Genesis 3: 8-15

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” The Lord God said to the serpent,

“Because you have done this,

    cursed are you among all animals

    and among all wild creatures;

upon your belly you shall go,

    and dust you shall eat

    all the days of your life.

I will put enmity between you and the woman

    and between your offspring and hers;

he will strike your head,

    and you will strike his heel.”

Sermon Text

As you receive this I should be in Buckhannon for Annual Conference. This is one of the rare Sundays I get to write a sermon I do not actually end up preaching. For those who stumble upon this online or who receive it in our weekly mailers, may this word – though not spoken aloud – be a blessing however it find you.

The passage we read above is the start of all trouble. After humanity betrayed God’s trust and ate of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, they hid and tried to cover their shame. Their attempt to hide could not overcome the compelling nature of God’s presence. When God asked them, “Where are you?” they could not help but cry back, “I heard your voice!” Even when they had done wrong, they still could not help but hear God and answer. There’s something to that, I think. If we have known God and we love God then even when we do wrong, we desire to be back with God again. A call comes out for us to come home, and we can only resist it for so long.

The first people had erred all the same, and they would face consequences for the wrong they had done. Sin, definitionally, puts distance between us and God. If God is the source of all life then distance from God is distance from life itself. Humanity did not need to be punished to suffer after the Garden – they had done that all themselves. God spells out the punishment for every participant in the whole debacle. Humanity would struggle to scrape a living out of the dirt, children would no longer be guaranteed to see adulthood, and loss would define more of life than plenty would. Hard time had entered the world, and no one could be blamed except for our own sinful selves.

The one who had initiated this deception, all the same, was a quite literal snake in the grass. This Primordial Serpent is described as being limbed and lingual, speaking and walking in a way that no serpent ever would be again. The story seems to want to explain how snakes came to slither rather than to wander and to leave tracks in the dirt wherever they go. In our Genesis study we recently looked at this story and how there is nothing in the text that actually calls the snake “the Devil,” or “Satan.” Where do we get this idea of the serpent as the source of all evil then?

I could here go into a history of the interpretation of the text, the way that Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian stories came together to make an understanding that fallen angels took the form of snakes to tempt humanity. That isn’t the question that is really being asked though. Why do we see the serpent as the source of all evil in Eden? Because it speaks to us on a personal and spiritual level. We as people know what it is to fight sin, to face temptation and not always win, to meet evil face to face, and struggle against it. We see the snake and its machinations against the first couple and in that we see a reflection of our own life.

We often treat Eden like something that happened once a long time ago. If we are more earnest in our reading, however, I think we can see it play out time and time again. We often know what we should do and yet do something else. We know what we should not do and yet we do it willingly and with relish. We who love God do not always reflect that love in our actions. We fail, we give-in, we sin – again and again and again. Eden is not a far-flung history, it is a reality we play out every day.

It is not wonder then that the story became for us a fight with primordial evil as an external force as much as an internal reality. If we can see sin as something solid, something outside ourselves, it is easier to imagine that we could overcome it. The sin of the first humans was in their unwillingness to follow God’s commands, an internal reality, but it was realized by the temptation of the serpent, and external reality.

The promise of Genesis 3 is not just that the Serpent will be reduced to a crawling beast and enemy of humanity, but that God will allow humanity a way to escape sin’s control.  The internal reality of our sin can be conquered with God’s help and the external manifestations of it can be put down. The curse of the serpent makes clear that Sin will not have the last word. The serpent is made into a stupid animal rather than a clever beast and the descendants of Eve are given victory over it. The skull of the serpent, of sin, will be crushed, and the heel of humanity will only ever be bruised.

On a grand scale this promise is called the “proto-evangelion,” the first instance of the Gospel. Christ will come and crush evil and allow us to escape from sin. Yet, God did not wait for Christ’s incarnation to begin this work. From Noah’s reception of the command, “Thou shalt not kill,” to Moses’s full reception of the Law, to the judges, to the prophets, and even till today – God is constantly working to empower people to conquer sin. We are not helpless in the face of the world’s evils. We are constantly being equipped to take counter wickedness with righteousness, love, and holiness.

I will close this unspoken sermon with a quote directly from John Wesley, his vocalization of what it means to be saved is one of the best I have seen, and it captures what kind of victory over sin – over the Serpent – we are promised in Genesis 3.

“By salvation I mean, not barely, according to the vulgar notion, deliverance from hell, or going to heaven: but a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, its original purity; a recover of the divine nature; the renewal of our souls after the image of God, in righteousness and true holiness, in justice, mercy, and truth.” – A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion.