Episode 14: The Blame Game
Eve, and then Adam, made a terrible mistake and trusted the wrong guy. Will they fess up or will they make their sin even worse?
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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.
So, last week we saw that Eve, and then Adam, made a terrible mistake in Genesis 3 and trusted the wrong guy. Will they fess up or will they make their sin even worse? You probably already know the answer but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot to learn from their terrible mistake. But before we get to this week’s verses, I want you guys to notice something. Did you notice how peaceful everything is in Genesis one and two? God creates the universe through His powerful and creative word, Jesus, and there is no violence in the world—except against plants. In Genesis two, it is still absolutely peaceful. The man is created and brought into the Garden and given a job to do and then Eve is brought in as well. Everyone knows who they are and what they are supposed to do. It really is paradise. But all it ever takes for paradise to be destroyed—and you will find this in your own lives as you get older as well—are accusations and suspicion. The Serpent, through what he said and how he said it, planted the idea in their heads that God is ungenerous, a liar, and not looking out for their best interests. As we will see later, the Serpent wasn’t technically lying but how he told the truth poisoned Adam and Eve’s minds against the trust they originally had for God based upon His actions toward them. That’s why gossip and jumping to conclusions about other people is such a terrible sin. And this is a good lesson in how someone can lie even while they are telling the truth.
When Adam and Eve listened and ate, that moment was the very beginning of an important theme in the Bible. What’s a theme? A theme is an idea that occurs over and over again in a book. A very common theme in books all over the world and throughout history is the battle of good versus evil. And nowhere do we see that battle more than we do in the Bible. And here is where it first began—the cosmic battle between God and the forces of evil for humanity’s loyalty—for our hearts. And each person makes the decision about who is going to win their hearts—will it be God or will it be Satan? Last week we watched as Jesus chose God and God’s plans over and over again when He was tempted. Jesus is sometimes called the “Second Adam” because He got right everything that Adam got wrong. Adam and Eve made the wrong choices when tempted but will they do the right thing now or keep doing more wrong?
8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” 10 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” 11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Last week, I talked about one-way decisions that we can never un-make. Once we’ve done certain things, we can never undo them. Adam and Eve found this out when they noticed that they were naked and, for the first time, it really bothered them. It bothered them so much that they made itchy clothes for themselves and hid from God when they heard Him coming. Now, you might think that they were scared because they believed that God was going to hurt them but that’s not what the Bible says. The Bible says that they were afraid because they were naked—which is kinda funny because they were always naked but for some reason, now they didn’t want God to see them naked. Reality hadn’t changed at all, the world was still the same, but now they saw it differently. They didn’t like themselves or the world as much as they once did before they ate that fruit. They were even afraid of something that they didn’t need to be afraid of when they were in God’s presence. You see, once they ate the fruit of that tree, it gave them the ability to see things in a different way and they responded by deciding what was good and what was bad for themselves. They had learned to make judgments that only God made before that. They didn’t have the wisdom or the experience to really know if being naked was good or bad but once they saw it, they made the decision that it was bad—even though it didn’t seem to bother God at all!
Now, I don’t want you guys thinking that you should go outside naked. We don’t do that! We’d get arrested! Plus, our human bodies really aren’t designed for nakedness outside of the Garden—with all the thorns and thistles and sharp rocks and the cold and the rain. We aren’t animals. We aren’t living in the perfect environment where nakedness just doesn’t matter. Modesty, or protecting your body from other people’s eyes, is a good thing because now there is evil in the world and you need to be safe. Covering up is one of the ways that we show we are different from the world, by respecting ourselves. The world is a different place now and even when we are in New Jerusalem with King Jesus, we will be wearing clothing.
So, we see that God calls to the man and says, “Where are you?” And that’s kind of strange because certainly, God knows where everyone is all the time. Jesus said He knows every hair on our heads and so He has to know where our feet have taken us. I think that when God used to visit the Garden, Adam and Eve would hurry over to Him. I sure would and I bet you would too! If people hear there is a movie star or a sports star nearby, they go running and so I imagine that if we knew that God was close by, we’d run even faster! After all, we might like a famous person but we love God! But they were nowhere to be seen this time, and they didn’t come to Him so He asked, “Where are you?” What He was probably really asking was, “Why aren’t you here with me?” Again, He has to know the answer, but He gives us the chance to be honest and say we’re sorry.
Adam tells God that he is afraid because he is naked, and so he is hiding—what Adam doesn’t say is that they decided to trust the Serpent and disobey Him and that this is the consequence. Perhaps Adam is hoping that God isn’t that smart. But God is smart and so now He has to confront Adam about his sin. “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” I guess there were only two ways that Adam was going to know He is naked—the first option involved someone telling him. But how would that even work? Say the Serpent tells Adam and Eve, “Dudes, you guys are like bare-buck naked!!” And what were they supposed to say, like, “What’s naked mean?” If there are no clothes, then the word naked doesn’t mean anything. Like, if I came up to you and pointed and said, “You are ferfluffilized.” You would say, “Excuse me? What? That’s a totally made-up word! That doesn’t mean anything!” Well, naked doesn’t mean anything in a world without clothes. So it wasn’t enough for someone to tell them they are naked, they have to understand what naked means. So, that means they told themselves that they were naked—but how did they even notice it? There was only one answer to that—they must have eaten the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The one thing God told them not to do.
Let me tell you really quick about rules. Rules never exist until someone does something that makes the rules necessary. Like, if you buy a chainsaw, the safety instructions say, “Do not stop chainsaw blade with hand.” Ya think? Good grief, something that can cut wood is going to go right through a hand but I guess someone did it so they had to make a rule. And if you buy a Superman costume, the warning will tell you that the cape won’t make anyone fly. I guess someone tried it and maybe they died, or hopefully didn’t do anything worse than break something. A bottle of dog medicine says this, “May cause drowsiness. Use care when operating a car,” but who lets their dog drive—that’s scary. Do not, ever, let your dog drive the car even if he isn’t taking meds. How about the warning telling people to take off the shirt before ironing it?? When I post the transcript for this, I will post some funny websites with a bunch of these (they are linked at the end). I think, in the history of the world, this is probably the very first time there was a rule before someone did something terrible. We humans learn by not dying when we do foolish things.
Rules are what we call a “double-edged sword’ And that is an awesome idiom for us—a double-edged sword can be good or bad. Imagine a knife—a knife with one edge will cut your sandwich and you can press down on top of it to make the blade cut all the way through, right? But if it is sharp on both sides, it will cut you and the sandwich if you do that—which is good because it cuts your sandwich and bad because it cuts you. Rules are like that and wise parents are careful about their rules. Because sometimes rules give people ideas about doing things that would never occur to them otherwise. Like, if I made a rule not to jump off the roof when my kids were little, they might say, “Wow, I never thought about jumping off the roof before, that might be cool.” And so my son Andrew, one day I am in the kitchen and I hear the immortal words, “Bandit, I do it all for you!” And I hear this great big thud as his body hits the back lawn. There was a covering over the back porch that could be accessed by the windows from their bedroom. It was a miracle he didn’t break something. He never did it again and after seeing how long it took him to breathe again, his twin brother never tried it either. Oh, and Bandit is our dog. I have no idea why he said that. It’s funny now but he could have landed on his head or broken his back or a hundred other things. After that, I made a rule—no jumping off the roof. Except no one wanted to do it ever again. Almost all rules are like that—but not God’s rule about the fruit because once they did that, there was no going back. But back to the story—what did Adam say to God?
12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
We got a whole lot of blaming going on and no one taking any responsibilities for their decisions! No one made Eve eat that fruit. No one made Adam eat that fruit! Adam knew exactly what God told him. Eve knew exactly what Adam told her. When the Serpent told Eve that she wouldn’t die, I don’t know if she distrusted Adam or God more. But she sure decided that one or both of them wasn’t wothy of being believed. And she took a bite and, lo and behold, she seemed just okey dokey. At that point, Adam decided not to trust God either. I do find it interesting that he didn’t stop her from eating—like maybe he was using her as a test subject to see if she would die before he tried it. So not cool. But there was just a whole lot of bad decisions going on here. And you would think that we would hear the words, “I really blew it.” Coming out of at least someone’s mouth. But nope. Nope. Now we are playing the blame game and that’s the worst choice we can ever make with God because we all make our own decisions.
Adam said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Oh, but that’s not the whole story, is it! She didn’t just randomly give him fruit while he was minding his own business. Like, “oh hey, Adam, here’s some fruit for your lunch since I can’t make you a turkey sandwich yet. I found this in a new tree, but it totally isn’t from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Nope.” Have you ever noticed that blamers like to make everyone else guilty and they never take responsibility for their own actions? Nothing is their fault! And even worse than that, he blames God too! “This is the fault of the woman YOU gave to be with me. If you had just left me here alone then everything would be fine!” That was really not very smart. Our sins are never God’s fault. We might as well say that we wouldn’t have hit our baby brother if God hadn’t given us a baby brother! That just doesn’t fly—we all make our own choices.
How about Eve? “Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”” This isn’t that much better. At least she doesn’t blame God but she isn’t taking responsibility either. This would be more honest, “So, there was this talking serpent and he was telling us that you were holding us back from having what we deserve and I just went ahead and trusted him and all the stuff he was saying about You even though You have always been so perfectly good to us. But the fruit looked really good and I totally wanted to be able to make my own decisions about what is good and bad so I said, “what the heck, this random animal wouldn’t lie to me,” and I ate the fruit. Now that I actually hear it coming out of my own mouth I totally see how stupid that decision was.”
And the serpent was the smartest one of all because he just doesn’t say ANYTHING. In fact, Adam and Eve would have been better off not saying anything at all than to say what they said. Blaming God, blaming the next guy down the pike. There was a lot of blame to go around but no one was accepting it. As far as we can see from the story of Adam and Eve—no one ever accepts the blame. No one apologizes to God. No one repents. Do you know what repentance means? In a few weeks, we are going to talk about repentance prayers and how we can always go to God no matter how badly we have sinned and be honest with Him and tell Him all about it and ask Him to change our hearts. Repentance means that we admit we have done wrong, and that we make a decision to do better, and to make things right if we can. Adam and Eve could have repented. They could have admitted that they did a terrible thing in breaking God’s only rule—a rule that they immediately regretted breaking once Adam ate and they were embarrassed about seeing that they were naked and deciding for themselves that it was a bad thing. They could have told God that they misjudged Him—that they were wrong about Him and that they finally saw that He was right. They could have bowed down and begged him for another chance now that they saw how important it was to do things His way. But they didn’t and so we will never know what might have happened if they decided not to play the blame game.
But because of this, everything changed. We don’t know what the world might have been like if Adam and Eve had tossed that snake into the lake. If they had trusted God and treated Him like their superior. They thought they deserved more than jobs in paradise. Next week we will see their consequences. But all around us we see the consequences in our own lives. Think of a river that we all need to drink from, and then imagine Adam and Eve dumping toxic waste into that river. There is nothing else to drink and so we all get sick. Well, sin is like toxic waste and we have all had to deal with it.
And I’ve talked a lot about taking the blame for the stuff we do but what does it really mean? Well, we take the blame when we take responsibility for something—whether we did it or not. Like, if you break someone’s window then your parents have to take responsibility to pay to fix it. And you need to take responsibility by admitting what you did and doing extra chores to help your parents with the bill. You don’t blame the kid down the street. But that doesn’t always happen and throughout the Bible there was a special class of people who told God’s people, the Israelites, to take responsibility for the things they did wrong, and to stop doing wrong, and to make things right. Those people were called prophets. You probably know some of their names—Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah and Elisha, and John the Baptist and many more. But I want to talk about one of the prophets in particular—the prophet Isaiah. God spoke to Isaiah during a time of terrible sin. God’s people refused to repent and do good and God knew that they would never decide to do what was right unless He did something drastic to change their hearts on the inside. But He also needed to do something about the sins they had already committed. They had done too much that was just wicked and God couldn’t just allow that sin to go unpunished. There had to be justice, They had to see the terrible price of their sins on the innocent. If they could see that, and if they could admit that they were guilty, then God could finally change their hearts and their lives and take them back from all the evil that Satan had planned for them. Remember when I told you about the cosmic battle between God and Satan? Where Satan tempted people to be disloyal to God and betray Him? Well, that kept happening and it is still happening today but the difference between then and now is Jesus. Jesus said no to temptation. Jesus didn’t ever disobey God. Jesus never sinned. But He is so good and loving that He took the blame for our sins. Humans rebelled against God and chose the wrong side in the war and so the Word became a human and was loyal to death. Jesus made us and so only Jesus could fix us. He showed us the way. Through loyalty to Jesus and God’s ways, we become part of God’s plans again for the whole world to worship Him again someday. Let me read to you about what God told the prophet Isaiah about Jesus and what He would do for us and why He had to do it. People all over the world were suffering because of the pain of sin and God couldn’t allow that to go on forever.
But he took our suffering on him and felt our pain for us. We saw his suffering. We thought God was punishing him. But he was wounded for the wrong things we did. He was crushed for the evil things we did. The punishment, which made us well, was given to him. And we are healed because of his wounds.
We all have wandered away like sheep. Each of us has gone his own way. But the Lord has put on him the punishment for all the evil we have done. He was beaten down and punished. But he didn’t say a word. He was like a lamb being led to be killed. He was quiet, as a sheep is quiet while its wool is being cut. He never opened his mouth. Men took him away roughly and unfairly. He died without children to continue his family. He was put to death. He was punished for the sins of my people. He was buried with wicked men. He died with the rich. He had done nothing wrong. He had never lied. (Is 53:4-9, ICB)
Compare that to Adam and Eve. Compare that to us. He did nothing wrong but when they accused him, He was quiet. Adam and Eve did wrong and when God confronted them, they made excuses. And we do that too. We don’t like to take the blame for the bad things we do even though Jesus took the blame for all the bad things people have ever done. When we get accused for the bad things we do, it’s fair. When He got accused, it was unfair. If Jesus can be so humble and quiet when He is being blamed for things He didn’t do, we can be more like Him and admit the things we have done. We have all done wrong things but He never did anything wrong. God told Isaiah that Jesus would step in and take all of the hatred that Satan had for people onto Himself, all of the consequences for all the times that we did terrible things to one another because we were following Satan instead of God. Satan doesn’t tempt us and lie to us because he likes us and wants to be friends. He does these things because he hates God and he hates us. When we listen to Satan or when we just do things Satan’s way, when we are hateful and prideful and unforgiving and mean and when we lie and steal and gossip and all that, we’re being more loyal to Satan than we are being to God. And that messes the world up really badly.
The good news is that, in the end, God wins the war. But we have to decide what side we want to be on. It’s easy to say that we want to be on God’s side but it’s a lot easier to end up acting like Adam and Eve instead of acting like Jesus. Next week we will see what God ends up having to do in order to start fixing the mess than Adam and Eve made.
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.
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/tips/a25713/weird-warning-labels/
