Holy Heilsgeschichte: In the Garden Richmond’s First Baptist Church, March 1, 2020, The First Sunday in Lent Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Welcome to the Season of Lent! And welcome to this new sermon series called “Holy Heilsgeschichte” (HILES- guh-shik-tuh). You may have seen the video of some of our members trying to pronounce this strange-sounding German word, often with hilarious results. Just so you’ll know, it means “salvation history.” I learned it when I was in seminary. And what I learned was that heilsgeschichte told the stories of how God has been at work from the very beginning to save his people, including this story from the Book of Genesis—the one about the Garden of Eden. We’ve heard it so many times we think we know it, and that can be a problem. For example: . I’ve heard people say, “Well, Eve never should have eaten that apple!” And I say, “What? There’s an apple in this story? Where does it say that?” It doesn’t. The people who bottle pomegranate juice think the forbidden fruit may have been a pomegranate.i When I lived in North Carolina and had a fig tree in my back yard I was pretty sure it was a fig. But the truth is, the Bible doesn’t say. . I’ve heard people say, “Well, if Adam had been there he would have stopped her.” In fact, there’s a children’s Bible that suggests the snake caught Eve in a vulnerable moment, when she was all alone, but the grownup’s Bible doesn’t say that.ii It says, “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.” . I’ve heard people say, “Well, if Satan hadn’t tempted them, they wouldn’t have done it.” Does the Bible say it was Satan who tempted them? No, it does not. It says, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.” If I’m reading that correctly it wasn’t Satan it was a serpent—a snake—who was distinguished among the many other wild animals the Lord God had made only because it was the craftiest of them all. So, if we’re going to hear this story as it was originally told we’re going to have to forget everything we’ve ever learned and listen with fresh ears. It might help to start at the beginning, and I mean the very beginning. Because this isn’t the only creation story in the Bible. If you turn back to Genesis, chapter one, you hear about a God who made everything there is just by saying the word. “Let there be light,” God said, and it was so. “Let there be earth and sea and sky, let there be sun, and moon, and stars, let there be fish, and fowl, and frogs,” and in every case—it was so. Near the end of that incredibly creative week God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our

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likeness.” iii

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them (NRSV).

And then we get to this other story, this second creation account, written in a very different style, presumably by a different author. In this version God makes people not through the spoken word, but with his own hands. He shapes the man’s body from the dust of the earth, and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. His name, “Adam,” is from adamah, the Hebrew word meaning “earth.” God takes this “earthling,” made of dirt, and puts him in the garden to till the soil. But after a few days of watching him work God realizes “it is not good for the man to be alone.” So he causes the man to fall into a deep sleep, takes a rib from his side, fashions it into a woman, and when she is ready he gives her back to the man. And the man likes what he sees. Unlike the porcupine and giraffe God may have brought him previouslyiv Adam says about Eve, “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. I will call her woman (or in Hebrew, ishah) because she was taken from man (in Hebrew, ish).” The author wraps up this part of the story by saying, “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” It’s a beautiful picture of that first couple, but it is a very different picture from the one that precedes it, where God makes men and women at the same time, in the divine image, simply by speaking a word. When people ask me to explain the difference I sometimes say, “Well we have four Gospels, four different stories of Jesus; why not two different stories of Creation?” But often I ask them to think about a movie that begins with a long shot of New York City, and then picture the camera zooming in on a particular apartment building, and then a particular window, and then a particular couple sitting in their living room. In the movie business they call that opening scene an “establishing shot.” It establishes where the story is going to take place. You could think of the Bible that way: the first chapter tells us where the story is going to take place—in this wonderful world that God has just spoken into being—and then we zoom in on this particular couple: Adam and Eve. Let’s talk about her for a minute. When I was a boy my mother used to say she wanted to be a good “helpmeet” for my father and I would think, “What kind of meat?” But she was quoting from the King James Version, where God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” In 1611, when the King James Version was published, that word could mean “fitting,” or “suitable.” A better translation for our time might be, “I will make a suitable helper for him.” But both of those English words come from the Hebrew word ezer (AY-zair), which simply means “help,” or “helper.” It is used 21 times in the Old Testament, and outside of this story it is always used of God.v Psalm 33:20 says, “Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and shield.” Psalm 70:5 says, “I am poor and needy; hasten to me, O God! You are my help and my deliverer!” Psalm 121:1 says, “I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come?”

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So, when God says that he is going to make for Adam a helper—an ezer—he means that he is going to make for him someone like himself, someone who can come to Adam’s rescue (incidentally, this might be a good time to hear the testimonies of every man who has been rescued by a woman). But this is also where it gets interesting, because if you know that first creation story you know that God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” In the second story God offers to make the man a helper, an ezer, a word that is elsewhere applied only to God. And when the man sees the helper God has made he says, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” It’s interesting because these human beings God has made are practically god-like: they bear God’s image and likeness; they sometimes perform the same divine functions; they are more alike than different. As I said, they are practically god-like already, and yet the thing that tempts them is the possibility of being “like God” (Gen. 3:4). Let’s take a closer look. Genesis, chapter 3, begins with the announcement that “the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.” Not Satan, not the Devil, but the serpent. And not “evil,” not “wicked,” but “crafty.” He asked the woman a question for clarification. “Did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?” And Eve answers with the command God gave Adam back in chapter 2, before she had even been created: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” She and Adam have been talking about that tree, apparently, and she has been paying attention. But then the serpent contradicts God (maybe he is evil). He says, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And you know what happened: she plucked the fruit and ate it and gave some to her husband. It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil all right, because as soon as they ate that fruit they knew the difference, and knew that they had done an evil thing. Have you ever had one of those moments? Where you want something so much that you can’t resist the temptation? And then, as soon as you have tasted that forbidden fruit, you find yourself filled with guilt and remorse?vi You wish you’d never done it; you wish you’d never been born. The Bible says that when Adam and Eve ate the fruit of that tree their eyes were opened, and these two who had been naked and unashamed were suddenly filled with shame. “They saw that they were naked,” it says, and stitched fig leaves together in a desperate attempt to cover themselves. It’s not in our reading for today, but the story continues. Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the garden, in the cool of the evening, and they hid themselves, which may be the most heartbreaking detail in the entire narrative. These two, who had walked with God in the garden, who had enjoyed his company and conversation, are now lurking in the bushes like fugitives. God calls out, “Adam, where are you?” And eventually the pinnacle of God’s creation steps out of the bushes naked and ashamed, trembling in his fig-leaf loincloth. He tries to explain himself, but God doesn’t need any explanation. He knows exactly what has happened. The crime has been committed; the verdict has been pronounced; all that remains is the sentence, and we brace ourselves for the worst. We know what God has promised: “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” We know what Paul has attested: “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).

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If God had chosen to blow those two back to the dust from which they had come it would have been nothing more than they deserved: it would have been justice. What God offers instead is mercy. After telling them how they will be punished (and they will be punished, make no mistake about that—the snake will have to crawl on its belly, the woman will have pain in childbirth, and the man will earn his living by the sweat of his brow), God clothes the man and woman in the skins of animals and sends them out of the garden. But notice that he does not give them a death sentence: he gives them a life sentence. Walter Brueggemann writes: “The miracle is not that they are punished, but that they live. Graciousness in this narrative is not just in verse 21, after the sentence. God’s grace is given in the very sentence itself. Perhaps “by one man comes death [as Paul says in Romans 5:12]. But the news is that life comes by this one God (cf. John 6:68-69).”vii Sometimes earthly parents do these things. They threaten their children with punishment beyond their ability to carry it out. “You walk out of this house now young lady and I will never let you back in!” “Talk to me like that one more time young man and I will cut you off!” They mean it in the moment, but when the time comes to follow through on their threats they can’t; their hearts won’t let them. This salvation story from Genesis doesn’t teach us much about ourselves. We know that we were sinners from the very beginning. But it does teach us something about God, something that will be repeated again and again in the pages of scripture, something that still seems like a miracle:

God is gracious and merciful, Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.viii

Holy Heilsgeschichte!

—Jim Somerville © 2020

i There’s a Pom commercial about Eve and the serpent that begins, “Some scholars believe it wasn’t an apple…” ii From the Good God podcast, Episode 93, in which Baptist pastor George Mason talked to Old Testament professor Jack Levison about Adam and Eve. iii Speaking to the other two persons of the Holy Trinity? iv Good God, Episode 93. v Ibid. vi Read the story of Amnon in 2 Samuel 13:1-23 for a good example of this. vii Walter Brueggemann, “Genesis,” in the Interpretation series (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), pp. 49-50. viii Joel 2:13 as one example.

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