Chapter 4: The Point of Decision
chapter 4
the
point of
decision
Let us go back to the beginning. Creation is finished. Each created thing is operating in the circle of its own creation, standing in its proper place, and all things are at rest and in balance. Man, as made in the image of God, has a unique place because he has been made different from the machines, the plants and the animals.
To Love God
Jesus once stated exactly that peculiar place man has in the various circles of creation. One of the Pharisees had asked him, “Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And Jesus replied, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment” (Mt. 22:36-38). Some fifteen hundred years before this, in Deuteronomy 6:4-6, we find this same concept: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: and thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart.” Thus at the time of Moses the central issue is not merely an outward keeping of the commandments but something far more profound. Man is to love God in his heart.
But it is equally important–and this is brought out in both Matthew and Deuteronomy–for man to remember whom he is to love. Loving a superior is different from loving an equal. Take, for example, the love of a child for a parent. If a child constantly says, “I love you,” and yet at the same time is constantly and openly disobedient, the parent can say, “Your actions do not indicate your love.” The reason for this is that there is a hierarchy inherent in the relationship between the parent and child. The two people do not stand on a horizontal plane in every regard. Parenthood involves an “office.” As Israel is brought face to face with the loving Creator who is there, Israel is not merely to say, “I love you,” rooting their reaction only in emotions. The kind of love proper here is also rooted into obedience simply because of the nature of the relationship between the two parties. Love of the creature toward the Creator must include obedience or it is meaningless. Jesus’ teaching in Matthew is the same.
With this principle in mind, then, we can begin to understand Adam and Eve’s relationship to God in the early chapters of Genesis. Genesis 2:16-17 reads: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Basically, this command is no different from the commandments in Deuteronomy 6:4-6 and Matthew 22:36-38: The first law for man is to love God with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind. If one is a creature in the presence of the Creator, to love includes to obey.
But something else is involved, for here is the idea that obedience to this law is the purpose of man, the only way that man can be fully man.
Today people constantly ask, “Does man have a purpose?” In some areas of the world man is told that he has meaning only in reference to the state. In other places he is told that he has meaning only in his sexual life. Elsewhere he is told he has meaning only through affluence. But all of these turn to sawdust in his hands. The Bible gives us a quite different answer: The purpose of man–the meaning of man–is to stand in love as a creature before the Creator.
But the man who stands before God stands there in God’s image as a true personality, and the love which he is to give is not mechanical. The machine can obey God mechanically; when it does, it is doing all that God meant it to do. The far-flung system of the universe operates, much of it, as a great machine; and as such it fulfills its purpose. That is all it was meant to do. But man is a different being, made in a different circle of creation. He is to love God, not mechanically, but by the wonder of choice. Here stands an unprogrammed part of creation–unprogrammed chemically or psychologically–real man in a real history, a wonder in the midst of a world of uniformity of cause and effect. In the flow of history, man is brought face to face with that for which he has been made–face to face in a loving relationship to the God who is there.
One Tree
Love and obedience in Genesis 3 are placed in the context of a commandment concerning a tree–the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is important to note that the test Adam faces does not involve a choice between an evil tree that God has made and a good tree that God has made. For God has made no evil things. If he had, or if God had programmed man so that man must disobey him, then we would have here a concept like the Hindu idea that eventually both good and evil, cruelty and non-cruelty, spring from God and thus are finally equal.
But God has not made a bad tree. He has simply made a tree. And there is nothing intrinsic about this tree that is different in any way from the other trees. Rather, God has simply confronted man with a choice. He could just as well have said, “Don’t cross this stream; don’t climb this mountain.” He is saying, “Believe me and stand in your place as a creature, not as one who is autonomous. Believe me and love me as a creature to his Creator, and all will be well. This is the place for which I have made you.”
It is perfectly true that in making man as he did God made the possibility of evil. But the bare possibility of evil is not the actualizing of it. And in making that possibility, God validated choice and validated man as man–a being significant in history. If he had left him without choice, you could speak forever of man being man, man being significant, but it would be only meaningless words.
All love–man to woman and woman to man, or friend to friend–is bound up with choice. Without choice the word love is meaningless. And, incidentally, as modern man has lost the concept of choice in the midst of determinism, the word love has increasingly become meaningless.
God has indeed made the possibility of man’s choosing, including the possibility of choosing wrongly. But God has not made evil. There is not an evil tree and a good tree. There is simply choice. When God finished creating there was nothing made which was contrary to his character.
Let us look more closely at the specific kind of tree. It is not simply the tree of knowledge but of a specific kind of knowledge–the knowledge of good and evil. It was not an evil thing to have knowledge. Such a concept would contradict the giving of dominion to man, and be in conflict with Genesis 2:19-20, where man as man had knowledge to give proper names to the creatures.
Adam and Eve already knew good, everything around them was good, and their relationship to God and to each other was good. And in knowledge from God they knew the possibility of evil and its result: “Thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17). What was involved was the experiential knowledge of evil in contrast to God’s telling them about evil. They are, of course, finite in contrast to God being infinite. God can know all possible possibilities–even what could be but will not be, as well as all that will be. The Bible makes plain that God, as infinite, knows all possibilities even if they never will be actualized. In 1 Samuel 23:9-29 we are told that God knew (and told David) what would happen in case a certain circumstance occurred, even though the situation changed and thus the circumstance never did occur and the possible result never was actualized.
In the case of Adam and Eve, as finite, they had received from God true knowledge concerning the result of eating and revolt, but when they did revolt they then had experiential knowledge of evil and all the flow of resulting cruelty and sorrow. It was not knowledge as knowledge that was wrong, but the choice made against God’s loving warning and command.
Notice too that God’s command to them was not an unmotivated command, not a bare, unexplained command. Adam and Eve were warned about the result, a loss that involved their own best interests. The command was a rational, propositional command and a loving warning.
So let us look again at Genesis 2:17: “But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” The last phrase is extremely strong in the Hebrew and could very well be rendered, “dying, thou shalt die.” Reformed theology treats this commandment as a covenant of works. That is, first, there are two parties. In one way they are equal (both of them have personalities, the one being in the image of the other), and in another way they are not (one is infinite and the other finite; one is Creator, the other the created). And, second, there is a condition in the midst of the covenant, a condition of love couched in the terms of obedience insofar as it involves a creature before the Creator. Third, there is a promise involved–life. Surely, what is promised here is not just a continuing physical life but rather all of those things which we later know to be life indeed in Jesus Christ our Lord. Of course, man does not need a Savior at this point, because he has not sinned. Thus there is no place here for soteriology, no place for the Lamb of God–not yet. Soteriology is related to fallen man. The promise of life is “fullness of life,” just as the penalty is “fullness of death.”
Note that in the day, the twenty-four hours, when Adam sinned, he did not physically die. He died in a way that the New Testament labels a “present death.” Before a man now accepts Christ as his Savior, it is not just that he will die but that he is already dead. He is separated from God, he has no purpose and no final meaning.
Therefore, in the day that Adam ate, he died. There are three steps in this death. First comes separation from God, the infinite, personal reference point and immediately thereafter meaninglessness in the present life. Even though man continues to breathe, and with his wife brings forth children, he is dead. And to this extent our voices as Christians are joined with the voices from the opposite end of the spectrum–the existentialists and the modern men–who say with us, “Amen. Man is dead.” And thus perhaps it is easier to say this and be, in some sense at least, understood than it was fifty or a hundred years ago.
Second, there is physical death. A few short years, though Adam’s life was longer than ours, and Adam’s body will rot in the grave.
Third, there is eternal death in the penalty that is meted out. Those separated from God will ultimately “be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power” (2 Thess. 1:9). The end of the eating is not just the present situation as horrible and abnormal as it is, not just physical death, not just a blank, a vacuum. There is a horizontal extension–eternal death and eternal separation from the God who is really there–from his glory and his grace.
We must be careful to notice the loving provisions that God gave. Man was made in the image of God. God had told him that evil was possible, but man was good because he had not yet chosen evil. Man was in constant fellowship with God: “And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden” (Gen. 3:8). He was surrounded by a perfect environment, God himself having selected a special place for man himself within this creation: “And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed” (Gen. 2:8). Adam knew something of his place in history and he knew what Eve was: “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20). The word Eve really means “living.” Adam chose her name and in doing so showed that he knew who he was. Furthermore, man had a truly free choice with power to obey or to transgress. He was not (either materially or psychologically) deterministically conditioned. He was not programmed. Finally, it was a simple test and everything involved in it was made absolutely plain.
Enter the Serpent
We will begin to look now at a new stage in the flow of biblical history: “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made” (Gen. 3:1).
Immediately questions arise. We want to know more than we are actually given. So it is necessary for us to remind ourselves again just what kind of book the Bible is. As I have already indicated, the Bible is a book for fallen men. Wherever it touches upon anything, it does so with true truth, but not with exhaustive truth. That is, where it speaks of the cosmos, science, what it says is true. Likewise, where it touches history, it speaks with that I call true truth, that is, propositional, objective truth.
When the Bible talks about the supernatural world and tells us of heaven and things beyond this earth, they stand as corollaries to the theme of the book–the propositional communication in verbalized form from God to fallen man. The corollaries given are those we need to know to get the major thrust, the central purpose of the Bible. But it does not answer every question that we might ask about any of these matters. If everything concerning which we have a proper curiosity was given, the book would be larger than the great libraries of the world and no one could read through it all. John seems to have this thought in mind in the last verse of the Gospel of John: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”
It is in this context that data concerning the supernatural world is given. We might well enjoy a book about the supernatural world. That half of the universe intrigues us, and it stands, not somewhere far off, but immediately before us almost as a fourth dimension so that there is indeed a cause-and-effect relationship between it and our own visible world at every existential moment. It really is not less natural and no less real than the seen part of the universe, and we cannot understand the seen half if we write off the existence of the unseen portion. But while we would be interested to find out some of these things in more detail, we are given adequate knowledge. Information about the supernatural world is brought in to help us understand who we are as man, lost man looking for meaning and saved man looking toward the second coming of Christ. When the serpent enters, we are introduced to this other half of the universe.
One of the lies of Satan, by the way, is his attempt to convince us to follow modern liberal thought in breaking the Bible into pieces and destroying its unity. We recognize, of course, that while the Scripture is a whole it records an increasing revelation as time passes. But it all forms a unit and while we have increasing revelation we do not have contradictory revelation.
Interestingly enough, it is often toward the end of the Bible that clear explanations of earlier parts are given. By the time we study through the full circle of the whole book, we have what explanations we need, for now, of all the parts. Thus in Revelation we read this: “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and the Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (Rev. 12:9). It is unfortunate that the King James translation leaves out the definite article applied to Satan. One cannot translate Satan as a “general” adversary. Rather, he is “the” adversary, the Satan. He is the one who has deceived the whole world. But he is not alone; he has angels who are cast out with him. One is reminded of the flaming poetry of Milton who described Satan and his hosts so well. Along with Satan there were those who chose his way, those who joined his cortege, that leads not only to rebellion but to condemnation. Later in Revelation we are given further information: “And he [an angel] laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years” (Rev. 20:2–ASV). Notice that this serpent is a special serpent. A definite article is used here again. You can call him the old serpent, or the devil, or the Satan. In any case, with this information before us, who we are dealing with in Genesis 3:1 is clearly identified. The definite article that is applied to Satan in Revelation 12:9 and to the serpent in Revelation 20:2 and Genesis 3:1 is important. It has, in fact, been suggested that with the addition of the Hebrew definite article in Genesis 3:1 we have something called in Hebrew grammar an article of eminence. And if this is the case, the serpent actually is, even here, made a proper name–The Serpent.
Jesus tells us something significant about the devil when he challenges those who rejected Jesus while claiming to have God as their Father: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (Jn. 8:44). The point is that the devil does not abide, does not stand, in the truth. Rather, he is the liar behind all liars and stands in the lie back of all lies–that the creature can be equal with God. This was his own point of rebellion against his Creator, God. Every other lie is only an extension of this one. And this is who the devil is–the originator of The Lie.
This is the context, then, in which we should understand what I call the theology of the Fall. In Genesis we have a free man with an unprogrammed choice. And coming to this free man from the outside is the temptation of Satan. But we must go back even before this, and bind together Satan’s fall and Adam’s fall. Satan, without an outside temptation, had already chosen to revolt. He revolted from himself outward. Adam and Eve, on the other hand, were tempted by the father of The Lie, someone outside themselves. Although there is some debate over this, and without wishing to be dogmatic about it, I think that Isaiah 14:12-15 gives us the fall of Satan: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer [that is, Day Star], son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.”
Assuming that the word stars refers to the other angels, he was saying, in short, “I will be greater than all the rest.” But he goes further, specifically adding, “I will make myself like the most High.” Satan the liar, the originator of The Great Lie, in his heart (that is within himself, from himself outward) says, “I will be greater than the rest, and I will be equal with God.”
The story of Satan in Isaiah is paralleled almost exactly in Genesis in regard to man’s revolt. Satan wants to be equal with God, but the end of this is that he will be brought down into the abyss. In Genesis 3 the woman would be equal with God, but she ends in death. As we consider the entrance of the serpent into the garden, we see the revolt about to spread across the world of mankind which God has made. There is no revolt among the machines, nor the plants, nor the animals. But in the circle of that which can rebel, angels and men, we see rebellion.
I think it is clear that the devil used the animal, the serpent as his first try to challenge and defeat God in the world of mankind. In other words, The Serpent used a serpent. This is not the only time he himself employed Devil possession. In contrast to demon possession there are at least two other cases where the Devil himself used Devil possession.
Luke 22:3 tells us that at a crucial moment in the life of the Messiah (who had come to bruise The Serpent’s head) Satan possessed Judas: “Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot.” Satan did not delegate this job to a second, but took it on himself. He entered into Judas.
The third place where there is a special effort on the part of Satan is yet to take place–at the time of the anti-Christ where one of anti-law will revolt against God. Revelation 13:4 portrays a tremendous picture of that future day when the forces of humanism–the united economic, religious and governmental forces–draw together in revolt, casting down the gauntlet before the God who is. Proud humanism is no longer naturalistic; it is joined to the acme of the occult. Under the reign of the anti-Christ, we read, “they worshipped the dragon (identified in Rev. 12:9 and 20:2 as Satan, The Serpent) which gave his authority unto the beast [anti-Christ]: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?” So Satan is here into the play again, completely committed to the struggle.
Returning to the third chapter of Genesis, we are not taken by surprise. Satan’s use of something else, whether it be a Judas or an anti-Christ or a serpent, is not in any one of these cases unique.
The Temptation
With revolt already in the universe, with the angelic host split and a hierarchy of evil, the leader himself tempts Eve: “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Gen. 3:1). The woman stands in her glory–the glory of being created in the image of God with no necessity upon her to choose evil. Standing in a perfect environment, having heard the voice of God, she is at a place where she can choose. What a wonder is man! Not mechanical man, not merely biological man, but man who can choose in a situation, as in the image of God, with no necessity upon him.
Satan comes to her and says, “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” What will she reply? “And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (vv. 2-3). It has been pointed out that Eve added something here. God apparently had not said, “Don’t touch it,” but rather, “Don’t eat it.” I am not sure we should make much of this, but it should be noted. The serpent replies in a direct contradiction: “Ye shall not surely die” (v. 4). And the issue is joined.
But Satan offers something further: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil” (v. 5). It is unfortunate that in the King James God is translated as plural, for it is not that they will be like some primitive gods, but that each of them will be like God himself. Notice the direct contradiction. God said in the day you eat you shall die; Satan said in the day you eat you will be like God.
In a way, there is a half truth here. Satan’s approach has often taken that form ever since. It is true that Eve is indeed going to learn something. If she chooses to disobey and to rebel, she will have what she couldn’t have otherwise–an experiential knowledge of evil and its results. So in a way Satan is telling her the truth. But what a useless, horrible knowledge! It is the knowledge of the child whose mother says, “Don’t go near that fire, because if you do you will get hurt. You will catch fire and be burned.” But the little child goes on in disobedience, falls into the fire and spends the next three days dying in agony. The child has learned something that it wouldn’t have known experientially if it had listened to the knowledge given by its mother. But what a knowledge!
Eve’s fall is not a fall upward but a fall downward in every conceivable way. She already knows from the voice of God that “in the day you eat you will die.” She can have experiential knowledge, but that knowledge is no truer knowledge than the knowledge from God, and the result is that the whole human race will be in agony.
It is a lie, of course, that she is going to be like God, because experiential knowledge of evil is not what makes God God. God is God because he is infinite, the non-dependent one. No created being will ever be able to be like him in this. Even in the area of knowledge, what Satan has said is a lie because God is infinite and knows all the possibilities, and he is not bound by limitedness. We, however, with all our knowledge are still bound by limitedness and always will be. So what Satan has said is a half truth but a total lie.
Eve’s response is, first, to consider the situation: “. . . the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant [a delight] to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise. . .” (v. 6). Three steps are involved: She looked at the tree and saw that it was good for physical food and that it was delightful to look at, and she desired the knowledge which would make her equal to God. Eve, with these things in her mind, is actually standing in the situation of the last commandment of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not covet” (Ex. 20:17). After all the external commandments comes the commandment on which all the others rest. Coveting, wanting that which is not properly mine as I stand as a creature before the law of God, is really the basis of all sin, for it is the internal attitude which leads to the external breaking of the other nine commandments. This is what Paul had reference to in Romans 7:7 when he pointed out that the center of his own sin was coveting. Jesus also made it explicit in Matthew 5:21-22. He said that it isn’t murder itself but the hatred that was in your heart first, ultimately leading to the murder, that stands at the heart of the issue. Likewise, he indicated in verses 27 and 28 that adultery is already there when it’s only in one’s mind. The internal later flows out into the external.
Eve stands exactly there–in the area of the internal where choices are always made. Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:3 hearkens back to her situation at a point of space-time history as he advises the church of his own day, “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.” We live in our thought life. This is who I am. And for Eve the choice was this: whether to remain as a creature or to try in rebellion to have what the finite creature can never have and to be what the finite creature can never be. And we hold our breath to see what Eve will choose in the inner man.