A social media poster asked:
“If the 10 Commandments didn’t exist before Moses then what were Adam and Eve “guilty” of?
Adam and Eve were disobedient in following the one simple, seemingly small directive Adam received from the Lord God and subsequently, that Eve also received by means of Adam’s slightly embellished report of the Lord God’s command.
That command was given because the potential for creating difficulty for themselves was inherent in the environment the Lord God created….They had been given the capacity for freewill choice, they could obey or not obey. To disobey the Lord God’s established boundary, which was quite generously set and was explained to Adam in Eden, would also clearly have a consequence that would be significant to them….. and to all humankind thereafter. Although the Lord God had warned of the consequence of disobedience, He had not disclosed the length of the “tail” on the liability (an insurance industry concept) that would accompany their disobedience directly to them in the Garden and to all their progeny for millennia to come.
It was later explained to mankind at the time of Moses as part of a more thorough boundary, warning, and disclosed consequence in Deuteronomy 6:7-11 as part of the larger Mosaic Code
7 “You shall have no other gods before me.
8 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.9 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me
10 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
11 “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”
The inherent risk of danger, represented by the presence of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the center of the Garden was the means by which mankind’s freewill and the opportunity to exercise it in obedience or disobedience to the Lord God’s will would determine their own and humanity’s future. It would also set the stage for the obviousness of the need for the redemptive work of the Lord God when mankind inevitably would abuse freewill through disobedience.
Setting the desires of one’s heart on anything that is not the Lord God’s will is to create an image and idol of one’s own heart’s desire. Fulfilling one’s own heart’s desire may appear to offer fulfillment of a lust of one’s flesh, or of a lust of one’s covetous, materialistic, or power-craving yearnings, or to offer one a perceived advantage in matching the Lord God’s wisdom, power, or authority. (1 John 2:16)
Those temptations that satan offered Eve, and Adam, too, were the same as those offered to Jesus in the wilderness. Adam stood by suspiciously quiet, curious perhaps, but non-responsive in the moment in this beautiful, fully and sufficiently provisional Garden of Eden as satan launched his lies. However, until one has examined one’s desires and they have been aligned and conformed to those of the Lord God, expressed through His Word, the outcome will always be disobedience. ( I think that is why God has said in Isaiah 1:18, “Come, let us reason together…” and in Isaiah 55:8, ““For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Neither are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD.” Because we do not desire to seek, engage with, know, understand, and obey God’s thoughts (expressed through His Word), we are unable to carry out our ways in keeping with His ways. This is the foundation of cognitive behavioral theory and practice….. What we think gives rise to how we feel and motivates what we do.
Furthermore, in regard to misuse of the name of the Lord God, note that in all of Genesis 2 the references are to God. After God has created Adam and Eve the references are to “The Lord God” or “The Lord your God.” But in Genesis 3 when the cunning serpent arrives on the scene, he immediately refers to God as merely “God,” not the Lord God” and twists the Lord’s instructions in a way so that when Eve corrects him she gets the tree in the center of the garden right but she follows satan’s lead and drops “Lord” from God’s name. Dr. Tony Evans pointed this out in his Kingdom Woman snd Kingdom Man studies and it reflects satan’s lack of respect for God while questioning and twisting the truth of God’s instructions further shows his dismissive attitude toward the Lord God. This misuse of the Lord God’s name by satan goes right over the woman’s head and in verse 3:3 she says merely “God,” too, following the pattern offered by satan.
The temptations to Eve were the same temptations that Jesus Christ, equipped by the Spirit of God, faced down in the barren wilderness. But satan addresses Jesus as the Son of God to which Jesus consistently replies speaking scripture. In response to the first temptation to turn stones to bread, Jesus replies that “man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” He is witnessing to his identity as a human man and pointing to the distinction between those of the human race who do live by bread and those who know how to live in the Spirit, obedient to the word of God, as well. In the other two temptations Jesus refers to the “Lord your God”, putting himself in the same category with those men who worship and obey God as their Lord. By referring to the “Lord your God.” Jesus is also subtly reminding satan that even though he has been disobedient, disrespectful, and dismissive of the Father, and is bound to the earth now, the Lord God still has authority over satan, too!
These are the same three temptations John the Beloved Apostle says in 1 John 2:16 that all humanity faces. Adam and Eve exercised freewill in disobedience by yielding to them while living fully into their humanness, forgetting the Lord God’s authority over them and handing that over to satan while making idols of satan’s authority and their own physical appetites, their yearning to possess that which had been withheld, and to be like their Creator.
Jesus Christ in his earthly existence did none of that. But he also didn’t use fancy supernatural maneuvers to defeat satan in the wilderness, either. He used the Word and His personal knowledge of the Lord God’s will for His life. And so can any one of us, too, if we learn to grow and live the way Jesus Christ did, keeping the Lord God’s will and Word at the forefront of our thoughts and actions. He himself gives us the tools and means to do exactly that…… to restore good to the Lord God’s beautiful creation that has been spoiled by the poor use of humanity’s freewill in having chosen disobedience. We can be part of the redemption . We, all humans, are image-bearers of the Lord God, our Creator. When we come to know Him….
– through His Word,
– by His Spirit,
– by knowledge of and relationship with His Incarnate Son Jesus Christ,
– through community among His people,and
– in the circumstances He allows that instruct us
… one can become a Child of the Lord God, knowing His presence, goodness, sovereignty, and delight in giving us good things. The god one calls “Lord” is the true God of our life
When we live in obedience and honor the Lord God we are able to see and enjoy those good things, as well as recognize and reject the tinny and tawdry counterfeits and distractions of the enemy.
A wise pastor once told me….”God gave us freewill and we have the agency to exercise it. The good news is that God will give you what you want. The bad news is that God will give you what you want.” The way I read that is that I need to be careful what I set my heart on. If it is not in alignment with the desires of God’s heart, I may find myself with one of those counterfeits or distractions……. The human heart is, above all things, deceitful until it is shaped by and conformed to that of its Creator.It seems that a wise strategy is not so much to ask, “What would Jesus do?(WWJD)”, but rather, to ask, “What does the Lord your God desire?” One can be sure that Jesus was asking that question himself as he knelt in Gethsemane and that he was fully devoted to the Father’s will, not his own.
Creation, first spoiled by Adam and Eve, then by members of one generation after another, can be redeemed by responding to the temptations the same way Jesus responded them. He used His personal knowledge of God’s Word and will and His personal relationship to Him to defeat the enemy. We can help bring restoration to creation by our cooperation with Christ instead of extending and multiplying the deathly consequences of sin begun in Eden.
Sin brought spiritual death separating mankind from an intimate and personal relationship with God, psychologically separating man from knowledge and understanding of his own human nature, and physically separating his own earthly body from the eternal God-imaged spirit and soul, leaving the body to decline and decay prematurely in the physical realm.
In Eden, there was the presence of a Tempter whose existence as a God-created being certainly preceded Adam and Eve’s own creation. Satan likely chose the serpent appearance in order to disguise his true appearance and avoid questions and suspicions by Adam and Eve…… As far as they knew, the serpent satan was just another of the creatures God had created in the Garden over whom they were to have dominion….
But satan’s presence in the Garden was likely a result of his own misguided cunning in his own rebellion against and disobedience of God’s will. His fall from grace in the heavenlies appears to have preceded the creation of Adam and Eve. But did it? Certainly Job’s time on earth would have been some time after Adam and Eve’s. And yet it appears that satan may have still had standing among the heavenly hosts when he came for an audience before the Lord in Heaven at a time when all the heavenly hosts were one. When the Lord asked satan where he had been (as if the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent God didn’t already know!) satan had a conversation with Him in which satan refers to “God” (not the Lord God) as having set a pleasant hedge around his servant Job (just as He had set a similar pleasant hedge around Adam and Eve in Eden. ) Satan challenged the Lord by saying essentially, “Of course Job loves, honors, and obeys God because God has made it so easy for him to do so!” Satan suggested that Job would not be so adoring and obedient if God had not given Job such abundant favor. Satan was insulting God, by failing to refer to Him as “Lord God”!but he was also insulting all of the Lord’s created earth and the humans He had put there. Satan’s challenge to Him over Job suggested that God’s created realm and its occupants weren’t really “very good.” Satan implied that even someone as favored as Job was incapable of living obediently into the godly image instilled in humanity, of honoring God if faced with suffering, and would not exercise freewill positively and, in fact, would abuse it unless God kept them in a tightly protected, safe, well provisioned environment. Satan here is wagering with the Lord.
Satan’s temptation of Job yielded dismal results for satan and failed to achieve luring of Job into cursing or abandoning God, demonstrating that He truly was the Lord of Job’s life…. unlike satan himself.
When satan pulled his stunt with Job, I think that is when God, being a timeless being in a timeless heavenly existence, set the curse on satan to exist as a serpent and cast satan and a third of the heavenly hosts who cheered him through it not only out of heaven, but also backward into the earliest time-bound existence on earth, to the time of creation’s dawning and God’s charge to Adam and Eve to have dominion over the earth. The earth, became satan’s penal colony for all of time’s existence. The Garden of Eden and the Lord’s cherished humans, Adam and Eve, were set upon the earth in a protected place, a Garden of safety and favor.and were given freewill to prove to satan that even if he succeeded in undermining one of God’s humans, even the very first ones, his success would be constrained and limited by God’s redemptive power from Day 6 on and forever…… Note, as an aside, it seems that after Adam and Eve’s disobedience and the shame, hiding, and blaming of God and one another that resulted, they had to leave Eden’s “very good” Garden that was shut off from them. They were put out into a reality that reflected satan’s handiwork in having already spoiled the created earth with difficulty that they would now have to learn to overcome.
Satan came to them, cunning, disguised as a serpent, and eager to try again having failed with Job, who represented perhaps a maturing creation of humanity in relationship to the Lord God. Perhaps from Genesis 2 to Genesis 3, satan had been time-warped backward from a “metaverse” that included a flourishing humanity up to Job’s day, all the way back to the dawn of humanity with Adam and Eve.
Satan did not realize and could not have known that the rest of his existence would be spent coming after the Lord God’s human creation with every tool he had in an attempt to kill, steal, and destroy them only to be thwarted again and again as the Lord God provided, protected, and redeemed humanity from, or even within, the consequences of one assault on His image-bearers after another and setting the stage for satan’s ultimate defeat through Christ What more appropriate punishment could the Lord God have crafted for satan than to condemn him to forever strive to destroy the Lord God’s “very good” creation only to run up against the Lord God’s redemptive power in every assault, but stringing satan and his cohort along for millennia doomed to failure after failure, condemned to see every effort at destruction ultimately fail.
The Tempter called into question the goodness of the Lord God, the truthfulness of the Lord God, and the very sovereignty and authority of the Lord God in his assault on Adam and Eve. He sought to direct their attention to their own egoistic desires. Satan knew that if he could direct their focus of desires onto themselves instead of on the Lord God, he could confuse and deceive them. His assault on Job had been just that, a physical assault on Job, to inflict suffering. It truly was upon Job’s every physical treasure… health, possessions, family relationships, and even friendships. But satan couldn’t defeat God with just inflicting physical suffering alone on one of God’s own. He would have to call into question the character of the Lord God Himself and make humankind believe that God was withholding from them things better than the “very good” the Lord God had already given them.
Satan uses the same tools with the same goals with all humanity and is doomed to the same frustrated result for all time as the Lord God demonstrates again and again that created beings, including satan himself, will never prevail over the Creator’s will.
“Evil labors with vast power and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.”
J.R.R. Tolkien