There's trouble, it seems in Paradise. Everything had been going so well up until this. As the crown of all that God had made on this earth, God had installed the humans as his living images in the sanctuary of his garden, entrusting us with awesome responsibility in the world, but lavishing us with so much grace as to make it light and joyful to pursue his work (Genesis 2:7-15). There was only one commandment: enjoy freely everything that this garden has to offer, except for one measly limit, one and only one tree held back from us (Genesis 2:16-17). Can we bear to have all but one, to accept the principle that God is God and we are not? That's where we practice obedience.
But last Sunday, we caught a filthy intruder in the garden. Slithering in, his goal is to inject chaos into what had been so precariously arranged. Word by word, with a cunning care he whittles away at the woman's implicit faith in the LORD God, twisting God's words, portraying God as stingy, selfish, a source of starvation (Genesis 3:1). Luring her into conversation, he nudges her to think of God only in common with what she can't have, to think of what's forbidden as the center of her world (Genesis 3:2-3). Now the serpent can launch the next phase of attack: he quiets her fear of punishment, he trashes God's motives, says God lied to keep us in the dark and keep us down, but that humans can climb our own way to godhood and be a law unto ourselves (Genesis 3:4-5).
With every step of the way, the serpent – with a mix of half-truths and misdirection – has pulled the wool over her eyes on the pretext of helping her see better. Whispering from the outside, he's clouded her thinking. And in this, we have a stunning case study of the process of deception, of how our thinking runs wild from the purity of faith. So often, the way toward failure begins with error in our minds. And by the end of this conversation, the woman isn't acting out of a place of thinking God's thoughts after him. She's thinking with a compromised noggin, a head crammed with suspicions and doubts. She wonders who she can really trust. Her head spins.
So at this point, the serpent pulls back. He has nothing else to do. Like they said in the Middle Ages, “the devil is not a direct and sufficient cause of sin; he can only persuade or provide what is desirable.”1 Well, persuade he has. “The woman was deceived,” her mind whispered in and worked over (1 Timothy 2:14). But she still hasn't willed or done anything against the commandment. Confused though she is, she still doesn't have to.
At this point, she's got plenty of options. She can put the whole thing out of mind and walk away. She can opt to sleep on it, hoping her mind clears up by the next morning. She can see if her husband's perspective might help clarify her thinking, call her back to God's word. Best of all, she could pray. She could go seek the LORD face-to-face when he walks in the garden, submitting her clouded thinking to him for a decision. And the same is true for us when we find ourselves assailed by doubts or presumptions, by distortions in our thinking. We can mentally change the topic, we can sleep on it, we can seek help, or, best of all, we can pray and seek God's face.
But the woman takes a more dangerous path. “So the woman saw the tree...” (Genesis 3:6). With the serpent's words rattling around in her head, she aims her senses at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, at what the commandment held at a distance. Now, she isn't forbidden to look at the tree. But she gives the tree her full and focused attention. And what she sees, her deceived mind processes differently than before the serpent worked its charms on her.2 With faith compromised, there's plenty of room for perceptions to malfunction.
“So the woman saw that the tree was good...” (Genesis 3:6). The serpent told her that the tree had the power to make humans “like gods” (Genesis 3:5), so she'll practice by doing what God does. All through chapter 1, what happened day after day? “God saw that it was good,” whatever he had made (Genesis 1:12). Now, she puts herself in God's place as an observer and esteemer of the world, exercising her own independent evaluation of this tree.3 But she plays it like a parody, because whereas “the LORD looks on the heart” of his creation, she's going to “look on the outward appearance” and judge that way, with her senses (1 Samuel 16:7).
“So the woman saw that the tree was good for food” (Genesis 3:6). That's her first observation. It was, as some early Christians granted, a “sweet-flavored fruit.”4 The point is that what the woman notices here about the tree is that its fruit has a certain genuine goodness. The tree actually isn't something evil, some dark void that drains all light and joy from the world. It is a created good – as in, God made it and called it good. God designed it in such a way that its fruit could supply nutrition. More than that, he gave its fruit its own kind of flavor.
So, in studying the tree, the woman appreciates that eating from it would yield a physically pleasurable experience. Usefully, it would satisfy her carnal appetites. And as she perceives it in this way, as a potential object for her flesh, her appetites awaken. Her passions are aroused for the way the fruit would feel on her lips, the way its skin would give way to her teeth, the way its pulp would taste on her tongue, the way its solidity would fill her belly. Now, naturally we crave fleshly pleasures, to “relax, eat, drink, be merry” (Luke 12:19). It is totally normal for us to hunger for food, thirst for drink, to feel sexual and other bodily impulses. In a sense, these are matters of “animal necessity.”5 The drives we have toward these goods are good drives; their proper satisfaction yields good pleasures. The woman sees that, feeling herself tugged toward eating this fruit.
However, she doesn't need this fruit. Humans in the garden find every tree there “good for food” (Genesis 2:9). The woman has no need to focus on this particular tree to gain nourishment or savor a flavor.6 She doesn't have to venture outside God's will in order to be satisfied. Confronted with her fleshly desire to eat, she only needs to abstain long enough to turn around and eat the fruit of a different tree, a lawful tree. But her desire – her “lust of the flesh,” as the Apostle John calls it (1 John 2:16) – confronts her from within. And we often find the same thing happening to us. Our bodily urges urge us to meet them, sometimes quite strongly. But the Apostle Paul warns us about “indulgence of the flesh” (Colossians 2:23), tells us to “make no provision for the flesh, to satisfy its desires” in ways out of step with God (Romans 13:14), lest we functionally replace God and so “serve our own appetites” (Romans 16:18). Insofar as any appetite becomes an idol to be served, its object in that moment is not 'good for food.'
Next, “the woman saw that the tree was... a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6). As her sight reaches out to the tree, as she surveys the shape of its trunk, the textures of its bark, the handsomeness of its leaves, the plumpness of its fruit, her attention is captivated. She perceives it as beautiful, as delightsome. Looking at it makes her want to look at it. It inclines her toward it. It fills her with a sense of longing. It moves her emotions. It exerts a pull on her, but not just by the sensations of touch and taste. She engages with the tree by “the visual apprehension of external goods,” by an enjoyment in seeing and imagining.7 She is “overcome by the beauty of the tree and by desire for its fruit” alike.8 She “looks to the tree... for aesthetic pleasure.”9
And this, as it gets out of hand, is what the Apostle John dubs “the lust of the eyes” (1 John 2:16). It's the same as if she were entranced by the sleekest new toys, or the shiniest gold or silver or jewels, or by clever art, or by great production values. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with aesthetic pleasure. There's nothing bad in seeing and feeling and imagining, so far as that goes. God made a beautiful world, and gifted us with incredible imaginations and lovely emotions. We may look, visually or mentally, on the beauty of anything to admire the handiwork of God the Creator. But problems emerge when, in Job's words, “my heart has gone after my eyes” (Job 31:7), for “never satisfied are the eyes of man” (Proverbs 27:20). We have to be careful about the allure of creatures stoking our desires for their own sake, like how commercials constantly present images to captivate us. Christ warned that “everyone who looks” at created goods “with lustful intent,” for the sake of moving our hearts without reference to God, in ways that enlarge a conflict between our desires and his word, has a problem already (Matthew 5:28). We're meant to have our “eyes fixed on all [God's] commandments” (Psalm 119:6).
Looking through the eyes of the garden woman, this tree “appeared to the eye to be beautiful and to the taste to be edible.”10 But in attending to the tree in these terms, things it shares with all the trees in the garden (Genesis 2:9), she effectively reduces it to the level of every other tree; what should be sacramental, holy, is treated as common food, common sight.11 Because she sees it this way, she can't find any reason in the tree itself why it ought to be forbidden, why she ought to restrain her bodily appetites and her imaginative affections. Isn't this tree such a good tree, good for the same reasons and in the same way as every other tree she has to hand? Does not her appetite cry out that she has a need for the tree's nourishment? her taste scream that she has an interest in the tree's gourmet flavor? her awareness of its allure whisper that the tree is enjoyable, enriching, worthy? She seeks reason in the creation to obey the Creator, rather than seeking in the Creator a reason for the creation.
So the woman keeps her focus on the tree, and she “saw... that the tree was desirable to make wise” (Genesis 3:6). This, finally, is not something she could get from any of the trees she was to enjoy in the garden. This restores something special to the tree, but no longer is its specialness on account of God's word speaking about it. Now, what's special about it is entirely utilitarian: what use can I make of it, what profit squeeze from it?
On one level, her seeing has maybe moved her to a more refined class of pleasure, from carnal to aesthetic and lastly to intellectual pleasure – a puzzle to turn over in her mind, a solution to all her riddles, a source of insight and intellectual fulfillment.12 But on another level, what the woman seeks in the tree isn't the Bible's usual word for wisdom. This one is more associated with the sense of being skillful and therefore successful, able to chart a path to prosperity.13 The 'wisdom' she's chasing is perhaps less contemplative and more pragmatic, a wisdom that can be used to achieve what she wants, to gain and grow and impress the world.14 Now, again, this kind of wisdom isn't inherently bad. It's the capacity for “wise dealing” that Solomon's proverbs aimed to give “instruction” in (Proverbs 1:3). But if desired for its own sake, it feeds into what the Apostle John calls “the pride of life” (1 John 2:16) – our ambitions for power, possessions, prestige. It's an outsized desire to overcome obstacles or limits, “an inordinate attraction for some kind of superiority.”15 This is a materialistic pursuit of “self-actualization and accomplishment” that seek to act as though with the sovereignty of a god.16
By this point, in desiring this, the woman perhaps is priding herself on her enlightened yearning for intellectual triumph. But interestingly, the word here for 'desirable' comes from the same Hebrew root as the word 'covet' in the Ten Commandments.17 As high and lofty and godlike as she might pretend her aspirations are, it's really just as basic as St. Paul said: “Sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness” (Romans 7:8). Although her thinking about what the tree offers has been shaped by the message of the serpent, ultimately it's her own covetous desires that have the potential to drive her actions. It's exactly like James tells us: “Each person is tempted when by his own desire he is lured and enticed” (James 1:14). In the end, it isn't the devil who tempts us; it's our own inner desires that lure us. We are ultimately self-seduced.
The problem, again, is that at no point does she weigh any of these considerations – her flesh's hankering for its flavor, her eyes' appreciation for its beauty, her soul's craving for self-advancement – against the factor she's screened out: the word of God. She evaluates what her eyes see in creation, but not what her ears had heard from creation's Creator. Or maybe she accords them all equal weight and tallies three pros to one con, as if morality were mere statistics.18 The central issue is, her inner life is no longer subordinating these desires to their ultimate goal in God. See, if “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” are “from the world,” then these add up to a world-love that competes in our lives with the love of God (1 John 2:15-16).
Such distorted love, such runaway desire, leads to devastating places. That's why St. James says that “desire, when it has conceived, brings forth sin” (James 1:15). St. Augustine put it like this: “Sin is nothing but the twisted consent of the free will, when we stoop to things forbidden by justice which it is true freedom to abstain from. That is, sin consists not in the things themselves, but in the unlawful use of them. Now, the use of things is lawful when the soul remains within the bounds of God's law and subject to the one God in unqualified love, and regulates other things that are subject to it without greed or lust – that is, in accordance with God's commandments.”19 The message here is that when we “use created things not temperately but inordinately, the Creator is disdained.”20 Intemperate use of created goods adds up to sin because it falls short of love for God.
There's a tree in South America, Central America, the Caribbean, even south Florida that grows little greenish fruits that look a bit like apples. The tree is lovely to set your eyes on, with leaves so symmetrical. The taste of its fruit is sweet and satisfying, they say, and it smells great too. It's such an interesting tree, one so exotic you'd love to brag to your friends about your new experience. Just ignore the warning posted on the trunk. Why not pick a fruit up and take a little bite? Well, I'll tell you why. This manchineel tree “produces one of the most potent tree toxins known” to humanity.21 It isn't just the fruit that's toxic. To touch its bark or leaves, to even let the rain roll off it onto your skin, brings danger. This tree guarantees you a bad time.22 I came across a story told by a woman who unknowingly found this forbidden fruit on a beach in Tobago – how she took the fruit, ate a bite, even gave some to a friend to eat – perhaps that's the shape of a familiar tale. Here's how she told it:
I saw some green fruits among the scattered coconuts and mangoes lying on the beach. They were round, the size of a tangerine, and had apparently fallen from a large tree with a silvery bole and oblique based leaves. I rashly took a bite from this fruit and found it pleasantly sweet. My friend also partook (at my suggestion). Moments later, we noticed a strange peppery feeling in our mouths, which gradually progressed to a burning, tearing sensation and tightness of the throat. The symptoms worsened over a couple of hours until we could barely swallow solid food because of the excruciating pain and the feeling of a huge obstructing pharyngeal lump. … Over the next eight hours, our oral symptoms slowly began to subside, but our cervical lymph nodes became very tender and easily palpable. Recounting our experience to the locals elicited frank horror and incredulity, such was the fruit's poisonous reputation.23
Better to eat a trillion manchineel fruits, though, than to do what the woman in the garden did: “She took of its fruit, and she ate, and she gave also to her husband (who was with her), and he ate” (Genesis 3:6). Her mind was corrupted, her will was dragged by deafening desires; all she knew was that the fruit's finite goodness in that moment became as if infinite to her. So she reached out her hand to seize, steal, consume; then she offered to share. “Adam,” we read, “was not deceived” (1 Timothy 2:14). Yet he accepted and ate anyway. “Sin came into the world by one man” (Romans 5:12), for he “committed transgression without any justification.”24
What we have here is a picture of warning: deceived or undeceived, if we let our desires and passions run away with us, if we let them lead us into intemperate uses of creation that reflect worldly loves rather than pure love for God born from faith, sin is what happens. But we, no less than Eve, no less than Adam, grasp daily for the fruit we foolishly think will satisfy, the fruit we feel ourselves admiring and appreciating and attracted to. But there's a better fruit offered to us in Christ: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, temperance [you might know it as 'self-control']; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-25). Amen.
1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q.80, a.1, in Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae 25:221.
2 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 87.
3 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 25; Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 113.
4 Gregory of Nazianzus, Poemata Arcana 7.114, in C. Moreschini, ed., and D. A. Sykes, tr., St. Gregory of Nazianzus: Poemata Arcana (Clarendon Press, 1997), 41.
5 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 88.
6 C. John Collins, Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary (P&R Publishing, 2005), 172.
7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q.77, a.5, in Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae 25:177.
8 Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis 2.17.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 91:108.
9 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 88.
10 Ambrose of Milan, On Paradise 2 §9, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 42:292.
11 Iain W. Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), 112.
12 David Fohrman, The Beast That Crouches at the Door: Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, and Beyond (Maggid Books, 2021), 39.
13 Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 121.
14 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan Academic, 2001), 91-92.
15 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q.77, a.5, in Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae 25:177.
16 Gary W. Derickson, 1,2,3 John, Evangelical Exegetical Commentary (Lexham Press, 2014), 205.
17 Seth D. Postell, Adam as Israel: Genesis 1-3 as the Introduction to the Torah and Tanakh (Pickwick Publications, 2011), 116.
18 Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 50.
19 Augustine of Hippo, Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 1 §3, in Works of Saint Augustine I/13:115.
20 Augustine of Hippo, Homilies on the First Epistle of John 2.11, in Works of Saint Augustine III/14:47.
21 Lauren M. Blue, et al., “Manchineel Dermatitis in North American Students in the Caribbean,” Journal of Travel Medicine 18/6 (2011): 422.
22 Lewis S. Nelson, et al., Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants, 2nd ed. (Springer, 2007), 178.
23 Nicola H. Strickland et al., “My Most Unfortunate Experience: Eating a Manchineel 'Beach Apple,'” British Medical Journal 321, issue 7258 (12 August 2000): 428. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127797/>.
24 Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra on the Pentateuch 1.2.4, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 137:59.
No comments:
Post a Comment