Frail and Faithful The Character of Humanity in Gen 3—11

“What sort of thing am I?” Every creature of character eventually asks this question. The Greek philosopher Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“I think, therefore I am,” proclaimed French philosopher, Rene Descartes, after long and skeptical musings.

When Jean Valjean asks it dramatically at a turning point in is life in Les Miserables, he answers, “Who am I?...My soul belongs to God, I know / I made that bargain long ago / He gave / me hope, when hope was gone / He gave me strength to journey on! / Who am I? / Who am I? /I am Jean Valjean!”

While living out the last days of his prison stay under the Nazis, the German churchman Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a poem called “Who Am I?” In it, he reflects on the high regard others have for him, compared with his own feelings of inadequacy and failure. He closes with the one thing of which he is sure:

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!”

What is it to be human? What is it to be you? Genesis 3 through 11 introduce us to both the frail and the faithful in us. Let’s read on!

Part One – Freedom and “The Fall”

How free are you? Do your choices feel like they are really yours to make, or are they determined by other agents or forces? What does God have to do with your free choosing? What does true freedom feel like? In Genesis 3, we get our first window into human freedom.

Theologians and philosophers across the ages have given widely different answers.

o Hard Determinists. Some, see us as programmed/predestined persons whose every act has been scripted by our genetics and socialization/God’s will. Those who hear the Bible saying we are predestined make their way to passages like John 15.16 and Romans 8.29.

©Allen Hilton 1 Fran Park Center o Completely Free Will. On the other end of the spectrum are people who believe that every decision we make hinges solely on each individual’s free decision-making process. Christians who hear the Bible saying they are utterly free to choose gravitate to passages like John 7.17 and 1 Corinthians 10.13.

o Soft Determinists. Finally, there are many, many people who see human acts as partly determined by genetics and socialization/God’s and partly by a freely-choosing self. The fact that both hard determinists and free will people can appeal to a long string of Bible passages – even sometimes within the same book (e.g. John 15.16 and 7.17 above) – tells them that this is a constructive (or not so constructive) tension in humanity.

Let’s look at Genesis 3 and see whether it helps us with this issue.

A Fruit Tree and Human Freedom

For the first time, in Genesis 3, we encounter humans choosing actions that go against God’s commands. In chapters 1 and 2, the divine voice and human actions seem consonant, so that when God says people should have dominion, name the animals, tend the garden, etc., we take it for granted that and will do so. It is not until chapter 3 that we recognize humanity’s prerogative to disobey God.

“Eat from any tree except this one,” God says, and suddenly humans have a chance to do wrong by God. Like a child who’s been told, “Don’t touch!” become curious and a serpent ushers them toward dalliance. The result is an all-new static on the line between God and humans. Communication had always flowed freely between God and the humans before this. Now, though, Adam and Eve hide from God, then blame each other and the serpent, then face the consequences of defying God’s way. Result: they have to relocate .

Are Adam and Eve free?

o A hard determinist looking at this passage would see inevitability and predestination. “Serpent tempts, humans fall. That’s the way God set it up. All according to script!” o A free will believer would insist that Eve and Adam actually ponder their options and freely elect to eat – volunteer to defy God’s command. o Soft determinists would picture a more complex and nuanced set of causes – part human nature and part free choice.

Which do you see?

Also, can you see yourself in this picture? The Apostle Paul sure could. He reflects on his life before Christ in Romans 7, which becomes a poignant commentary on this scene from Eden. “I

©Allen Hilton 2 Fran Park Center was once alive apart from the law,” he says. “But when the law came in, Sin sprang to life, and I died.” Consider these equations; “Law = God’s Tree Command, and “Sin = Serpent.”

Do we humans naturally recoil against limitation? Think of times when you’ve experienced conflict with God.

Does your inner life ever feel this way? What “ushers” you into conflict with God? What consequences have you faced?

Misappropriated fruit, nakedness, fig leaves, a family’s exit from Eden’s paradise – these seem a bit quaint in the story. But you and I know that our author has a wider scope than this. Nothing less than human history is in play. “The Fall of Humanity” is the common title for this section of Genesis, and, in a way, this part of Genesis puts human freedom on trial.

In his chapter called “Rebellion” in The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky raises the question whether human freedom comes with too high a price tag. A disappointed character called Ivan chronicles all the inhumanity of adults toward children: abominable forms of abuse and torture against innocent kids. Ivan suffers the weight of human suffering, and especially the suffering free adults inflict on them. “It’s too high a price!” he fumes to his brother, the monk Alyosha. “And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."

©Allen Hilton 3 Fran Park Center Dostoevski famously built his characters around his own inner musings, so Ivan and Alyosha speak for the two opposed voices in the author’s internal dialogue. Both characters believe in human free will. Ivan sees the cost as too high. Alyosha ultimately trusts God with the whole messy, intricate web of human relations.

Caligula, Atilla the Hun, Adolf Hitler, the many genocidal leaders of history, the 9/11/01 attackers, the gunmen of Newtown and Parkland and Charlston, and all the others who dot history with the blood of their victims – all of these people were free to destroy. On the other hand, St. Francis, Mother Teresa, Claude Monet, and the kind person down your block were all built with the capacity and freedom to create and build people up.

According to Genesis 3, human freedom was God’s idea. So what do you think? Is it a good idea?

What does it cost humanity?

What does it cost God?

A Word from Brother Clive

Blessedly, C.S. Lewis brings his prodigious imagination to the project of understanding temptation and fall. In his brilliant book, Screwtape Letters, he has a Senior Tempter called Screwtape writes a series of strategic missives to his Underworld protégé, the Junior Tempter called Wormwood. In Letter 8, Screwtape takes on the complex nature of humanity and the opportunities it presents to a young devil.

My dear Wormwood,

So you 'have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away', have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Subgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one every told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians-- half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and

©Allen Hilton 4 Fran Park Center imaginations are in continual change, for as to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation-- the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life-- his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself-- creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because he has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in,, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs-- to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot 'tempt' to virtual as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be

©Allen Hilton 5 Fran Park Center deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next week I will give you some hints on how to exploit them,

Your affectionate uncle Screwtape

How does Lewis’ reflection on God and freedom resonate (or not) with your experience of God and your own freedom?

How does his reflection fit within the picture of God and humanity in Genesis 3?

What is your favorite line in Dostoevski or Lewis? Why do you like it?

Part Two – Fallout from the Fall

After Adam and Eve eat the fruit and leave the Garden, the next eight chapters of the play out the ramifications of their choice for subsequent humanity.

o and . The very first episode afterward features the first murder, when jealous Cain kills his brother Abel because he believes God likes him more. o Noah and the Flood. God calls Noah to build a boat, because God has decided to push the reset button because humanity, made in God’s image, has turned to violence and other wickedness. o The Tower of Babel. Even after the reset, humanity eventually plots to “storms the palace” of the heavens, in a way, wishing to build to godlike status and power.

All of this suggests that the of the human family doesn’t fall far from the tree of Eden. The Apostle Paul will later trace these and all other human evil to that original decision of Adam and Eve, writing, “Sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.” (Romans 5.12) For our purposes in Genesis, Paul

©Allen Hilton 6 Fran Park Center sees a thread that moves from the tree through fratricide, then broad human evil, and finally to the Babel desire to usurp God. Let’s trace that thread.

Envy’s Bitter Fruit In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve know the bliss of utter intimacy with God. In Genesis 4, they experience the destitution of a son’s murder. In his painting, “The First Mourning”, William Adolpho Bougereau captures their grief at finding Abel’s murdered body. Eve averts her eyes, Adam grabs his heart, and we all grieve right along with them.

As powerful as Adam and Eve’s mourning may be, the Book of Genesis leaves it to our later imaginings (Adam and Eve are never mentioned in the story), directing us instead to the grief and anger of God. After Cain has learns that God favors his brother’s sacrifice over his own, he prepares to do him in.

Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. 9 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” 10 And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood

©Allen Hilton 7 Fran Park Center is crying out to me from the ground! 11 And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.

When God asks where Abel is, Adam and Eve’s attempt to deceive God (“I do not know [where my brother is]!”) repeats itself in their son, but God will not be fooled. The question was a mere test. Abel’s blood “cries out to me from the ground!” says the Lord, and we get our first insight into the ultimate value God places on the lives He has created. (Later, at the Burning Bush of Exodus 3, God will tell Moses, “I have heard the cries of my people enslaved to Pharoah..”) As the consequence of Cain’s homicide, God curses the ground Cain must till and hides His face from Cain.

It is no wonder classic Christianity named Envy one of the Seven Deadly Sins and Cain its patron perpetrator. We all have it in us to think, with Tommy Smothers, that “Mom always liked you best.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyn6a_DrRX4) In Shakespeare’s time one was “orange with envy”, in our time it’s usually green, but whatever its hue this one rings true. Much later in the Bible’s story, David will act on envy when he takes Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11), envy will drive King Herod to pursue “the one who is born King of the Jews”, and the high priests will turn Jesus over to be tried by Pilate “on account of their envy.” (Mark 15.10) As vicious as Cain’s murder of Abel, we can all find our share of what drove him to it. It’s no wonder it’s cousin, coveting, became the capstone of the Ten Commandments.

When have you felt strong envy in your life?

What do you do about it when it arrives?

An Ark Tale

But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord. (Genesis 6.8)

The Noah story is harsh. In it, God sees human evil lain bare. These creatures, whom God declared “good” on the exalted sixth day of creation, who have been made “in the image of God”, have persistently turned against God and against one another. God is grieved, almost as if He didn’t see this coming. Our narrator tells us,

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart… Now the

©Allen Hilton 8 Fran Park Center earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. (Genesis 6.5-6, 11)

In response, God decides to destroy all of earth’s wicked, evil, corrupt, violent creatures except a very select few. Maybe you think, “Of course a righteous God can’t abide such evil!” Or you may be with a faithful friend recently said, “The God I believe in would not do this!”

However you come down on this, the story of Genesis has it that God is appalled at rampant human evil, then decides to destroy it and start again. That’s a pretty dreary plot line – both for literature and for history. Fredrick Buechner has reminded us how we deal with such bleak and terrifying stories: we give them to the kids.

We make it into a fairy tale, which no one has to take seriously – just the way we make dark jokes about disease and death so that we can laugh instead of weep at them; just the way we translate murder and lust into sixth-rate television melodramas, which is to reduce them to a size that anybody can cope with; just the way we take the nightmares of our age, the sinister, brutal forces that dwell in the human heart threatening always to overwhelm us, and present them as the Addams family or the monster dolls that we give, again, to children. Gulliver’s Travels is too bitter about man so we make it into an animated cartoon; Moby Dick is too bitter about God, so we make it into an adventure story for boys; Noah’s ark is too something-or-other else, so it becomes a toy with a roof that comes off so you can take the little animals out.

So, where is the light in this story? The answer comes in one verse: amid all the disappointments, amid the mass of human evil, amid the corruption and violence and human disobedience to God, one line stands out: “Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.” (Genesis 6.8)

The faithful remnant or even the lone faithful soul will become a theme in scripture. For now, it is a welcome sight for our sore eyes. “Noah found favor.” A bright light shines in the darkness of these chapters. “Noah found favor.”

Maybe you’re like I am, and you want to know just how Noah did it. “What kind of person does God like?” is probably a good question for us all to ask, and Noah’s story raises it.

The answer of Genesis seems both simple…and difficult. “Noah did all that God commanded him,” says our narrator twice (6.22 and 7.5) In fact, Noah’s obedience even leads to God’s new resolve: “Never again!” Never again will God flood the earth. Never again will God destroy all God has made. Noah’s obedience seems even to move God.

There’s a second element to Noah’s response that Buechner captures in his brilliant sermon, called “A Sprig of Hope”. He first tells how outlandish the voice that Noah thinks he has heard must sound, against the backdrop of every day life and clear skies. God’s ridiculous command to

©Allen Hilton 9 Fran Park Center build an ark leaves no between. Noah will have to decide, and if he says yes to God in a no-saying land, it will be the last normal decision he makes. Here’s Buechner:

When a man has to decide which way he is going to bet his entire life, it is very often the feet that finally tell the tale. There are Noah’s feet – dusty, a little slew- footed, Chaplinesque, stock still. You watch them. Even the birds in the trees watch. Which direction will the feet move, or will they move at all? It comes down to that with every man finally. And finally they do move. Maybe with spring in the step, maybe dragging a little, but they move nevertheless. And they move in the direction of…the lumber yard…as he bets his life on his voice.

This bet is called faith, and it’s what makes obedience happen. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years later, Noah will make the Faith Hall of Fame for it, because he believed a God he could not see and did what that mysterious voice told him to do. (Hebrews 11.7)

What are you betting your life on these days?

Babel Blitz

The last stop on the Depravity express that is Genesis 3—11 is the Tower of Babel. In it, humanity teams up to storm heaven. Ou seeThe whole human population speaks one language, y

“Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” 5 The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”

Do you know the word “etiology”? Etiologies are explanations for why things are the way they are by going back to a long-distant cause.

In Plato’s Symposium, he has Aristophanes trace erotic passion back to a time when the gods sliced ovular humans in half, sewed them up, and then spread them over the earth. Love (Greek = EROS) is the motive force that drives us to find “our other half.”

We’ve already run into a few biblical etiologies. A good way to remember what these do is to picture those moments when little kids ask their grandparents, “Why?!”

Why do snakes slither along on their belly? The serpent’s curse (Gen 3)

©Allen Hilton 10 Fran Park Center Why do women feel pain in childbirth? Eve’s curse (Gen 3) Why is it so hard to get the earth to yield crops? Adam’s curse (Gen 3) Why do rainbows appear in the sky? God’s promise “No more floods!” (Gen 6)

On one level, the Tower of Babel story is an etiology, because it offers reason why different peoples speak so many different languages: God confuses tongues and scatter people across the globe. Voila. We know why the U.N. General Assembly needs a translator and earbuds.

But in the Book of Genesis, and really the whole biblical (hi)story, the Tower episode does more than just explain why there’s Chinese and Swahili. It reveals the reason why God would call a “chosen people” and, by doing that, sets up God’s signature redemption strategy. The next paragraph after we hear how geographically and linguistically separated humanity has become, God reveals (next session for us) the Grand Plan for how to “bless all the families of the earth.” (Genesis 12.3) Did God cause his own problem, just to set up a solution, like a detective committing a crime so she can solve it? Or does the etiology oversimplify who God is – jealous of people’s empowerment and collaboration? What I know is that the redemption strategy that appears when we turn to the 12th chapter feels true to the God of Creation whom Jesus reveals. We can hear that God saying to the hosts of heaven, “We’ve created all of these people in my image, and now they hurt one another and can’t even understand one another. We gotta find a way to bless them all!” Solution? Work through a family = Call Abram and Sarai.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now, ask yourself, do you imagine God as a divider or a gatherer? Or both?

What experience inclines you that way?

For Next Time

Onward into God’s Grand Strategy to reverse Babel. Way off in the distance lie the Pentecost story of Acts 2, where “everyone hears the apostles speaking in their own native language,” and the vision of Revelation 7, in which “every tribe and every nation” is gathered singing praise to God. But between the point A of the depravity of Genesis 3—11 and those glimpses of Pentecost and Apocalypse lie Abraham and Sarah and a large, world-blessing family. Next week we will join them in Genesis 12—21. Feel free to read ahead!

©Allen Hilton 11 Fran Park Center