Sean C. Capparuccia
26 July 2026
Sermon VI in the Genesis series
Gen 3:14-24 (part II); Gal 4:1-11; Psalm 130; John 3:12-17
Sin by the Ounce
Into the Garden he came unannounced (Gen. 3:1);
Then with a quick and silent jounce
the serpent’s body he did trounce;
With an unhurried swagger and cocky flounce
He eyed poor Eve and made ready to pounce (:1)
And ask her God’s law to please enounce (:2-5).
Long story short, from Eden they were bounced (:24).
Adam’s, Eve’s, our own judgement pronounced (:14-24):
The devil denounced (:14-15),
evil renounced,
And the remedy for sin plainly announced (:15, 21).
So, day after day as your sins greatly mount (Rom. 3:23),
Thank God it’s not He who likes to keep count (Ps. 130:3),
But graciously washes them in the Saviour’s bloody fount (Rev. 21:6)
Today’s message is a continuation of last week’s where we have Eve’s deception by the crafty serpent that was inhabited by none other than the angel, Lucifer, himself. Here is the inception of sin into our world and into our humanity, into our very being. But it is also the beginning of the hope of the promise: that what Adam and Eve did to distort God’s blessing, one day someone would come, born of a woman just like Eve, who would restore God’s blessings. As St. Augustine said, “The Old Testament is revealed in the New Testament, and the New Testament is hidden in the Old Testament.” They go together. As we sometimes say in some of our liturgies: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” If we learn anything from our study in Genesis, it should be this, that God at no point in history was ever side-walloped by what an angel, or a man, or anything else did or can do. At no time was God ever dumb-struck and faced with a cataclysmic decision to do one thing or another. He has had a plan from the beginning. Adam’s sin was not a surprise to God Almighty. Nothing comes to pass that God has not willed to come to pass, or allowed to come to pass, as difficult a concept as that is. And yet, we are responsible for every sin we commit.
Snakes
Continuing on…. After getting through the original creation of all that is, Genesis 3 begins with a talking serpent. Let us note that the book of Revelation, three chapters from the end of the Bible, talks about the silencing of the serpent.[1] The triumphant Christ will see to that – and all God’s people said…. Amen!
I hate snakes, you hate snakes, we all hate snakes, except for one of my sons-in-law who likes snakes for some reason. Whenever we find a snake in the yard, we’ll send him a picture and ask what it is. “It’s a common black snake. Only eats rodents. It’s harmless. Don’t kill it.” “Too late.” I’m sure there are ‘good’ snakes out there, but, you see, in normal people’s minds, a snake is a snake. And possibly this goes back to thousands of years of conditioning based on this very event in the Bible. I mean, the truth is, more people have been bitten by dogs than by snakes. In fact, roughly 7000-8000 are bitten by venomous snakes each year, of which only about 5 die in the U.S. At the same time, there are about 4.5 million dog bites, with 30-50 deaths. But Scripture doesn’t say, “Now the puppy was more crafty than any beast the Lord God had made…” This is perhaps part of the “enmity” between the woman and the snake.
In Hiding
Backing up just a little, we find Adam and Eve hiding after eating from the forbidden tree. This is significant. Hiding denotes shame and shame denotes the knowledge of having done something wrong. Oh, they knew they sinned. The serpent said their eyes would be opened and indeed they were as they saw for the first time their nakedness, both literally and as a euphemism for their shame.[2] But it is here that man – and woman – are fallen; the Fall didn’t happen when God pronounced the punishment, it was here at the time of the disobedience. And what did they do? They hid. They grabbed some fig leaves and attempted to cover themselves. Note immediately here that they did not confess, they did not repent, they did not come to God in their shame and say, “I’m sorry, God, for this terrible thing I have done.” No, they tried to cover it up. As if God wouldn’t notice the fig leaves. “Nice fig leaves, Adam, why are you wearing those?” “Oh, hey, well, you know it’s all the rage on the other side of Eden so me and the missus we decided to wear the leaf.” And mankind has not changed a bit since that day. We run; we hide; we try to cover our wrongs when all God asks us to do is to confess to Him and repent, to turn away from them.
We think of David, that man after God’s own heart[3], the one who gave us many of the Psalms we read, the man who led Israel to victory time and time again, yes, that man, who would see a beautiful married woman and sleep with her, impregnate her, and then have her husband killed so that his sin would not be discovered. And if you’re a fan of Agathie Christie or Dorothy Sayers or John Grisham or any number of crime and mystery writers, you find that the whole profession of investigation and detective work is there to find out why Adam is wearing a fig leaf. We always attempt to cover our crimes, our sins, in the hope that we won’t be found out.
Who Seeks Whom?
The other prevalent idea here is that mankind does not seek God; God seeks man. Humans are born in a sinful state and do not, by nature, seek God because, in our sinful nature, we want to hide from Him. We want to avoid Him because well, He may just require something of us. And while some people avoid God altogether, some give Him lip service enough to feel content, but in truth are avoiding Him all the same. I came across a sermon entitled, “Why Good People Go to Hell” by evangelist Fred Brown. It was preached in 1971. Talking about people who go to church he said,
“There are two attitudes of heart with which people go to church… Some people go saying, ‘Well, I got everything I need…’ and they go just to grace the audience with their august presence. They feel a need for nothing; they are as good or better than anybody else. If you go to church feeling that way, you will come away just like you went. You will get nothing. But if you go realizing your shortcomings and expecting a blessing, then you will get it. If you come in here spiritually proud, you will go out the same way. But if you come in here as a suppliant[4], as one who feels his need, you will go away .”[5]
I hope that all of us here come into this place with our heart in the right place – seeking God’s forgiveness as well as seeking to learn from His Word, among other things. In a word, seeking His blessing.
The Punishments Meted Out
:12-13 Just as no fair judge condemns a man without a trial, so God gives Adam his chance for stating his sorry case. After Adam explains why they are wearing fig leaves, he immediately places the blame not only on his wife, but on God Himself: “the woman whom You gave to me, she gave it to me, and I ate.” It almost sounds like he’s saying he simply ate what his wife gave to him and he didn’t know what it was, doesn’t it? This would make her not only deceived but a deceiver as well. No, he knew what it was. But to blame it on the sovereign God who formed Eve for Adam in the first place, now that’s something. It’s like he said, “I was doing just fine by myself,” or “I didn’t ask for a woman, that was Your idea.” But how many times have we done the same? And men, the lesson we can learn from this is simply: blaming your wife is never a winning strategy. Don’t forget, Adam had to live another 900 years with the wife he blamed! You know this episode was brought up every time the family got together!
Then there’s Eve. Our Bibles generally have God say to Eve, “What is this that you have done?” Calvin says that the Hebrew is more vehement in its wording, saying, “‘How have you done this?’ or as if he had said, ‘How was it possible that you should bring your mind to be so perverse a counselor to your husband?’”[6] Then she, following the shining example of her husband, blames the crafty serpent. And here she thinks she may be absolved; the serpent tricked her, and her husband didn’t stop her. How is any of this her fault? Because, Beloved, each one of us stands before God and are responsible for listening to and upholding His Word of Truth. Yes, Adam carries more responsibility because of the order which Gid created and therefore it is he who will bear more punishment, but we will all stand before the Judge one day to give an account.
The Serpent
:14-15 So what follows are the curses and punishments. Actions have consequences, a lesson that I am sure all of here have learned more than once. And some actions have worse consequences than others. And one of the hardest lessons to learn in this life is that, for some reason, not everyone suffers the same consequence for similar actions. The world is unjust. And it is unjust because of what happened right here in Eden. In verse 14 God addresses the serpent, the animal being used of Satan at present. But God knows that it is the angel Lucifer using the serpent and therefore His judgement addresses both. That being the case it is difficult to distinguish between what is figurative and what is literal, although they both serve the same purpose: to show that this action has a consequence. Let me give you this illustration: you hear your child or grandchild screaming from outside; you run out and there they are on the ground being attacked by a dog (not a puppy) but a wolf, say. Do you tell the animal that it isn’t nice to bite little boys or girls? No, you probably grab the nearest stick and kill the dog unless you happen to be carrying a pistol. And then the SPCA comes in and says the dog was only doing what was natural. Do you care? No.
In this case, the serpent, an animal that God created, was created to be a benefit to man in some way or another. And now here it is as a party to man’s destruction. The serpent is just a serpent, but it isn’t “innocent.” And so, God’s punishment is well within reason. And whether this serpent is a serpent now extinct, or a snake that has a perpetual bad rap, this is the punishment. It is also allegorical for the Devil who used this animal. Crawling on the belly is a sign of humility, of being always low. And the enmity pronounced between the serpent and the woman was nothing but a foreshadowing of his ultimate destruction. From woman will come one who will destroy the serpent once and for all. Here is the promise. A Savior will come. Next week we will see that Eve thought it was Cain. But God, even in His judgement of this first and terrible sin, had the salvation of humankind in view. That, my friends, is called mercy.
Eve
:16 To the deceived Eve, increased pain in childbirth. This tells us that God did not intend for woman to have painless childbirth before the sin, but whatever pain it would have been, will now be “greatly multiplied.” But wait, there’s more. The second punishment, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” has been the source of endless debate, for sure. Some translations have it as,
“thy desire shal be subject to thine husbande, and he shall rule over thee” Geneva
“your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” ESV
“thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” ASV
“your trust turns toward your husband, yet he will dominate you.” ISV, Int’l Standard
“thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” KJV
“to your husband shall be your desire. And he shall rule over you.” LEB (Lexham Eng.)
“your desire shall be toward your husband; and he shall rule over you.” LITB (Lit. Trans.)
“thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” RV
This has primarily been interpreted in two ways. One, the irony of a greatly painful childbirth and then, guess what? You’ll keep desiring your husband so you’ll just keep getting pregnant over and over again. I think this seems a bit vindictive. The second interpretation is that the woman, who is by God’s order, subject to her husband’s care, provision, concern, and responsibility, will now always want to dominate him, and yet his rule will continue to be over her. This is far more plausible for it doesn’t alter the Creation order but alters the players within it. And this is precisely what Paul referred back to in his letter to Timothy about women in church. Be that as it may, Beloved, sin has consequences. And so far as church goes, one of the worst consequences by far is that a bishop should appoint a complete nincompoop to a church as a preacher who can’t put two thoughts together and a highly intelligent woman should be in the congregation who could probably preach circles around him. Oh, the irony!
Adam – and the rest of us
:17-19 And then to Adam: “Because you listened to your [lovely] wife, [instead of to Me, your Creator and God] and completely disobeyed the ONE thing I commanded you not to do…..
The ground, which up til now has been so easy to work and walk on and play in and roll around in, will be cursed. Thorns and thistles will grow. And the plants which you so easily ate from whenever you were hungry will now require care and weeding and fertilizer and lime and things like that. In other words, to fill your stomach will require work and sweat.” And the worst part of the punishment, on Adam, Eve, and all their descendants – the entirety of the human race – is that “to dust [he] shall return.” For I ask you, from what dust did he come? God formed Him with His own hands; he was, in a sense, divinely made. And we, we are “knit together in our mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13) and born whole and entire in this world; we did not crawl or roll around like a larvae on the ground and become what we are through some great struggle against nature. We were, in a sense, just as Adam and Eve were, fashioned by the Master’s loving hand. Yet to the dust we shall go. Would that we could go as we came, gloriously. (Not literally, of course, poor moms.) But that God would simply lift us up into the next world when the time came. But death awaits. For Adam, who had no concept of death, here it was taught to him: “For you are dirt, and to the dirt you will return.” And so we, to this day, dread death because it is the great unknown. All we have is a promise.
But What to Call Her?
:18 The next verse tells us that Adam named his wife, who still hasn’t been named, Eve; “the mother of all the living.” Isn’t this a wonderful place to place this verse? After being told of his imminent death, and the imminent death of all of his posterity, he finally names his wife, and he calls he “mother of all the living.” What did he mean? Was Adam being sarcastic? Remember now, Adam had the task of naming things; God did not name her Eve. He may have been thinking after God’s pronouncement, “Ah, wifey, the one who brought all this death upon us, what shall I call you? Hmmmm….. how about mother of all the living?” Or, he could have been driven by the hope that God had given him, the promise of a restoration, a return to the way it was, a great forgiveness from God, and with this hope named her Eve, as if to say, “even though we are now sentenced to death, through you, my Love, will come new life.” Well, we’ll have to ask him some day what he was thinking. But I think that’s probably what he was thinking; he named her for the hope of what was to come, not for the sin that had been. Suffice it to say, they both left their judgement with at least some hope. God could have wiped them off the face of the earth right then and there. But he didn’t. Which told them – as it does us – that God does indeed have a plan for us. A plan that neither sin nor death can destroy.
Atonement
:21 But with sin must come atonement. In this case, the first shedding of blood in the history of the world happened in order to cover their sin. And just as we see from the Mosaic Law and the Temple sacrificial system, this sacrifice did not erase the sin, else all would have been restored right then and there; but it did cover it. And so their meager attempt at covering their own sin was done properly by God. Let us then remember, that these clothes we proudly wear on our bodies are really nothing more than symbols of shame; we were meant to be shameless and naked, yet through Adam that has been completely reversed.
:22 And lest Adam should now, in his sinful state, eat from the tree of life and make this sin immortal God closes the gate to Eden and bars it shut. You see, until the Disobedience, the Tree of Life was available. God walked with Adam – and Eve – in this Garden; in this place, God was appeased. Life, happiness, constant fulfillment were there as natural as the animals and the trees and the shrubs and the fish of the sea and the birds of the air. There was nothing wanting in Eden. Now it is gone. As is the life, the happiness, and the constant fulfillment. Kicked out of Eden, they would have to find contentment elsewhere – and work for it; they would also have to appease God in some other way, through sacrifices, the proscription for which God gives them as we will see next week. Now it will be through death that God must find His people pleasing.[7]
Christ Bears the Curse
Until the time should come that the death of One shall cover the sins of many. For all the sacrifices made down through the millennia were but surety for the true payment that would pay for all sin in full. It’s kind of like paying interest only on your loan. What good does it do, really? It keeps the bank off your back, that’s all. But Christ’s death paid the price once and for all for all who would look to Him for their Life. Like the bronze serpent that Moses raised in the air during the time of plague, all who look to the serpent, in Hebrew, the Naphesh, lifted high would be healed. Christ, lifted high on the Cross would heal all who looked to Him, and He will still.
God asked Adam and Eve the same thing He will ask you and me and everybody else: Where is your confidence? In what do you place your trust? In what do you hope for Life?
When Eden was closed and the gate barred, God placed a cherubim there with a flaming sword to keep anyone from entering. I’m sure the descendants of Adam for centuries would get close enough to see it standing there. But no one dared to cross its path. Then, with the Great Flood all traces of Eden were gone, but the path to Eternal Life was still there somewhere. The tree that once gave eternal life in the Garden is that same tree upon which the Savior died; Beloved there is your eternal life. There is the coming Seed who will crush the serpent, the One who will bear the curse, the One whose brow will bear the thorns that Adam caused to grow up; the One who will restore all of creation in due time, when all who are coming to Christ will come.
There is, in ancient liturgies, the phrase felix culpa, or “happy fault.” The idea being that because of Adam’s sin, because of his tragic fault, we have Christ. And though it may be thought to make light of Adam’s sin, we must remember that Adam’s fall was never God’s desire, but neither was it beyond His power. While the angel Lucifer, Satan, intended the Fall to ruin humanity forever, God used it to reveal the fullness of His love in Jesus Christ. And so, the felix culpa is not that sin was good—it is that God’s grace proved even greater. Because Adam fell, we came to know Christ not only as our Creator, but as our Redeemer.
Brothers and sisters, Adam’s sin was not your fault, but the punishment affects us all and we are yet responsible for every sin we commit. Some sins, the Scriptures tell us, are visited on generation after generation. How is this so? Because we often fail to stop and repent of sins and they are taught to our children who teach them to their children. We see sinful cycles running through families for many generations, don’t we? In Christ, that can end. God’s Word tells us to Repent. Look to Christ. Look to the One Who brings Life instead of continually returning to the things that bring death (Gal. 4).
“Let [us] hope in the LORD: for plenteous redemption” (Psalm 130:7c).
Amen.
Addendum:
One group of people who haven’t been mentioned in quite a while are the Satanists. I remember back in the 1980’s Satanists got a lot of attention. Now, not so much. And this may be due to the fact that, in a way, society has become post-modern, post-religion, which, in effect, is right where Satan wants it. You see, Satan doesn’t care about getting the “credit,” he doesn’t need his name in lights; he simply needs to draw people away from God. [In preparing this sermon I went to my shelf and found a copy of the Satanic Bible written by the self-proclaimed “founder” of the Satanic church in the early 1960’s, Anton LaVey. To be honest, I forgot I even had this book. But he does give an interesting view of what Satanism truly is. In it he states, “Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification.”[8] He also says, “Satan has been the best friend the [C]hurch has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years!”[9] And in another place, “I break away from all conventions that do not lead to my earthly success and happiness.”[10] And if you were to read the rest of the book, which I have not nor do I recommend, you would find that most of it relates to that very theme: to reject anything that doesn’t lead to my success or happiness,] for that is what is at the heart of Satanism; to reject all that God call us to be, whether it leads to earthly success or happiness or not.
Satan said to Eve, “If you eat this, God knows that your eyes will be opened and you will be like Him, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). You see, to be human is to love knowledge; Satan embedded his goal – to get Eve to disobey God – in the lie that eating this fruit would give knowledge, and therefore, happiness. But Eve already knew everything she needed to know – to not eat the fruit. Would that we could be content with those things we know are “true, honest, just, pure, lovely, ….” As the Apostle says, “think on these things” (Phil. 4:8). For just as sin comes from within, so does happiness. I think we have conflated the words of the Declaration of Independence, the right to the “pursuit of happiness,” with the biblical command to “be joyful.”[11] Satan would have us “pursue happiness” with no regard to God’s will for our loves nor with any concern for our neighbor; God would have us be joyful in waiting on Him, considering our neighbor above ourselves, and being willing to lay aside our pursuit of happiness in order to do what is right and just. Can you see the difference there? There is nothing wrong with pursuing happiness, but as an end goal, while Satan would want us to be happy no matter what, God wants us to be full of joy which may or may not include this so-called “happiness.”
[1] Rev. 20:2-3, “And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.”
[2] The Hebrew for “crafty” is ‘ārûm (aw-room’) while the word for “naked” is êrôm (ay-rome’) so you can hear the play on words there.
[3] Acts 13:22.
[4] One who is seeking or asking of God; a petitioner; one who is hopeful.
[5] Fred Brown, “Why Good People Go to Hell” in Great Preaching on Hell (Murfreesboro, TN: Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1989), 221.
[6] John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries vol. 1, 164.
[7] Psalm 116:15, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.”
[8] Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible (NY: Avon Books, 1969),25; from The Nine Satanic Statements.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 30; under the chapter titled The Book of Satan.
[11] Psalm 32:11, “Be glad in the LORD, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.”
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