You need to hear it this way.God says, “Trust me.Live this way.Be obedient.Live within these bounds for life, for inside them is work, blessing and obedience, the life I intend for you in creation.Outside these bounds you will only encounter suffering, pain, and death.”The serpent takes those words and says, “You won’t die.You’ll become like God.You’ll know good and evil for yourself.You’ll be free, free from the need to trust, free from the need to obey, free from God.The serpent turns the boundary that God identifies for our protection and life into a threat or at the very least a barrier that needs to be circumvented. The seed is planted, the life we are called to lead for our blessing is distorted with misrepresentation, and they eat the fruit.Before they lived in the garden, as God intended, with work and blessing and prohibition.Now the prohibition is violated, the permission of God is perverted, and eventually removed without toil, and the work, the vocation that God has given us, to till and keep the garden is neglected.The man and woman no longer concern themselves with anything, except their shame and nakedness.Their interest and focus is completely on self, on their new found freedom apart from God, and the terror that comes with it. This story is profoundly relevant for our lives today, for this story is about anxiety.We live in a world overwhelmed by anxiety, and in our story, the man and woman seek to overcome that anxiety about themselves, about their position of dependence and trust with a lack of knowledge, by overcoming the prohibition of God [living in trust without certainty creates anxiety].
This cannot work, for only God, who calls, permits, and prohibits can deal with the anxiety among us.The man and woman seek autonomous freedom, freedom outside the boundaries set up for human life by God.They try to overcome anxiety by overcoming the boundaries that cause the anxiety.In today’s world, we try any number of ways to overcome or resolve this same anxiety.They are psychological, economic, or cosmetic, but they are bound to fail because they only deal with symptoms of our anxiety and not with the cause.Our current culture builds off from that anxiety, if we only consume more, we will find fulfillment.You must have that latest it item, new phone, new car, new toy to find fulfillment.But just like the serpent, this seduction into security apart from trusting in God is a distortion of human life.
Security apart from God, trust in God and God’s care is what leads to the cycle of death, for every time we seek that security in something new, it disappoints, over and over again, until we become numb or so cynical about anything that can fulfill that life seems impossible, so we accept death as inevitable, as obvious.Life outside the boundaries of God become so normal that we come to believe that living life within those boundaries is just plain impossible, for all we know is mistrust and toil, difficulty and a desire to control. And here’s where the surprise of God comes in.Right when all we have to expect is death outside of the boundaries that God has set up, God gives life.And this is grace.Once again grace is the defining characteristic of God dealing with the facts of human life.When the facts warrant death, God insists on life.Notice, I hope, that this grace comes in the form of the punishment God hands out.The man and woman disobey, stray outside the boundaries of God, and rather than hand out the death that is warranted, the sentence is life apart from the goodness of the garden, life in conflict filled with pain, sweat, and the distortion of desire between the man and woman, but it is nonetheless life where death is warranted.It is life that makes room for the possibility of God’s salvation.It makes room for one who will come to handle the anxiety of humanity with God once and for all.This one whom God says, “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." In Christ, God enters our place of anxiety.Only because of Grace and only through Grace.