Genesis 3:1

THE TEMPTATION OF MAN

‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’

Genesis 3:1

(1)

The writer of the narrative intended to imply, by his language, the existence and operation of a personal agent of evil.

I. The tempter is admitted into the garden.—The garden was not a sacred enclosure, which he was forbidden to enter. It was not meant then, any more than now—that human beings should be protected from the assaults of temptation. Not the virtue which stands, because it has never been tried, but the virtue which has passed through trial, and come triumphantly out of it—this is what God demands, and expects at the hands of His creatures. Just as it is with us now, so was it with Eve, temptation met her in the ordinary walk of life, and when she was occupied with the tasks which God had given her to fulfil. She had not wandered into some perilous region. She may have been intellectually a child; but she had a moral instinct that must have given her warning, and must have hinted plainly that even to parley with such an interlocutor was a deviation from the path of duty. Clearly, what she ought to have done was to have turned at once from a being who cast a covert slur upon the character of her God, and to have refused to hold further communication with him.

A point of resemblance between the first temptation and all subsequent ones is to be found in the injecting into the mind of suspicions about God, especially with reference to the prohibitions which He imposes. In our better moments we can see that these prohibitions are intended for our good, that they are really evidences of the Divine love and watchfulness over us, and that the great Father would never really deny His children anything but what He knows it would be injurious to them to possess. But when God puts limits to our self-indulgence, or warns us altogether off from certain regions of enjoyment, is there not sometimes a feeling in our heart akin to that inspired by the tempter into the heart of Eve? and are we not sometimes inclined to suspect that the Creator grudges to see His creatures happy, and that there must be something exceptionally delicious about the fruit of the forbidden tree, inasmuch as it is so carefully guarded and placed beyond our reach?

II. Consider, in the next place, the result of the temptation—I mean the result that appeared at once, and which is indeed the type and forerunner of all the results of successful temptation which we see in the world around us. This was their shrinking from the presence of God. Up to this time, it had been a delight to Adam and Eve to go forth and meet their Heavenly Visitant, when He descended to converse with them. Now, as soon as they are aware of His approach, they hide themselves among the trees of the garden. And are we not reminded by this circumstance of our own natural recoil from personal contact with God?

III. The instrument which the tempter employed to make his temptation successful was falsehood. He persuaded Eve to believe a lie. And Satan uses precisely the same weapon now—falsehood, but falsehood with a certain admixture in it of the element of truth.

—Rev. Gordon Calthrop.

(2)

I. Satan’s temptations begin by laying a doubt at the root.—He questions; he unsettles. He does not assert error; he does not contradict truth; but he confounds both. He makes his first entries, not by violent attack, but by secret sapping; he endeavours to confuse and cloud the mind which he is afterwards going to kill.

II. The particular character of these troublesome and wicked questionings of the mind varies according to the state and temperament and character of each individual. (1) In order to combat them, every one should have his mind stored and fortified with some of the evidences of the Christian religion. To these he should recur whenever he feels disquieted; he should be able to give ‘a reason for the hope that is in him,’ and an answer to that miserable shadow that flits across his mind, ‘Yea, hath God said?’ (2) A man must be careful that his course of life is not one giving advantage to the tempter. He must not be dallying under the shadow of the forbidden tree, lest the tempter meet him and he die.

III. The far end of Satan is to diminish from the glory of God.—To mar God’s design he insinuated his wily coil into the garden of Eden: to mar God’s design he met Jesus Christ in the wilderness, on the mountain top, and on the pinnacle of the temple; to mar God’s design he is always leading us to take unworthy views of God’s nature and God’s work.

—Rev. Jas. Vaughan.

(3)

The Tempter effected his purpose in Eden: (1) by a question; (2) by a negation; (3) by a promise.

I. By a question.—(1) Have we ever reflected on the tremendous power of a question? Some of the most important social and intellectual revolutions have sprung from a question. And it was through a question that the greatest of all revolutions was effected, by which man, made in the image of God, was seduced from His allegiance—a question that has carried with it consequences of which no man can foresee the end. (2) Mark the subtlety of the question. It aimed at destroying the blessed fellowship between God and man. ‘Men ask in vain,’ says Luther, ‘what was the particular sin to which Eve was tempted.’ The solicitation was to all sins when she was tempted to doubt the word and the goodwill of God.

II. The Tempter makes the way to sin easy by removing all fear of the consequences.—There is the negation, ‘Ye shall not surely die.’ We listen to the lie, and we stake our all, for time and for eternity, upon this blank and cruel negation.

III. The Satanic promise.—(1) It is malevolent: ‘God doth know’; He has a reason for the restriction; He dreads a rival. (2) It is fascinating: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ The perverted pride of man’s heart is the Tempter’s best ally.

Bishop Perowne.

Illustration

(1) ‘We shall err greatly if we treat Adam’s history in Eden as nothing more than a fabled picture of the experience of man; rather is it the root out of which your experience and mine has grown, and in virtue of which they are other than they would have been had they come fresh from the hand of God. We recognise the law of headship which God has established in humanity, whereby Adam, by his own act, has placed his race in new and sadder relations to Nature and to the Lord, (a) The origin of evil may still remain a mystery, but this history of Eden stands between it and God. Eden is God’s work, the image of His thought; and man’s spirit joyfully accepts the history, and uses it as a weapon against haunting doubts about the origin of evil. (b) The sin of Adam is substantially the history of every attempt of self-will to counterwork the will of God. Every sin is a seeking for a good outside the region which, in the light of God, we know to be given us as our own.’

(2) ‘Mysterious as the history of our fall is, its greatest wonder is this: that God out of ruin hath brought forth fresh beauty; out of man’s defeat, His victory; out of death, life glorious and eternal. Thou shall surely live is now the Divine proclamation to man’s world. “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.” ’

(3) ‘Let us learn to be early undeceived about the Tempter’s falsehood, “Ye shall not surely die.” If a man will serve his sin, let him at least reckon upon this, that in one way or other it will be ill with him; his sin will find him out; his path will be hard; there will be to him no peace. The night of concealment may be long, but dawn comes like the Erinnys to reveal and avenge its crimes.’

(4) ‘The temptation had a personal source. There are beings who desire to draw men away from God. The serpent, by its poison and its loathly form, is the natural symbol of such an enemy of man. The insinuating slyness of the suggestions of evil is like the sinuous gliding of the snake, and truly represents the process by which temptation found its way into the hearts of the first pair, and of all their descendants. For it begins with casting a doubt on the reality of the prohibition. “Hath God said?” is the first parallel opened by the besieger. The fascinations of the forbidden fruit are not dangled at first before Eve, but an apparently innocent doubt is filtered into her ear. And is not that the way in which we are still snared? The reality of moral distinctions, the essential wrongness of the sin, are obscured by a mist of sophistication. “There is no harm in it” steals into some young man’s or woman’s mind about things that were forbidden at home, and they are half conquered before they know that they have been attacked. Then comes the next besieger’s trench, much nearer the wall,—namely, denial of the fatal consequences of the sin: “Ye shall not surely die,” and a base hint that the prohibition was meant, not as a parapet to keep him from falling headlong into the abyss, but as a barrier to keep from rising to a great good; “for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods.” These are still the two lies which wile us to sin,—“It will do you no harm,” and “You are cheating yourselves out of good by not doing it.” ’

(5) ‘A burglar, not long ago, rifled an unoccupied dwelling by the seaside. He ransacked the rooms, and heaped his plunder in the parlour. There were evidences that he sat down to rest. On a bracket in the corner stood a marble bust of Guido’s “Ecce Homo”—Christ crowned with thorns. The guilty man had taken it in his hands and examined it. It bore the marks of his fingers, but he replaced it with its face turned to the wall, as if he would not have even the sightless eyes of the marble Saviour look upon his deeds of infamy. So the first act of the first sinner was to hide himself at the sound of God’s voice.’