Paradise Lost, Grace Found

Perhaps the most mysterious part of these last few verses of Genesis 3 comes in verse 22, in the words, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.’ You will recall that the reference to US in 1:26 could more easily—and even necessarily—be understood to be something like inter-Trinitarian communication. In this place, either we must reject that, as man can certainly not be made “like” God in any real essential attribute. In fact, that would only confirm the serpent’s lie from verse 5; or else, it may be that this “likeness” is only reflective and restricted to a kind of immortality proper to creatures; or else, while that same restricted sense of immortality is in view, the speech is not confined to God in this case, but now, more appropriately to the heavenly court of angelic beings. Waltke takes this third view, citing 2 Samuel 14:17, where it belongs to “the angel of God to discern good and evil.”1

Two features stand out in the remainder of Genesis 3.

• Degrees of Judgment

• Hints of Grace

Doctrine. The grace of God often shines brightest in that loss where all is not finally lost.   

Degrees of Judgment

Adam is sent out from the Garden of Eden, yet the text says he was to continue in working and tending ‘the ground from which he was taken’ (v. 23). This can be confusing if we fix on this smaller set of words in themselves. “Wasn’t he taken from the ground in Eden? How can he work that ground if he is taken from it?” There are two possible roads to help the reader out of this knot they’ve got themselves into.

The first is that it is meant generically—namely, that since Adam is a prototype of all mankind, the curse to work the ground has reference to the “ground” per se, and not specifically to the historic Eden. Since that vocation would not change after he is exiled from Eden, that ground in exile is still “the ground.”

The second possibility is that the whole thing is completely literal in reference and sequence, since commentators (like Henry Morris, if you remember) points to the exact language of 2:8. Notice that the creation of Adam is mentioned first (2:7), and then in the very next words we read: “And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.” So what Morris concluded is that Adam was actually formed of the dust of the ground first, and then placed in the Garden. So in this case, he would really be sent back to where he was “from.” I don’t personally think that is necessary. But either answer solves the problem of the language in 3:23.

The basic message here, though, is judgment being meted out. But that judgment is in time, and that means by degrees and not in full. We saw that already about what it meant that Adam would die on “the day” that he disobeyed. Likewise with being sent to a place of judgment. This is not the final judgment, just as this is not the second death.

Note that this is another proof that the image of God and of that element of dominion are not confined to Eden or the prelapsarian state. The image is disconnected from God, losing his state of righteousness and holiness and the spiritual knowledge of God, but as to the essential image, man is still a man. His task is still his task.

And that is the part this verse picks up on: ‘therefore the LORD God sent him out … to work the ground’ (v. 23). Then, of course, there’s babies and the Sabbath. These are things that are ordained before the fall, and no one typically argues that those have discontinued. But for some reason, the image in its totality and dominion in particular are singled out by the more modern Reformed tradition—the former because of the Gnostic influence on the past hundred years of Reformed thought; the latter because of the Pietistic influence on the past hundred years of Reformed thought.

But mark the simple, repeated hints in Genesis 1-3. Adam was to be and to do after the fall exactly what he was to be and to do before the fall. God’s requirements to us do not soften up because of our descent into sin. Henry makes this observation about Adam naming Eve, that even now there was a “further token of dominion.”2

There are three dimensions about this kind of judgment by degrees that we can unpack.

First, he was driven out by God Himself—‘the LORD God sent him out’ (v. 23) and ‘He drove out the man’ (v. 24). Consecutive sentences begin with the Hebrew verb, first to send out,3 but then the more emphatic word for “drive” or “cast” out.4 Many people think that God is no longer in the business of driving out people; that He only punishes later. It is true that the full punishment of God is sure to come in the end; but it is also true that He intervenes in a judgment in time. Most pointedly, to the unbeliever, the Scripture says that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Rom. 1:18).

Second, it was to a place defined by the curse. It says ‘at the east of the garden of Eden’ (v. 24). Now this seemingly insignificant detail looms large in the Scripture. So, a chapter later, “Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden” (Gen. 4:16); and when the human race rebelled against God by attempting to form a singular global power in Genesis 11, it was “as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar” (v. 2). When Lot departs from Abraham he goes east (Gen. 13:11) into Sodom. The east wind off of the desert becomes a motif for judgment. For instance, when Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dream: “ seven ears, thin and blighted by the east wind” (Gen. 41:6), when Job asks rhetorically, “Should a wise man answer with windy knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind?” (Job 15:2) Or how about when “God appointed a scorching east wind” (Jon. 4:8) to burn up Jonah’s little plant? And finally one most fitting to our passage today:

“Measure by measure, by exile you contended with them; he removed them with his fierce breath in the day of the east wind” (Isa. 27:8).

But then again, the sun rises in the east. The connotations are not always bad. For example, The tabernacle’s entrance faces east (Ezk. 43:1), and the glory of God comes from the east in the next verse. Nevertheless, the way back to God is always from east to west, which many think is why the tabernacle and temple are always set up in this direction: “As far as the east is from the west, So far has He removed our transgressions from us” (Ps. 103:12).

Third, the angels were called to do what Adam failed to do, that is, ‘to guard the way to the tree of life’ (v. 24). It is highly unlikely that Adam would have dared to try to sneak back in, and, although we cannot know, it is just as likely that God should have removed the Garden from the earth shortly thereafter. At any rate, even if Adam was not made to hear this heavenly council, yet Moses does relay it to the children of Israel. We must remember that they were a people called to reconstitute the human race under God. So, the sons of Aaron were to stand in this same duty at the east-facing opening of the tabernacle:

“They shall join you and keep guard over the tent of meeting for all the service of the tent, and no outsider shall come near you. And you shall keep guard over the sanctuary and over the altar, that there may never again be wrath on the people of Israel” (Num. 18:4-5).

For Adam, though, and for us many times—God disciplines by showing us someone who is faithful where we have not been.

Hints of Grace

There are three hints of grace even in the midst of this darkest hour that Adam and Eve had known.   

First, Adam’s naming of his wife shows that he believed the promise of 3:15—‘The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living’ (v. 20). In Hebrew, “Eve” (ḥaw-wāh) closely resembles “living” (chay).5 This is Adam’s reason for the name. He now had an expectation again of life to come. However ignorant he may have been of its full significance, he at least understood that the purpose of offspring would go forward, now fixed to this promise of a saving seed. As Calvin commented,

“when he heard the declaration of God concerning the prolongation of life, he began again to breathe and to take courage.”6

The Hebrew is in the perfect form (i.e., not future) indicating either Moses’ perspective on the naming event, or else the certainty that Adam had that the child was as good as born.

Second, there was God’s action: ‘the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them’ (v. 21). GOD MADE the covering. If we compare this to verse 7, the contrast is between their own facade and God’s true provision. Then there is the fact that SKINS refers to animal skins. We must infer either that God killed animal for this, or that God simply created such skins without that death; though Calvin rejects the notion that God literally did so, but that,

“since animals had before been destined for their use, being now impelled by a new necessity, they put some to death … having been divinely directed to adopt this counsel; therefore Moses calls God the Author of it.”7

In trying to protect the reader from attributing the creaturely to God, I think, Calvin overreaches and defeats the purpose of the action. In any case, it would at least prefigure the idea later captured in the sacrifices of Israel; but the actual killing of the animal would obviously draw out that the truth that,

“without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb. 9:22).

Note the way that the author of Hebrews said that. Although the context was the place of sacrifices in the old covenant system, this is clearly a larger truth of the nature of things, given God’s holiness and man’s sin. This necessity of a covering, specifically from the sacrifice of blood, is seen here to be as true for Adam and Eve as for those Israelites later on.

Third, there was one of those examples of what has been called a severe mercy. Note the words right before the exiling action: ‘Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever …’ (v. 22). The casting out and preventing actions are LEST something happen, and this is a bad thing that would happen. This is that grace of protecting someone from obtaining something that they want, which may be good in itself, but which is bad for them in the grander scheme of things. This kind of living forever is more like the immortality of a vampire than anything else. To live on in an irreversible curse is, by itself, to live on in an ever-increasing misery.

The ‘cherubim and a flaming sword’ (v. 24) does not suggest to us some great danger Adam posed to the heavenly realm, but the great danger he posed to himself. Therefore even this judgment contained a mercy. The same action was at once punishing and preventative. Having said that, we must also come full circle from that mercy to this second state that Adam and Eve had passed into. Friends do not draw swords upon friends. Swords are for soldiers, and if our first parents were not permitted into God’s country, then they were now enemies. This is the teaching of Scripture, that “we were enemies” (Rom. 5:10); and “whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (Jas. 4:4). Surely the man and woman who made friends with the arch-enemy of God did more than befriend the world, but fell in league with its deceiver.

PRACTICAL

Use 1. Instruction. Calvin’s reflection on the banishment from the Tree in particular is instructive:

“They are mistaken who think this also to be an irony; as if God were denying that the tree would prove advantageous to man, even though he might eat of it; for he rather, by depriving him of the symbol, takes away also the thing signified.”8

Think about this. God is the real, ultimate source of life; but this makes the tree, not an empty sign, but a full sign. Like the bread and wine at communion, the bread and wine really are substance which nourish the body. Yet the spiritual life in them is of God in Christ, empowered by a faith given by the Holy Spirit. That tree was neither the ultimate source of life, nor (on the other extreme) was it devoid of life, an empty shell. The God of Life was truly present in that tree. So in the Lord’s Supper (replicating that tree at the center of history), the bread and wine are not the ultimate source of life (they do not become the substance they signify), nor are they devoid of that life, making it an empty shell. Consequently, to be exiled from the Garden of the church is to be deprived of the nourishment that comes from the Son of God. That is why excommunication, in 1 Corinthians 5, is set in the context of a meal shared and therefore a meal deprived.9

Use 2. Admonition. In this exile from Eden, there is also a prototype. From that moment until Christ returns, there are many mini-Edens, which are not even a faint shadow of the new heavens and new earth. They are here today and gone tomorrow. We never know what we have till they’re gone. It can be one’s childhood in a healthy Christian home, an early season in a healthy local church,

So, as God did with Israel—his bride in Hosea 2, removing all comforts she had credited to her lovers—or as things became for the Prodigal Son, so that “he came to himself” (Lk. 15:17).

One of the severe mercies that God gives to us are those previews of hell which are no hell at all. But it is exile enough. In other words, moments or seasons or even the whole duration of our earthly lives in which we lose some blessing which we take for granted, and yet it is not our whole soul for all eternity. And we are awakened to the ache, and our homesickness tells us that it’s not too late. These hints of grace in what was lost allow us to reflect, to soften our hearts, or simply to renew in us an appetite for God and His goodness.

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1. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary, 95.

2. Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, 15.

3. shalach (שָׁלַח) — to send.

4. garash (גָּרַשׁ) — to drive out, cast out.

5. Hamilton points out that the forms are not actually directly related, although “her name may reflect a primitive form of the Hebrew verb ‘to live’ with medial w instead of y. The evidence here is the Ugaritic verb ‘to live’: hwy/hyy” (The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, 205).

6. Calvin, Commentaries, I:181.

7. Calvin, Commentaries, I:181.

8. Calvin, Commentaries, I:184.

9. Henry has similar reflections: “Observe, (1.) There is a foolish proneness in those that have rendered themselves unworthy of the substance of Christian privileges to catch at the signs and shadows of them. Many that like not the terms of the covenant, yet, for their reputation's sake, are fond of the seals of it. (2.) It is not only justice, but kindness, to such, to be denied them; for, by usurping that to which they have no title, they affront God and make their sin the more heinous, and by building their hopes upon a wrong foundation they render their conversion the more difficult and their ruin the more deplorable” (Commentary on the While Bible, 16).