Genesis 3 - Why We Need Easter

So it’s Easter in just over a week guys. I’ve always liked Easter, and not just because I get to eat a bunch of chocolate. No, Easter’s super important because that’s when we celebrate when Jesus died and rose again. Now that might sound like a weird thing to celebrate, but we celebrate Jesus’ death and resurrection because that’s how Jesus saved us. But some of you might be wondering: “Save us? What do we need to be saved from?”

Well, to answer that, we’re going to have to go way back to the beginning of the Bible. No, not the very beginning – that’ll be a story for another day – but today I want to look at the time when Adam and Eve ate a fruit they weren’t supposed to and why that matters to us.

But I want to make something clear before we start… Today’s story isn’t the happiest story in the Bible. In fact, things feel pretty hopeless when this one ends. But don’t worry, the happy ending is coming next week when we hear a little more about Jesus.

But for now, picture this: God has just finished creating, well, everything! Adam has come up with names for all the animals, God’s given Adam a wife, and everything just seems all around peaceful. Adam and Eve work hard during the day caring for the plants and animals in the Garden of Eden, and they spend their nights talking, relaxing, and probably even playing with God and each other. And whenever they got hungry, they would take fruit from whatever tree was nearest and thank God for how tasty all this fruit was!

Actually, that’s not quite right… They didn’t eat every kind of fruit… See, when Adam and Eve were created, God gave them one command. They could eat fruit from any tree in the garden except for one: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. All the other fruit was fair game, but not the fruit from that one tree.

That’s it. One rule. Adam and Eve had only one rule they had to follow. You probably have all sorts of rules like, “No cookies before dinner,” or, “Put your toys away after you’re done playing with them,” or, “Don’t hit your brother or sister, no matter how much they’re annoying you!” But God only had this one rule for Adam and Eve.

And this rule is an important one guys. By following this rule, Adam and Eve showed that they loved God! How does that work? By not eating from that one tree like God had asked, Adam and Eve showed that they respected God and His rules. They showed that they were willing to trust God and listen to Him, even though this rule might have seemed random to them. But above all, they showed that they loved God by freely choosing to do what He asked and putting Him first, even though they could have ignored Him.

But then, enter the serpent. The Bible tells us that the serpent “was more clever than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made” (Genesis 3:1, NIrV). I can just picture him slithering up a tree, poking his head through some leaves, giving a sneaky little grin, and then calling out to Eve, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat fruit from any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:2).

Let’s pause right there. That snake just talked. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t met too many talking snakes in my life. Well, Kaa from The Jungle Book, but that’s a movie… That doesn’t count.

Now maybe Eve was surprised that the snake could talk. Maybe she wasn’t. For all we know, Adam and Even still had a lot to learn about God’s amazing creation. But we know something now that Eve didn’t then. We know that the serpent could talk because it wasn’t just any old snake.

See, this snake was Satan, an evil angel who didn’t want to serve God anymore. Satan thought he was better than God and deserved to be worshipped like a god. Satan fought against God and tried to take over heaven. But God knows everything and is all-powerful, so Satan never stood a chance. And because Satan had disobeyed God and fought against Him, the consequence was that Satan was sent away from Heaven forever.  

You can imagine that this would have made Satan pretty angry. And it did. Satan wanted to get revenge on God by ruining the creation God had just made. And what better way to do this than to go after us humans, the thing that God was most pleased with in His creation? So, enter the serpent, were Satan was going to use every trick in the book to get Adam and Eve to disobey God, just like Satan had!

Anyways, like I said before, the serpent asked Eve if they really weren’t allowed to eat from any tree in the Garden, but Eve responded, “No… That’s not right… God said we could eat from any tree except that tree in the middle of the garden. If we eat from or even touch the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we will die!”

The snake burst out laughing! “Hehehehehahahehahea! You won’t die! God knows that when you eat fruit from that true, you will know things you have never known before. Like God, you will be able to tell the difference between good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5).

It’s like Satan was saying here, “Don’t you want to be like God? Don’t you want to decide what’s right and wrong? You two look pretty smart… Don’t you think it’s time to take the training wheels off and make your own decision? Why listen to God, what does He know?

Remember, all of these lies and questions were coming from Satan. Satan had been jealous of God, and now he was trying to make Adam and Eve jealous of Him too. Satan had tried to fight against God, but that only ended in him being kicked out of heaven. And now Satan was trying to make Adam and Eve do the same thing – fight against God by disobeying him.

I can only imagine what was going through Eve’s head at that moment. What if the serpent’s right?… Maybe God is hogging all the knowledge for Himself! Why should He be in charge instead of us? Whatever it was she was thinking, none of it was good. They believed Satan’s lies. And before long, both Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit that God had told them not to.

You know how in movies the music always gets super creepy and intense every time the hero does something he or she’s not supposed to. Like when Nemo goes out to touch the boat? Life’s not like that. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, there was no big, dramatic music. There was no thunder and lightning. They ate the fruit, swallowed, and the serpent smiled, thinking he’d finally gotten the better of God.

But even though there was no dramatic music, there was a change. Adam and Eve looked at each other and gasped. For the first time in their lives, they realized something. They were naked! They weren’t wearing clothes! That hadn’t bothered them before, but now it suddenly did! Something was wrong!

So they tried to fix it. They ran over to a nearby fig tree and started ripping off leaves. Then they sewed these leaves together and made clothes. And the whole time, Adam and Eve were saying to themselves: “What have we done?” and “This whole no clothes thing didn’t bother us before… Why does it now?” and “The snake said we were going to understand good and evil… Is this what he meant?”

That’s when they heard the sound of footsteps coming closer. And with that, all their other questions were immediately replaced with fear. Adam and Eve looked at each other with terror in their eyes. God was coming. Before, Adam and Eve had walked with God, talked with Him, played with Him! But now that they had eaten the fruit they weren’t supposed to, they were terrified! All they could think was, “We’ve disobeyed God, and now he’s going to kill us! What are we going to do?!?!?!”

So they did the only thing they could do… They ran a little further into the Garden and hid behind some trees. And with hearts pounding, doing their best not to breathe too loudly, they heard God call out, “Adam, Eve, where are you?”

Don’t get the wrong idea here. God knows everything. God knew exactly where Adam and Eve were. God already knew what they had done. God knew that Eve was going to blame Adam and that Adam was going to blame the serpent. And actually, God already knew how He was going to fix this (again, the whole Easter thing). In other words, God didn’t ask this question because He didn’t know the answer.

No, God asked Adam where he was and what he and Eve had done because He wanted them to realize something: that their relationship with Him was changed. Broken. Because they had disobeyed Him – because they tried to say that they knew better and didn’t have to listen to God about what was right and wrong – their closeness with Him was destroyed.

Even worse, there was nothing Adam and Eve could do to fix this brokenness. It’s not like they could put the fruit back. Making clothes out of fix leaves wasn’t going to fix the problem. There was no way that they could fix their broken relationships with God on their own. They needed help! 

And sadly guys, this is a problem that all of us have to deal with! All of us have done wrong things in our lives, meaning that all of us have a broken relationship with God too. And like Adam and Eve, this broken relationship with God has huge consequences.

Because Adam and Eve sinned, God sent them away from the Garden of Eden. They had to work harder and experienced more pain because they didn’t listen to God. And even though they didn’t die instantly after eating the fruit, Adam and Eve did eventually die. And none of that would have happened if it hadn’t been for sin.

In the same way, each and every one of us does bad things. We disobey our parents, our teachers, and God Himself. We lie and steal and are mean to our friends. And because we sin, we will have to face consequences too. As long as our relationships with God remain broken, each of us will have to die one day. And unless that broken relationships with God gets fixed, we will be separated from God forever after we die. And just like Adam and Eve, there’s nothing we can do on our own to fix this. No amount of good things we do or “I’m sorry’s” can fix this.

That’s not a happy picture at all, but that’s what this story teaches us. I know that this may all sound scary, but it’s important for us to know this. God tells us the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible so that we’ll learn something super important: that Without God’s help, sin will always keep our relationship with God broken.

But don’t forget, the whole reason I’m telling this story now is because it reminds us of why we need Easter. God loves us so much, and He doesn’t want us to be separated from Him. That’s why He sent Jesus to die and rise again. That is God’s way of helping us! God knows that you and I can’t fix our broken relationships with Him on our own, so He sent Jesus to fix those broken relationships for us! And that’s something we can never say thank you to Him enough for!

We don’t have time to get into the details here, so I hope you’ll come back next week. We’ll be talking more then about Easter, what Jesus did, and why we can trust in Jesus to save us. And believe me guys, you’ll want to come back, because our story next week changes EVERYTHING! 

~Brentagious