6th October 2024

O.T. heroes 1 – Adam and Eve (Martin Mowat)

Can I take you into an imaginary world for a couple of minutes, a world a bit like the one that C. S. Lewis imagined for Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter when they climbed into that wardrobe.

But this world is quite different because it’s not mid-winter, it’s mid-summer, there are lions, but no witches. In fact there’s no-one else at all, it’s just you.

As you enter this world, you find yourself in a beautiful garden – the most beautiful garden that you’ve ever seen – except that it’s the only garden you’ve ever seen – more than that, it’s the only anything that you’ve ever seen, because before this moment you didn’t even exist.

So you stop to take it all in.  As you look, there are trees, all sorts of different shapes, sizes and colours. Some of them are full of fruit.

There are flowers too, all the colours of the rainbow, except that you have yet to see a rainbow. 

You stand quite still and you listen. You can hear the wind gently rustling the leaves in those trees – interesting!  What else? Birds singing, insects buzzing amongst the flowers, and small animals scurrying about in the grass and the plants. 

But wait a minute, you can smell those flowers too – they smell like … like honey, whatever that is.

It could all be mind-blowing but actually it isn’t.  It all feels perfectly normal – natural and peaceful.

And as you take it all in, you sit down and talk to God, which is just the most natural thing to do.

As the minutes turn into hours, the hours into days and weeks and months, although you’re on your own you don’t feel lonely because you’re in constant communication with your maker. 

Who needs anyone else? Right?

One day God points out one of the fruit trees and tells you NOT to eat its fruit.  OK! No big deal.

And then, a bit later still, God communicates to you the idea that perhaps you shouldn’t be on your own, you should have someone to help you, to keep you company, to share this heavenly experience.

O.K. Why not? If God thinks that that’s a good idea, then who are you to think otherwise? There’s plenty of space after all.

When you wake up the next morning, experiencing some pain for the very first time because something has happened to one of your rib bones, lo and behold, big surprise, there’s someone else.

That’s cool!  So, you show them around the garden, tell them which of the fruits and vegetables you prefer, and you point out the one that God has forbidden you to pick from.  

You find that you and this new arrival get on well together – you’re both on the same wavelength, same likes and dislikes, same ideas, same …, same everything in fact, except that your bodies are a bit different. That’s just how you are, just how God had made you both to be.

The differences don’t strike you as particularly worrying because lots of things are different in this wonderful garden environment that you’re in. 

You enjoy each other’s company, doing things together, discovering things together, like swimming in the river.  One of the activities that’s the most time consuming, though, is finding names for everything. But it’s good fun, especially naming the animals and the reptiles. They are all so different, not only in the way they look, but in the way they behave. 

No complaints!  That is - except – well, one of the reptiles seems a bit sneaky. 

First reading: Genesis 3:1-13

Suddenly everything is different.

Well, not everything of course. The trees are the same, the flowers, the river, the creatures, but it’s God! The tone of his voice has changed.  He doesn’t sound quite so friendly as he has up until now, and especially in those lovely quiet relaxed times at the end of the day, in the cool of the evening, when the sun starts to disappear over the horizon and fill the sky with the most amazing colours.  

Second reading: Genesis 3:14-24

So you’re probably asking yourselves why I would have included Adam and Eve in a series of messages about O.T. heroes. 

Well, I suppose that they did have a very unique relationship with God, that could be a reason perhaps.

But, well, I mean!  For goodness’ sake, they ruined everything didn’t they?  What’s heroic about that?  So actually, it should be quite the reverse.  If it hadn’t been for their crass stupidity, we’d all be living stress-free in beautiful gardens, right? No wars, no famines, no refugees. No politics, even. 

And you might also be saying that you can’t make heroes of people who didn’t actually exist because, of course, those first chapters of Genesis are all myth, aren’t they?

Well, I don’t know whether they are or they aren’t, and we won’t find out until we get to heaven, but I do know that because, as we saw a few weeks ago, “all scripture is God breathed”.  God put that account at the very beginning of his word for a VERY good reason, and that was to teach us something absolutely fundamental.

Because it’s about ‘control’ !

Until the forbidden fruit episode God was in control.  It wasn’t forced, it wasn’t oppressive, there was no animosity about it, it was just the most natural thing in the world.  God had set everything in motion, he knew best, so naturally he was in control, he made the rules, and that was the safest way for things to be.

God knew best.  

“But did he?” Eve asked herself. 

And then she shared that thought with. Adam, because of course they shared everything.  

“Good question”, Adam thought to himself, and said so to Eve. 

And so they decided to put their thought to the test.

As an aside, can I say that I don’t believe that this was all Eve’s fault.  I think this was something they conceived together, and something they decided together, and something they planned together, and something that they carried out together.

Why did they do it? Because they wanted some of that control. They wanted independence. They wanted to make their own decisions. 

So they put it to the vote. 2 votes for, none against, no abstentions.  The result was unanimous. It was all agreed. 

Making their own decisions, thinking that they knew best, self-government, control.  Bliss, heaven, but what they didn’t anticipate was Edenexit! As Julia Roberts said in the film Pretty Woman, “Big mistake, big, HUGE.”

Our obsession with money, our obsession with politics, our obsession with power, … it’s all about control! And that’s where everything goes wrong.

That’s the lesson of the Adam and Eve story.  What we call “original sin”. Control.

And why are they heroes? Because they did it for us. For you and for me, because if you and I had been in that garden we would have done EXACTLY THE SAME THING, you know we would. 

But they did it for us. 

And in doing so they triggered four things, albeit inadvertently.  They triggered all the pain and the suffering that self-government, money-grabbing and power-grabbing causes, they triggered fear, they triggered death, and they triggered grace.

Therefore, Paul wrote in Romans, … sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned. …….

But, he goes on, the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!  Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.  For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people.  For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man (Jesus) the many will be made righteous.

The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 5:12, 15-21)

The thing about Eden is that we want it back.  Deep down that’s what we’d really like.

Comfort, good weather, no stress, no illness, no wars, no famines, no heartache, …..

But we also want the control, don’t we?

Well, we don’t want to control the country, or the economy, we want other people to do that, but we do want to control what we do when we get up in the morning.

The bottom line is that we want our bread buttered on both sides, but the fact of the matter is, like it or not, it just doesn’t work like that. 

And that’s what our heroic friends Adam and Eve discovered.