The teaching behind The Fruit. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version (KJV).
Genesis 3:1–24
1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
8 And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
13 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
20 And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
The garden and the one command
To understand this chapter, you have to know what the world looked like just before it.
Genesis 1 ends with God looking at everything He had made: "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). There was no sin, no sickness, no sorrow, and no death. Chapter 2 zooms in on one place, a garden in Eden that God planted for the man He had formed, and it was filled with "every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food" (2:9). God put the man there "to dress it and to keep it" (2:15), to work it and look after it.
God gave the man one command. He did not give it to take something good away. He gave it after He had given nearly everything: "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (2:16–17). Freely eat of every tree but one. The one was a line between the Creator and the creature, and it came with a warning that God was not exaggerating.
And the chapter ends with a verse that is easy to read past: "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed" (2:25). They had nothing to hide from each other, and nothing to hide from God. Remember that, because it is about to be lost.
Then chapter 3 begins, and a voice that is not God's speaks.
1. God's word can be trusted
"Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made" (3:1). "Subtil" is the old spelling of "subtle," and it means crafty. The Hebrew word is 'arum. There is something here you can't see in English. The verse right before it, 2:25, says the man and woman were "naked," and the Hebrew word there is 'arummim. They are two different words, but they sound almost alike. Genesis places them side by side, and in Hebrew you can hear the echo. The crafty one has come to the people who are completely exposed and have nothing to hide. By verse 7, the serpent's work is done, and "they knew that they were naked."
Later in the Bible we are told plainly who was speaking through the serpent: "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world" (Revelation 12:9).
Now look at how he works, because he does it in three steps, and he has been using them ever since. First, he asks a question: "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" (3:1). He doesn't start by calling God a liar. He starts by making God's words sound unclear, as if God might have meant something else, or something harsher than He really said. Second, he flatly contradicts God. God had said, "thou shalt surely die." The serpent says, "Ye shall not surely die" (3:4). Third, he accuses God of holding back: "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods" (3:5). In other words, God isn't protecting you. He is keeping something good from you.
That is the same God who had just given them a whole garden, and the one tree He withheld was for their good. But the lie was believable, because it was wrapped around something that looked appealing. "The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise" (3:6). Good to eat, good to look at, and promising wisdom. "She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat."
The very next verse shows what the serpent's promise was worth. "And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons" (3:7). They did get their eyes opened. But what they saw was their own shame, and the first thing they did was try to cover themselves. A promise of being like God ended with two people sewing leaves together.
Here is what this teaches us about God. When the tempter comes to you, he will most likely come the same way: not with an open attack, but with a question about what God really said. And the only answer is to know what God has said and to hold to it. When Jesus himself was tempted in the wilderness, He did not argue or reason His way out. Three times He answered, "It is written." "It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4). God's word is true, God's word is good, and God's word is enough. When you doubt it, remember how the first doubt ended.
2. God comes looking for sinners
What happens next is one of the most striking moments in the Bible. "And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden" (3:8).
Notice what has changed. A few verses ago, these two people walked with God and had nothing to hide. Now they hear Him coming and run for the trees. That is what sin does. It makes us afraid of the One who made us, and it sends us hiding.
And God does not wait for them to come to Him. "And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?" (3:9). God knew exactly where Adam was. He was not asking for information. He was calling a man out of hiding. Adam's answer is honest, as far as it goes: "I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself" (3:10). And then God asks the question that brings the whole thing into the open: "Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?" (3:11).
What follows is hard to read. Adam blames the woman, and even God: "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat" (3:12). The woman blames the serpent: "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat" (3:13). "Beguiled" means deceived. There is truth in that, since she was deceived. But nobody says, "I did it, and I'm sorry." We still do exactly the same.
Then God speaks, and we should hear it for what it is, because the Bible does not soften it. The serpent is cursed (3:14). The woman will know pain and sorrow in bringing life into the world (3:16). The ground is cursed, and the man will work it by the sweat of his face, among thorns and thistles, "till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (3:17–19). That is death, which God had warned about. At the end of the chapter they are sent out of the garden, and "he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life" (3:24). The way back is closed. Paul sums up what spread from that moment: "as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Romans 5:12). That includes you and me.
That is the bad news, and the Bible does not hide it. But look again at the question. God came to the garden. Before there was any sentence, before the curse, God came looking and called, "Where art thou?" He did not have to. He could have left them in the trees. But He is a God who pursues. Jesus said it of Himself, many centuries later: "For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10).
Maybe you feel like you're hiding right now. Maybe there is something you have done, or something done to you, that has you running for the trees. Hear the question the way Adam should have heard it: God is not calling you out to destroy you. He is calling you out to deal with it, because He wants you back.
3. God promises a Deliverer and covers our shame
If the chapter stopped at the flaming sword, it would be a tragedy. But in the middle of the curses, before He says a word to Adam or Eve about what they will suffer, God speaks to the serpent, and these words are the first promise in the Bible:
"And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." (Genesis 3:15)
"Enmity" means hostility, a lasting war. God declares that there will be a war between the serpent and the woman, and between his offspring and hers, and that the war will end with a descendant of the woman wounding the serpent in the head, which is the blow that ends a snake, while the serpent strikes only the heel. God is saying that the serpent will not win. Someone is coming who will crush him, though it will cost that someone a wound to do it.
The New Testament tells us who that is. "But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law" (Galatians 4:4–5). And John writes, "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). God did not wait until the end of the story to start rescuing His people. He promised it in the garden, in the very chapter where sin entered.
And then comes a verse that is easy to miss. After the curses, after Adam names his wife Eve, "because she was the mother of all living" (3:20), we read: "Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them" (3:21).
Think about what that means. Adam and Eve had tried to cover their shame with fig leaves, and fig leaves could never be enough. So God Himself made them clothing from animal skins, and He put it on them. The word is clothed. It was a tender thing. The same God who had just pronounced judgment bent down and covered the people He had judged.
Matthew Henry, the Bible commentator, wrote about this verse in the early 1700s. He said the coats God made were "large, and strong, and durable, and fit for them; such is the righteousness of Christ." What he meant is that God's covering is not something we can make for ourselves. It is something He gives. The prophet Isaiah says it this way: "he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness" (Isaiah 61:10). And Paul tells believers, "put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 13:14).
So here is the good news in Genesis 3. We cannot cover ourselves. Our fig leaves are always too small. But God has not left us to hide in the trees. "God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). The same God who called, "Where art thou?" is the God who clothes. So if you are hiding, come out. Leave the fig leaves behind and let Him cover you. He did it for Adam and Eve, and He promised the One who would do it for everyone who trusts Him. The way into the garden was closed, but God was already at work to bring His people home.
Keep reading
- Genesis 2:4–25 and 3:1–24
- Romans 5:12–21
- Luke 19:1–10
- Matthew 4:1–11
- Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, Genesis 3, at Christian Classics Ethereal Library