When We Sin

The story of God’s confrontation with Adam and Eve after they ate the forbidden fruit is full of insight for us today if we pay attention to the questions by which God elicits the truth from them.

The first question God asks Adam is “Where are you?” (Gen.3:9) Adam says “I heard you coming and hid because I was naked.” God’s first question top us when we are struggling with sin is the relationship question. We are out of relationship with God, hiding at the mere hint of his presence. Where are you? – apart from God, out of proximity to him, out of relationship. Hiding is a primal response to shame when we have failed someone. Especially God. Unless we are in active rebellion against God, in which case we’d be hotfooting it in the other direction not simply hiding in the same environs, we try to explain ourselves but often give ourselves away and get in deeper. As Adam did by talking about nakedness.

Who told you that? God wants to know. (Gen.3:11) This is quite important. Losing touch with God, a common experience of all who seek to follow Christ is who and what besides God we have been listening to.

-That little voice inside that tells us we’re not good enough, not adequate, not trustworthy, not . . . well, you can fill in your own. We all have them. Guilt!

-That same voice that insinuates we’ve not just done wrong but in some fundamental way we are wrong. Shame!

-The one that attacks us with doubt about God’s goodness, like happened to our first parents?

-the one that tells us it really is up to us, or the one with the most toys wins, or you are what you have and do or . . . again, you can fill in the blank for yourselves.

The only voice we can count on to tell us the God’s honest truth about who we are is God. And he’s always busy telling us who we are in Christ. Read Eph.1:3-14 sometime. Do you believe that about yourself? Can that really be true? Any voice telling you it’s not true is the accusing voice of the enemy. After his defeat at the cross that all he’s got left to do. Try and keep us from acknowledging, internalizing, and acting on the truth about us in Christ. (Rev.12:10) In C S Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Edmund, the child whose treachery toward Aslan and his own brother and sisters, has been rescued from the White Witch. He and Aslan have a long talk about he has done. We are not told what was said but Edmund was never the same again. They have to meet with the Witch to deal with some unfinished business. You see, Edmund’s treachery had placed him in her hands to carry out his execution as the divine law of Narnia, the Deep Magic, decreed it.

“You have a traitor there, Aslan,” said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he’d been through and after the talk he’d had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn’t seem to matter what the Witch said” (Lewis, C.S.. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia Book 2) (p. 141). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Whatever Aslan had told Edmund had restored and cemented his relationship to the great lion. The Witch’s accusation did not undo him or throw him off stride. As Lewis beautifully puts it “He just went on looking at Aslan.”

Who or what have you been listening to?

Have you disobeyed me, Adam? (Gen.3:11) That’s the third question God asks. Only now does he get to the actual wrongdoing. Tragically – for all of us – Adam can’t own up that he is out of sync with God or that he has listened to other voices then his about who he and Eve are and are meant to be. So neither can he take responsibility for what he has done. “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”  It’s Eve’s fault; and God’s by extension: “you gave her to me.” The blame game is one we’ve all played too, I suspect. Again, at this point Adam is in so deep the blame game seems his only way out, though I doubt he really thinks it will work. He’s just buying time.

God does not respond to Adam at this point but turns to Eve and asks the fourth question the text records: “What is this that you have done? (Gen.3:12) She plays her version of the blame game but at a different level. Some other than human agency made me do it! If all else fails, play the “devil made me do it” card. Go rebukes this suggestion by immediately turning the snake into a dust-slivering, dirt eating creature, far from the fearsome and august presence he seemed to Adam and Eve. No, the devil did not make you do it, Eve.

Adam and Eve do reap the rewards of their perfidy. Consequences follow that bedevil humanity right up to this day. But God also reveals himself a God whose bark is worse than his bite. The two do not die as God decreed but live on to become progenitors of the people who will finally crush the serpent’s head (Gen.3:15) And since their act had brought shame through their awareness of their nakedness, God clothes them to mitigate their curse and make possible the future he will have with and through them. Throughout Gen.1-11 we find this pattern: humanity sins, God judges and punishes, God mitigates his own punishment – something we find writ large over the entire New Testament: “Where sin abounds, grace super-abounds!” (Rom.5:20). Grace means God’s bark is worse than his bite!

God always acts, unilaterally, out of grace, to restore the relationship we break with him. We cannot out-sin the grace of God, however mightily we try sometimes. We can act out of sync with him, we can listen to other voices as our reality, we can try to blame others or even the devil for our trouble. But at the end of the day we’ll find God patiently waiting for us to play out our little gambits until we find ourselves back in his gracious arms. That’s how this grace-thing works!