Where Art Thou

Everyone knows this one, which is the problem with it. A garden, a snake, an apple that is never called an apple, and two people in fig leaves. Told whole, it is the story of the first question God ever asked a human being, and He asked it walking, in the evening, of a man who was hiding. Everything the Bible says afterward is the answer to that question.

Dust and breath

"And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7). Two ingredients, and the second one is God's own breath, mouth to face. Then a garden, planted by God Himself, and the man "put… into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it" (2:15). Work before the fall. A job, a place, and one instruction: "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (2:16-17). Every tree but one. The permission is the long clause; the prohibition is the short one. Then God says the first thing in creation that is not good, "It is not good that the man should be alone" (2:18), and makes the woman, and the chapter ends on the last sentence of the world as it was meant to be: "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed" (2:25).

Yea, hath God said

The serpent does not begin with a lie. He begins with a question about what God said, and gets it slightly wrong on purpose: "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" (3:1). God had said the opposite: of every tree thou mayest freely eat. The serpent turns a permission with one exception into a God who withholds. Eve corrects him, mostly, and then he says the thing itself: "Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (3:4-5). Two claims. The consequence is not real, and the reason for the rule is that God is keeping something good from you. Every temptation since has been one of those two, or both.

"And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat" (3:6). With her. He was standing there. Adam is not deceived by a serpent; he is handed the fruit by his wife and takes it, and says nothing. The text does not give him a single word in the whole scene until God arrives.

"And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons" (3:7). The serpent told the truth about one thing: their eyes were opened. What they saw was themselves, and the first thing human beings ever made was a covering, and the first thing they ever did with it was hide.

Where art thou?

Walking. In the cool of the day, the evening, the time He evidently came every evening, because they knew the sound. God does not arrive in thunder. He arrives the way He always had, and the two people He made are in the bushes. And He calls, one word in Hebrew, ayyekkah, where are you. He knows where they are. The question is not for His information. It is the first question God asks a man in the Bible, and it is a door held open, the way "Where is Abel thy brother?" and "Why art thou wroth?" and Nathan's story about a lamb are doors held open: a chance to come out and say it.

Adam comes out, and what he says is the truest thing he says all day and also a dodge: "I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself" (3:10). Afraid, naked, hid. All true. Not a word about the tree. So God asks again, more pointedly, and Adam finally answers, and it is the oldest sentence in the world: "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat" (3:12). The woman did it, and You gave her to me. The woman, asked, says the serpent did it. Nobody in the garden says I did, though every one of them says "I did eat." The confession is there in the grammar and refused in the heart.

Irenaeus, who learned the faith from a man who had heard John, reads the evening walk as the first coming of the Word who would come again. The same voice. The same question.

Skins

The sentences come: pain, thorns, sweat, dust. But in the middle of the curse on the serpent there is a promise that nobody in the garden could have understood yet: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (3:15). Her seed. A woman does not have seed; a man does. Someone born of a woman alone would crush the serpent's head and be wounded doing it. The church has called that verse the first gospel since the second century, and Eve, when her first son was born, seems to have thought he was it.

And then a verse that is easy to read past. "Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them" (3:21). They had made themselves aprons of leaves. God makes them coats of skins, which means something died, in the garden, on the day they were told they would die, and it was not them. The first death in the Bible is an animal's, and God did the killing, and He did it to cover the two people who had just ruined everything. He dressed them Himself before He sent them out.

"So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life" (3:24). The way is kept. Not destroyed; kept. Guarded, so that no one takes the fruit of life in the condition they were now in. That sword is the last thing in the story, and it stays there until the last book of the Bible.

Where this lands

Paul says what the garden did: "as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men" (Romans 5:12). And then he says what undid it, in the same shape: "For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous" (5:19). "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22). The first Adam was handed fruit in a garden by the one he loved and took it and said nothing. The last Adam knelt in another garden, at night, and said "not my will," and was taken. The first hid among trees. The last was nailed to one. The woman's seed had His heel bruised, on a Friday, and the head under it was crushed.

And the question is still the one from the evening walk. Jesus said what He came for in five words: "to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). To seek. Where art thou. He has not stopped asking it, and He asks it the same way, walking, in the cool of the day, of people in the bushes who know His voice. The answer He is waiting for is not "the woman" or "the serpent." It is the two words nobody in the garden would say. And at the very end, the sword is gone and the way is open: "on either side of the river, was there the tree of life… and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" (Revelation 22:2), and "God himself shall be with them" (21:3). Walking with them, in the evening, the way He always meant to. Come out.

Related: Abide, day one: the garden, Born Fallen, Not Born Guilty, The Tree of Life, and The Protoevangelium. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.