Day 2 — The Starting Point: Who Jesus Is, and What He Has Done
Today’s Passage: Genesis 3:1-13
Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and this is near the front of it. In the pages just before today’s reading, God makes the world and calls it good. He plants a garden, sets a man and a woman in it, and tells them they may eat from every tree in the place except one. One tree, out of a whole garden.
Then something in the garden starts a conversation, and thirteen verses later the two of them are crouched in the bushes. One note as you read: where you see LORD in capital letters, the Hebrew has the personal name God gave for Himself, and where you see God in ordinary letters, it is the general word for God.
This study reads the man and the woman as two people who were actually there, not as a fable with a moral attached. You have not been asked to agree to that. Read it as it is told, and see whether you recognise anything.
As you read, hold this: It began with a question that made a good command sound mean, and it ended with hiding.
Context A garden, and a creature in it
A garden in the ancient world was not a flowerbed. It was a walled orchard, the private grounds of a king, planted with fruit and watered on purpose, about the safest and most generous place anyone could picture. Not a wilderness to survive, but a place laid out for him, with food on every side and one tree marked off.
The serpent is introduced as one of the animals God had made. He is not a second god and not God’s equal. He is a creature, and he talks. Later parts of the Bible name him as the enemy of God. Here he is simply there, asking a question. And “knowing good and evil” in this book is not an offer of education. It means the right to decide for yourself what counts as good and evil, instead of receiving that from God. That is what is on the table.
Genesis 3:1–5 (BSB)
¹ Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field that the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” ² The woman answered the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, ³ but about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You must not eat of it or touch it, or you will die.’” ⁴ “You will not surely die,” the serpent told the woman. ⁵ “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The first thing said about God in this chapter is said by somebody else, about Him, to a woman who has never had reason to doubt Him. And it comes as a question rather than a claim. A claim can be answered. A question just sits there and works.
The question also gets the facts wrong in one particular direction. God had said: eat freely from every tree, except one. The serpent’s version is, you must not eat from any tree in the garden. One tree withheld has become a whole garden withheld. Generosity told back as stinginess.
She corrects him, and she defends God, and then she adds something. God had said do not eat of it. She says do not eat of it or touch it. A small addition, and it makes the command a little heavier and a little colder than it was.
Then the serpent stops asking and contradicts God outright. You will not surely die. And he supplies a motive: God is holding something back from you, because He knows what it would make you. The command is no longer a fence around life. It is a lock on a door, with God on the other side holding the key.
Word study "crafty" — arum (Genesis 3:1)
Hebrew: עָרוּם (ʿarum), pronounced ah-ROOM. Strong’s H6175.
On its own the word can mean shrewd, and elsewhere it is sometimes a compliment. What English cannot carry here is the echo. The sentence just before this one, at the close of chapter 2, says the man and his wife were both naked, ʿarom, and were not ashamed. Naked, then crafty, one vowel apart.
Genesis 3:6–7 (BSB)
⁶ When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, she took the fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; so they sewed together fig leaves and made coverings for themselves.
Nothing has been said about how the fruit looked until now, and then three things arrive at once: good for food, pleasing to the eyes, desirable for obtaining wisdom. All of it probably true. The trouble was never that the fruit was bad. The trouble was that it was taken.
“She also gave some to her husband who was with her.” With her. Not off in another part of the garden, not called in afterwards. He stood there through the whole conversation, saying nothing, and then he took it from her hand and ate.
Their eyes were opened, exactly as promised. What they saw was themselves. They had been naked in front of each other and in front of God without a thought about it, and now they could not bear it. The first thing the new knowledge produced was not wisdom. It was a need for cover.
Genesis 3:8–10 (BSB)
⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the breeze of the day, and they hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ But the LORD God called out to the man, “Where are you?” ¹⁰ “I heard Your voice in the garden,” he replied, “and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.”
Then a sound: God walking in the garden in the breeze of the day, an ordinary hour. And the two of them get behind the trees.
Consider where they hid. Among the trees of the garden. God’s trees, handed to them with permission to eat. There was nowhere to go that He had not made, so they used His gift for cover.
“Where are you?” is not God searching the shrubbery for information. He asks so that the man will have to come out and say something. It is the first question God puts to a human being in this book, and He asks it after everything has gone wrong, as the one who was wronged. He came, He called, and He waited for an answer.
The man answers honestly and incompletely. He was afraid, he was naked, he hid. Every word of that is true. Not one word of it is about the tree.
Genesis 3:11–13 (BSB)
¹¹ “Who told you that you were naked?” asked the LORD God. “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” ¹² And the man answered, “The woman whom You gave me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” ¹³ Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” “The serpent deceived me,” she replied, “and I ate.”
The next question closes the gap. Who told you that you were naked? Nobody told him. He knows, and he knows how he knows. Then the question with nowhere left to stand behind it: have you eaten from the tree.
“The woman whom You gave me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” Count the moves in that one sentence. She did it. And You gave her to me. The gift he had been glad of the day before is now the reason he is in trouble, and he says so to the one who gave her. He does reach the truth. “And I ate.” It arrives last, with two other parties standing in front of it.
The woman is asked next, and her answer has the same shape. The serpent deceived me, and I ate. What she says is accurate. She was deceived. It is still an answer with something placed in front of it.
Neither of them tells a lie. That is what makes the scene so easy to recognise. It is an old sentence, that one, and it is still in daily use: here is what happened, here is who else was involved, and yes, at the end of it, I did it.
The chapter goes on, and it goes somewhere better than this. Today stops here, with two people standing in front of God in leaves, telling the truth in the wrong order.
Study notes One more verse
The instinct in verse 8 is to get out of God’s sight. Centuries later, a king of Israel wrote a song about that same instinct:
"Where can I go to escape Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence?" Psalm 139:7 (BSB)
He asks it as a man who has tried. His question has no answer, and in the song that turns out to be a relief rather than a threat. The trees were never going to work. He came walking, and He called.
Today’s Decision
Read verses 11 to 13 again, slowly, out loud if you are somewhere you can do that.
Then say one true sentence to God about something you have done, and put nothing on the end of it. No reason, nobody else in it, no account of what led up to it. Your own words, however plain. You can say it without being sure He is there. Nothing is asked of you today except that you stop arranging it.