Genesis: A Fresh Perspective
Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”
And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; 3 but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’”
Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.
And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:1–8)
The first chapters of Genesis answer fundamental questions. Some people regard the creation story only as the account of how God created the universe, established the Earth, and formed His most cherished creation, the human being. Of course, the details of how God did these things are a matter of passionate debate. Were the six days of creation literal days? Is the Earth young or old? Is the theory of evolution the truth, a lie, or something in-between?
How we got here is an important issue, but it is not the only idea the creation story addresses. The story also helps us answer questions that go to the core of everyone’s life. Why am I here and why is my life so hard? Why are we constantly fighting one another and God? Is there any way to regain what Adam and Eve lost? If we view the creation story in terms of relationship rather than scientific facts, these mysteries unfold.
I am going to present an interpretation of the creation story that is probably different from others you have heard. This does not mean I believe other views are wrong. It is simply a different perspective. We love to fight about what we think we know about God. Yet, to know God is to drop our sword. In this article, I will not try to persuade you to take up a viewpoint and fight for it. Rather, I hope to help you see how astonishingly glorious your life is. We can only comprehend God’s glory from a place of rest. It is this rest and this vantage point that was lost in the fall and restored in Christ.
Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28)
Before we get to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must talk about the Tree of Life. The fact it was in the garden says something wonderful about humanity’s purpose. Some say God loved us, so to show His love, He created a wonderful place where we could have a good life. Only, we messed up, so God took away the good life and made everything bad.
The Tree of Life suggests God’s gift was far greater than a good life. The tree’s identity is revealed in the New Testament. It represented Christ. Jesus’s message was not follow me, and I will give you a good life, but I will be your life. He came to restore an infinite measure of life. This is one reason He was so misunderstood. Many reckoned the Messiah would restore the good life, and to do that, He would first take away what made life bad… Rome.
The presence of the Tree of Life in the garden meant God’s gift was nothing less than Himself. We were created for the greatest gift ever given, the gift of God, and this gift would both complete and define us. We will see later the serpent tempted Eve with alternate sources of completion and identity.
Hebrew Scholar John Walton wrote an outstanding commentary on the book of Genesis (1). A culture far removed from our own wrote Genesis. We miss much of the story’s meaning because we don’t understand the ancient mind that wrote it. We still don’t, but we are getting better at seeing the text through their eyes.
Walton reveals that there is temple imagery in Genesis one. I won’t go into the details, but Walton’s book is excellent if you want to read it for yourself. Walton asserts hidden in Genesis one is not only how God created, but why. It presents the creation as a temple, the habitation of God. This idea persisted to the time of Christ. The Jews considered the temple in Jerusalem a microcosm of all creation. What a glorious identity! It implies our lives are the place where we and God live as one. Togetherness is the purpose of it all.
The serpent came to steal the gift, and we look to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to understand how he did so. Some people shorten the tree’s name to the Tree of Knowledge. They believe knowledge was the great threat to God. This supposed conflict didn’t begin until the 16th and 17th century with Copernicus and Galileo. Charles Darwin didn’t write On the Origin of Species until 1859. While these men were not necessarily atheists, their ideas lead others to conclude natural explanations are the enemy of God. In other words, if we understand how stuff works, we don’t need God.
However, knowledge is never presented as a problem in the Bible. To shorten the name of the forbidden tree to the Tree of Knowledge is a gross abuse of the text. It is an attempt to see something that isn’t there. Science verses the Bible is never a theme in the Bible, which suggests this is a battle we shouldn’t be fighting in the first place.
Some reduce Genesis 3 to a mythological story. Myths are narratives ancient cultures used to explain the world around them. Why is life so hard? Their answer? Adam and Eve disobeyed God, ate of the forbidden fruit, and now the world is cursed. This is an idea that becomes more unreasonable the more we ponder it. Shouldn’t the punishment fit the crime? God unleashed untold suffering upon humanity because of one bite? And what kind of God does such a thing? There must be more to the story than this, otherwise we are left with a myth not unlike many other myths of the ancient Mesopotamian world. We must dig a little deeper than simple crime and punishment.
Genesis 3 was an awakening, but of what? When they ate of the tree, they became aware they were naked. For the first time, they experienced fear and shame. I believe chapter 3 is a story about the birth of the human ego or what Paul calls the flesh. We can also call it the self. The ego is at enmity with God and its neighbor, and it cannot comprehend God. If this is what the narrative portrays, it goes from being a troublesome myth to a very profound explanation for much of human suffering, one that far surpasses other creation stories of the ancient world.
The serpent’s ploy to arouse the ego was twofold. Humanity was meant to find identity and completion in Christ. God’s gift was an infinite measure of who they were and an infinite measure of life. The serpent offered a finite measure of both of these. He began with identity. He told Eve if she disobeyed, she would become like God.
If you read the story from chapter one, you should call for a timeout. Didn’t God already create Adam and Eve in His own image? This means who they were was tied to who God is. To discern their identity, they merely had to look at God. In knowing Him, they would know themselves. The serpent tempted them to look elsewhere, not at the Lord but at self. This was the birth of self-definition and what the New Testament calls self-righteousness, the righteousness that has self as the source. Good and evil became the source of worth rather than Christ.
Once Eve’s focus turned to self, the second aspect of the temptation was easy. The ego’s fundamental question crept into her consciousness, “What’s in it for me?” The tree was a delight to the eyes, good for food, and desirable to make one wise. This is the birth of lust, and lust can only exist in a state of incompletion. Lust comes from the belief that getting what we want is the way to wholeness. Thus, the tyranny of wanting was born.
This is the last temptation Jesus faced in the wilderness (Matthew 4:8-10). (All the Devil’s temptations were an attempt to arouse the ego. They were not blatant attempts to make Jesus do something bad. In fact, if we believe the devil was trying to get Jesus to do evil, most of the temptations will be a bit puzzling. When our eye shifts to the ego, they become obvious.) The devil took Jesus up on a high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world. He sought to turn Jesus’s eyes to the finite. If he could, he could create a sense of being incomplete.
It is interesting that Jesus responded by talking about worship. To the ancient Hebrews, worship was not just singing hymns but the act of giving one’s self as a gift to God. Worship is giving yourself to whatever you believe makes you whole. Everyone worships, even atheists. We are all going to give ourselves to something. Jesus said we are to worship God alone. The gift of God is what completes us. The great lie is that something else can. If we swallow the Devil’s deception, wanting becomes our master and its tyranny never ends. There is no rest in lust.
In the serpent’s lies, we see the nature of temptation. Many reckon it is all about evil. God wanted a well-behaved creation, and He didn’t get it, so punishment followed, and it has been following ever since. God rewards good and punishes evil to keep us in line. We can find many scriptures that seem to support this assumption. However, I do not believe it fits the overriding narrative of the Bible.
A careful reading of the scriptures reveals that habitation and union have always been God’s aim. God’s heart was always to give Himself to us, but the ego resists both through good and evil. In the Bible, we read stories of those who resisted God by serving their own lusts, but we also read the stories of those like the Pharisees who opposed God by finding their identity in their own good.
When we grasp these things, it becomes apparent who the enemy of God is. It is the ego. While it lives, there can be no union. In the Old Testament, we see God’s war with the flesh in types and shadows. Two of my favorites are the story of David and Goliath (I Samuel 17) and the story of Elijah at Mount Carmel (I Kings 18).
Goliath was the embodiment of ego, with its great boast in self and its own strength. His glory was self, and he lived in his own potential. This great foe seemed impossible to defeat, just as the ego in our own lives seems impossible to overcome. David was a type of Christ who lived in God’s potential. God was His only boast. One was self-defined, and the other was God-defined. David, of course, slays the giant. It is not just a delightful story but a picture of the Christ who came to slay the giant who seemingly ruled the world, the ego.
At Mount Carmel, Elijah faced the prophets of Baal. I will never forget the day I read the story and saw myself in the prophets of Baal, or at least in my flesh. Both Elijah and the prophets implored their God to send fire from heaven to consume a sacrifice. Baal’s servants were certain they were praying to the true God, and they put on quite a show to get him to respond. They cried out, danced around, and cut themselves to get their god to do what they wanted. This is a wonderful picture of ego. On the surface, it is not necessarily anti-God. With flesh self is always the measure of God’s favor and the catalyst for His disfavor. The ego’s aim is never God Himself, but a finite blessing. It relates to God from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, seeking to be like God and to obtain that which delights the eyes. The ego can believe it is serving God, but it serves self.
In the story, Elijah poured water around the base of the altar before praying, thus stressing the impossibility of what God was about to do. The altar made of twelve stones represented Israel and the bull, Christ. God sent fire from heaven and consumed them together. This represents the cross where the ego died together with Christ.
When we consider the cross, we think of forgiveness, and we should, but it was also ego’s end. There God defeated His enemy, the self. He did so in the most remarkable way. Jesus laid down all the ego measures itself by. He lost his dignity and every measure of human worth. That’s what crucifixion was. The Romans wanted it to be the most painful death possible, but also the most humiliating. They stripped you of every shred of human dignity. The writers of the day, when speaking of crucifixion, wrote more about its shame than its pain. The Romans also took from you every measure of life. You had control over nothing, not even your bodily functions. The cross said you are nothing and you have nothing.
Christ’s death was the ego’s death. As Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me…. (Galatians 2:20)” At Calvary, God put away His enemy of old, the ego which enslaved His beloved so long ago.
We see the theme of rest in the first chapters of Genesis. It would be especially apparent to a people who had been enslaved to the Egyptians their whole lives. In the first chapter, God rested. This is more than a vacation. It is a state where becoming and obtaining have ceased. Rest is an excellent description of the infinite. It is complete and finished, and it is always so. God needs neither to become nor obtain. He is.
We were meant to partake of His rest. Yet, when ego was born, the tie was broken and striving became our lot. We see a picture of this in the curse (Genesis 3:17-19). It involved the return to endless labor and endless striving to gain. I imagine to the ancient Hebrews fresh out of Egypt, this meant a return to the labor they left behind (2). To us, it is slavery to becoming and gaining. We must do more, be more, and have more. Such is our end when the finite is the measure of who we are and what we have, and this is also a good description of the ego’s nature. It can never know rest.
Jesus came to set us free from the curse by becoming the curse for us. In Christ, life is no longer about becoming and obtaining. God has invited us to live in the infinite, that which is so, always has been so, and always will be so… absolute rest. From this perspective, life is not so much about doing and gaining. It is an unfolding revelation of the One who is, and when we behold Him, we know who we are, and we know we are complete, lacking nothing.
What would a return to Eden mean to you? A perfect life with no troubles? I suggest this is never what Eden was all about. It was a place of perfect union defined by togetherness, not circumstances and not good and evil. Our circumstances don’t have to change to return to Eden. The Romans don’t have to leave town! Eden is a place where the infinite is unveiled.
It is no accident that the ancient Hebrews embroidered cherubim on the veil to the Holiest of Holies (Exodus 26:31). Recall God set a cherub with a flaming sword to prevent anyone from returning to the garden. What was behind the veil was, in a sense, Eden, the place where heaven and earth are one, a place where we rest in the glory of God. There, His glory defines us and every moment of our lives.
The ego cannot comprehend the glory. All it sees is the glory of self and of the creation. Some say the veil in the temple represented the flesh and tearing it meant ego’s end. It is also an unveiling of what the ego could not see…God’s glory. With this unveiling, the old paradigm of becoming disappears like darkness when exposed to light. We begin to walk in a new paradigm of being and having. God’s rest becomes our home, and where we once saw lacking, we see glory.
(1) The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (The Lost World Series, Volume 2), by John H. Walton (IVP Academic, 2009)
(2) Bema has a very interesting podcast with Marty Solomon and Brent Billings on how the ancient Hebrews would have read Genesis one. https://www.bemadiscipleship.com/1
