162 Mark,

I am still concerned from what you wrote in relation to your doctrine of adam and eves sin if im going to be honest. I’m failing to see how you hold to Eve being a sinner and yet say “At the time that she ate she fully believed that there was no command that brought death…Eve now believed that what she was doing was a good thing and not a disobedient thing.”

There is a lot of Eve ‘believed’ this and that in what you are saying. Is this not equally reading into the text?

I do not believe that this is reading into the text and the reason is because we are told that Eve was fully and completely deceived. So let’s take the time to ask ourselves what she was deceived about? Let’s take this passage apart piece by piece to understand Eve’s deception.

Gen 3:4 The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die!

The first thing that Eve was deceived about was that she would not die from eating the fruit. God had said that she would die if she ate the fruit, but the serpent said that she would surely not die! Because she believed the lie, she would of necessity no longer believe that there was a consequence to eating the fruit since death was the only consequence that God gave them.

Gen 3:5 “For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Here the serpent tells her what “God knows”. God knows, he said, that you won’t die but He knows that you will be like Him if you at the fruit. This is what Eve believed. She believed that God knew more than He had been telling them. His “scare tactic” was that they would die if they ate the fruit, but the “real” truth was that they would be given the key to be equal to God. Eve believed this. And believing the lie she not only believed that there was no bad consequence for eating the fruit, but there was a huge prize awaiting her if she would just reach out and touch and eat. We know this because she was deceived by the lie and we know what the lie was.

Gen 3:6 When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes,

Eve was deceived by the appearance of the beauty fruit and she was deceived to believe that beauty was equal to “good for food” even though God said that the fruit that they were allowed to eat came from fruit trees that had seed bearing fruit. Since we know for sure from the Scripture that God gave Adam and Eve permission to eat from every tree that had seed-bearing fruit (Gen. 1:29), and since we know from chapter 2 that there was only one tree that they were forbidden to eat from, we can be certain that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil did not have seed-bearing fruit. So no matter how beautiful the fruit looked, we know that Eve was deceived to believe that this fruit was “good for food” when it was not good for food.

Gen 3:6 …and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit

Eve was fully deceived to believe that the fruit from this tree was “desirable”. This was a passionately desirable thing because it would give her something that was desirable.

Gen 3:6 …she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.

The term “gave” means to present to someone something as a present or a payment. We know for a fact that Eve was fully deceived and she believed the serpent. Her actions after she was deceived was to offer her good fortune to her husband as a gift to him.

So what do we know for sure from the text? We know for sure what Eve believed because she was deceived to believe what the serpent was saying. Since the serpent contradicted God and Eve believed the serpent, we can know that she stopped believing what God said was true. There may be more that Eve believed but anything that we could add to her belief that is not in the text would be reading into the text.

In choosing to believe the tempter over God, she rejected God-that is the essence of sin.

I think that is a leap from the known to the unknown. The text doesn’t say that she rejected God. What we do know is that she believed the serpent’s word that she would be Elohim. The term “like” isn’t actually in the text. The literal Hebrew says that she will be Elohim (God). It is a grammatical plural so it implies that she will be what God is. She isn’t so much rejecting Him as wanting to stand there right beside Him, in essence she would be just as He is.

She had 2 choices, what God told and what the serpent told her, in choosing one, she rejected the other.

You are right in that to believe one means not to believe the other, but there is a huge difference in not believing God and outright rejecting Him. After all if she wanted to be God alongside Him, how was that outright rejecting Him? After all they were going to be buddies, right? Side by side gods at that!

I cant help but feel you are watering this down. Maybe i am misunderstanding you, i dont know. Are you saying Eve accidently sinned?

I am not watering down her sin. She absolutely sinned. And she suffered the consequences of her sin. But her sin was a result of being taken captive by the enemy without her even knowing that he was the enemy. Paul brings out this point when he writes:

2 Cor 11:3 But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

Eve was “led astray” into sin. She did not conceive of her sin by herself as Adam did. She was roped into sin and dragged there by having her mind taken over by an expert liar.

The fact is that God has made a difference between unintentional sin and defiant sin.

Num 15:28 ‘The priest shall make atonement before the LORD for the person who goes astray when he sins unintentionally, making atonement for him that he may be forgiven.

Num 15:30 ‘But the person who does anything defiantly, whether he is native or an alien, that one is blaspheming the LORD; and that person shall be cut off from among his people.

Let’s look again at Eve’s sin. What did God curse because of her sin? God cursed the earth because of Adam’s sin but He did not curse anything on behalf of Eve’s sin. For some reason we have been deceived to believe that God treats all sin in the exact same way. That is not true. Defiant sin is treated as much more severely than unintentional sin.

Is unintentional sin an “accident”? Well the word “astray” in the Hebrew means to “sin ignorantly”. The Hebrew word for “unintentional” sin means:

unintentional wrong, accidental error, i.e., a mistake which has culpability, yet the wrongdoing has not been made by intention or commission
Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Old Testament)

In 2 Cor. 11:3 where Eve is said to have gone “astray”, this word means:

To corrupt, with the meaning of to subvert or corrupt opinions
The complete word study dictionary

1b to lead away a Christian church from that state of knowledge and holiness in which it ought to abide. 1c to be destroyed, to perish. 1d in an ethical sense, to corrupt, deprave.
The exhaustive concordance of the Bible

Since those who are led astray are ones who have sinned unintentionally, I think that we can have full confidence that Eve being led astray by the serpent, sinned unintentionally. She still suffered the consequences, but the fact that God held the serpent responsible and God cursed the serpent and all animals because of what one animal did, shows that the blame was laid at the feet of the serpent, not at the feet of the one who sinned unintentionally.

Does this make more sense? It shows that Eve’s sin was very bad, but the fact that she was led astray allowed God to provide a sacrifice for her unintentional sin that led the way for the Messiah to come through the one who had been deceived. I love this part…the deceiver is destroyed by the seed of the one who was deceived. What the deceiver meant for harm, God has turned around for good for all of us who have faith in the Lord Jesus, our Kinsman Redeemer.