Bible Study
Genesis
Each Tuesday - 9:30 AM
Lesson #4 Genesis 3 October 4, 2005
The Devil Made Me Do It
A Quite a few years ago there was a show that was popular on T.V. One of the reasons it was such a big hit was that they had some lines on the show that they repeated over and over, week after week. The show was “Laugh-in” and one of the most famous lines was “the devil made me do it.” That line didn’t originate with “Laugh-in though, it was almost a direct quote from Genesis chapter 3.
Today we are going to look at three things in Genesis 3: The problem of all humanity, the penalty of sin, and the provision of God.
Genesis 3 begins with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and ends with them banished from that same garden forever. The cause of that banishment was sin. Here is the picture. Adam and Eve are working in the garden, probably pruning some of the trees. That was their only responsibility – cultivating the land. God had provided everything they needed to survive; all they had to do was to pull a few weeds and dead-head the flowers. Then along comes a serpent. John in Revelation 12:9-20:2 tells us that the serpent is Satan, or the devil. This serpent asks Eve if God said that they shouldn’t eat from any tree. Her reply was that they could eat from any tree they wanted to, except the tree in the middle of the garden, or they would surely die. In the Hebrew, that phrase literally means that in dying, they would die…eternal death. Satan goes on to say that they wouldn’t die, in fact God knows that if they eat from that tree, they would become like God and know good from evil, Satan implied that God was holding back from them. As I thought about this lesson, it dawned on me that Satan was tempting Adam and Eve with the same thing that got him kicked out of Heaven. Satan was kicked out of Heaven because he wanted to be like God…to have the same power and be worshipped. Now he is telling Adam and Eve that they could be like God too, which ultimately ends up in their being kicked out of Eden.
But that lie from Satan was all it took. Eve took the fruit, ate it, and then gave it to Adam. We always thing that Adam was somewhere else when all of this happened, but Genesis 3:6 says that he was right there with Eve. This act of listening to the deceiver and believing him instead of God, began what we know as sin. It wasn’t the listening that was sin, it was the acting on the lie that he fed them, and that is an important distinction. We do not sin by listening or even by feeling. The temptation to sin was not the sin; it was the eating of the forbidden fruit. Adam and Eve had a choice and God gave the ability to choose. They could have walked away, choosing to believe God instead of the serpent, but they did not and so sin entered the world.
The penalty of their sin was immediate. Right away things in their perfect world began to unravel. Adam and Eve looked down and realized they were naked and so they covered themselves with leaves they found and sewed together. When God came to see them that evening, for their evening vespers, they hid from Him. When confronted by God, Adam confessed that he was afraid of God and was ashamed, so he hid from God, and then God begins a monologue. His response was punishment. God sets up a punishment for sin not because He is evil or sadistic, not because He is trying to "teach these rascals a lesson”, but because transgression always requires punishment. That is a moral law and because God is moral, He cannot let sin slip by. Instead, like a surgeon who cuts with a scalpel only so that he can heal, God picks up his holy scalpel to begin a means of redemption for fallen humanity. He reads the sentences for both man and woman, but in those sentences, He makes provisions. They are hard to swallow, but in the end, they will provide salvation for the whole world.
You see, God made provision for us. Genesis 3:15 is the pivotal verse in this chapter. It has been traditionally viewed as the first word of promise – in a prophetic sense- of deliverance from sin. Its concern is not in the present, but in the future. The serpent would bruise Eve’s seed on the heel, a temporary and healable injury, but her seed would crush the serpent on the head, a fatal injury. So you see, though the Word of God is full of man’s struggle with sin and salvation, the story ends in Revelation with Satan’s eternal destruction.
So, Adam and Eve believed the liar, a serpent named Satan and brought death to the entire human race – not immediate death, but eternal and spiritual death. A death that means while we are on earth, we can’t have a relationship with God and when we die, we can’t spend eternity with God. But God! But God, in His infinite goodness and love, provided a way of salvation.
In order for us to understand Christianity we need to understand 4 things, 4 principles that will enable us to know God and have a relationship with Him.
First, God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life. That plan began in Genesis 3 and is expressed in John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.” God loves us so much, that instead of wiping us out and starting over with smarter, more obedient people, He gave His own Son to die on the cross so that we could have a relationship with Him.
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This document is by Bob Sly. It was last revised on September, 2005