It’s been a few months since I’ve written. We left Calgary, Alberta and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee at the beginning of February and things have been busy (to say the least). But I am overwhelmed and humbled that by God’s goodness and grace I get to pastor the wonderful people of All Souls Knoxville. It feels like home. Yesterday was our fourth Sunday here and, now that I’m settling back into a routine, it’s great to be writing again.
As I was preparing for yesterday’s sermon, I was struck by craftiness of the serpent in the garden (Genesis 3), and the craftiness of Satan in the desert with Jesus (Matthew 4). I thought I’d explore that here for a few minutes.
Crafty in the Garden
Yesterday’s First Testament reading combined the latter part of Genesis 2 and the beginning of Genesis 3 (2:15-17; 3:1-7). I think most of us immediately think – ‘Ah, the fall!’ (a word noticeably absent from the text itself). We’re prone, for some reason, to jump to the bad news before the good; the prohibition before the stunning invitation to abundance. Regardless of our inclination, the first command in the Bible is a positive one:
“And the LORD God commanded the [hu]man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden…”
-Genesis 2:16
In the Hebrew the word eat is written twice (אָכֹ֥ל תֹּאכֵֽל). Most literally, the command could be translated “Eat! Eat!”1 As Leslie Leyland Fields puts it,
“The whole world is presented to them as their table.”2
Our creation story thus begins with a spotlight on God’s astounding abundance. The world’s table is set for the first humans to feast on and enjoy in perfect freedom. Bob Ekblad recounts how was reading this text with a group of prisoners with whom he regularly studies the Bible in his book Reading the Bible With the Damned. Part of Bob’s initial work in studying the Bible with others is to “challenge the reigning negative theology.”3 So before jumping to Genesis 3, he asks this question regarding the first command:
“If the only information we had about God was this first command, what would this call to ‘eat of every tree in the garden’ tell us?”4
This is a good question for us all to ponder as we consider one of the most foundational theological questions we need to ask ourselves and each other again and again: what is God like?
As we move to Genesis 3, it is important to keep God’s abundant generosity in view. God’s “Eat! Eat!” should still be ringing in our ears as we read about “the Fall.” But it is exactly here that the crafty5 serpent comes along to tempt the first humans and deafen them to God’s abundance. But how does the serpent tempt them? How is the serpent crafty? The craftiness is seen in the way the serpent frames his first question to Eve:
“Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’”
-Genesis 3:1
With this one question the serpent is attempting to twist Eve’s imagination by offering a “countertheology"6 which views God as withholding instead of generous. As Ekblad writes,
“The image of a liberal, generous, good God who desires that humans enjoy life and who seeks to protect them from danger stands in stark contrast to the serpent’s dark picture of an unlovable, miserly God of prohibitions.”7
The plan, unfortunately, works. Eve, at first, attempts to correct the serpent by stating, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,” but as we read on we can see that her imagination has been marred. She continues responding to the serpent by saying,
“but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
God, of course, said nothing about touching the tree. But it is too late, her imagination of what God is like has shifted and she has embraced the countertheology offered by the “Serpent Theologian.”8 She does so, it seems, without noticing. But something has changed in her and she has inserted words into God’s mouth that God never spoke.
We do this to each other all the time, particularly when we are wounded. If I perceive you are angry or disappointed with me, I am likely to hear and subsequently remember what I think you said instead of what you actually said. In so doing, I am, as my wife would put it, imposing my broken narrative on you and, as a result, I stop listening to the real you and hear only the you I imagine, the you that fits inside my broken narrative. This is why arguments often get stuck in moments where one person says, “but you said!” while the other insists, “I did not say!” One of our congregants came up to me after I said some of these things last night and let me know that all the marriage counselors in the room were nodding during this point. We do this to each other all the time. Adam and Eve were the first to do it with God. They were, as Baxter Kruger puts it, projecting their “own brokenness…onto God’s face.”9 The craftiness of the serpent, then, was to create “a staggering communication problem for God. For now there is a great ugly ditch between who God actually is and who Adam believes God is.”10 God speaks God’s good word, but we hear God saying something that God is not, in fact, saying, only what we, in our broken imaginations, imagine God to be saying. The craftiness of the serpent, then, was to create a communication problem between us and God. He did a pretty good job.
Crafty in the Desert
In the desert, something similar happens, yet there is also a significant dissimilarity that we should pay attention to. Chris Green writes:
“What we find when we read the story of the wilderness temptations closely is that Satan is not so much tempting us to disbelieve as to believe unfaithfully…Satan wants us to take God’s promises to mean what they do not in fact mean, so that we are confused about what we can and should expect from God.”11
In the garden, the serpent’s craftiness resulted in us putting words in God’s mouth which God never spoke. In the desert, however, Satan speaks God’s words with stunning precision. The cunning work at play here is not in the words themselves, but in what we believe God means by these words. Because of time I didn’t get to further quote Chris last night, but here’s what I wished I had been able to include:
Perhaps that is where we too often find ourselves: believing strongly–but in misunderstandings of God’s word. We trust God as provider, but rely on our own sense of need. We trust God as healer, but assume we know what health is. We trust God as deliverer and protector, but expect that deliverance to come on our own terms and in our own time. In these and in countless other ways we are so much of the time taxed by false expectations and bad desires, waiting on God to do what God is not going to do–at least not in the way that we expect it to be done. And so we move from suffering to suffering, from frustration to frustration, from disappointment to disappointment, not because God is unfaithful, but because our expectations of God are stubbornly perverse. We have turned the bread of God’s promises into stones of distrust.12
While the method of craftiness differs between the garden and the desert – one dealing with the words themselves, the other dealing with what is behind the words – the result is the same: distrust. In both instances we project our broken narratives onto God which results in us imagining God is saying or meaning something that God is not saying or meaning. The craftiness of Satan lies in distorted communication.
So why was the starving Jesus, unlike Adam and Eve (full on the world’s buffet), able to withstand the temptation of bread in the midst of his crippling hunger? I think it is just this: Jesus knew that “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” is a good word, and that every meaning from every word that proceeds from the mouth of God is a good word too. And friends, we can believe this and believe it precisely because Jesus is the Word that proceeds from the mouth of God, and every word he speaks, and lives, and means, and is, is a good word.
Bob Ekblad, Reading the Bible With the Damned (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 30.
Leslie Leyland Fields, The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Towards God (Eugene, Org: Cascade Books, 2010), xxiii-xxiiv.
Ekblad, Reading the Bible With the Damned, 30.
ibid.
Robert Alter notes that the word “crafty” is a pun in Hebrew: “‘arum, ‘cunning,’ plays against ‘arumim, ’naked,’ of the previous verse.” See Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), Kindle loc. 1171.
Ekblad, Reading the Bible With the Damned, 31.
ibid.
Ibid.
C. Baxter Kruger, Jesus and the Undoing of Adam (Jackson, MS: Perichoresis Press, 2001), Kindle loc. 336.
Ibid. 376.
Chris E.W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 39-40.
Ibid. 40.