Fall: There Is a Snake in Every Garden

The second in a series of sermons
The Word First: A Journey Through the Bible
Dr. James Flamming, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
November 3, 2002

Some weeks ago, Becky Kyle, one of our finest children’s Sunday school teachers was teaching her three-year-olds about the Garden of Eden. Becky had a tree and on the tree she put candy and she said to the boys and girls, “Now I’m putting candy on this tree.  This is good candy, sweet candy, delicious candy but I don’t want you to eat it, don’t want you to take it.  Just leave it here on the tree.” 

And then she went on telling the story; but in the middle of it from behind her back she brought the snake which was represented by her little finger.  And she said, “Now, boys and girls don’t listen to your teacher.  She is just trying to keep something good from you.  Go ahead and eat the candy.  I give you permission.  Go get it and eat it.”  And they did! And then Becky said, “Now boys and girls, I told you not to eat the candy.”  And they said, “But the serpent said we could.”  Sound familiar?  My goodness sake, isn’t it just incredible the relevance the Scripture has for life and for what’s evil around us if we’ll only just listen to it.

The drama of Genesis.  Five acts. The first one of which is innocence.  Second one of which is the fall.  The third one is the cover-up, the fourth one, the consequences and the 5^th one, God’s answer. 

First one’s innocence.  Adam and Eve are in the garden and they are just thrilled to be in the garden.  It is Hawaii to the nth degree.  Everything is perfect.  There’s no evil, everything’s pure, no temptation and then God does a strategic thing.  He puts two trees in the middle of it and he says don’t eat of it, drew boundaries, made a choice.  Why?  I mean it’s almost like entrapment because and hear this please, to have a real choice you have to have a real choice.  And if you don’t, choose you never grow.  You never assume responsibility and you never resume, assume responsibility for your wrong decisions.  Growth and choice go together.  Love and choice go together.  Faith and choice go together.  Hope and choice go together.  You cannot separate your ability to choose with the whole walk of faith.  No wonder God put at the very outset crucial choice. 

We don’t like boundaries.  We don’t like when somebody else sets them for us.  We sure are having trouble setting our own boundaries in this day and time.  God put the boundaries, put the trees, in a sense it’s about to be threatened.  But oh how we love the Garden of Eden.  Innocence syndrome, Garden of Eden Syndrome, our culture really has trouble with the fall.  See, the Christian faith says you’ve got to take this package if you want to understand modern life you’ve got to understand we go, every one of us, every one of us, from innocence to fall to sin, to cover-up.

I remember when I was a boy and just kind of being a boy ran through.  Some how or another I hit Mom’s favorite lamp and it went down and crashed.  And it just broke into a thousand pieces.  And later she came through and said what happened to my lamp?  And I said, “I don’t know.”  Cover-up, right?  You mean some of you have done that?  Cover-up.  And then consequences and then God’s answer.  And you see the Christian faith only makes sense when you understand the first four.  I mean if you never admit that you have to leave innocence you don’t need a Christ.  You picture yourself still back in the Garden of Eden.

When I was pastoring in Dallas, younger pastor then, and we put in the basement an activities area for the young people and it worked well.  But we put a drink machine and lo and behold the drinks kept being stolen as did the money.  So we set up a little, trying to figure out who would do it and one Saturday afternoon some boys from the neighborhood, we didn’t know their names, crawled in a window.  I called the police, probably wouldn’t do that now but I was young then.  The police caught them on the way out of the window, took them downtown, fingerprinted them, the whole bit.  The parents were livid.  They could not possibly understand how a Christian church could accuse their sons, demanded that they go before the official board, wanted me to apologize to the boys.  They went before the deacons.  When they were finished the deacons, very wise, they said we understand your concern.  We have children ourselves but it puzzles us a little bit that, that you excuse them from stealing and accuse us because we found it out.  And they went on to say it looks like you might want to use this to teach them right from wrong, which just made the parents even more angry.  Now what’s wrong with those parents?  They’re still living in the Garden of Eden.  They can’t admit that there is a potential wrongness in all of us, that there is a potential destructive power within all of us.

Mother Teresa, one of the saintly persons of our era once said in an angry moment there’s a murderer that lives within side of me.  Now of course only a saint could say it and see it.  But she understood that inside of all of us is a potential to do bad as well as good.  Innocence, don’t stop there because it’s not realistic.  It’s not the world.  How would you deal with 9/11, snipers, constant warfare in our world if you insisted that we were still back in the Garden of Eden which leads us to The Fall.  That’s what’s it’s called. 

There was a Sunday School teacher by the name of Gwen.  She was having her children on a day re-enact creation.  And she divided the group up, here were the creeping things and here were the swimming things and here were the growing things and where was God?  So she got Jonathan and put him up on a, on a ladder and he was to shine down a, a big light down on everybody else.  Well about the time the creeping things were going to see the swimming things Gwen felt a little bit of a tug at her skirt.  It was Jonathan.  He had climbed down from the ladder, handed Gwen the light and said I’m feeling crazy today.  Can you get somebody else to play God?  You know what?  Not, our age, our age has a tendency to really want to be God.  We just can’t admit we need help.  We haven’t ever come down from our ladder and said in many ways we’re crazy.

The Fall is that choice which reveals that there is a potential within us to choose wrongly and the Satan, the serpent is alive and well in us.  When Paul said in Romans 3:23, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God I don’t notice at the end of that verse that he listed a lot of exceptions.  He didn’t say everybody is a sinner except preachers or deacons or bishops or choir members or members of First Baptist Church in Richmond.  All, is all.  The Fall is followed by cover-up.  Isn’t it fascinating that, that when we’ve had all of this corporate scandal and you’ve got these high moguls who have lied, who have cheated, who have stolen money from people that could afford it the least and we won’t call it sin.  We, you know, the press calls it malfeasance.  Ok, let’s call it malfeasance but you’ve got to have a word for something’s wrong.  Guess what they did, the first thing?  Cover-up.  You think the Bible’s talking fairy tale?  What the Bible’s doing is giving you a realistic domino fall of how it happens, innocence, the fall, cover-up.

In my lifetime two presidents have done wrong and got caught with it.  One of them resigned, probably, probably the other one should have.  And do you remember what the first response was?  Cover-up.  The cover-up in the Genesis story takes two uncomfortably familiar dimensions.  The first one of which is they hide.  They know that they are naked and the scripture says they sewed leaves together.  Not too good in winter.  Later on it says God made them skins, sewed them together and gave them to them.  God’s a little more realistic than they were.  God’s a little more realistic with our problems than we are.  We keep leaving, we keep living with pie high in the sky by and by when God’s already on the cross in Jesus Christ doing something for us that we cannot do for ourselves.  The second thing is to blame, not take responsibility.  Adam won’t take responsibility.  The woman, she made me do it.  The woman won’t take responsibility, the serpent, he made me do it.  And the serpent if he were given the chance would probably say don’t blame me, blame God he put the choices out there.  Cover-up.  Consequences, the consequences are always really, really ignored if we can in our culture or one of the things, one of the things we do and we do it pretty well on occasion and that is we take the sharp edges of reality and we make humor out of them.  And that’s good.  I mean, you know, you can’t live with the harsh realities all the time.  But we do need to look beneath the humor. 

I heard, by the way, of three ladies who went to heaven and Simon Peter met them at the gate.  First lady, he said what makes you think you ought to be here? Listed all the beliefs and all of the good things, went in.  As she was going in Simon Peter said don’t step on the ducks and she said, what?  He said don’t step on the ducks like d-u-c-k-s, ducks, don’t step on the ducks.  Well, there were ducks all over the place.  She stepped on one.  Immediately an angel there saying told you not to step on the ducks.  Here’s your penalty, and handed over the homeliest, ugliest man she’d ever seen.  Said, this is your partner for eternity.  Second woman goes through, steps on a duck, too.  Immediately the angel is there saying I’m so sorry, so sorry, wish you hadn’t done this.  But here’s, here’s your eternal person, partner, the ugliest, homeliest man she’d ever seen.  The third came in, very coordinated, wonderfully able, didn’t step on a duck.  And the angel appeared and said congratulations, going to give you your reward, handed over the handsomest, most gorgeous man she had ever seen in her life.  The angel was gone, she looked at the man and she said, I can’t imagine this.  How could this have happened?  And he said I stepped on a duck.  Consequences, you can make humor out of it or you can realize the truth of the Genesis story, they got cast out.  Something came to a close.

There is a finality to this cast out business.  They are forced to leave and they can’t return.  There’s an awful edge to it.  There’s a shut door to it.  Now God has some things he can do.  One is he can just destroy the whole mess.  He can say, oh my soul, what a terrible experiment.  Or God can say you know I need to make a little tweaking here of my game plan.  Let’s take away choice in which case, of course, we become like animals run by instinct.  Or robots, push the buttons.  But you see, God, Jesus says, is like a heavenly parent, Heavenly Father, just really, really want for us to be family.  The Lord God as Heavenly Father wants his sons and his daughters to grow and mature and to have communication with him, doesn’t want them like robots.  Would you like for your children to be robots simply run by instinct?  Why no, the dream, the whole soul of your heart is you want your children to grow up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord but you want them to grow up.  And the Lord God won’t take choice away because that’s the only way it can happen.  Now what the Lord God chooses is a redemptive call, a call of redemption.  Redemption means to buy back, buy back that which is scarred, that which is ruined, that which is rusty, that which has been cast away to buy it back.  That’s what redemption means.  And the call, the call leaves you with choice.  You’re no longer just, you’re not a robot.  The call of the Lord keeps coming, doesn’t destroy choice you have to choose to listen and you have to choose to respond and you have to choose to obey but the call keeps coming.  That’s where we come next week, Genesis 12 with the call of Abraham.  But let me tell you something all of the rest of the Bible is the story of God’s incredible patience, mercy and love in the redemption and call that he gives to us and ultimately, ultimately it would take the crown of thorns, a cross, a borrowed tomb. Tradition says Jesus was buried in a garden.  Things have gone full circle.  The Lord Jesus on that night took the bread as if to say please understand what’s going on.  The price that’s been paid, the gift that’s been given.  And he said this is my body which is broken for you and then he took the cup and he said this is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you and as oft as you eat the bread and as oft as you drink the cup remember me.  This morning move through those four acts and move to redemption, call.  Listen to the Spirit of God as the Spirit of God comes, caresses you, loves you, calls you, forgives you.

© 2002 James Flamming