Let’s put all that we have learned together and read Genesis 2 and 3 (or most of it anyway) as though we are right there. How does our understanding change based on a first-person experience?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Let’s put all that we have learned together and explore Genesis 2 and 3 (or most of it anyway) as though we are right there. How will our understanding change based on a first-person experience? For this episode, you are on a special assignment. I want you to pretend like you are one of God’s angels, invisibly watching in the Garden to see what happens. So, you are there, but no one can see or hear you and you can’t interact with anyone, but you have a front-row seat to everything that happens. Now, we are going to do something very different from when we experienced the Creation Story together because I am not going to read directly from Scripture. This time I am going to do something different—something they started to do a few hundred years before Jesus was born. I am going to write a fictional account based on Scripture. However, unlike those accounts—as we find in Jubilees and in later midrashic fiction—I am going to stick to what Scripture says and I won’t make up anything really crazy. I am going to take what we have learned and make a narrative story that puts it all together in the way I think this story would have sounded when Moses told it in the wilderness to the children of Israel—but I am also going to include other information from books like Ezekiel and Revelation, things they maybe didn’t know when Moses told the story. Also, I will include things that are important to us, but aren’t in the story, things that I believe they would have understood without it being included. Remember that context is the stuff you know that you just assume everyone else knows too and would never think to tell people when telling a story—no one ever writes everything down, just the unusual events. You can disagree with a lot of it and that’s okay. I am not going to change anything that will dishonor God in any way. In fact, my reason for telling the story this way is to give us all a better idea of how God wants us to live and to know about Him and love Him and one another. I want to help you become critical thinkers.
Here we go!
In the beginning, after God had created the Heavens and the Earth, the earth was a clean and beautiful place to live but there were two problems—the land was abundantly filled with wild plants but no crops to feed the people He had created, and there was no rain yet to water the crops anyway. There was, however, the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the land there was very fertile. When the rivers would overflow, they would water the plain and so the people whom God created settled there in that good land and began to grow barley and wheat and other crops for food. As the population grew, the people learned how to create canals and irrigation channels to water land that was farther and farther away from the rivers.
Now, although God had created these people in His image, they were mortal—they would someday become just like the dust on the ground that they were planting crops in. They were born, then grew up and got older and then they would eventually die. But they weren’t like the animals, birds and fish that God had created before them—they could learn and love and wisely care for the planet He made for them and could use the animals wisely to make their lives better.
Although the Lord God stopped His work of creating on the seventh day, He wasn’t done working. No! He always watched over and guided the humans He had created, and He was busy planting a special garden of His own so that He could live among them. There was a land the humans called Eden and out of that land flowed a river. That river was beautiful, and it split into four different rivers. But in the place where the river split up—that was where God decided to build His Garden sanctuary, a very special place where humans could come and worship Him.
In this garden, there were no crops but there was every kind of tree imaginable to eat from. Oranges and apples, peaches and pears, mulberries and apricots and the fruit of the trees was always good. But the two most beautiful trees of all were in the middle of the Garden—the fruit of the first tree gave life to anyone who ate it, so it was called the Tree of Life. The leaves healed people and it gave a different fruit every month of the year (Rev 22:2). The fruit of the second tree would give anyone who ate it the ability to decide for themselves what was right and wrong. This tree was called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Once the Garden was just right, the Lord God took one of the men He had created and put him in the Garden to take care of it. The man, who had been farming the land of the Euphrates, couldn’t believe how beautiful the Garden was and how much easier his life would be working here. Instead of laboring all year to dig irrigation canals and to grow barley and wheat and other crops, he would simply be a caretaker—carefully protecting what God had already planted. God came to him one day and said, “Everything I have planted here is good for food and you can eat anything you want whenever you want and there is a tree here that will keep you from getting older and dying, but I want you to look at that tree right over there. It gives you the knowledge of what is good and bad, but the cost is very high–don’t eat from that one or you will die.”
The man nodded and stepped back a bit. He carefully marked the place of the tree in his mind and looked at the fruit so he would be sure not to make a mistake. But he didn’t eat the fruit of the Tree of Life either, because he was alone and being alone made him think that he really didn’t want to stay alive forever and ever. He was grateful to be in the Garden, and the work was so much easier, but doing the work alone—even with the presence of God there with him, left him feeling very empty inside. God watched the man as he worked and noticed how quickly he grew unhappy. But God wasn’t angry—He didn’t yell at the man and tell him that he should consider himself lucky and that he should just be happy to be with God. God agreed that the man needed someone just like him, someone perfectly designed to help him in the work of the Garden and to be his equal—someone he could fully share life with. But how would God make sure Adam knew that this wasn’t just someone to boss around or fight with, destroying the peace of the Garden? God came up with a perfect plan.
God called all the animals to the Garden in two’s and brought them to the man and told him to give them names because, as a human being created in God’s image, he was in charge of them. They were his responsibility. Well, this was very interesting. It took Adam a long time to come up with names for them all, but once the job was done, he was sad again—there wasn’t a single one that he had felt a connection with. He had marveled at the amazing works of God but none of them could understand him when he spoke to them and none of them really seemed to care about what he had named them. They also weren’t very helpful for working in the Garden. The cats were fun for a while but then they started ignoring him and spent the rest of the day licking themselves and sleeping. Playing fetch with the dog got really old. This just wouldn’t do. Adam looked at all the animals and saw that there were two of each but he was all alone.
This made God happy because now the man was all ready to understand exactly what he needed to know, so that there would be perfect peace and happiness in His Garden paradise. And the Lord God made the man fall asleep and placed a vision in his dreams. In that vision, Adam watched as God cut him in half. At the same time that God was healing Adam, He also created a woman out of the other half of him. Adam woke up but he was confused, shaking his head and wondering what it all meant.
But then, God took one of the women from outside of the Garden and brought her to the man. God knew they would be perfect for one another because He knew the man inside and outside and he also knew the woman inside and out. He knew they would love and help one another. When Adam saw her, he slapped himself on the forehead and said, “I understand my dream now! Her bones are made of the same stuff my bones are made out of and her body is made out of the same stuff my body is made out of. She isn’t an animal, with different flesh and different bones, she is just like me! Just like the tigresses are like the tigers and the cows are like the bulls and the does are like the bucks. She’s a woman like I am a man. The same but different. She can help me and be my partner in caring for the Garden because she is a human and so she is my equal and not like the animals, who can’t even understand me or talk to me.”
Later, Moses would tell this story to explain to the Israelites in the wilderness to show them that this is how God intended marriage to be—that a man would only be united with a woman. That He gave the man and woman one another and that two people would be married forever and would never hurt one another. They were supposed to be allies, which meant they would always be loyal to one another. When men changed that later and were abandoning their wives and hurting them, Jesus told them that God didn’t approve of it at all and they were not doing what God wanted in the beginning, when men and women were given to one another as helpers and equals in the Garden. In fact, they were so perfect for one another and so happy that they were both naked and they didn’t even care. No one was embarrassed and no one felt scared or jealous or suspicious.
But all that was about to change. One day, the man and the woman were working at the edge of the Garden, making it bigger, and they heard something say, “Psst! Hey, over here!” They were shocked because they hadn’t seen any other humans come near the Garden and when they looked, they saw a serpent in the scrub brush. The snake looked at the woman and said, “Hey, I heard a rumor, did God really tell you that you aren’t allowed to eat any fruit here in the Garden where you are slaving away?”
The woman thought it was very strange that a snake was talking but, unlike the man, she hadn’t seen all the animals yet and shrugged it off. Maybe snakes talk! But what he was saying was wrong and she frowned. “No, that’s not true, we can eat all the fruit we want—except for the fruit from that one tree in the middle of the Garden. God says if we eat it or even touch it, we will die.”
The man winced a little bit when she said they couldn’t touch it. When he had told her God’s command, he was only trying to protect her and he had added that so she wouldn’t even go anywhere near the tree. His intentions were good but he was worried now that the snake knew the truth and would correct her.
The snake looked right at the man as though he was going to tell her that he had lied, but then didn’t. The man kept his mouth shut because he wanted his wife to go on trusting him. The snake shook his head and chuckled, “Believe me, you’re not going to die today. God just wants you to think that because He knows darned well that as soon as you eat that fruit, you will be just like him. You’ll have the ability to decide for yourself what is right and wrong. You don’t have to depend on Him to make all those decisions—you will be like gods yourself. I wonder why He is holding you back from your destiny?”
The man, who had been worried about his lie being outed, now forgot about his lie and was asking himself, “Is it true? Was the Lord God just like us once upon a time? Did he eat the fruit and become perfect and all powerful? If so, then why am I spending my time working my butt off in this Garden when I can just eat that fruit?”
As the man was thinking, so was the woman, “Why did my husband tell me that I couldn’t even touch a tree that will make me like God? I mean, it’s great here in the Garden compared to the outside world but wouldn’t it be even better to be as wise as God is and to stop having to take orders and work so hard every day? I don’t see God working at all.”
Slowly, the man and the woman went together to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Their heads were filled with so many questions now. Was the tree good or bad for them? After all, they really had no proof it was bad—maybe the snake was right. Maybe God was lying to them. Maybe God was hogging all the really good stuff for Himself—that wasn’t even remotely fair. They deserved their chance to be more than they were—stupid gardeners in this stupid garden. Why was God holding them back? But–maybe the snake was lying to them. But why would the snake lie to them? What did it have to gain? It seemed like it knew a lot. Certainly, it wouldn’t just make stuff up and cause trouble. “No,” the woman said to herself, “the snake has nothing to gain—so it must be telling the truth.”
The more the woman looked at the fruit, the better it looked—so juicy and sweet. She could almost taste it in her mouth. And the snake said it would make her like God. Wasn’t it worth the risk? What did she really have to lose? Before she knew it, the fruit was in her hand and she smiled—she wasn’t dead. The whole thing had been a huge lie to hold them back from their destiny of being just like God. She took a huge bite and handed the fruit to the man, “Guess I am not going to die after all. Here, you might as well have some too.”
The man himself hadn’t expected her to die when she touched it—he knew better than that. But when she took a huge bite and chewed it and swallowed it down, and didn’t die, he realized that the Lord God had lied to him on his first day in the Garden. Maybe everything had been a huge lie and God couldn’t be trusted. So, he looked at the fruit and looked at the woman one last time and took a huge bite for himself. “Hmm…” the man thought to himself as he chewed and swallowed, “that doesn’t taste nearly as good as I thought it would.”
All of a sudden, as the fruit began to digest, the man and woman began to see everything differently—even each other. The woman looked at the man and saw he was naked, and the man looked at the woman and saw she was naked—and then they looked at themselves and saw that they were naked! They tried covering themselves with their arms but it was no use because their arms and hands weren’t big enough to cover everything. “The fig trees!” Adam cried out, and they ran to the edge of the Garden where there was a huge fig tree, with very large leaves. Out of the corner of their eye, they saw the snake and could have sworn that they saw a slight little smile on its face as they scrambled to pick the large but itchy leaves, stitching them together with small twigs until they got enough together to awkwardly hang over their bodies. It was hard to scratch themselves without destroying their fragile coverings, and sometimes they fell off entirely and they had to be fixed and put back on.
As the sun started to go down, the man said to the woman, “He’ll be here soon—we can’t let Him see us like this. Let’s just hide.”
Sure enough, it wasn’t long after that when they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the Garden. Usually, they went running to Him but today they stayed put. It wasn’t long before they heard Him say, “Adam, where are you?” The man facepalmed, he should have known that his absence would be noticed. He thought for a minute about just keeping quiet but knew that God would find them sooner or later and so he replied, “I heard you, but I decided to hide because I am naked and it scares me to be naked!”
The voice of God became sterner, “Who told you that you were naked? How exactly did you figure that out without being told? I am the only one who knew that you were naked. Unless of course, you ate from the one tree I told you not to eat from.”
The man didn’t know exactly where God was because He had stopped coming closer to them. But all of a sudden, he forgot about being naked and was ashamed of having disobeyed. And that shame turned to anger. He gave the woman a dirty look for the first time and accused God, “You put this woman in here with me! She took that fruit and gave it to me! All I did was eat it! This is not my fault!”
The Lord God was sad that the man was accusing him and turning on the woman and not taking responsibility for his own actions. Maybe the woman would do better. He asked her, “What on earth have you done?” And she threw her hands in the air and replied, “Oh, it was that snake who tricked me into doing it, that’s the only reason I ate the fruit.”
Again, God was sad because the woman wasn’t taking responsibility for herself either. So, he gave up trying to reason with them. He said to the snake, “I see you aren’t denying tricking them into doing this so you are obviously guilty. No one tricked you; you just decided to make trouble, so I am going to curse you and your descendants forever. Every wild animal and every tame animal will hate you forever. You won’t be able to be around other animals—they will all try to run or kill you when they see you. You won’t have any comforts; you will live and move with your head on the ground. And the woman you deceived, she and all her descendants will hate you and they will kill you whenever they can. One day, one of her descendants will destroy the evil thing you did here, even though it will destroy him to accomplish it. “
Then God said to the woman, “Your life is going to be very different now. From the time you get pregnant on, your life as a mother will be very painful. It would have been so wonderful here, with your children, eating the fruit of the Garden in peace. And your relationship with your husband will be tainted with anger and sin now—you will still want the loving relationship you had here in paradise, but he will dominate you instead. I am not cursing you or your husband, but your lives are going to be full of terrible consequences.”
Then God spoke to the man, “You knew exactly what I told you not to do, you and no one else. But you listened to your wife instead of Me, who made you and made this Garden and put you here and gave you a companion. I am not going to curse you either, the way I cursed the snake, but your life as a gardener will become a life as a farmer, working land that isn’t already a lush garden. And beyond that, because of what you did and so you will realize what I gave you here, I am cursing the land and it is going to grow thorns and weeds. You will have to watch where to step now and farming will be as hard for you as being a mother will be painful for your wife. You will have to struggle in order to have enough food to survive. And you both will die someday.”
Adam frowned and looked at his wife, and thought about how God had given him all the animals to name like God had named him. He didn’t want to apologize to God for not trusting Him, he was too angry. If only the woman had never been put in the Garden, that snake would never have tricked him! He would have been smarter. She really was not much better than one of the animals, he thought to himself. “I will call you Eve,” he said angrily. “You will be the mother of all my descendants.”
God sighed with great sadness as he looked at them, at how angry they were and because they weren’t willing to take responsibility and admit they were both terribly wrong. But God loved them. He wasn’t going to give up on them. He knew He couldn’t allow all this anger and sin and strife to be in His Garden sanctuary, and He knew that if they could still come into the Garden they would continue to eat from the Tree of Life and their sins would never end. Who knows what else they might do? He knew they had to leave forever, but he also knew that they would cut their feet and arms and legs on the rocks and thorns outside. He knew that living outside the Garden would be bad and even dangerous without real clothes, and so he lovingly made them clothes and sandals out of animal skins to protect them.
After they had put on the leather clothes, which felt much better than the leaves, the Lord God told them to leave and when they protested, they heard a noise in the Garden they had never heard before. Coming toward them were creatures terrifying to look at. Each one had four faces—the face of an ox with fearsome horns, the face of a man, the face of an eagle, and the face of a lion so no matter which direction you faced them, there was someone looking at you. Each of the cherubim had four wings and hands under the wings and in their hands, they each held a flashing sword of fire. They ran until they were far outside the Garden and when they turned around, they saw those two horrifying creatures standing guard.
“That’s it,” said Adam, sobbing as he fell to his knees. “We’re going to have to live out here, and we’re going to die. If only I hadn’t trusted you.”
Eve winced at the accusation, and whispered, “If only I hadn’t trusted that snake.”
But even though this seems like the end of the world, it wasn’t. The Bible tells us in the very next chapter that God continued to speak to their children, so we know He didn’t abandon the people He loved, even though their sin made it impossible for them to continue to live in the Garden. From this, we learn that even when we do terrible things and suffer terrible consequences and even punishment sometimes—God doesn’t give up on us. God still had plans for Adam and Eve, through their children. And God won’t give up on you so easily either. Next week we are going to talk about repentance prayers—which is what Adam and Eve should have offered to God instead of excuses. The week after that, we’re going to talk about Jesus, the one who destroyed the evil that was created in the Garden through Adam and Eve’s sin.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.