True Heart of Worship
Church of God (Seventh Day) Independent
Church of God (Seventh Day) Independent
The problem with hearing the original sin story in all of its depth is that no one is teaching it in all of its depth. The cause of that is that almost no one understands it in all of its depth anymore. The cause of that is, at least in part, that feminism has come into the church, and it's impossible to hear the true story of Original Sin told in almost any church.
The problem there is that, for some reason, that story is understood as a story that is mean to women. Therefore if the story is taught to adults at all, it's taught as a story of equality, that is, they both sinned equally, or even as Adam's sin was worse. Otherwise the story might offend women.
This is an odd idea. There are lots of men in the Bible who did all sorts of horrible things, and telling those stories doesn't seem to be an offense to men. There are also women who did terrible things in the Bible, and telling those stories doesn't seem to be an offense to women. It just seems to be this one story about what the woman does here that is offensive to women. Because of that, the story isn't taught much or often in the church, and it's usually only taught to children. Therefore there's never any depth of understanding given to the people.
That's unfortunate because the story is foundational to Christianity, to all of Judeo-Christianity. It's therefore a necessary story. We need to understand this story. We need to know why all these things happen. It speaks to the Adams and Eves in our time, because this is a story of who we are. This is a story of who we were, who Adam and Eve were, who we are now, and who we will be in the future. This is all tied together in the story.
It's the story of sin. How did sin come into the universe? How is sin going to be dealt with in the future? It's about that as well. This Old Testament story is important enough that it's referred to in the New Testament; Adam is referred to by name five times; Eve is referred to by name twice, and there are other references to the events of this story.
So it's an important story, but it's also a hard one to understand completely. I have to admit, to get down to the depths of the story, you can't just read the story like it's a novel. You have to take the right attitude towards it. And the right attitude is to ask questions. Why is this person doing this? Why are they saying this? Those kinds of questions are the right questions to ask to unlock it. When you start with the right question, like an orange, the whole peel comes right off easily. No problem at all. That's what we're going to do.
If you've seen my work before, you're almost certainly going to know that I encourage people to ask questions of the Bible. Now that might seem like a silly thing. The Bible is not going to say, "Hey, here's your answer". What I mean is asking yourself, really thinking up the good questions, and asking yourself, why did this person do this? Why did they say this? What's the motivation here? Why are these words even in the Bible? That particular question is a really good one. I've had a lot of productive things come from that one.
In this study, the right question is, Why did Eve give some of the fruit to Adam? You've probably never thought of that question. What are her motivations? Why is she trying to do this? Why is she giving it to him? And once you ask this question and think about it for a little while, you should come up with a bunch of other good questions.
Here are some examples. What would she have told Adam when she gave him that forbidden fruit? Did she just sneak it into him and nonchalantly say, "Here, eat this," or did she disguise it, perhaps mixing it with some other fruits? Did she try to give him an explanation for what she'd been doing and why she was bringing fruit to him? Exactly what went on there?
Now we can't know all of that in detail, but we do know that there had to be a motivation for her to give him that fruit after she had eaten it herself.
Another question that would naturally come out of that is, why didn't she just talk to Adam about the snake and the fruit earlier? Instead, she's now trying to sneak the fruit to Adam. The opposite of that question is, why didn't she just admit her sin and repent? She's got that option available. Why did she choose the option that led to trying to trick Adam?
A somewhat related question comes when we see God's judgment. Adam thinks that he's innocent. Why does he think that? He knows that he ate the fruit, he knows that he changed, but he still thinks that he's innocent. He feels like he's the offended person here. Why does he think that way? That leads us to another question: what exactly was Adam's sin in this? Maybe that's part of why he feels this way.
Another question that comes out of the whole story is, why is Eve so different from Adam? She's done all of this for her own reasons. Satan has picked her for his own reasons. She's very different from Adam in ways that make her the target of the snake. Why is she so different from Adam, having come from his rib? I think that is a big part of our story as well.
There are lots of good questions. With a little reading and thought, we can figure out most of them.
Before we dig into those questions, we need some background. I want to bring to your memory something I think many of you understand already.
Until that original sin, Adam and Eve were very different from us. We don't always recognize that. We kind of think that they were sort of just like us. But, they were nothing like us. Their whole view on life, the way they thought, was completely different. We get only a hint of that in the Bible.
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:25)
If you ask a good question about this, you probably ask, Why are we being told this? Why are these words worthy of being recorded and copied for thousands of years? They are a hint, saying, look deeper at this. Well, why weren't they ashamed? That leads us into an understanding that their psychology is completely different from ours, the way they understand right and wrong is completely different from ours, and that affects their entire life. It's not just this nakedness that makes them different from us.
This nakedness is not just skin nakedness. It is also a spiritual or even psychological nakedness. We would call it openness or transparency. They were transparent people in every way. It would have been nothing for Eve to talk to Adam about situations that we find difficult. Maybe she asked him about some vegetable they'd eaten, and whether that changed the color of his poop. Talking about those kinds of things would not have bothered them at all. They were just completely transparent people, and so they were very different from us.
If we were the ones in their situation in the garden where they lived naked, we would be ashamed because we are so different from them, and we would continue to be ashamed until our consciences had become seared. Now, that searing is something the Bible talks about. When you do something that your conscience is warning you about, and you do that over and over again, eventually your conscience will just become quiet. It won't warn you about that anymore, and you won't feel bad about what you're doing. For us, that would be the situation, but for them, they simply didn't experience that. Their consciences weren't pricking them like they would be with us. They're not having a problem that way.
That's the way it should have been for them. There should have been no reason for them to be ashamed in that situation, in the garden, and in fact, there shouldn't be for us in the same situation. But because we're different from them, we would be immediately ashamed, as they were, once they had sinned. That shame comes from our consciences, which are God's law in us. When God made man, he put his law into man in the form of a conscience.
Yet, Adam and Eve had something more. They lived God's law holistically, which is to say, they understood all of it at the same time, and they didn't have to apply it in pieces like we do in any situation. In any situation, they would have known the right thing to do, and that it was the right thing to do. They wouldn't have to think about it. They just understood it all, holistically, at one time.
Because of that, it would never have occurred to them to do anything that was against that law. They didn't have a way to even express the idea. They couldn't have even formed a devious question: "If we eat the fruit at night, will God know?" That's why Satan has to get in there and start pushing Eve in the direction that he does. He has to break over that wall and get her to stop living by the law holistically, and get her to start thinking about it in pieces. He starts with, "Did God really say?".
Even understanding that idea is difficult for us to do, because we are not like that. We live God's law in pieces. From Adam and Eve after the sin, to the Old Testament people who had the written law, and us who have the spirit law, now, we're very different that way. After the sin, Adam and Eve had a "shattered in pieces" conscience, which all mankind inherited. The written law of the Old Covenant was the same way. Thou shalt not do this. Thou shalt not do that. The people lived by the law in pieces. Whenever they got into a situation, they had to take those pieces and apply them to the situation. Sometimes there were two pieces that applied to the situation. They had to figure out how those two pieces work together to know how they should handle that situation. Before the sin, Adam and Eve were not like that, not in any way. For us, in our time with the spirit being the law, we are drawn toward living the law holistically, but we still can't do that. We still fail to be what Adam and Eve were. Although the Holy Spirit is trying to draw us in that direction, it's just not possible for us to do that. Ultimately, like the people of the Old Testament, we tend to break the law into pieces and understand right and wrong in terms of don't do this and do do this.
Satan's target here is Adam. If all he does is knock off Eve and not Adam, then he's really failed at what he's trying to do. Lots of people have speculated about what would have happened in that circumstance. I won't go there in this study, but the basic idea is that Adam has more ribs.
If Satan's target, his real target, is Adam, why is he picking on Eve? Why is he targeting her when the real target is Adam? Satan understands the natures of Adam and Eve. He sees that they're different and the ways that they're different. He has decided that Eve is the easier target to hit. Genesis 3:6 tells us why. She already has a physical desire for the forbidden fruit. The verse says:
The woman saw that the tree was good for food.
So she had looked at the fruit and thought, "Hmm, that looks like it would taste really good. I think that'd be great food for us. We should have that. We should definitely have that. I bet it even smells good."
Also, she already has a visual desire for the fruit. The Bible tells us that, too:
The woman saw that the fruit was a delight to the eyes.
Also, she already wonders why she is the helper and not the leader. She has recognized the difference and wondered, "Why am I the helper and why am I not the leader? Shouldn't I get to be the leader some of the time?" The verse supports this, too:
The woman saw that the tree was desirable to make wise.
Why does it matter to her if she becomes wiser? She thinks that this is what she needs so that she can move up the ladder. She understands that she is not the leader, wonders why that is, and the snake has told her she is being held back and can become like God. In Genesis 3:5, the verse before this, the snake says:
Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.
Is this desire to move up really within her? The snake knows it is. That's why he focuses on it in his discussions with her. She sees the opportunity here and thinks that wisdom is going to be the solution to her problem of not being the leader.
We are back to the one big question that leads to understanding what is going on. Why did Eve give some of the fruit to Adam? Along with that, there are questions about how she gave it to Adam. With what words does she offer it? How does she present it?. I mentioned those before.
Some of those answers we don't know exactly, and Eve doesn't say, but it turns out Adam does say some things that point us in the right direction. In Genesis 3:12, we have Adam speaking:
The woman whom you gave with me, she gave me from the tree and I ate.
You probably just thought, "Well, that's pretty horrible English. What translation are you using that you've got such horrible English?" Well, don't worry, the Hebrew is just as bad. That "with me" phrase is a glitchy thing in both languages, and people have asked why such an awkward statement is there. I'll come back to that in just a moment.
In that verse, Adam is trying to place the blame on God and declare his own innocence. He says, You gave me this woman. She gave me some of that fruit without saying what it was. She tricked me. You gave me a person who couldn't be trusted. He's right that she tricked him by giving him the fruit and not saying what it was, but he's wrong about the rest of it. We'll get to that later.
From Genesis 3:6, we have a similar statement. It talks about the actual giving of the food, and it says:
She gave also to her husband with her.
Here we see another glitchy thing using "with" again. In a lot of English translations, you'll see that they've added words to make it smoother, but in a direct translation to English, and in Hebrew as well, you will see these.
We saw Adam saying "with me" above, and now we see "with her" here. That's interesting because there are two glitchy "with" phrases in the same story. God has done that for a reason. They're both telling us something that is supposed to catch our attention.
They mean completely different things. Adam's "with me" means she was supposed to be bone of my bone, so she was supposed to be with him in the sense that, "she was supposed to be just like me, I was supposed to be just like her, and we would be able to trust each other, and everything would be wonderful." But when the text talks about Eve giving the food and Eve is thinking "with him", she means it in the sense that we will be together in my situation. Her "with" is entirely different than his "with". I think it is wonderful that God would hide things like this for us to find.
This answers our question. She gave the fruit to Adam so that they would both have done wrong, idiomatically in the same boat. She did it so she wouldn't be the only one who did what God said not to do. That helps us understand some other things.
Why is that any better than her being the only one who sinned? It's a defensive coping strategy. She's almost certainly thinking in her head, "Is God going to destroy both me and Adam? All of mankind?" Remember, God had said:
In the day that you eat from [the tree], you will surely die. (Genesis 2:17)
Eve's coping strategy is, "Well, God won't kill all of mankind. So if I can get Adam in the same situation as me, then I have a hope." She has come up with an interesting defense. She's going to get somebody else in trouble to cover herself.
It's also a very evil strategy and a calculated plan. She could never have come up with those before she ate the fruit. Therefore Eve changed before Adam. Because she is now devious, we see that she changed the moment she ate the fruit. Immediately she also knew that she had changed. We see that because she knows she needs to do something to deal with this situation.
This seems to go against one of the verses about this.
And the eyes of both of them were opened … (Genesis 3:7)
Many people understand this verse to say that they both changed together. That's impossible, as we've seen. Some translations take it in that direction by saying something like, "And then the eyes … ." The Hebrew is using a Consecutive Imperfect, something we don't have in English. The Consecutive Imperfect tells us something is happening after a previous thing.
The Consecutive Imperfect can be translated as "then," but "then" can also mean that something happened at that moment. So translating it that way can be confusing. It can also be translated as "so," which is better. Therefore the verse would be, "So the eyes of both of them were opened … ." That means they had both now changed consecutively.
She has also realized that the snake lied to her. He said that she would be like God. She knows she isn't like God. Instead of knowing good and evil like she thought, she now knows good and evil within herself. She only knew good before. Now evil is running amok inside of her, as well.
She also realizes that the snake deceived her. She says later on:
The serpent deceived me and I ate. (Genesis 3:13)
When she says "deceived", she means she was talked into knowingly doing what was wrong. She wasn't tricked into it. She did it knowingly.
Next, we're going to look at that defensive strategy that Eve chose, that "get somebody else in trouble" strategy, and Eve's choice of that. We'll start by looking at the natures of Adam and especially Eve, and go in that direction for a little while.
From Genesis 2:21 and 2:22, we see the creation of Eve.
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. Then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh. At that place, the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man.
Was Eve a clone of Adam? That's what we would expect if you took the flesh and blood of a man and made another being from it. you would expect it to have the same genetic code as the man, and therefore be a clone, an exact copy. But that's not what we get. We get another being who has a very different body and a very different nature. Their psychologies are also different.
We see that difference in the snake's choice of a target. He sees that they're different, and he sees that one is going to be easier to work on. This tells us that God took more than a rib from Adam. I don't want to spend too much time on that idea, but the Hebrew word that is translated as "rib" is only rarely translated as rib. This may be the only place. The Hebrew word is translated better and more often as "side", like a side of a house, or a side of a mountain. God took more from Adam than only a rib, but he did take a rib. He took part of the personality of Adam and made that the personality of the woman. Adam becomes different psychologically from what he was before.
This may seem like a strange idea, but it isn't. After God's initial Ex Nihilo creation, he spends his time separating. He separates land from water, waters above from waters below, and so on. Separating Adam into Adam and Eve shouldn't be a surprise.
They're very different beings. This continues through all mankind. More or less, all men inherit the nature of Adam. Those characteristics that are inherent within all men were in Adam as well. There are differences between men, but there is a common maleness. There are certain patterns in male behavior that allow us to say men will react in some kind of way and make predictions based on those. In the same way, cats do certain cat things that are different from dog things. This is also true of women. Women inherit, more or less, the same nature that Eve had. Therefore women have a common nature with Eve that lets us look at women now and know what Eve was like.
When we look at Eve's strategy, we have to ask the question, Why didn't Eve just come clean and repent?
She had options other than tricking Adam. She could have just taken the "get out of dodge strategy" and said, "That's it. I'm running. I'm getting as far away from here as I can." She doesn't choose that one either. Instead, she chooses not to be accountable. Her actions say, "I'm not going to accept that I did this. I'm going to try to patch it up and get somebody else in trouble so that I can escape what circumstances I know are coming for me."
This characteristic of her nature is causing her to choose this option over other options. As daughters of Eve, all women generally have difficulty with accountability. This isn't me talking. This is psychologists talking. Women would prefer to solve problems that they have created by trying to fix the damage rather than by owning the problem and saying, "Yeah, I messed up. I did that wrong. I deserve what I get for it." It's not in her nature to choose any of those other options.
Is her ego involved in this choice? Yeah, I think so. Eve was trying to gain wisdom by having this knowledge that she expected to get, and instead, she caused a giant failure. Nothing proves you lack some wisdom more than a big failure. Therefore her ego is damaged and injured, and that's almost certainly part of what's driving her to do this.
Here's the real kicker. Satan knew Eve would make this choice. His whole plan depends on it happening. She has to choose this option, to not be accountable. He has set up what you'd call a bank shot in pool. Instead of just "eight ball in the corner", it's "eight ball off the bank and into the corner." It's an amazing choice for Satan to make, and it shows his level of understanding. It's also a brave choice, considering he gets one shot at this. If he doesn't succeed in this, he will not get another chance, because they will be aware of who he is and how he works, and it will never be possible for him to deceive.
Along the line of understanding the thinking that Eve was going through, we asked the question: when was Eve going to involve Adam in all of this?
As the helper, we know that she should have gone to Adam as soon as the snake said all this strange stuff to her. She should have told him, "Hey, you know, the snake said this, what do you think of that?" If she had done that, there would have never been a sin. The snake would have been unmasked. Adam would have known what was going on or figured it out. He would have called God, and the whole thing would have fallen apart.
Again, the snake is relying on certain behaviors from Eve. So instead of going to Adam, she will go straight out and eat the fruit. We don't know what exactly her plan was, but I think that we can put some facts together here to give us the correct understanding of it.
I think that she didn't plan on ever telling Adam how she obtained this god-like wisdom that she expected to get by eating the fruit. She expected just to quietly have greater wisdom, and wasn't going to tell Adam how she came by it. That would be consistent with her goal here, which is moving from helper to leader, or at least getting a share of that leadership role. If she told Adam about it, he would certainly eat the fruit as well, which would nullify the advantage she hoped to gain.
Next we'll cover some different but related topics. We ask the question: did the snake lie?
You might say, "Well, why do we care?" But we do care because of what Paul says. The real question here is, was sin in the world before the sin of Eve and Adam? Paul says, No:
For just as by the agency of one man, (he means Adam), sin entered the universe. (Romans 5:12)
But here's the snake deceiving Eve. If the snake was lying before that, then sin was in the world before.
It's an interesting question. There is also an additional insight. That's why the snake's real target was Adam. It was because of his sin, Adam's sin, that the universe would become polluted with sin.
We're going to take a look at what the snake says to Eve and judge whether he's speaking the truth or what. The first declarative statement he makes to Eve is:
You surely will not die. (Genesis 3:4)
His statement is true if you're thinking of Eve's physical body. Eve's physical body does not die, but her nature does. That holistic understanding of the law dies, and she becomes subject to death in the future. The Eve before has died; the Eve after is very different. So, if you look at it the right way, it's true. That's what we're going to see in all of his statements. The snake is using half-truths here, things that Eve is going to interpret one way, but he's not really saying that. He's saying something different.
The next thing he says to Eve as a statement is:
The day you eat from it your eyes will be opened (Genesis 3:5)
Okay, that's a true statement. She became much wiser, but not in the way that she thought it would be. Her eyes were indeed opened, but not like she thought. So it's a true statement again, but again, it's a statement that she's going to understand in a different way than he means it. He's being devious.
You will be like God, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5)
That's the next thing that he says to her. That statement is also true. God does know good and evil. The snake says, You're going to know good and evil too. But he knows it will not be in the same way that God knows good and evil. So again, he's speaking the truth, but he knows that she's going to misunderstand it and take it in the wrong direction because of the way she's thinking and her goals.
These three statements are all true, in the way the snake means them. Thus, the snake didn't lie. It was really up to Eve to ask him, "What do you mean by that, when you say that? Give me some more details there. It's not matching up with what God said." She didn't go through that process, though. She heard what she wanted to hear.
She had never encountered a being who would speak like that. Right at the beginning of Genesis 3, it talks about the snake being crafty. She had never dealt with any being like that who would speak half-truths, tell her something that it knows she's going to misunderstand, and use to do something wrong. She wouldn't have been capable of doing that herself, or even coming up with such a plan.
This might seem like she was in an unfair situation, one she could never have handled. She could have easily countered what he was doing, but she was focused on moving up the ladder. All she had to do was be obedient to God.
There's another good question we can ask. Why does Eve have the rule wrong?
The snake has asked her a question to get her to say what she understands about what God said about eating the fruit from that tree. He knows she has it a little bit wrong. She says:
God has said, "You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die." (Genesis 3:3)
That's not what God said. Eve understands a more restrictive version of the rule. God only said, Don't eat it. He didn't say you couldn't touch it. So you could touch it. There wouldn't be a problem with that. Where did she get this more restrictive version from?
It didn't come from God. He created the rule, and the Bible records what he said. He said, don't eat from it.
It wouldn't have come from her, although some people have said that it must have come from her. That wouldn't make any sense because people don't usually make rules for themselves that are more restrictive than the rule that somebody gave them. People don't say to themselves, Well, I've been told not to go into the house, so I'm not going to even go close to the house. I'm going to stay away from it entirely. People just don't do that. People don't like to have restrictions put on them, so they don't restrict themselves anymore than necessary. They like the freedom to do whatever they want to do. Rules are a hindrance to them, and they have no desire to increase that hindrance. In fact, here is the nature of people. If you tell them not to go into a house, the curiosity that they have, and I'm sure that Adam and Eve would have had the same curiosity, the curiosity that they have is going to drive them to go right up to the house, peek in the windows and try to figure out why it is they're not supposed to go in the house.
If it didn't come from God and it didn't come from her, it has to have come from Adam. So, why would he tell her that? Why would he tell her, Don't even touch it? I think there's a good reason for that. I think that he has also seen what the snake has seen in the characteristics of Eve. He has seen that she has this attraction to the tree. The tree is something that she cannot have, therefore it's attracting her. She likes the look of it, but it's something that she can't have, and that's bothering her. Adam has seen that, and so he said to her, perhaps when she was close to the tree one day, Don't even touch it. You can imagine a man doing exactly that. That's his way of coping with an obvious display by her of an attraction for this thing that she cannot have. So this is his effort to erect a bulwark, an additional barrier, around this tree so that she won't do what she isn't supposed to do.
Now here's another good question. What was Adam's sin? What makes this a good question is that there's some disagreement in Christianity over what Adam's sin was. But to me, the answer seems pretty straightforward. We look at what God said the sin was. That comes in Genesis 3:17, and this is God speaking to Adam.
Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree.
What does God mean by that? Was Adam supposed to be ignoring everything Eve said? God means you listened to her instead of me, and you did what I told you not to do. She said, "Eat this," and he ate it … without checking, questioning, or anything. That's really what it comes down to.
Why did Adam do that? Why didn't he do the thing that he should have done, which was to check and question her and make sure that she wasn't giving him the fruit? The reason he didn't check is that he trusted her. When God says, "You listened to her voice," he means you trusted her, and you didn't remember what I told you. Because God had said there was something that must not be eaten, Adam should have been checking to make sure that he wasn't about to eat what he shouldn't have been eating. The onus was always on him. The responsibility was always his to do that, but he didn't do that.
Adam trusted her, and he says to God about Eve, essentially, "You gave me this person who wasn't trustworthy." He thinks that way because men desire relationships they can trust. Men build bonds like that, and they do that with other men, particularly. It's necessary to trust because men need to work as a team in society, as men, and working as a team requires trust.
Once men have built something, they like to lie back and enjoy what they have. But they can lie back so much that they stop doing the things that they should be doing, and even doing the maintenance of what they do have. Men can fail in both of those ways. They can trust too much, and they can lie back too much. That's what happened with Adam here.
So every man, and of course, every woman, is responsible for keeping God's laws. We can't ever put that duty on somebody else and say, "Make sure I don't do this." Adam's sin was that he ate the fruit, even though he didn't know that he was eating the fruit. It was still his responsibility to make sure that it wasn't the fruit he shouldn't have been eating.
There's another interesting question. This is interesting for the same reason as the last question. There's a disagreement in Christianity about the answer to the question. The question is, were Adam and Eve equally sinful?
The liberals in the church want to see equality here. They don't want to see a difference between Adam and Eve, especially one that shows Eve to have done worse. But that's not what the Bible says, and we'll cover that.
There is a reason why the snake asks Eve, "Has God said you shall not eat from any tree of the garden?" He's asking that very intentionally. He needs her to be conscious of what God said. That's because he is trying to get her to do what the Bible calls an intentional sin.
The Bible talks about two kinds of sin: unintentional sin and intentional sin. An intentional sin is much more serious. It's the difference between an injured relationship and a lost relationship. I don't want to talk about that in detail here. There is another study that covers these sins. For now, you have to just accept it.
Satan needs Eve to be conscious that she is doing what God said not to do, to sin intentionally, so that she will be aware afterwards that she knew it was wrong when she did it. She needs to feel that forgiveness is not available, that she knew it was wrong when she did it. In that situation, what would anyone say to God to restore the relationship? Would you say, I didn't mean to. No, you meant to; you knew it was wrong. You did it intentionally.
The idea, I believe, is that Satan needs this to make sure that she is not going to make a different choice about the action she's going to take to deal with her sin. He needs to make sure that she is going to try to get Adam to sin as well. We mentioned before that Eve's nature will pull her toward tricking Adam. This ensures that choice. Satan's whole bank shot depends on her choice.
Adam's sin was not intentional. He didn't know what he was eating; she knew she was eating. Paul talks about this.
Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and violated the commandment. (1st Timothy 2:14)
Paul is saying this to make a different point than we are making here, but this part of what he says shows that Eve's sin was more serious. She was deceived, that is, she was convinced to intentionally or willfully do what she knew was wrong. Adam was tricked.
Satan, as the snake, played on Eve's weaknesses. He knew these weaknesses. We can see that because of everything that he's set up. Had he been watching her and studying her to find out what all of her weaknesses were? We can't know. Maybe he just knows that because, as a great angel, he has this knowledge. Whatever it was, he knew those weaknesses, and he played on them. By using half-truths, he talked her into doing what she knew was wrong.
And after she had eaten the fruit, the snake's work was done. He isn't mentioned in the story anymore. His role is done. She's going to take over for him. She's going to be the snake with Adam. She's going to play on Adam's weaknesses, just as Satan played on hers. And she does that, as we saw. She tricks Adam into doing wrong.
That's the real short summary. But in fact, there's an even shorter summary, a one-word summary. It's the word that we talked about earlier, the word "with". They both wanted to be "with" the other person, but for different reasons and in different circumstances. After she had eaten the fruit, the text says she wanted him to be with her, in the sense that she wanted him to be guilty of the same crime as her, so that they wouldn't be different. So, he wouldn't be alone. But the "with" that is talked about by Adam is from before she eats the fruit. That "with" is where he wanted her to be with him, in the sense that he wanted her to be trustworthy.
My main goal here was for you to have a better understanding, a deeper understanding, of what is going on in the original sin story. You should see how important it is and all of the details behind it. It's a wonderful story that way, because it's full of details that you can pull out of it.
There are some things that we can take home, things that we can apply to our own lives. There are deceivers and tricksters, and they come in many forms, and they can even come as family members. We always need to be aware of that, as Christians, the people that we should be able to trust, we can't always trust.
Along with that, each of us must know good from evil. We must know what's right and wrong for ourselves, and we must always be watchful to apply that. It's necessary for us to be checking all the time, making sure that we aren't being steered in the wrong direction. Those are pretty obvious statements, I think.
As part of that, we need to know our own weaknesses. That's a very difficult thing to do. We don't like to look at our weaknesses. We don't want to say, "Boy, I'm kind of weak in this area. I wish I could make myself stronger, but I don't seem to be able to do that." But we need to know those weaknesses because that's where we'll be attacked. That's exactly what we see happening here. Eve was attacked in her weak areas, and then she attacked Adam in his weak areas. That's just the way it works. We need to be prepared for that.
There's another good thing that I really want you to pull from this study. It's what you've seen throughout all of it. We've asked a lot of good questions, and those good questions led to other good questions. That's an important way to look at the Bible. Ask the Bible questions. Why is this here? What is this saying to us? Why are we supposed to think this way?
Those are all really good questions to ask of the Bible because they lead to deeper understanding, as we've seen here. Also, the Bible says in many places that God rewards those who seek to understand his word. His word is not meant to be a mystery to us. It's meant to be something that we can dig into and learn more about. That's what I hope we've done here.