Plan for Redemption, His Eternal Purpose, should be executed (Isa. 46:8-11; 1Co. 15:20-28; Eph. 3:8-13; Eph. 1:4; Heb. 4:3; 1Pe. 1:19-20; Rev. 13:8; Rev. 17:8). From this general point of view, it is contended by various Bible scholars that the entire posterity of Adamall mankindmust suffer physical death because they are so unfortunate as to be born outside the Garden and hence without access to the fruit of this Tree to counteract their mortality. (This position is well presented by Brents, GPS, Ch. 5).
Account must be taken, of course, of the obvious symbolism of the elements of the Genesis narrative of the Fall. However, this symbolism is not necessarily weakened by the literal interpretation: in the Bible, real objects are often used as symbols and metaphors of profound spiritual truths (e.g., in the parables of Jesus). As stated heretofore, the correlation of Gen. 2:9; Gen. 2:17; Gen. 3:22-24 with Rev. 2:7; Rev. 22:2 indicates clearly that the Tree of Life is to be understood as a symbol of the Logos, mans connecting link with the Source of Life (Gen. 2:7; Joh. 1:51; Joh. 10:10; Joh. 11:25-26; Joh. 14:6; 1Jn. 5:12). Similarly, the Tree of Knowledge evidently is to be taken as a symbol of knowledge per se, that is, knowledge that comes from the actual experience of sin, (Cf. also the discussion of the Cherubim and the Flaming Sword supra.) Moreover, there is a fall in every life: this is the old, old story of what happens to every human being on reaching the age of reasoning (discretion or accountability): conscience is born in the passing from innocence to moral responsibility (Rom. 3:23; Rom. 5:12). Any human act that is motivated by inordinate physical lust, devotion to the purely sensual, or desire for illicit knowledgethe temptations that beset Mother Eveis a fall in the Biblical sense of the term. The plain truth isit seems to methat Scripture gives us no clear information as to what might have been mans ultimate end had he not chosen to enter upon a course of rebellion against God.
Occasionally one encounters the statement that man was created perfect. Now perfection is completeness or wholeness (from per and facere, to make thoroughly, to finish, to make complete). It seems evident that man as he came from the creative Hand of God was perfect in a personal sense, and in a personal sense only, that is, in being vested with the powers of thought, feeling and volition. But can it be said that he was morally perfect? Or, to be more explicit, can it be said rightly that he was created holy? It seems more reasonable to hold that he was created innocent, and holiness is definitely not innocence; rather, it is a moral and spiritual condition of the inner man that is achieved by obedience to the Word; it is the product, not of human passivity, but of human activity. Again, can holiness be imposed upon a person from some outside source? I think not. It is, rather, the fruit of a life of voluntary commitment to God, in our Dispensation the life that is hid with Christ in God (Col. 3:3, 2Co. 7:1, Rom. 12:1-2, 2Pe. 3:18); in a word, the Spiritual Life which blossoms into the Life Everlasting.
7. The Three States of Man
Can it be said, then, that man fell downwardor did he actually fall upward?
Alexander Campbell has left some interesting comments on this problem (LP, 115, 116) as follows: Adam and Eve were in a state of nature when created by God. They were primarily in a state of nature, which is always proper. They could not reasonably aspire to rise above it, in any relation. If man were in a state of nature, he would be absolutely perfect. We are aware that natural theology (as some have it) speaks of man as now in a state of nature, But this is an unfortunate error. Man is in a preternatural, or unnatural, state. Adam and Eve only of all the family of men were ever in a natural statein other words, in the condition in which they were created by God. God made the natural state of man; sin and its consequences, the preternatural or unnatural; and the drama of redemption, the supernatural. Adam and Eve, before the fall, were natural; after the fall, unnatural, Men have no power to return to a state of nature, but by grace they can rise to a supernatural state. These are the definitions of the true science of man, which it is important to remember.
From the point of view suggested by Mr. Campbell, it would seem that the Fall was, in a sense, benevolent in characterhence, a fall upward. It would seem, surely, that a state of holiness is to be preferred above one of innocence, a supernatural state above a purely natural state, It is apparent, moreover, that God predestined man to be free, that is, to be endowed by creation with the power of choice. Still and all, insofar as man in the present world is considered, according to Mr. Campbells view, there was a fall downward, from what he designates the natural to what he calls the preternatural or unnatural. Have we a paradox here that cannot be resolved?
Perhaps we should conclude that the fall was both downward and upward. The fall itself was downward, into a state of rebellion against God. But Gods Love has transformed it (transcended it and its consequences) into a possibility of what might best be called upwardness (Joh. 1:29; Joh. 3:16). The upward pull is no work of man: it is solely the efflux of Divine Grace (Eph. 2:1-10). What man did to himself pushed him downward; but what God does for him is remedial, to lift him upward, upward through the Spiritual Life here into the fulness of union with God in the hereafter, and hence the recovery of the lost chance of immortality. For Adam and his posterity, God has chosen to override evil by providing the potentiality of ultimate and complete good (redemption in spirit and soul and body) for all men who conform to the necessary prerequisites of conversion (Act. 2:38, Rom. 10:9-10, Gal. 3:27) and the essentials of the Spiritual Life (Gal. 5:22-25), and who thus make it possible for Him to be just and at the same time the justifier of those who manifest the obedience of faith in Christ Jesus (Rom. 3:26, Gal. 3:2, Jas. 2:20-26). (Cf. also 1Th. 5:23; Mat. 5:48; Joh. 17:23; Heb. 12:14; Heb. 12:23). From these truths it is obvious, surely, that no possibility exists of mans lifting himself up to glory and honor and incorruption simply by tugging at his own bootstraps. There is no promise of Divine overruling of evil for those who persist in neglect and disobedience and wickedness throughout this life. For them there remains only a certain fearful expectation of judgment (Rom. 2:8-9, Heb. 10:27, 2Th. 1:7-10).
It must be conceded, of course, that the concept of a fall upward, so to speak, from a condition of innocence to one of the potentiality of holiness is more in accord with evolutionism than the traditional concept of a fall downward. But here, as usual, when we reach the depths of the mysteries of God, we are confronted with the inadequacy of human language to provide precise word-symbols for the concepts involved. In the use of such terms as natural, unnatural, preternatural, supernatural, and the like, in their inter-relationships of meaning, we find ourselves bogged down in semantics: and the road of sheer semanticism usually leads to a dead end. The question arises: Could not our first parents have continued in their unvitiated natural state by maintaining unbroken obedience to God and so have attained holiness without the necessity of a pilgrimage through this world of sin, suffering, senescence, and death, and would this ultimate state have been any less supernatural than the holiness ultimately to be attained through the fall and the recovery (redemption)? And to what extent is the redemption of the body, the putting on of immortality, involved in all this? This reasoning in turn might lead us to the unanswerable dead end insofar as human reason and experience are concerned: Why was man clothed in a physical, instead of an ethereal body (like that of angels?) in the first place? We cannot avoid the conclusion, it seems to me, that Creation and Redemption are the two grand divisions of the Plan of the Universe. Redemption, therefore, presupposes something, some change of interior state, which can only be rightly designated a fall. Moreover, the concept of a fall downward is indubitably implicit in the fact of the birth of conscience, and the interior state itself can hardly be properly designated anything other than a state of depravity.
8. Predestined To Be Free
(1) This felicitous phrase I have borrowed from a sermon by my good friend, Dr. James F. Jauncey. Man was predestined, and therefore created, to be free, that is, to have the power of choice; and obviously spiritual growth and maturity are attainable only by personal choice, choice of the Way of Christ and of personal commitment to it; in a word, choice of the Spiritual Life (Joh. 14:6; Mat. 7:13-14; Act. 18:28; Act. 19:23). This means that Adam and Eve were endowed at creation with the power of choice. What, then, was to prevent their continuing in unbroken fellowship with God? Nothing, absolutely nothing, but their own wills. (Recall Truebloods pertinent remark (PR, 251): Evil is the price we pay for moral freedom.) The first sin was the terminus of the human choice to rebel against God, to put self above God, even though the choice was elicited under the pressure of Satanic temptation, As stated previously, there is no hope for the Devil and his angels: they sinned of their own free volition, uninfluenced from without; hence they are totally depraved, held in the everlasting bonds of this depravity unto the Judgment of the Great Day (Jud. 1:6, 2Pe. 2:4, Act. 17:30-31). But there was hope for our first parents, because they were in great measure seduced by outside agency; hence, for them and their kind God could consistently temper justice with mercy (Rom. 8:1-4). The fact remains, however, that no necessity was imposed upon Adam and Eve to sin against God: their choice of the wrong way was their own choice, but they could have chosen otherwise. Their wills were not burglarized by the Almighty. The same is true of the all (humankind) who have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). Man was predestined to be free, not to be enslaved to sin.
(2) Butdoes man actually have this power of choice? Fatalistic, necessitarian, deterministic, mechanistic cults have flourished in all ages, the common denominator of which is the view that he is under the compulsion of forces over which he has no control; in a word, that free will is an illusion. If this be true, obviously there can be no such thing as morality, as democracy, or even as scientific inquiry, in the full sense of these terms. Perhaps we should try to define freedom. What does it mean to man to have the power of choice? This writer defines freedom as the power (not necessarily the right) which a human beinga personhas (a) to act or not to act, or (b) to act in one way instead of another, given the circumstances, in the form of motives, for such action. As Roberts writes (PC, 6): The practical problems with which life confronts every one of us are questions as to which of two or more . . . attractive possibilities we shall choose. Where there is no choice, there is no problem. If there ever is really only one thing to be done, there is no uncertainty. We do it. If we hesitate at all, it is because we suspect there my be another possibility. When we review and appraise action, our own or others, it never occurs to us to praise or blame actions which could not have been other than they were Whatever is truly necessary is neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong. As R. A, Maclver puts it (STC, 520): To live is to act, and to act is to choose, and to choose is to evaluate, Perhaps a simple illustration will suffice here: To what extent is a man in charge of himself when he is falling from a twenty-story building? Obviously, he is not in charge of himself at all; rather, he is helpless in the throes of that mysterious physical compulsion known as gravity. On the other hand, to what extent is the same man in charge of himself in solving a complex mathematical problem? Evidently this is a mental process in which he is in charge of himself throughout. Freedom means that, in some measure, the person is in charge of himself when he acts. To be sure, freedom is necessarily limited by the circumference of a persons acquaintanceship. A Hottentot, or any other person, who has never heard of ice, could hardly choose to go skating. One could not be expected to choose anything of which he is entirely ignorant.
(3) Freedom is not motiveless action, that is, the ability to deliberate or choose without motives. If the will were free in this sense, we should never exhort a person to do this or that: we should realize that such exhortations would accomplish nothing. We do not exhort the winds to blow in this or that direction: we realize that the winds are not influenced by motives. But because the will is free, we do urge and exhort, and by exhortation we present to it motives. Freedom of will means, not that the will is undetermined, nor that it is fully determined by some power other than itself, but that it is self-determined.
(4) Freedom of will, negatively defined, is immunity from necessity. Natural physical law is indeed stamped on the lower nature of man and governs all those movements of man which are not ordinarily subject to his volitional activity (e.g., metabolism, respiration, digestion, assimilation, circulation of the blood, etc.). Nevertheless, man is physically free in his will; at the same time, however, he is morally bound: that is, bound by the moral law which determines his relationships and their corresponding rights and duties. Free will, then, is immunity from necessity within the framework in which choice can be made: immunity from necessity (a) of choosing this instead of that object or end, and (b) of making any choice at all. Any normal person realizes, even when deciding on a wrong course of conduct, that he is capable of choosing the right course: in a word, that his choice is not necessitated. This is just common sense.
(5) A free act is a self-determined act. An act of will which is necessitated in the will by forces of the inner nature, or one which is forced upon it by violence from without (if that were possible: one might be compelled to give to a burglar the combination of a safe, but he would not do it willingly) is plainly not under the control of the I; therefore, such an act is not a human act. Such acts as those of a madman, or those done in sleep, are not human acts, because in such cases the will is not free. Freedom to act in one way implies prior power of the will (person) to have acted in another, even in the opposite, way.
(6) Freedom attaches only to a person. Negley writes (OK, 85): I suggest that Liberty is the concept most appropriate to Person. As a value principle, Liberty means, briefly, the guarantee to individuals of as much freedom of thought and action as is consistent with the exercise of an equal freedom by other men. Liberty is personal freedom exercised in relation to other persons. In political thinking, liberty signifies generally the absence of external restraint. Complete absence of external restraint would, of course, be anarchy.
(7) Necessitarianism is the doctrine that all effects follow invariably their prior causes, and especially that the human will does not have any freedom of choice, (The doctrine that the human will is free (especially, to the extent of a persons knowledge) is known as voluntarism). Necessitarianism takes one of two forms: (a) that in which man is supposed to be under the rigid control of a predetermining will, which is known in secular terms as fatalism (whatever may be signified by such terms as fate or fortune), and which is known in theological circles as predestinarianism (absolute control of all events by the Deity); and (b) and that which supposes that all effects are invariably determined by their respective antecedent impersonal causes, the view which is generally designated determinism. Determinism is simply the denial of freedom of initiatory action in man. The determinists tell us that in order to freedom of will, man must have the power to do what he chooses to do, and in the doing much be free from all external or internal constraints. They ask: Are all these conditions ever met at one and the same moment? Their own answer is, No. They tell us that if one could know all the factors involved in the personality development of any human being, it would be possible to predict his decision in any given situation which apparently demands his making a choice. Of course, the feeling that one has made such a decision becomes in deterministic lingo an illusion. (Notice should be taken especially of the if involved in this supposition. It is evident that no one can ever know all the factors involved in the development of anyones personality from moment to moment, from hour to hour, etc. Such an analysis is utterly impossible; hence the whole theory rests on imponderables and not on available facts. Moreover, every human being is an individual. That is to say, no two persons are ever duplicated; every person is unique in that he is different froman other toevery other person. There is no possible way by which my experiences, memories, emotions, thoughts, and decisions can become your experiences, memories, emotions, thoughts and decisions. As Emerson has said: Nature never rhymes her children or makes two men alike. And as Dr. Allport has written (PPI, 4, 5): In everyday life, the scientist, like anyone else, deals effectively with his fellow men only by recognizing that their peculiar natures are not adequately represented in his discovery. The single functions which they have in common are deeply overshadowed by the individual use to which they put these functions. The piling of law upon law does not in the slightest degree account for the pattern of individuality which each human being enfolds. The person who is a unique and never-repeated phenomenon evades the traditional scientific approach at every step. In fact, the more science advances, the less do its discoveries resemble the individual life with its patent continuiities, mobility, and reciprocal penetration of functions. Each self is simply a unique existence which is perfectly impervious to other selvesimpervious in a fashion of which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue (Illingworth, PHD, 30).
(8) Theoretically, determinism is of three kinds: (a) physical (that all natural events are reducible ultimately to physiochemical action: thus the human being is defined as a locus in the movement continuum, constituting a relatively permanent electron-proton aggregatethe atoms, molecules, and tissues of the bodyinteracting with the electron-proton systems not with the body, etc.A. P. Weiss, TBHB, pp. 390392); (b) biological (that gene combinations determine all physical, temperamental, and mental chartcteristics, and hence all human behavior); and (c) psychological (that which finds the sources of necessitarianism in unconscious forces and factors, hidden motives). Perhaps the most clear-cut presentation of a strict determinism is given us in a book, novelistic in character, entitled Walden Two, by the Harvard psychologist, B, F, Skinner (who is currently revered as a kind of demigod in many psychology circles). Joseph Collignon, reviewing the book, in an article in Saturday Review, June 27, 1964, summarizes Skinners thesis as follows: B. F, Skinner sees, as Dostoievskys Grand Inquisitor saw, that the masses are incapable of freedom, and that man must be relieved of guilt if he is to be happy. Walden Two eliminates guilt by eliminating sin, Man is an animal that can be conditioned to gratify his desires within the framework of the complexity of social needs. Proper conditioning eliminates the need for choiceif, indeed, choice does exist. Choice becomes an automatic response. If the animal becomes depressed or anxiousby chance, not choicepsychiatrists are available. The holes in this thesis, it seems to me, are the following: Just what is meant by proper conditioning? What are to be taken as the norms of proper conditioning? Who are to decide what these norms are? Indeed how could any group decide anything under this view. It follows, too, that Skinners decision to write the book, including, to be sure, all the thoughts, words, phrases, etc., incorporated in the bookall this must have been the product of chance, not of choice. It is really amazing how silly some Ph.D.s can become, especially when one is pursuing the exploitation of his own dearly beloved brain-child. (It has been said rightly that the difference between the man who rides a horse and the man who rides a hobby is that the former has sense enough to dismount occasionally to let his horse rest, whereas the man who rides a hobby persists in riding it to death. This is especially true of the intelligentsia and their theoretical hobbies. Professor C. D. Broad once remarked that the theory of determinism is so absurd that only a very learned man could have conjured it up.
(9) Descending from the ethereal mansions of abstract speculation to the earthly plane of practical thinking, what is the testimony of mans common sense with respect to his own freedom of action? To ask this question is to answer it: common sense has never yielded to deterministic theories. Common sense has always held as facts of experience (a) the substantial existence and personal identity of the self, and (b) freedom of will in human conduct. To think, or at least to act otherwise would be to manifest incipient insanity and in all probability to run afoul of the civil law. Observation, introspection, and experience in general, all point in the direction of these two facts of human selfhood and self-determination. It is freely admitted, of course, that human action takes place within a framework of hereditary and environmental factors. But the commonsense view is that in addition to these two sets of factors, there is, in every human act, the personal equation: that is, the reaction of the self as a unitary whole, reaction which terminates in the will and in the overt act. I am convinced that I do choose, and every sane person has the same conviction. As Illingworth has written (PHD, 3 536): We ground our belief in freedom on two thingsits immediate self-evidence in consciousness and its progressive self-justification in moralitythe way in which its moral results approve themselves to the universal reason of mankind; and we are confident that no contrary argument can be constructed without surreptitiously assuming what it attempts to disprove. Lucretius was obliged to allow his atoms the power of swerving. And when Hobbes defines the will as the last appetite in deliberation, he concedes by the latter word what he intends to deny by the former. And so it is with the later necessitarians. Their analysis is more elaborate and possesses the attraction for certain minds of any attempt to explain the primary aspect of a thing ingeniously away. But they have been convicted again and again, either of ignoring the point at issue, or begging in one phase or other, the question to be proved; while their success, if it were possible, would only land them in the old dilemma, that by invalidating consciousness they in-validate all power of reasoning, and with it the value of their own conclusions.
(10) Life and personality are not amendable to mechanistic laws; the stronger motive is stronger because it is in greater accord with the desire and will of the person making the choice (and in too many cases, unfortunately, in greater accord with his desire than with his reason or better judgment). Life and thought surge on and function qualitativelyfar above the mere quantitative mechanistic level. Perhaps this is the reason why the conviction of personal freedom is innate and unshakable in man. His ideas, institutions, and laws are all predicated upon it. If any one of the theorists who deny free will were to commit a crime, certainly he would be treated by societythat is, indicted, tried, and maybe convicted and executedas if he were free to act and therefore responsible for his deeds. His deterministic theory would avail him nothing before the civil law, nor would it avail him anything before the moral law. Imagine a man on trial for murder, pleading his case before the judge in these words: Your honor, I am innocent. The laws of heredity and environment committed this crimeI did not commit it. I have the feeling that the judge, in response to a plea so asinine, would turn him over to the proper authorities for psychiatric examination and treatment. The fact is, of course, that the man gave the lie to his whole argument the moment he used the I, the personal pronoun. Anyone making such a defense would become the laughing-stock of the whole community! Those who preach determinism know, while they are preaching it, that it is false; they never treat themselves or their children as mere machines. Let us hear C. D. Broad again (in Muirhead, Contemporary British Philosophy, p. 98): If a man referred to his brother or to his cat as an ingenious mechanism, we should know that he was either a fool or a physiologist. No one in practice treats himself or his fellow men or his pet animals as machines; but scientists who have never made a study of speculative philosophy seem often to think it is their duty to hold up in theory what no one outside a lunatic asylum would accept in practice.
(11) Man knows from immediate experience that he possesses this power of choice. Against determinism is set the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate action . . . I find it impossible not to think that I can now choose (Sidgwick). As William James vigorously contends, our consciousness of freedom and the fact of regret for wrongdoing are the immediate facts of human experience; the world must have moral coherence as well as logical coherence. And Bergson argues with great eloquence that life is basically a flow in which the free spirit of man is constantly emerging as a victor, expressing itself in art, in science, in religion, and in free political institutions. I know, and every person who will be honest with himself knows, that one makes choices between alternatives every day, every hour, even every few minutes. This we know from immediate experience, and to deny such knowledge is to manifest wilful ignorance. We may not, and indeed do not, know the extent to which forces of heredity and forces of environment enter into personal motivation and personal choice, but we know that we do choose. Freedom is not determinism; it is not indeterminism; it is self-determinism. The two essential properties of person and personality are self-consciousness and self-determination; the latter is properly defined as that power by which the self, the I, determines its own acts.
(12) The problem may be stated best, perhaps, as follows: As far as this writer knows, no one questions the fact of the interplay of forces of heredity and forces of environment in the building of personality, The new-born babe is comparable, let us say, to a blank tablet (tabula rasa). He has all the potentialities of person and personality, but at first these are latent, waiting to be actualized. Hence as the child matures, through the interaction of these hereditary and environmental factors, the time arrives when he senses a distinction between the me and the not-me. This is the first glimmer of self-consciousness. And as this distinction becomes more obvious, the awareness of self becomes correspondingly more potent and becomes per se the determining factor in human motivation and action. Hence, the fact is that in every choice three factors are involved, namely, heredity and environment (the forces of which are largely imponderables) plus the personal reaction. In the final analysis, it is the person, the I, who tips the scales in one direction, toward one alternative, in preference to an-other. We do not say, My eyes see, my ears hear, etc., but we say, I see and I hear; we are equally right in saying that I choose, I decide, I act, etc. Present effects follow from prior causes, to be sure; but the fact overlooked or ignored by the determinist is that the Self (the I) is one of those causes, indeed the efficient cause. As Kemeny has written (PLS, pp. 225226): We could restate the deterministic argument by saying that we cannot have a free choice because the Law of Nature says what the outcome of our choice will be. If it is already written, then we have no real choice. The Law is not something binding, but a simple description of all events, past, present and future. Among other things it describes how we choose. This is the only reason why our decision must be in accordance with it. It would be just as correct, and perhaps less misleading, to say that the Law of Nature depends on our choice, instead of the reverse. That is to say, again, that we are predestined to be free.
(13) Kant, the German philosopher, held that freedom is not a natural inheritance of man; rather, that in order to have freedom we must create it for ourselves. If man, he says, were to follow his natural bent, he would not strive for freedom; he would choose dependence instead. It is much easier to depend on others to think, judge and decide for us, and so man is inclined to look upon freedom as a burden rather than a privilege. Here the totalitarian state and the political myth step in (Cassirer). In his chapter, The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoievsky, in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, perhaps the most profoundly searching psychological novel ever written, pictures the Inquisitor as meeting Jesus of Nazareth on the streets of the Spanish city of Seville and as chiding Him for having resisted the appeals of the Devil. By doing this, the Inquisitor argued, Jesus had condemned men to the assumption of responsibility, a burden which they did not want to bear. Men are naturally happy, the Inquisitor went on to say, only when they have no responsibilities, when they can live the life of grasshoppers floating downstream, so to speak. This, of course, is the negative way of putting before us the truth that with freedom necessarily goes responsibility. Unlimited freedom in any area of life would be equivalent to total irresponsibility and this in turn would be equivalent to complete anarchy. Obviously, if this be the true view of human character, there can be little hope for the future of democracy.
(14) If man does not have freedom of will, at least within a certain framework, then he is not responsible for anything he does; and if not morally responsible, then all his laws and all his courts and all his mechanisms of enforcement are but pompous vanities. If man does not have and exercise free will, then Might becomes Right, and there can be no such thing as morality, no such thing as real democracy, not even any science itself as free inquiry. This would mean, of course, mans abandonment of all pretension to social order and his adoption of the ways of the jungle, (But even the evolutionist will agree that man has advanced beyond the brute stage,) We affirm, therefore, with Brennan, that no power outside of willeither material force or physiological reflex, or instinctive urge, or even intellect itselfcan so determine the human will as to leave it trapped and helpless in the face of superior agencies (TP, 220), As Sullivan remarks (LS, 186): As things are, biologys main contribution to our theoretical understanding of the world is the stale and unlikely surmise that a living organism will turn out to be nothing but a mechanical system. cf. also Negley (OK, 20): The argument that men are in the grip of conditioned behavior-patterns from which there is no escape rests upon a description of experience which is simple to the point of simplemindedness.
(15) The following somewhat lengthy excerpt from the pen of Dr. Will Durant (MP, 100102) is a fitting summarization of the problem before us: The determinist will recall the conservation of energy; the organism cannot emit more energy than it has received. Which is to forget that life itself is energy, visibly transforming the forces and materials brought to it into combinations that aim at the mastery of environment by thought, and occasionally succeed. What issues from action may be no more in quantity than what entered in sensation; but how different in quality! This transforming power of life is the highest energy we know; it is known to us more directly and surely than any other energy in the world; and is the source and promise of our modest freedom. The determinist supposes that freedom is illusory because the stronger motive always wins. Of course this is a vain tautology; the motive that is strong enough to win is stronger than those that fail. But what made it stronger if not its harmony with the will, with the desire and essence of the soul?Yet there cannot be any uncaused actions. Verily; but the will is part of the cause; the circumstances of an action must include the forward urgency of life. Each state of mind follows naturally from the total preceding state of all reality; but that state and this include the transforming energy of life and will.The same effect always follows the same cause. But the cause is never the same, for the self involved is always in flux, and circumstances are forever changing.If I knew all your past and present I could infallibly predict your response. You could if you knew also the nature and power of the life-force within me; you. could, perhaps, if you abandoned mechanistic principles and asked yourself, for your guidance, what youi.e., lifewould do in this complex of circumstance. Probably you could not predict successfully even then; probably there is in life an element of incalculability and spontaneity which does not accord with our categories and our laws, and which gives peculiar zest and character to organic evolution and human affairs. Let us pray that we shall never have to live in a totally predictable world. Does not the picture of such a world seem ridiculously incongruous with lifemechanism in life being, as Bergson said, a passing jest?But all action is the result of heredity and environment. Not quite; the determinist modestly fails to take account of himself. He supposes once more that life is the passing product of external forces; he neglects (if we may use a pleonasm) the very vitality and liveliness of life. We are not merely our ancestors and our circumstances; we are also wells of transforming energy, we are parts of that stream of directive force, of capacity for adaptive choice and thought, in which our forefathers also moved and had their being. These ancestors are in truth living and acting within us; but the will and the life that were once in them is in each of us now, creating the spontaneous me. . . . Will is free in so far as it is creative, in so far as it enters, with its remoulding energy, as one of the determining conditions of choice and action. There is no violation of natural law in such a freedom, because life itself is a natural factor and process, not a force outside the varied realm of nature, Nature itself, as its fine name implies, is that living power through which all things are begotten; probably throughout the world this spontaneity and urgency lurk which we have claimed for life; how else could life have acquired it? To say that our characters determine our actions is true. But we are our characters; it is we, then-, that choose. (Italics mineC.C.)
(16) Voluntariness is the actual exercise of freedom. The act of choice is the act of the person, an act stemming from the interaction of thought and desire, and accompanied by the set of the self toward the end-in-view. This is what is meant by the human act: it is the act which involves prior deliberation, freedom, and voluntariness. The person does choose between motives, but within the framework of hereditary and environmental factors. Adam and Eve had a choice to make between Divine ordinance and Satanic persuasion; though they could have done otherwise, they chose Satan, lust, sin, and death, and thus their choice brought into operation Gods ineffable grace (Eph. 2:8) in His actualizing of His Plan of Redemption, lest manthe creature who bears His image and who is the supreme object of His loveshould be lost forever (Joh. 3:16-17). (We shall look infra at the problem of the relation between Divine foreordination and foreknowledge on the one hand, and human freedom and voluntariness on the other.)
9. Some Pertinent Questions which arise in connection with the Genesis Narrative of the Fall are the following:
(1) Why did God create man capable of falling? To this we reply: (a) That it is difficult to see how God could have created a man incapable of falling. If man is to be a moral creature in any sense of the term, subject to moral government (law), he must have freedom of choice to some extent, which surely would include freedom to choose between good and evil, right and wrong. Lacking this power, he would not be man. (b) That mans fall made it possible for the actualizing of the Divine Plan of Redemption the essence of which would be the Atonement, the supreme demonstration of Gods love for the creature He had created in His own image. Moreover, by means of this Remedial System, not only has Gods love, but Satans total depravity as well, been demonstrated to all intelligent beings of the universe. God overruled evil for good in the sense that He made use of the Fall for benevolent ends. John Wild (IRP, 385): Either we are free and sometimes choose wrongly, in which case the divine purpose is frustrated, or we are always made to choose in the proper way, in which case we are not really free. Trueblood (PR, 3 51): Evil is the price we pay for moral freedom . . . the limitation on Gods working, which accounts for the presence of evil, is due, not to the nature of things, but to the nature of goodness. Thompson (MPR, 497): Although no morally evil act is itself necessary yet it may be necessary that evil should occur in a world of free but finite agents. Again (ibid., 507508): A world free of evil would have to be a world which contained nothing capable of evil. . . . Not even God can love a puppet. Plato, in the Timaeus, would have us believe that the creation of the world was the victory of persuasion over force. This is a doctrine that Christian theologians can ill afford to overlook. Undoubtedly, as far as man can ascertain, Gods will to give man freedom of will has made evil possible. However, God does not make it a practice generally to override human freedom of choice, for the obvious reason that for Him to do this, in view of His endowment of man with this power, would be the very height of inconsistency. Rather, God resorts to persuasion: hence the Gospel (Rev. 14:6eternal good news) is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believes (Rom. 1:16), The Gospel embodies Gods persuasive, rather than his coercive, power. (Cf. Luk. 1:8-13, Mat. 28:18-20, Rom. 10:4-15, 1Co. 1:20-25, 2Co. 5:17-21, 1Ti. 2:3-4, etc.).
(2) Why did not God interfere and keep man from falling into sin? To this we reply: (a) the fact that God did not interfere is conclusive evidence that He should not have done so. For man even to question the Divine Intelligence and Will is sheer presumption, (b) Temptation is not the cause, but the proof, of an inner disloyalty (cf. Mat. 5:28, 1Jn. 3:15). To the extent that the human heart is loyal (1Co. 15:58) temptation has little power over it. It follows, therefore, that temptation serves primarily to reveal our real interior selves to us and to our fellow men, (c) If God had interposed His power in the first temptation and so prevented man from disobedience, to act consistently He would be compelled to interfere in all similar cases; otherwise, He would be a respecter of persons, which by the authority of His own Word He is not (Act. 10:34, Rom. 2:11, 1Pe. 1:17). In effect, this would be to set aside natural order and to govern the moral universe by force (miracle).
(3) How could so terrible a penalty justly have been connected with disobedience to stick an apparently trivial command? To this we reply: (a) The very simplicity of the command enhanced the importance of the loyalty test involved, and so made disobedience all the more reprehensible. Adam and Eve could not have failed to understand the simple prohibition required of them; hence, their disobedience arose out of sheer disloyalty. The overt act of rebellion was, therefore, the revelation of a will corrupted by lust. This fact the guilty pair themselves recognized as evident from their attempt to hide from Gods presence.
4. Does not the fall of man, and its consequences, prove the Creation to have been a failure) Most emphatically, it does not. The real success of any undertaking, divine or human, is to be determined by the achievement of the desired ultimate end in view (Isa. 46:8-10). The end sought, both in Creation and in Redemption (Generation and Regeneration) is (a) Gods own glory in His vindication from the false charges brought against Him by Satan and his rebel hosts, and (b) mans eternal Beatitude, which is inseparably linked with Gods glory (Eph. 3:8-12). Therefore, if one, and only one, saint is revealed in the Judgment, redeemed in spirit and soul and body (1Th. 5:23, 1Co. 6:19-20), the process of discomfiting Satan which began at Calvary will be gloriously consummated (Rom. 12:19; Rom. 16:20; Deu. 32:25; 1Co. 6:2-3; 1Co. 15:26). In short, the greatness of Gods Plan of Redemption is to be measured, not by the number of the saved (Mat. 7:14), but by the sheer wonder of the salvation to be revealed at the last great Day (Act. 3:20-21; 1Co. 2:6-10; 1Co. 15:50-58; Rev. 20:11-12; Rev. 21:1-6; Rev. 22:1-5).
* * * * *
FOR MEDITATION AND SERMONIZING
Lessons From the Story of the Fall
The most poignant human interest stories in literature are to be found in the Bible, and of these the account of mans Temptation and Fall is second to none. Note the following practical lessons to be learned from this Genesis narrative:
1 It points up the havoc that can be wrought by a single act of disobedience to God. As a consequence of mans first act of rebellion against God, the race has suffered toil, sorrow, disease, and death universally.
Twas but a little drop of sin
We saw this morning enter in,
And lo, at eventide a world is drowned.
Farrar has written: The guilty wish of one woman has swollen into the irremediable corruption of a world, Sin is self-propagating, and its reproductive powers are almost supernatural. Like a huge locomotive, it gathers momentum as it goes, saturating the whole human family with corruption, spreading violence, suffering, disease and death in its wake, There is no limit to the spread of the consequences of a single evil deed. Tom Paine once wrote a book, entitled The Age of Reason, a book which has pushed thousands of impressionable minds over the precipice into infidelity. The effects of this single activity will never disappear entirely, Why, then, should not the unrepentant person who sets in motion such a never-ending flood of iniquity suffer correspondingly a never-ending punishment? Just as the good lives of the saints do follow with them up to the Throne of God and the Life Everlasting (Rev. 14:13), so does the unrighteousness of the neglectful and the disobedient follow with them into their final state of eternal separation from God, timeless Hell. (Cf. Psa. 89:14; Mat. 25:31-46; 2Th. 1:7-10; 1Pe. 4:17; Heb. 10:27; Heb. 10:31). Those squeamish souls who would eliminate the fact of Hell simply are blind to the fact of the heinousness of sin. Let no one be fooled into assuming that sin can ever be eradicated by such boastful devices as eugenics, new thought, Theosophy, Bahaism, the social gospel, the religion of humanity, salvation by character, ad infinitum, ad nauseam-. There is one, and only one remedy for sin: that remedy is the atoning blood of Him who died on the Cross (Mat. 26:28, Act. 20:28, 1Jn. 1:7).
2. It points up the contagious character of sin. Every person is a center of moral influence from which he cannot possibly escape. There is a small stream which pours down one range of the Alleghenies in Western Pennsylvania, which is joined later by another small stream, near Pittsburgh: the union of these two streams (in fact they are now rivers themselves) forms a great river. Follow the course of this river past the peaceful hills and fertile valleys of Southern Ohio, past the place where it is joined by the Miami, past the southern border of Hoosierdom to the point where this now rapidly swelling river is united with the torrents of the Wabash, and by the time one reaches Cairo, Illinois, those waters which once stole quietly down their respective mountainsides in Pennsylvania and in West Virginia, are lost in raging billows of the mighty Father of Waters, whence they find their way into the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately into the bosom of the great deep. So it is with moral influence. We repeat that it is only reasonable that a man who sets in motion a scheme of sin that will damn the souls of his fellow creatures in eternity, should suffer a punishment as timeless as the consequences of his sins. Eternal punishment is both Scriptural and reasonable. Indeed we not only believe that what is Scripturally recorded is true because it is in the Bible, but we believe also that what is recorded in the Bible is in the Bible because it is true, that is, in harmony with the very nature of things. Men do not like the doctrine of Hell because they are unwilling to admit that they are sinners.
3. It points up the folly of trying to hide our sins from God. Adam and Eve tried to hide their guilt; so did Cain (Gen. 3:9-15); so did King Saul (1 Samuel 15); so did Achan (Joshua 7); so did Ananias and Sapphira (Act. 5:1-11)and they all failed miserably. Num. 32:23Be sure your sin will find you out (Luk. 8:17, 1Ti. 5:24-25). It is far better to flee to God when we sin, than to try to run from Him. It is far better to go to Him with open confession, as did the Prodigal Son, because confession is the shortest road to forgiveness (Luk. 15:21, 1Jn. 1:7). David could say from personal experience, Psa. 32:1Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. And the beloved John testifies: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1Jn. 1:9). Catharsis is the only remedy for the burden of guilt.
4. It provides a meaningful prototype of Everymans experience with sin. Even though we regard the story of the Fall of Man as being essentially historical, we should not miss the profound spiritual teaching embodied in it, the aspect which is in fact the more important. This account in the third chapter o Genesis portrays vividly the manner by which sin gains entrance into the soul, and the consequences that ensue. At first, the suggestion may be very subtle, but once entertained, it bears evil fruit. Just as the disease germ enters the body, and, on finding conditions favorable, germinates and produces sickness and death, so the germ of sin (which usually takes the form of questioning Gods goodness) entering the soul, if it finds even the least favorable condition, will ultimately breed vice and crime. We should avoid exposing ourselves to needless temptations, because human character is never so strong as to be able to resist Satans subtlety under all circumstances. We should keep our inner lives so strong, by feeding on the Bread of Life who came down from Heaven (Joh. 6:35; Joh. 6:48), that is, the Logos, the Word, that the germ of sin cannot readily find breeding-places in them. The prayer, And bring us not into temptation (Matt. (Gen. 6:13) has real significance when viewed in this light.
5. It points up the folly of failing to put God first in all things. The Scriptures intimate that Eve was the first to sin, and that Adam, partly out of sympathetic affection, followed her into the transgression (1Ti. 2:13-14). There are, there have always been, sheer multitudes who prefer Hell with their relatives to Heaven with God. Adam had the opportunity of parting company with his wife and remaining true to God. Sapphira had the same opportunity, but she, like Adam, preferred her spouse above the Lord. People seem never to realize that faith, obedience, salvation, worship, etc., are personal (individual) matters. Lot seems to have been the one Bible personage who exercised good judgment in this respect. When the Divine order came to him and his family to flee Sodom and not look back under any circumstances, Lot obeyed. He did not even look back to see what was happening to his wife (Genesis 19)he was too busily engaged in working out his own salvation, no doubt with fear and trembling (Php. 2:12). Jesus teaching on this matter is too explicit for either conjecture or doubt (Mat. 10:34-39, Luk. 14:26, Mar. 3:31-35). There is no such thing in Gods Plan as salvation by proxy.
6. It shows that God never intended that man and woman should be placed in competition with each other in any area of life. Eve was created to be the mans counterpart, a helper meet for his needs. This teaches us that her position is complementary, not competitive. As his counterpart, she is neither his superior nor his inferior. If man has the greater physical strength and more proper use of his reasoning faculties, woman undoubtedly has the greater sensitiveness and the more generous heart. However, in the penalty pronounced upon the Woman, the fact is clearly set forth that, in the marriage relationship, man is the divinely recognized head. The woman was created for the man, not the man for the woman. She supplies a place in the creation, by nature and impulse, that man cannot possibly fill, a place that would be a blank without her. Hence, any attempt to place the two in competition with each other, in any field of human activity, is a violation of the Divine intention. Womans true sphere of action is the home; and in discharging her obligations to husband and children she often exerts greater influence than the man: hence the well-known Scripture phrase, Man that is born of woman (Job. 14:1, Mat. 11:11).
7. It points up the fact that the essential principle of sin is selfishness. The choice made by Adam and Eve was the choice of their own way of doing things. above Gods way of doing things. It was the choice of earthiness over godliness, of worldly wisdom over heavenly wisdom, of pride over humility, of rebelliousness over obedience to authority. This is the choice which we must all make sooner or later (Mat. 25:31-46, Php. 2:5-11, Rev. 20:11-15). Mat. 6:24Ye cannot serve God and mammon. It is doubtful that a sin is ever committed that is not the choice of self above God.
The Beneficent Curse
Gen. 3:17Cursed is the ground for thy sake. Note the following matters embodied in this declaration:
1. The significance of what is called in Scripture the curse. (1) In the language of everyday life, a curse (cursing, swearing) is an invocation, by one person, of Divine wrath and judgment on some other person or thing (Mat. 5:34, Luk. 6:28, Rom. 12:14, Jas. 3:9-10). This, of course, is a human vanity, because no man has either the power or the right to try to manipulate God for his own selfish ends (Exo. 20:7, Deu. 5:11, Mat. 5:34, Jas. 5:12). This vanity is similar to that of the deluded cultists who would handle poisonous snakes to prove that God will protect them by miracle: as a matter of fact they are trying to put God on the spot, whereas God alone chooses when and where He shall do mighty works and wonders and signs (Act. 2:22). Vindication belongs to God only (Deu. 32:35, Rom. 12:19), and only as He wills it to be accomplished. (Deu. 6:13; Deu. 10:20, and similar texts, have reference to the juridical oath, violation of which is perjury, a crime severely punished throughout the entire ancient world.) (2) In the Bible, however, the term (the curse) is used frequently in a special sense, namely, as indicating the Divine penal decree covering all mankind as a consequence of the universality of sin (Rom. 2:23, Gal. 3:10-14, Rev. 22:3). This is the import of the term as it appears in Gen. 3:17. Translated into the concrete, it is the curse of sin that is implicit in this use of the word. Sin is the universal curse which man has brought on himself; it is sin that is, and has always been, the cause of all his troubles. 1Jn. 3:4Sin is lawlessness.
2. The significance of the Divine anathema with respect to the ground. It is indeed significant that it is the ground, not man, which is under the curse. The Divine judgmentthe various aspects of the penalty pronounced on mankindwas to come upon him from the ground. With respect to toil, the ground contributes to the execution of this phase of the penalty by the niggardliness of the soil and the frequent fruitlessness of human labor. This aspect of the curse is actualized too in what is popularly known as the struggle for existence, in the dog-eat-dog competition which the race apparently must suffer to attain any satisfactory measure of temporal security. (2) Weeds and thorns and thistles also are produced by, and come upon man from, the ground. (3) The human body, moreover, is ultimately consigned to the ground, that is, to the physical elements of which it is composed: the corporeal part of man is dust and ashes, whether ultimately suffering interment or cremation (Ecc. 3:20; Ecc. 12:7; Psa. 103:14; Psa. 146:4). Physical death is a Divine appointment (Heb. 9:27) and one which all men keep sooner or later. Thus it becomes obvious that Mother Earth plays a prominent role in the execution of the penalty pronounced on humankind.
3 The express Divine declaration that this was to be a beneficent curse. Cursed is the ground for they sake. Never forget this phrase, for thy sake. What does this teach us? It teaches us that every drop of perspiration that trickles down the toilers face, that every weed and thorn and thistle which mars the beauty of woodland and field and garden, that every solemn procession which wends its way to the city of marble, that every funeral dirge, every parting sob at the graveside, every clod of dirt that is heaped on the coffinthat all this is for the purpose of teaching man that he is lost and in danger of perishing forever, and indeed will perish in Hell unless he accepts and commits himself to the Remedy which God, out of the depths of His ineffable grace, has provided for his redemption. Every decree, every ordinance of God, is for mans good. And His positive ordinances are no exception. For example, both Christian baptism and the Lords Supper are for our own good as Christians and especially for the good of others, in consequence of our witnessing visibly, by obedience to these ordinances. to the facts of the Gospel, that Christ died for our sins, and that He was buried and that He was raised up the third day according to the Scriptures (1Co. 15:1-4). Incidentally, any act which would substitute anything else than a burial in water and raising up therefrom for Scriptural baptism (Rom. 6:3-11, Col. 2:12), obviously vitiates the witnessing aspect of the ordinance and so thwarts the purpose of God in ordaining it.
The fact needs to be emphasized that our world (mankind) is still under this curse, and because sin is universal, the curse of sin is universal. Joh. 3:17God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should be saved through him. Why did not God send the Son to judge the world? Because the world (mankind) is under Divine judgment, and has been since man allowed sin to come into it. It was in view of mans danger of perishing, of being lost forever, that God sent the Son that the world might be saved through Him. God gave His Son, the Son willingly gave His life, and the Spirit has given us the knowledge of the Way, the Way that leads to redemption in spirit and soul and body (1Th. 5:23). Without Christ, man would be without an Atonement (Covering) for sin, lost forever, condemned to the same fate as the angels who kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation (Jud. 1:6).
The preachers most difficult task today is that of convincing and convicting men of the fact of sinsin generally, and sin in their own lives. And yet, to deny the fact of sin is to deny the existence of moral law; and this, in turn, is to deny the existence of the Eternal Lawgiver, the Author of the moral law. To deny sin, therefore, is to be, for all practical purposes, an atheist: it is to believe, and to live, as if there were no God, no right and wrong, no judgment, no life to come. Millions are walking in this broad way that leads to a godless eternity (Mat. 7:13-14). Note well that for Gods saints there will be no curse in the Home over there (Rev. 22:3).
* * * * *
FROM INNOCENCE TO HOLINESS
THE FALL
RECOVERY
Adam
The Person Tempted
Christ
Eden
The Place
Wilderness
Innocence
The State
Holiness
Satan
The Tempter
Satan
To Disobedience
The Appeal
To Disobedience
Death
The Result
Life
Sin the Conqueror
(Gen. 3:1-8)
Sin Conquered
(Mat. 4:1-11)
In Eden where everything pulsated with life, God spoke of death (Gen. 2:17; Gen. 3:3-4). In the world at large, where everything around us speaks of death, God, through His Son, speaks of life. (Joh. 1:4; Joh. 5:40; Joh. 6:35; Joh. 10:10; Joh. 11:25-26; Joh. 14:6; Joh. 20:31; cf. Rom. 8:6; 2Co. 2:16; 2Co. 5:4; 2Ti. 1:10; Heb. 7:16; 1Jn. 5:12; Rev. 2:7; Rev. 2:10; Rev. 3:5; Rev. 22:2; Rev. 22:14). Is it not most significant that Jesus had so little to say about death, and so very much to say about life?
REVIEW QUESTIONS ON PART THIRTEEN
1.
Explain how the Genesis account of the Fall exemplifies the psychology of temptation.
2.
Explain what is meant by physical evil as distinct from moral evil
3.
Define the three categories of evil as given by Leibniz.
4.
Explain: Order is natures first law.
5.
Why do we say that the problem of the origin of evil cannot be resolved by human speculation?
6.
To what source, then, must we look for the understanding of this problem?
7.
Explain how the caption, The Inquest, is applicable to this chapter.
8.
Explain what is meant by the universality of the content of the first three chapters of Genesis.
9.
Explain the anthropomorphic character of this account and the probable reason for it.
10.
What was the general reaction of Adam and Eve to the Divine Inquest?
11.
List the steps in the uncovering of their guilt.
12.
What facts in this section reveal their rebelliousness?
13.
Explain what is meant by the fatherly motif in relation to this account.
14.
Explain what is meant by projection as a defense mechanism.
15.
Show how the whole human race is guilty of this device of passing the buck.
16.
What factors do men today blame for their own neglect and disobedience?
17.
Explain the statement that the forbidden fruit turned sour for Adam and Eve.
18.
Explain the penalty pronounced on the serpentkind.
19.
Explain the mysterious oracle concerning the Seed of a woman.
20.
Why do we say that this was the first intimation of redemption?
21.
In whom was the oracle fulfilled?
22.
According to this oracle, what is to be Satans last end?
23.
Explain what is meant by catharsis and how it is related to the unburdening of guilt.
24.
Why do we say that the controversy about the words almah and parthenos is largely academic in relation to the accounts of the Virgin Birth given us by Matthew and Luke?
25.
Show how the Bible is the most realistic of all books.
26.
Show how it is, in a special sense, the Book of Life.
27.
Show how it is, at the same time, unfailingly optimistic.
28.
How is this optimism implicit in the oracle of Gen. 3:15?
29.
Explain the progressive unfolding of the Messianic anticipation.
30.
What was the penalty pronounced on womankind?
31.
Explain the aspect of this penalty having reference to wifely pain and sorrow.
32.
Explain the aspect of this penalty that has reference to womans subordination to man in the conjugal relationship.
33.
What are the reasons for this subordination?
34.
Explain the apostolic teaching with respect to womans role in Christian faith and practice.
35.
What was the threefold penalty pronounced on mankind?
36.
How is the cursing of the ground related to the execution of this penalty?
37.
What are the blessings of honest labor?
38.
In what sense, then, is toil a phase of the penalty?
39.
What is the significance of the deterioration of nature as indicated by the thorns and thistles it produces?
40.
What is mans last and most terrible enemy, and why is it so?
41.
What are the three terms by which death is described in Scripture?
42.
What are the two kinds of death indicated in the penalty for sin?
43.
What does the phrase dust of the ground suggest in modern scientific language?
44.
What is meant by the term psychosomatic unity as the definition of human nature?
45.
Are we justified in supposing that man was created immortal?
46.
What is the specific meaning of the term immortality as it is used in the Bible?
47.
Distinguish between immortality and survival.
48.
What was the probable correlation between the mortality of Adam and the fruit of the Tree of Life? How is this often explained literally? How may it be explained symbolically?
49.
In what other texts do we find the Tree of Life mentioned in Scripture?
50.
Is there any suggestion in the narrative of the Fall that man and woman would have lived forever had they not sinned?
51.
What are some of the examples of mans insistence on playing God?
52.
What is physical death?
53.
Why do we say that it is not the real death?
54.
In what sense is physical death but the shadow of real death (Psalms 23)?
55.
In what sense did Adam and Eve suffer spiritual death?
56.
In what sense is spiritual death the root of all evils?
57.
What, according to the Bible, is the second death?
58.
Why, according to Scripture, is death in the world and why is it universal?
59.
Explain Satans progeny as listed in the Epistle of James.
60.
What were the elements that characterized the immediacy of the execution of the penalty pronounced on man?
61.
Why were the Man and the Woman expelled from Eden?
62.
What probably did the Cherubim signify?
63.
What evidently was signified by the Flaming Sword?
64.
What is a prolepsis and why is Gen. 3:23 considered an example of it?
65.
What is the apparent significance of the coat of skins?
66.
Explain the fallacy implicit in the phrase, the lost chance of immortality.
67.
What must be regarded as the main sources of this fallacy?
68.
Show how failure to take into account the teaching of the Bible as a whole contributes in a special sense to this fallacy.
69.
State the three views of the ultimate destiny of the body.
70.
Explain the Biblical doctrine of the redemption of the body.
71.
Show how the Atonement is related to the Christian doctrine of immortality.
72.
Explain the fallacy in the view that immortality can threaten the sovereignty of God.
73.
Explain how the ultimate destiny of the bodies of the saints is an integral part of Gods Eternal Purpose.
74.
Show how the Biblical doctrine of the destiny of the bodies of the saved proves that the Genesis account of the Fall could not have been a borrowing from Babylonian mythology.
75.
Review the symbolism of the various elements of the Genesis narrative of the Fall.
76.
Do you agree that conscience is born in the passing from innocence to responsibility? Explain your answer.
77.
How does the birth of conscience presuppose a Fall morally?
78.
Explain how the Genesis account of the Fall is a picture of what happens in the life of every human being.
79.
Distinguish between innocence and holiness.
80.
To what extent is it true that man was created perfect?
81.
Why do we insist that he was not created morally perfect, that is, holy)
82.
Explain Campbells view of the three states of man.
83.
In what sense was the Fall a fall downward?
84.
In what sense can it be considered a fall upward?
85.
On what ground do we conclude that Creation and Redemption are closely related in Gods Remedial System?
86.
What is meant by the statement that man is predestined to be free?
87.
Is man depraved? Is he totally depraved?
88.
What intelligent beings are said in Scripture to be totally depraved? What are the Scripture texts that assert this truth?
89.
How does depravity differ from immaturity, and from irrationality?
90.
How is freedom defined in this text?
91.
To what extent is personal freedom more or less limited?
92.
Can freedom be rightly defined as motiveless action? Explain.
93.
How is freedom defined negatively?
94.
Explain what is meant by self-determination.
95.
Of what type of being only is freedom an essential property?
96.
Define voluntarism and necessitarianism.
97.
What are the two general kinds of necessitarianism?
98.
What is meant by the statement that every person is unique?
99.
Explain the three kinds of determinism.
100.
Point out the fallacies in Skinners theory of determinism.
101.
What attitude has common sense always taken toward these deterministic theories?
102.
What does immediate personal experience testify regarding the persons power of choice?
103.
Why cannot life and personality be reduced to mechanistic theories?
104.
Explain: In every human act three factors are involved, namely, heredity, environment, and the personal reaction.
105.
Why does the stronger motive always win?
106.
What was Kants theory of freedom?
107.
Explain why freedom of choice is necessary to a human act.
108.
Explain why freedom of choice is necessary to morality, to democracy, and even to science as free inquiry.
109.
What is voluntariness?
110.
Why, then do we conclude that Adam and Eve could have chosen otherwise than they did choose?
111.
How answer the question: Why did God create man capable of falling?
112.
How answer the question: Why did not God interfere and keep man from falling into sin?
113.
How answer the question: How could so terrible a penalty justly have been connected with disobedience to such an apparently trivial command?
114.
How answer the objection: Does not the fall of man prove that the Creation was a failure?
115.
List the important lessons to be gotten from the Narrative of the Fall.
116.
Why do we affirm that this Narrative is one of the greatest human interest stories in world literature?
117.
On what grounds do we hold that the curse pronounced on the ground, and the accompanying penalty on humankind, is a beneficent curse?
118.
Does the Scripture teach that the world (mankind) is under Divine judgment?
119.
What according to Scripture was Gods purpose in sending His Son into the world?
120.
When and under what circumstances, according to Scripture teaching, will this curse and the accompanying penalty be removed?
Fuente: College Press Bible Study Textbook Series
9. Where art thou , where thou? or, where (shall I find) thee? How is it that I must now search for thee, who hast been wont to watch for my coming, and hail it with delight? The entire passage is in condescension to human conceptions. Not that Jehovah was unable to find the guilty one, but to intensify the picture of the sinner attempting to hide himself from Omniscience. Here, truly, is revealed the Good Shepherd seeking after the lost sheep.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
‘And the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” ’
God speaks directly to the man. This is no vague call but a word spoken directly to the heart. God, of course, knew where he was, but He was making him face up to his present situation. He was giving him a chance to express his deep sorrow and repentance.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Gen 3:9. And the Lord God, &c. It is not to be supposed that the Omniscient either knew not where Adam and Eve were, or wanted to be informed of what they had done, when he asked the questions in this and the 11th verse: but these questions are used to introduce the account following, and to shew us, more humano, after the manner of men, what was the consequence of this great transgression. This observation should be remembered, as many instances of the like kind occur.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Gen 3:9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where [art] thou?
Ver. 9. Where art thou? ] Not as if God knew not; for he searcheth Jerusalem with lights; yea, himself is the “father of lights,” Jam 1:17 the great eye of the world, to whom the sun itself is but a snuff. He hath “seven eyes upon one stone”; Zec 3:9 yea, “his eyes run to and fro through the earth”; 2Ch 16:9 and “all things are naked and open” – naked, for the outside, and open, for the inside – “before the eyes of Him with whom we have to deal.” Heb 4:13 Simple men hide God from themselves, and then think they have hid themselves from God; like the struthiocamelus, they thrust their heads into a hole, when hunted, and then think none seeth them. a But he “searcheth” – so one may do, yet not find – “and knoweth.” Psa 139:1 “He seeth” – so one may do, yet not observe – “and pondereth.” Pro 5:21 Though men hide their sins, as close as Rachel did her idols, or Rahab the spies; though they dig deep to hide their counsels, God can and will detect them, with a woe to boot. Isa 29:15 For “hell and destruction are before him”; Pro 15:11 how then can Saul think to be hid behind the stuff, or Adam behind the bush? At the voice of the Lord he must appear, will he, nill he, to give account of his fear, of his flight. This he doth (but untowardly) in the words following.
a Pliny
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Where art thou? The 1st Q. in O.T. comes from God to the sinner. Compare 1st Q. in N.T. of the seeking sinner, “Where is He? “(Mat 2:2).
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
Gods Condemnation of Adam and Eve
Gen 3:9-21
God does not wait for Adam to find his own way back, but hastens in search of him. Where art thou is rendered in one version, Alas for thee. Jesus met the Tempter not in a garden, but in the wilderness. He suffered being tempted, but has become to all who obey Him a Life-giving Spirit, and the Author of Eternal Salvation. Read 1Co 15:45, and Heb 5:9. The penalty is gone, borne by Him in His own body on the Cross. So Paul affirms in Rom 5:14, etc. Our bias toward evil is counteracted by His indwelling through the Holy Spirit; so we are taught in Rom 8:1-4. He bruises Satan beneath the feet of those who trust Him. Such is His own assurance in Luk 10:19, and Mar 16:17. He transforms the other results of sin. Through pain the mothers love is drawn out to her child. Hard work is educative and ennobling. Death is the gate of life. Where sin abounded, grace abounds much more.
Fuente: F.B. Meyer’s Through the Bible Commentary
Gen 4:9, Gen 11:5, Gen 16:8, Gen 18:20, Gen 18:21, Jos 7:17-19, Rev 20:12, Rev 20:13
Reciprocal: Num 22:9 – What men 1Ki 19:9 – What doest thou 2Ki 5:25 – Whence Job 15:21 – dreadful sound Ecc 6:10 – and it Luk 16:2 – How Luk 17:17 – but Act 5:9 – How Act 9:4 – Saul Act 22:7 – Saul
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Gen 3:9. The Lord God called, (probably with a loud voice,) Where art thou? This inquiry after Adam, may be looked upon as a gracious pursuit in order to his recovery. If God had not called to him to reduce him, his condition had been as desperate as that of fallen angels.
Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
God’s confrontation of the sinners 3:9-13
This section begins to relate the effects of the Fall. We now see the God who was creator and benefactor in chapters 1 and 2 as judge (cf. Gen 1:3-4). He first interrogated the offenders to obtain a confession, then announced new conditions for life, and finally provided for the sinners graciously. The sinners’ responsibility was to confess their sins and to accept and trust in God’s provision for them (cf. 1Jn 1:9).
Note that God took the initiative in seeking out the sinners to re-establish a relationship with them. Evidence of God’s love is His unwillingness to abandon those He loved even when they failed to do His will. His approach was tender as well as gracious (Gen 3:9; Gen 3:11; Gen 3:13).
"In . . . spite of the apparent similarity in expression to pagan religions the anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament reveal all the more remarkably a sharply contrasting concept of deity." [Note: Edwin M. Yamauchi, "Anthropomorphism in Ancient Religions," Bibliotheca Sacra 125:497 (January-March 1968):29.]
The text records several effects of the Fall on Adam and Eve.
1. They felt guilt and shame (Gen 3:7)
2. They tried to change these conditions by their own efforts (Gen 3:7).
3. They fled from God’s presence out of fear of Him (Gen 3:8; Gen 3:10).
4. They tried to blame their sin on another rather than confessing personal responsibility (Gen 3:12-13).
The fact that Adam viewed God’s good gift to him, Eve, as the source of his trouble shows how far he fell (Gen 3:12). He virtually accused God of causing him to fall by giving him what he now regarded as a bad gift.