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August 26,2022 |
| The Change In Eve | ||
When Satan was deceiving Eve, he said to her that, if she ate the fruit, she would "be like God (or gods) knowing good and evil".
She has no idea what it would mean to know good and evil, but she likes the idea of being like God (or gods). Satan isn't lying, well, yes, he is, because deception is just another name for lying, but there is an element of truth to his lie.
It's true that God knows good and evil. Unlike Eve, Satan knew what it would mean for Eve. In eating the fruit, she would:
You see what Satan meant by "like God".
We have a pretty good idea what Eve was like after eating the fruit because she became what we are now. It's much less clear what Eve would have been like before that and the change that made her like us. In this study, we'll look to see what we can understand about what Eve was like and what the change would have been like for her.
Jesus said:
I Am (the living God), the Way and the Truth and the Life; no man comes to my Father but by me alone. (John 14:6)
He says he is "the truth". By that he means that he is the definition of truth. He is not a bunch of different truths; he is the definition of one truth so big and all-encompassing that we cannot grasp it. I'm not even going to try to help you grasp what I cannot grasp myself. If you could grasp it, you wouldn't be able to finish putting it into words before the world ran out of ink.
This truth is how God discerns good and evil. Whatever is part of that truth and therefore part of God, is good. Anything else would be evil.
I believe that Eve knew this truth. Adam would have known that truth as well but we are focused on the first one to sin, Eve. They would have known this truth, but they would not have "been truth" as God is. Therefore it was more like knowledge to them than being part of their character or nature.
This difference between knowledge and character seems to be the reason God created Eve without the knowledge of good and evil. Being created with both of those would mean that God had created man as a hopeless sinner. Having the truth would give Eve the ability to know and do what was right. Not having the knowledge of good and evil would give her no reason to choose to do evil.
If you had been there before Eve's fall and asked her questions, you would have gotten answers you couldn't understand. For example, if you had said, "Eve, Adam just planted a garden over there. Go and wreck it!", she would have answered something like, "No, that isn't truth".
She has nothing to gain from wrecking his garden, so she looks to her knowledge of truth and finds that your suggestion isn't there.
We have to speculate about that because we don't see Eve's words in the Bible until the snake is tempting her.
Eve is not only without clothing but she is naked. The Bible says it that way though we wouldn't in our time. We might say she was innocent but that isn't the best word either. We don't really have a word for that because there hasn't been a need for such a word because there hasn't been another person like she was for almost 6000 years.
Eve would have told you anything about how she was feeling, what she was thinking, or what her ambitions were. She would have been completely open … about anything. She wouldn't have even understood the idea that she might hide something from someone - that her inside was different from her outside.
To say she was innocent, would indicate that she was not yet aware of the rules of polite society. We have many social mores about which things we can't say to which people in our lives and things we can't do in public. This would have seemed silly to Eve. "What is wrong with telling the truth", she might have said.
It's worth mentioning that Satan is also naked. He isn't afraid to show Eve what is inside of him. He is full of lies and wrong desires. He lusts for what God has, just as he gets Eve to lust for what God has. She has never encountered a being like him. It would seem unfair except that she has been given a commandment. All she needs to do is to hang on to that truth.
Satan has to get her to rely on her own understanding of the world instead of the knowledge of truth that she has. He gets her into thinking that way by asking her an easy question that she already knows the answer to, "Did God really say that you cannot eat from any tree?".
This question also has a hook for her ego. She has found someone who knows less than her. This sense of superiority helps to keep her thinking rooted in her own understanding.
Satan appears to know that her own understanding is weak. We see that weakness in her answer, that God has said they must not eat or even touch the fruit. The part about touching was not said by God so she must have gotten it from Adam. Adam, like Satan, seems to have noticed she has a strong attraction to the fruit she cannot eat, and he has tried to buttress God's words by adding to them.
Now that Satan has her relying her own understanding, he begins to appeal to her ego even more. He gets her to think that she is a victim of God. God is in fact keeping her down. Those same ideas echo through our society now.
Summarizing then, Eve understands the all-encompassing-truth but she is able to think for herself and ignore it.
Most people don't recognize that Eve changes immediately after eating the fruit. Prior to doing that, she would have never done anything to hurt Adam but now her nature has changed. She must have reasoned the chances were better for her if they were both guilty and also that she wouldn't have been singled out, i.e., 2 sinners versus God was better than God and Adam against her.
Eve is no longer naked. For the first time in her life she is hiding something within herself. She has become a liar. She doesn't tell Adam what she has done, or how everything has changed inside of her. She offers Adam some fruit without telling him what it is.
The all-encompassing-truth that she had understood is now beyond her grasp. Like Humpty-dumpty, she can now only understand it in pieces. It has been shattered into a bunch of rules about good and bad - "Doing this is good but doing that is bad" - some of which overlap and seem to conflict. She has to think through these rules to decide which apply to each situation to determine what is right.
These rules are also "quiet" like whispers. They are easy to ignore, especially for her ego, which is now in control.
Perhaps the all-encompassing-truth was quiet that way as well.
Eve has become the pre-Noah version of mankind. She knows these quiet rules, the remnants of a truth she once knew. The failure of mankind to live by that "law" results in a worldwide flood. Then God begins giving man written laws. After the flood, Noah is given some laws. Later, Moses is given many more laws. Later, the Holy Spirit is given to believers as a law written on our minds. This stage brings us close to how Eve was before the sin. The Holy Spirit, as an all-encompassing-truth, will guide us. Like Eve, we still need to desire to be led and we need to listen.
Eve is now naked but in a way that she wasn't before. Where she had desires before, they were in truth and therefore appropriate to the moment. Now she has those desires all the time and very little control over them. Whenever she sees Adam, she desires him sexually, even though it isn't appropriate to the time.
Once she has tricked Adam into eating the fruit and he becomes aware of what he has done, he also changes like she had. They both feel a barrage of desires, just as we do. They also feel those sexual desires and they see them in each other's eyes. They combat the desires by covering the bits that cause those desires. They also build a wall behind which they hide their thoughts. More lying.
She, and Adam, are now aware of what it means to be physically naked. They are no longer psychologically naked.
Notice something about being naked. You don't feel ashamed to be naked by yourself. Young children also are not ashamed to be naked. You also aren't ashamed to be naked with your spouse.
We can also be in various situations where we are uncomfortable being naked but aren't ashamed. This might happen in a doctor's office when you need to show him a part of your body that you wouldn't normally show anyone. That discomfort isn't what we are talking about here. This happens when we step outside of the social mores of our culture.
Shame comes when people, or even ourselves, see things in us that we don't want seen, at least not at the time, place, or to a person. It is really an ego thing. Maybe we didn't know the answer to a question, but should have. Maybe we fell while walking in public. Maybe something slipped out that let people know something we didn't want them to know. Maybe we did something we know was wrong.
We are ashamed to be naked when we know sexual desires and we see, or expect to see, those desires in others who look at our bodies. Because we have those desires in common, we feel we know how they feel about us. That makes us feel exposed and naked. Our reaction is to want to cover up.
We live in a world of wrongs and rights, the shattered pieces of a single truth mankind can no longer grasp.