Paul Burkhart

Sermon: Genesis 3 / Matthew 4:1-11

The Garden Temptation

Text: Genesis 3:1-24

3 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had
made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3 but
God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor
shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die;
5
for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,
knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that
it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took
of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
7
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed
fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
8
They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening
breeze, 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 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
from 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 from 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
tricked me, and I ate.” 14 The LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you among all animals
and among all wild creatures;
upon your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
15
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
16
To the woman he said,
“I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”
17
And to the man he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
and have eaten of the tree
about which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
 for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
20
The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living. 21 And the LORD
God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.
22
Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and
evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and
live forever”— 23 therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the
ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of
Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree
of life.

Text: Matthew 4:1-11

4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2
He
3
fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and
said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
4
But he answered, “It is written,
‘One does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”
5
Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple,
6
saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,
‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ”
7
Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”
8
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of
the world and their splendor; 9 and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall
down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,
‘Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.’ ”
11
Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.
Prayer for Illumination:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Be our center. Be our grounding. Be our home.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to
you, my Rock and Redeemer in whom I trust. Amen.

Main Idea:
Even though we are all exiles, in Jesus God has become our home, and has
brought us in.

Outline:
Introduction: Sermon Series & Other Worlds
 Bile Mixtape, Volume 2
 Approaching the text as original hearers
I. Catch Up: Chapters 1 & 2
 Chapter 1: Transcendent Temple World
 Chapter 2: Playground of Imminence
 The First Command: Enjoy (within limits)
 And yet… #1: This world is not that world
II. Chapter 3: What Happened?
 Red Flag #1: Miquoting God Word
 Red Flag #2: Questioning God’s Character
 What Now? Fallen Representative Heads
 (Brief Aside: Chuck DeGroat’s Three-Question Trauma Framework)
III. An Exile People, a Wilderness God
 Genesis 3 is Israel’s Story
 And yet… #2: Genesis 3 is Israel’s Post-Exile Story
 Jesus lives and transforms the exile story
IV. Exiles All
 Some try to remake Eden; some pitch a tent in the wilderness
 Even me
Conclusion: Jesus Joins us and Feeds Us
 Genesis 3 is a Self-Portrait, Not a Warning
 Eden Baptism, and What’s Most True
 Bloodshed, Covering, Eucharist
SERMON

Introduction: Sermon Series & Other Worlds

Today I am starting off a new sermon series that will last us through the
summer. We're calling it "Bible Mixtape, Volume 2". If you were with us for
Volume 1 last summer, you know that this is a series where we take stories
from the Bible that may be a little familiar to you. Maybe too familiar.
Familiar enough that they've kind of grown stale and we've put them up on
the shelf. But in this series, we want to take these Bible stories off the shelf a
bit and look at them back in their original cultural context to see if there's
any new ways that they can surprise us and teach us what it means to live
life together and with God. And so since I'm beginning this series, I thought I
might begin in the beginning with Genesis 3.
It is a dense passage that has inspired so much inspiration and reflection,
theologically, ethically, philosophically. It has been embedded within our
cultural imagination. It has been the inspiration for countless pieces of art
and media and music and literature and the like. And so inevitably, there will
be a lot of things I have to skip over today. There are a lot of things that you
may think are very important or questions you may have that I'm not going
to address, and I'm sorry. But I do want to approach the text in a very
specific way today. I want us to imagine that we are part of the original
readers or hearers of this story, hearing it for the first time after it got into its
final form; for us to talk about how it might have struck those readers and
the things they would have paid attention to and how they would have
received this story.

I. Catch Up: Chapters 1 & 2

So if you were in the original audience, hearing this story for the first
time, you would have first been treated with two different creation accounts
before you got to Chapter 3. And it would have delighted you, because these
stories would have been very familiar forms, very similar to other stories of
origins from other cultures around Israel, but these had their own twist on
them, wherein they had the God of Israel being the main character.

Chapter 1
You would have first had the regal sweep of Chapter 1, where creation is
using the same language as building the temple of the tabernacle, as if he is
building this temple world where he wants to dwell in peace, abundance, and
rest with his people. You would see that he ordains two priests to serve in
that temple garden. A man and a woman made in his image who would
cultivate and expand the boundaries of this garden until it fills the earth.
Chapter 2
Then, you would have been treated to Chapter 2, which is messier and
more playful, as God is literally getting his hands dirty to fashion this world.
Instead of the universal transcendent God "creating", you would have
Yahweh, the name of God revealed to Israel, "molding", "crafting",
"fashioning", and placing things to put together this garden.

The First Command

This God got his hands dirty in the mud and formed the first man,
breathing life into him and giving him humanity's first commands. And
notice: the first command of God was not "don't eat from that tree". Rather,
the first command of God was to "eat from every tree in the garden". The
first command of God is delight. It is to have a mindset of abundance, rather
than of scarcity. God looks to the man and says, "eat and enjoy all the fruits
of my labors, but exercise restraint. Eat from everything, but don't eat from
that tree".
And this would have been proper and right to the ancient Israelites. Full
life was not found in chasing one's own self-actualization and chasing down
every appetite and curiosity that strikes you. Instead, it was to fulfill your
responsibilities and enjoy what God had given you within the bounds God
had set.
Many theologians have debated for a long time what "the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil" even means. There are many options, but the
one that resonates with me is that God wants his people that have
knowledge of good and evil, but he wants them to obtain that knowledge
over time and maturity while walking in obedience with him. Not by
commodifying it and seizing it on their own according to their own analysis
and desires. It is fundamentally a call for his people to trust him and not their
own judgment.

And yet… #1
So, the man receives this command, and then God puts him into a deep
sleep and fashions a woman from the man's side. This is interesting
culturally, because if she was made from his foot, that would be another
creature to walk on. If he was made from his head, that would be a person to
lord over him. But instead, she is made from his side, as his equal and helper
and companion in life, in full equality and dignity. The man wakes up and
bursts out in sung wedding vows, all is well, and that second creation
account ends.
It's a beautiful story. And yet... It doesn't quite look like this world, does
it?
If you were the original hearers of this story, you would have been forced
to reckon with the reality that the world you're in doesn't look like the world
of those stories. And it would provoke some deep, hard questions. Things
like: why is it that whatever we put our hands to, to try to bring beauty and
flourishing in this world, seems to fight back against us? Why is birthing new
life, bringing new things out of the old, why does that come with so much
pain in the world? Why are snakes so weird? Deep questions like this.
II. Chapter 3
So the story begins: Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the
other creatures God had made.
Now, this opening wouldn't have been as ominous to the original hearers
as it is for us. Serpents were creepy but not sinister, and the word "crafty"
wasn't a bad word. It just meant street smart, and is otherwise a word that is
seen as good. It's about wisdom and discernment and being able to do things
in the proper way at the proper time. It's street smarts.

Red Flag #1: Misquoting God

So you wouldn't have been bothered by the first line, nor with the
serpent's first question. But your first red flag would have been the fact that
the woman misquotes God's command. She adds to the law of God. God
said nothing about touching the fruit in his original command to the man.
The ancient Israelites were a people that took God's law incredibly seriously
and this would have been the first sign of disaster.

Red Flag #2: Questioning God’s Faithfulness

The second red flag comes when the serpent begins to question God's
character itself. Now, if you were part of the original heroes, this would also
be shocking to you, because you would have had the stories already in your
mind of God saving his people from slavery in Egypt and delivering them
through the wilderness and into the Promised Land, and God had been
faithful to his promises over and over and over again. So the idea that the
serpent is questioning God's own nature would have been deeply disturbing.
And so, now the woman begins to assess the fruit with her own eyes,
seeing that there's nothing objectively bad about it. Her own logic cannot
think through what bad results might come from this. To her eyes, to all of
her senses, this seems like a good thing. Why would God prohibit that?
Remember, our faith is not a Western faith, but an Eastern religion. And in
Eastern mindsets, they think more in collective terms rather than
individualistically. In their minds, no one should be doing this sort of ethical
and moral reasoning in isolation, and by their own judgment. Rather, the
community and tribe reason together, sharing each other's critiques,
concerns, and questions. Because if you are only judging these things on
your own, you can justify anything.
So she takes, and she eats of it.

What Now? Representative Heads & God

 And if you were the original listener, you would have had a twist in your
stomach at this point. You would have thought to yourself, "oh no, what is
God going to do? What is Adam going to do when he finds out about this?"
These representative heads of this society-miniature was now split in two
with one half having given in to the temptation to not trust God. What will
the other half say?
But then the storyteller would look across at the group and say, "and then
she turned to her husband who was with her and gave him some of the fruit,
and he ate". At that point, the knot in your stomach would just drop.
So then the big unknown is what will God do? What will God say to the
humans when he finds out about this? And we don't have to wait long. God is
walking in the cool of the garden. And he asks three questions that reveal
everything in this ancient, Socratic way.

Brief Aside: DeGroat’s Three Question Framework

I wish I had time to go into it, but one of my friends and former professor
is a therapist and pastor named Chuck DeGroat. He has a book coming out in
a few months called Healing What's Within, about healing from religious and
spiritual traumas and hurts. And he uses these three questions as a
framework to begin that processing and healing. So I'll offer these to you to
process on your own at home and see what the Spirit may do with them.
Where are you? Who told you? And what have you done? (As opposed to
what's been done to you?) So I leave you with that. That was a freebie for
the sermon.

Judgment & Exile

Anyway, God asks these questions and reveals their sin and then comes
judgment. God lists out a litany of consequences of their sin: Not only will the
crops be difficult to cultivate, and not only will childbirth literally be painful
for you, but even in these more metaphorical ways, that the things you try to
do in this world will be hard. Bringing in new life will be painful. Where there
was harmony between people, now there is discord and conflict. And it will
be work to keep peace between those things. The natural gravitational pull
of the world is toward entropy, relationally and experientially.
Now, many ancient Near Eastern stories like this would end at this point:
the gods create humans, humans rebel against, gods, gods judge humans in
ways that explain some parts of life and humans go on living under those
conditions. End of story. And yet here there's one last kicker here that
changes the story entirely. There's first this little bit about how God does not
want them to eat of the tree of life and persist in this state of sin and
alienation forever. So, in an act of both judgment and mercy, God clothes
them with animal skins, and then he expels them, sending them east of
Eden.

III. An Exile People, A Wilderness God

Genesis 3 is Israel’s Exile Story
If you were in the original audience at the time when you heard this,
something would catch in your throat. You'd have one of those moments, like
a great twist at the end of a movie, where it changes how you view the
entire movie that came beforehand. You would have realized this was not
just a story about serpents and childbirth and farming, but this was Israel's
own story, its own story of exile.
You would have seen this fundamentally as a story about God creating a
land and then creating a people to put in that land. He gave their leaders the
law, the Torah, and told them to steward it and follow it. But then the
whispers of evil rose up from within their midst, not from outside the land,
but from within. And the leaders listened to those voices, fell out of trusting
God, and brought the rest of the nation into sin and disgrace, and ultimately
into exile to the east, into Babylon. You would have seen that the story was
not to explain snakes, farming, and childbirth, but to explain to Israelites:
"how did we end up in exile?" And to see that the answer is that this
tendency of God's people has been in their DNA from the beginning and has
been recapitulated time and time and time again throughout history, leading
to their exile.

And yet… #2: Genesis 3 is Israel’s Post-Exile Story

What's interesting, though, is that most scholars think that this whole first
section of Genesis came into its final form after Israelites came back from
exile into the land. And it's interesting because they still seemed to treat this
text as explanatory for their present and not just their past. But they still saw
the value of this story, even though they were back home.
Because Persia had come and beat Babylon and told the Israelites, “You
can go back home, but we still own you. You're not a free, independent
nation." So they got back, and all those that had been left behind had
intermarried with people from other cultures and other faiths, and they tried
to rebuild the temple, but it was nothing like the first one. And they were still
under the ruling thumb of another empire.
They were home! And yet… it still did not feel like God had fully delivered
on his promises. Even though they were technically home, it didn't feel like
home. In some deeply profound sense, they felt like their exile was still
continuing. And this sense persisted for generation after generation as
Persians gave way to Greeks, gave way to Hasmoneans, gave way to foreign-
ruled Jewish leaders, which gave way to the Romans. The time and again this
sense of alienation and exile continued to ratchet up. And it motivated the
longing for a Messiah, for God to act decisively and bring salvation to his
people, to set them free from the oppression of the powers that ruled over
them, and to exert God's rule and reign in and through his people in the
land.
Jesus lives and transforms the exile story
And God did this. He came among us in Jesus of Nazareth, and he came to
his cousin John the Baptist at the Jordan River and was baptized there. And
as he came out of the waters, the skies split and the Spirit of God descended
on Jesus, and a voice spoke from the heavens saying, "This is my son in
whom I'm well pleased. Listen to him." It was God declaring, "This is the one.
This is the one you've been waiting for, who would set you free, bring your
exile to an end, to be your Savior and Redeemer".
And the people were excited, and Jesus immediately got out of the water
and went into the desert to be tempted by Satan. Why did he do that? He
was re-living the steps of the first humans in order to succeed where they
failed. Where they were in a garden of abundance, he was in the desert of
exile wilderness with nothing. Whereas they questioned God's law and
misquoted God's law, Jesus accurately quoted God's law back to those
whispers. And all of the verses he quoted were about relying on God no
matter what, in spite of all the scarcity and the things that were difficult.

And yet… #3
And he comes out victorious, having succeeded where the first humans
failed, and then from then on time and space and humanity's story forked
and split into two, into the way of Adam and the way of Jesus, who Paul
called the second Adam. And this Jesus proceeds to live life in full obedience
to Torah and to the law of God, then tastes and experiences the full weight
of our ultimate exile in sin and death. And he overcomes it, coming out the
other side in his resurrection life that he extends to all people, bringing love
and justice, bringing us into a community, forgiving our sins, and inviting us
into a life of freedom and love and service to others, free of all the powers
that oppress us, inviting us into abundance and beauty.
It's a beautiful story. And yet... That world doesn't really sound like the
one we live in all the time does it?

IV. Exiles All

We have a sense that there is some way that God has made us free, and
brought us home. But we still struggle. The curse still seems to remain. It still
seems to be the reigning dynamic in the world. Still the things we tried to
bring that are beautiful in the world push back against us. Still trying to
change and heal and bring new life out of hard things is painful. We still have
conflict and struggle with those around us. It is still difficult. And we respond
in numerous strategies to cope.

Of Edens and Deserts

On one hand, we try to create facsimiles of Eden in our lives, that if we
can just get some level of abundance and growth and prosperity, then we
can just rest, and our work will be done. We can just breathe a little bit. But it
never seems to get there, does it? No matter how many letters are after our
name, no matter how many people of our preferred political party get into
office, no matter how much knowledge we have, no matter how many good
spiritual things we do, no matter how obedient of children we have, it always
is fleeting. We have to keep cultivating and planting and growing and
tending and trying to build this Eden of our lives just to keep our heads
above water.
Others of us just burn out and say, "I'm going to stop trying. There is no
other more reality with God that I could experience. Not in the real world,
with my schedule, with my kids, with my job, or with my mind. It's just not
possible. I'd rather just use my free time just to watch TikTok videos or watch
TV all night. That's the best I can do."
But the sad and terrible truth of it all is that there is always a serpent in
every Eden and a Satan in every wilderness. There's always a gravitational
pull of whispers bringing us down and reminding us that this is always
fleeting. It is never enough. There is no point, whether in the protection of
cynicism or the anxiety of freneticism and busyness, we will never find a
solution to our sense of exile from ourselves and God and the world and
others.

Myself in the Text

If you're a regular churchgoer, I think we all with an assumption (or
maybe just a hope?) that the sermons are more or less "a dispatch from
Eden". That the person preaching has spent time and prayer in God's Word
and has kind of tried to live this thing out in such a way that they've kind of
experienced the fruit of some Edenic state is now sharing how we all can get
there. But I am sorry to tell you that this sermon is a letter scrawled out from
the wilderness. I've not been sitting by the Edenic pool, sipping on spiritual
pina coladas, being like, "man, I can't wait to tell everybody else how to get
to this place."
It's been surreal working on this sermon in this stage of life. Because I'm
reading this litany of curses that God gives as my wife and I have just
decided to do all the adulting stuff all at once: we bought a house and got
pregnant all at the same time. And I'm sitting here reading these texts while
sitting amid a house that keeps fighting against my every attempt to bring
order out of chaos. Every time I think I have a vision of what that could look
like for things to just get a little stable, it seems to push back in some new
way. Similarly, I'm reading this text and I'm thinking to myself, "in less than
two months, I'm going to have a baby!" Well, more precisely, my wife is
going to have the baby. But I'm going to be there. And it's going to be
painful. And the recovery is going to be painful. And you know what? The
stress of all this? It's caused conflict between us.
We're okay. Don't worry. But this is the way the world is. This is the
gravity and entropy of the universe at work. This story is to remind us that
this is in our DNA. This story gets recapitulated many moments in every day,
both in my heart and, I suspect, yours as well. Isn't it the case that most
days you don't feel completely at home in your soul, and there's a sense of
exile there within you?

Conclusion: Jesus Joins Us and Feeds Us

So what do we do? Usually I would go to the text and I would see what the
people do in the story in response to all of this and see if there's some
parallel thing that we can do or an analogous thing we can do today similar
to what they did. But there's nothing here. God tells the people the difficult
things about the way life will be and then they just go off and live their lives
in that world the best they can.

Genesis 3 is a Self-Portrait, Not a Warning

Look, I could go into this story and focus on the temptation piece. I could
say, "well for a practical application, this is how you can be aware of
temptation coming your way. This is how you fight against it. This is how you
recognize it." I can say, "learn your Bibles better, wrestle with what your
conscience says it means to be human in the world according to the contours
that God has for it. Wrestle with that in community. Don't just do it by
yourself. And always try to rely on God."
But here's the thing, for the original audience, this text was not
fundamentally about temptation. It was not about sin and how not to do it. It
wasn't a warning about what not to do. It was a description of just the way
things are no matter what you do.
The human story is one that even if you find some version of Eden, you
will still find something else more pleasing to your eyes that will draw you
away from it. It is not about avoiding temptation or fighting temptation. This
text is about the fact that the way of the human heart is to give in to
temptation. This text is not a warning of what not to do, but a self-portrait of
what we all do all the time--and always will.
Therefore, I think the more helpful thing here is not to look at what the
people do in response but look at what God does in response to this reality of
human weakness and frailty. And I see that God does two interesting things
here:

Eden, Baptism, and What’s Most True

First, God does not destroy Eden. Where'd it go? God has transformed and
relocated Eden in Christ. And by baptism and faith, we are joined to Jesus
who is now our Eden—our rest and abundance. But what's more, he sends
his Spirit to dwell within us, making us the garden of God in which he walks
in the cool of the day. So even though our sense of exile and alienation is
very real and true, it is no longer what is most true about us. What is most
true is that you belong to God and God belong to you. So remember your
baptism. Remember that God has joined you to himself, thus transforming in
the deepest ways both who you are and whose you are. And this remains
true no matter the whispers you wrestle with, the temptations you give in to,
the exile you're in, or the doubts that rage. You are Christ's, and Christ is
yours.

Bloodshed, Covering, and Eucharist

The second thing that God does in this text is that he commits the Bible's
first act of bloodshed. The first bloodshed was not Cain and Abel in the next
chapter. The first bloodshed is God himself shedding the blood of an animal
to clothe his people's nakedness. The clearest picture of God character in the
story is that he is willing to pay a costly price to clothe the shame of his
people, to clothe them for the journey, to nourish them, to care for them, to
protect them through the journey. He protects and sustains them through
their exile. This reminds me of our other sacrament: Communion. We come
and we take hold of Christ in our exile and alienation, being brought in ever
deepening communion with him and one another as a community on this
journey.

So, Resurrection Church, hear the good news of Jesus

Christ, that though we are all exiles God in Jesus has
become our home, and through his resurrection he has
brought us in. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit. Amen.