01/18/2026 - Genesis 3:1-15

Last week we looked at the creation poem in Genesis 1, pulling out some of the details from that poem to see what we could learn from them. This week we’re going to do the same thing, this time from the story of what’s sometimes called the “Fall of humanity” in Genesis 3. Eve gets tricked by a snake into eating an apple, she coerces Adam into taking a bite too, humanity has officially Sinned with a capital S, so God gets mad and God kicks them out of the garden. It’s how we tell the story to give our children an explanation for the beginning of humanity’s original sin that keeps us separated from God - at least, that’s how it was explained to me.

Except the word “sin,” or really even the concept of how we tend to understand it, is something we tend to add into the story, rather than something that is already there. So let’s try to put aside our presumptions of how we’ve traditionally read this story, and see what else we can learn from it.

~

The snake was the most intelligent of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say that you shouldn’t eat from any tree in the garden?”

The woman said to the snake, “We may eat the fruit of the garden’s trees but not the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. God said, ‘Don’t eat from it, and don’t touch it, or you will die.’”

The snake said to the woman, “You won’t die! God knows that on the day you eat from it, you will see clearly and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The woman saw that the tree was beautiful with delicious food and that the tree would provide wisdom, so she took some of its fruit and ate it, and also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then they both saw clearly and knew that they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together and made garments for themselves.

During that day’s cool evening breeze, they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden; and the man and his wife hid themselves from the Lord God in the middle of the garden’s trees. The Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”

The man replied, “I heard your sound in the garden; I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree, which I commanded you not to eat?”

The man said, “The woman you gave me, she gave me some fruit[b] from the tree, and I ate.”

The Lord God said to the woman, “What have you done?!”

And the woman said, “The snake tricked me, and I ate.”

The Lord God said to the snake,

“Because you did this,
 you are the one cursed
 out of all the farm animals,
 out of all the wild animals.
 On your belly you will crawl,
 and dust you will eat
 every day of your life. I will put contempt between you and the woman,
 between your offspring and hers.
 They will strike your head,
 but you will strike at their heels.”

~

One small thing you might have noticed in reading this passage is that the type of fruit Adam and Eve eat is not mentioned here. In popular culture it’s pretty common to portray it as an apple - probably because it’s a pretty easy, cheap fruit to get for commercials, music videos, and the like. But we actually don’t know what kind of fruit it is.

Thankfully I don’t think apples have suffered too much from this slander, and if they have, apple cider donuts have done more than enough to rehabilitate their image in my opinion.

Going back to our story, after our passage ends, God clothes Adam and Eve and sends them out of the garden forever. And oftentimes we think of God being mad and sending them out in anger. But if God was angry, why provide for Adam and Eve by clothing them instead of throwing them out immediately?

In fact, why is any of this necessary? Why did God not want Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and become more like God? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to try and do as Christians? Be more like Jesus and like God?

And this questioning is what we’re supposed to be doing with Scripture. Especially when it comes to stories like this.

I remember being taught more of a literal creation story in Sunday School. So when I went to college and started taking theology classes, I was a little shocked to learn that there were plenty of other Christians who didn’t believe that the creation story in Genesis was literal. Instead, I learned to approach Genesis 2 and 3 less as a historical account, and more as a Old Testament parable, similar to the stories Jesus would tell during his ministry on earth. And I learned that doing this approach often taught me more than just the single story I’d been taught in Sunday School.

So let’s try that by asking some questions and seeing what we can learn from the details that might’ve been left behind in our Sunday School lessons.

Right after our passage, God goes on to tell Adam and Eve the consequences of their actions - for Eve, pain in childbirth, and for Adam, pain in tending to the land and growing food. And these are consequences, not curses. The only creature to get cursed in Genesis 3 is the serpent, Adam and Eve are not. Nowadays we see pain in childbirth as the “curse” on women, but it wasn’t written that way in Scripture.

In fact the consequences that God tells Adam and Eve about are kind of the same thing - new life will now be more difficult to bring into existence. Whether those’re new humans or new plants or animals, creating new life is not going to be as easy as God speaking it into existence, or forming it from primordial waters or the dust of the earth. It’s a shift in how creation will continue to come into being.

And it’s also a shift in the relationship between God, humanity, and the rest of creation. Because right after God declares the consequences of Adam and Eve’s actions, for the first time, a living thing dies. But it’s not Adam and Eve, like God said it would be. Instead, it’s an unnamed animal that’s killed so God can make clothes for Adam and Eve.

In some interpretations, this is the first sacrifice found in Scripture, made on behalf of Adam and Eve so they wouldn’t die. Because if we go to Genesis 2:16-17, God tells Adam to “Eat your fill from all of the garden’s trees; but don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you eat from it, you will die!”

So maybe God sacrificed a creature not only to clothe Adam and Eve, but on their behalf to save their lives. And the practice of sacrifices would then continue throughout Scripture, becoming part of Jewish practice up through Jesus’s time.

However when I was taught this story as a child, I was told Eve had committed the “first sin” by disobeying God and eating the fruit. Then Adam disobeyed by eating the fruit as well. And to explain why they didn’t die, it was explained that they essentially lost their immortality by death entering the world through their actions, and they started to die that day. I think the way of telling this story was done to try and explain to us little kids what sin was - disobeying God. Because Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they couldn’t be with God anymore, so God sent them out of the Garden of Eden.

So, the lesson went, when we sin, we’re separated from God as well.

But is that the only way to talk about what’s going on here? Or if we put that assumption to the side for a minute, is there something else we can learn about here?

The piece that was left out when I was a kid, and it may not have been for you, is that eating of the fruit gave humanity the knowledge of good and evil, just like God has. But why would God not want humanity to have that? Does God have a massive ego and wanted to keep that power to Godself and keep us all living in ignorance and bliss? Or did God have a really good reason for not wanting us to know good and evil?

Because maybe knowledge here includes not just being able to recognize what is good and evil, but having the knowledge to be able to try and decide for ourselves what is good and evil, calling what God calls good, evil, and what God calls evil, good.

So maybe that is what this Old Testament parable is trying to warn us against. And maybe another way to tell it goes like this:

Humanity lived in paradise, following God’s definitions of what was good and what was evil. But one day, humanity decided that we were clever and able to declare good things as evil and evil things as good for our own gain and power. And in doing so, we lost paradise. It’s become more of a struggle to bring new life into the world, to breathe hope and love and compassion into the world, when at the same time, we’re twisting what is evil and good into their opposites.

And when we try to twist what God calls good into something evil, or what God calls evil into something good;

when we say that empathy is toxic, like a book that came out by a Christian author called, literally, “Toxic Empathy”;

when we try to justify not feeding the hungry or housing the homeless;

when we try to justify people being tear gassed and violently pulled out of their cars and homes and schools and workplaces and streets and detained for no reason;

then we’re proving the point of the story.

Humanity should not have the responsibility of deciding what is good and what is evil. We live with the consequences of it every single day.

But just as we are capable of twisting that knowledge for our own gain, we’re also just as capable of doing the opposite. We can bring forth new life into places dying of despair and fear by choosing goodness, choosing love, peace, compassion, empathy, and so much more.

We can do as God says and Jesus modeled by feeding those who are hungry;

making sure that the poor among us have clothes and shelter;

caring for those who have been hurt, whether physically, mentally, or spiritually;

and demanding that justice and love be as prevalent here on earth as they are in heaven.

Not matter how big or small our actions are, we are all capable of bringing more love and goodness into the world.