"Did God Actually Say?" The Shape of the First Sin

The first sin started off as just a conversation, a simple question.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”

Genesis 3:1

Notice how the serpent does not set himself up against God, he just questions what God told them as if trying to understand.

Did God actually say…?

That is where it starts, not in sudden rebellion but with questioning God and His word.

The lie was about God’s generosity

This is what God had actually said:

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Genesis 2:16-17

Eat freely from every tree except one. That restriction was based on protection. God was protecting them from death.

God gave them everything they needed to thrive, and the snake used that, twisting God’s words and making it seem like He was holding back everything.

That is how these lies work. They present you with a distorted picture of God, generosity and protection made to look like control and withholding.

Why the tree was there at all

If you are like me, you might have wondered why the tree was there in the first place. Why would God create a restriction if He knew it would be a temptation? Why create the tree at all?

It is simple really. God wanted Adam and Eve to love Him, to choose to be with Him and obey Him. He wanted their love for Him to be a choice, and He wanted them to have the freedom to choose Him.

That one restriction gave them something to obey, something to choose love for God over their desire to find out why the tree was restricted, a chance for them to honor God with their obedience, trusting His words to be true.

God was not surprised by their sin, and the tree was never there to trap them. The choice was always theirs, and God seemed to already have a plan ready for if they did sin against Him. Ever since then God has been pursuing us, in hopes that we return back to Him.

We are still under those same conditions today. God made us able to love Him, and desires for us to love Him, and that means we also have the freedom to choose.

Doubt, suspicion, then a choice

Eve answers the serpent by telling him what God said, adding a small addition of her own, that they were not even to touch the tree.

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Genesis 3:4-5

The serpent makes two claims against God here.

First, God is lying to you. God said you will die but you won’t, in fact you will gain something that makes you like God.

Second, God is holding out on you. He knows the fruit will make you like Him and He doesn’t want that, He wants it all to Himself.

This is how Satan still attacks us today. He starts with a doubt about God’s word, then moves to a suspicion about God’s character, and ends with a decision that the creature knows better than the Creator, and will define good and evil for itself.

Both claims were lies. God was never lying to them, in fact it was the serpent lying to them, and God was never holding anything back. He was protecting them, the way a parent holds a child back from what the child cannot yet see is deadly. The serpent took that protection and made it look like deprivation. A good Father painted as a jealous rival.

Sin almost always begins by convincing us that God’s no is robbing us of something we want or desire, when in truth it is guarding us from something we would have lost.

They gained nothing

They knew what God said. Eve repeated it back to the serpent. They knew that obeying God was good and disobeying God was wrong.

The serpent offered knowledge, and in a terrible sense they got it. She saw that the tree was good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable to gain wisdom. Three things pulling them towards disobedience, desire for the body, desire for the eyes, desire for the pride of being wise. John would later name the same three in the way the world tempts every generation:

For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.

1 John 2:16

They ate. And their eyes were opened, exactly as promised.

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

Genesis 3:7

That much of what the serpent said was true. But look at what they gained. Their own nakedness and shame.

They had been naked all along and felt no shame. Now they saw themselves and could not bear to be seen. The first gift of their new knowledge was not power. It was exposure.

Before, they had known good and evil the way an innocent person knows them, from the outside, by being told, knowing about them. Now they knew evil the way the guilty know it, from experience, and all they could do was hide.

What was actually broken

Scripture never treats this sin as a small issue over a piece of fruit. It treats it as the moment the human race set itself against the God who made it. Disobedience was just the consequence of a love that was broken, a love for God.

The two great commandments had not been spoken yet, but they were already true. Love God with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself. Adam and Eve broke both in one moment.

They broke the first by preferring their own judgment to God’s. They were told what was good for them, and concluded they knew better. In one act they unseated Him from the center of their love and put themselves there.

And they broke the second by what they did to each other.

Adam stood beside his wife through the entire conversation with the serpent, and he said nothing. He had been given to her to love her and to protect her. Instead he stood by, and then let the deceit work on him too, and took the fruit from her hand.

He then failed her a second time. When God came looking and asked what had happened:

The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.

Genesis 3:12

Her fault, and while we are at it, Yours, because You gave her to me.

The man who should have protected her used her as his shield instead.

We are the same

What Genesis 3 gives us is a pattern.

Cain killed Abel because he preferred his own anger to God’s instruction. The generation of the flood filled the earth with violence because they preferred their own desires to God’s design. The builders of Babel built because they preferred their own glory to God’s calling. Israel made a golden calf because they preferred a god they could see. David took Bathsheba because he preferred his own desire to the married couple who would be destroyed and the husband who would be murdered as a result. Peter denied Christ because he preferred his own safety to the Lord he loved.

Sin is the heart preferring itself and its own desire over God.

And it connects straight back to where we started last week. If sin is the absence of godly love, then Genesis 3 is the first moment that absence appears in the world. Adam and Eve were made by a God who is love, made to walk with Him, to love Him with everything and each other as themselves. They withdrew that love and chose themselves.

The fruit was the visible act. The departure from love was the root.

So I want us to learn from this and be aware when God is attacked in our thoughts and hearts, when we start asking whether He really is good, whether sin is really bad, or if He is keeping something from us, and stop it. Choose God and run to Him.

Next week, we will look more at how Adam’s fall affects us.