Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  Those are funeral words, graveside words, goodbye words.  I’ve baptized many, marking them with water.  Today, I mark you with ashes.  Nothing in Scripture commands these ashes.  These ashes are a reminder that we are ashes, ashes and dust.  That’s not just bitter poetry.  Our chemical composition and the chemical composition of the earth are more similar than different—I’ll let you consider why that might be.

Nothing in Scripture commands these ashes.  God made us to be more than ashes and dust, yet to dust and ashes we return.  Why must this be?  In the first book of the Bible, we are told how things came to be, and we are told why certain things, now, must be.  Have you ever messed things up for everybody?  Ruined what was otherwise a really good day?  There are some things no amount of apologizing can undo.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made” (3:1).  We associate the serpent with Satan, because the serpent tempts Eve, but we’re not told here that Satan and the serpent are one and the same.  We’re told the serpent “was more crafty” than the other animals: subtle, sly—ulterior motives.  That’s sin itself, isn’t it?  Sin doesn’t come to us ugly.  Sin must make itself attractive.  What do you find attractive—what draws your eyes, your desire?  Beware.  Sin sidles up, saying, This is such a good thing—you don’t know!  Hey, would I lie to you?  Here, have some more.

Did you notice how God didn’t prevent the serpent from speaking to Eve?  Why doesn’t He just make temptation impossible?  If temptation were impossible, beloved, faith also would be impossible.  Faith never tested never knows itself.  However, stumbling into sin, again, isn’t necessarily a failure of faith.  There’s the mystery.  Did you notice how God allowed sin—the serpent—the freedom to speak?  Did you notice how Eve freely chose to listen?  Ah, freedom.  We can get to acting as if freedom were the exact opposite or negation of responsibility, but in truth, God’s own truth, there is no freedom without responsibility.  We are all answerable to God.

So, it matters what God says to us.  Sin, slyly, says to Eve who is listening, attracted, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?  The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die’” (3:1-3).  Let me just say here that Adam didn’t relay accurately, or Eve didn’t listen attentively or remember accurately, what God had said.  Already, distortion of the Word is creeping in, in the Garden!  God never said they couldn’t even touch the fruit, only that they must not eat of it, mustn’t consume it, mustn’t willingly take it into themselves like pretty poison, like a malignant cancer.

Some think the Bible says some things it doesn’t actually say.  When we read the Bible through for ourselves instead of having others tell us what the Bible says, we can be more than a little surprised at some of the things the Bible does say.  God wants us to listen because God wants us to live.

The serpent, sin, is testing Eve: did she listen, did she understand?  Does she know God’s Word?  How well does she know the Word?  Well, she heard something.  I guess you could say she got the basic part, the main part: Don’t eat!

There were many trees in the Garden, beloved.  Many had fruit.  And there was one tree the fruit of which they were not to eat, upon pain of death.  God wasn’t threatening to kill them.  If you eat that, I’ll kill you!  God was saying that the consequence of tasting that fruit, of willingly taking it into yourself, is death—choose life!  God was looking out for them.  We sometimes can have the feeling, a very natural feeling, that rules are just an impediment, especially God’s rules—it’s not about rules, it’s about freedom, right?  It seems like some people are so big into God’s rules, and we don’t want to be like that!  We’re all about freedom!  Yet God’s rules guarantee true freedom, and our taste for false freedom ends up killing us.

One tree, one fruit.  One fruit you may not, must not taste.  Paul picked this up right away: so soon as you are told, “This is the one thing you must not want,” from that moment on, it’s like you’re thinking of that one thing all the time.  It’s not even that you want to, consciously.  The ancient Greeks spoke of Pandora’s Box: don’t open that box!  But, somehow, someway, something in you really really wants to open that box, just to see, see for yourself, know for yourself.  And all the experience of countless generations gone by and even the Word of God Himself counts for nothing, then.

“‘You will not certainly die,’ the serpent said to the woman” (3:4): so sin is calling God a liar, right there.  Not only is God a liar, He is a liar because He doesn’t want you to enjoy the freedom He has.  He’s keeping something back, not sharing!  How is that kind?  How is that loving?  You just think you have freedom, with all these rules—do this, not that; believe this not that—but you don’t even know what real freedom is.  “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:5).  Oh, their eyes would be opened, alright—beloved, have you ever seen something you wished right away, and for years after, that you could unsee?  And just when you think, relieved, that you’ve forgotten all about it, you suddenly remember you haven’t forgotten.

I’ve always wondered about that last part: “knowing good and evil.”  Is that what makes God God: that He knows good and evil?  And what does that even mean?  Some argue that “knowing good and evil” means deciding for yourself what is good and what is evil: choosing, deciding, being a law unto yourself—the freedom and authority to say.  When we presume to be the judge of what is good and what is evil, we take for ourselves a prerogative of God.  Yet we must judge, constantly, especially in these perilous times in this culture, this society.  How to judge, then?  Judges ordinarily work from precedent.  God has set the precedent in His Word.  We must know His Word.  When we do not know His Word, or when we decline to permit God’s Word to have first authority in our living, we are left unable to judge properly—we make ourselves incompetent, but not inculpable.  So long as we have breath, our responsibility before God remains.

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it” (3:6).  There is a citrus fruit called an ugli fruit, and it ain’t pretty, but the name seems a little harsh.  Kroger and even HEB will sometimes have jackfruit, and dragonfruit.  At first glance, I don’t find that any of those look to be good for food, although I suppose a dragonfruit might be sort of pleasing to the eye.  But I want you to slow down with me here and listen, because the entire problem here in the garden is a problem of listening, and the entire problem we still must wrestle with today is precisely the problem of listening to God’s Word, hearing what God is saying.  Eve, Scripture tells us—without calling any attention to it—Eve “saw that the fruit of the tree was good.”  Even before she eats of that fruit, she is already making free decisions, decoupled from God’s Word about what is good and what is not good.  God said it was lethal.  Eve said it was good.

And why was it good, then?  Because it looked good to her.  Sin knows that.  Beloved, what looks good to you—or at least looks okay, even if it’s not your thing—that Scripture says quite clearly is not only not good but outright wicked?  Not that we like to use such language as that, wicked—who are we to say, who are we to judge, right?  Don’t judge, right?  So it’s all okay, really.  Whew, what a relief!  That fruit looked okay to her, so it was okay, no matter what any old words of some old book about some old God might say—time to get into the 21^st century!  Freedom!  As old philosophers have said, they call it liberty when they mean license; in earlier centuries, a libertine was no hero.

But Eve was also willing to believe what the serpent said: that eating the fruit would make her wise, like God was wise, and give her the ability to know what was good and what was evil.  The serpent was like her ally, here.  And Eve knew wisdom was desirable, and who wouldn’t like a little more wisdom?  How to become wise, then?  Beloved, God has already told us, even as He had told Adam so that he could tell Eve: we become wise as we listen to God’s Word, as we ask and allow that Word to shape us, guide us, direct our choosing, abide by its prohibitions and empower our actions.  But Eve wanted to cut out the middleman as it were, wanted to jump straight into wisdom without doing the work of making herself wise.  She saw that the serpent was offering her a shortcut, and that was attractive.  Beloved, Christ is not our shortcut to salvation.  He is not our Get Out of Jail Free card.  Christ calls us into the labor of freedom, to work alongside him, working out our salvation with fear and trembling.  Salvation is a joyful thing, and a most serious matter.  Let God make us wise.  For our part, let us be faithful.

What the serpent was saying was attractive to Adam, too.  Work, you know, tending the garden and whatnot, that labor of freedom, could be a real chore, a real bore.  “She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it” (3:6).  We get to know Scripture as we spend time with it, in it, and allow Scripture time to get in us.  People spend a lot of time online or watching TV.  Let us spend even more time in the Bible, but, you know—really?  When Scripture begins to get in us, our eyes are opened the way God wants, and we begin to see and understand things in ways we maybe hadn’t expected.  We can have the impression, even after many years, that the serpent somehow found Eve at an opportune time, when Adam was someplace else.  Maybe, if Adam had been there—if only!—he could have corrected Eve’s misunderstanding or expansion of what God had actually said.  Beloved, did you hear, though?  He was there!  “She also gave some to her husband, who was with her.”  Adam is there, but silent.  He wasn’t looking out for Eve, protecting and defending her.  He was listening to temptation together with Eve.  Both were ready, willing, and able to indulge what was already there, in them.

Why was it there?  How did it get there?  God created them.  God gave them freedom.  We love freedom!  But freedom is not without consequences, and freedom does not come without responsibility.  The ability to sin—to do what is displeasing to God—that was there, is there still, we know!  However, Adam and Eve, uniquely, also had it in them, of their own nature, to choose obedience . . . and they did not.  For us, now, after, none of us, without God’s grace, is able to choose obedience: that innate inability is the fruit of the Fall, the stickiness of sin that we can’t seem to shake off, even when we want to.  Yet we are not hopeless; God does not leave us hopeless, as we of all people should know.

We’re told, after they both ate, gave in to that urgent, alluring call to taste, and see, that “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked” (3:7).  I don’t think that only refers to their bodies being without clothing.  They had lost something . . . some covering, some protection: the loss wasn’t just innocence of naïveté.  They were exposed, now, stripped.  Something was gone, missing, and the first result of their revelation is shame.  The scalpel of Scripture cuts right to it: sin always comes across as so desirable, so . . . necessary, and then, once we’ve sinned, we know, again, that we’ve been tricked, again, allowed ourselves to be tricked, again, and all we’re left with, all we’re ever left with when it comes to sin, is shame.

And in our shame, we want to hide away.  “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (3:8).  That’s one of the saddest verses in Scripture, not only because it’s not possible to hide from God, but because, if we plunge into our hearts deep enough and swim around in there long enough, we’ll encounter that same impulse to be out of God’s sight.  It’s tragic.

But God is not ignorant of all this, and He does not leave us hopeless.  He calls.  He calls for them.  He calls out to them.  Come to Me.  So that He can destroy them?  No!  So that He can help them.  Please, please, please, be reading your Bibles over these next forty days, and note how often God is calling out to His people, like the shepherd calling out for his sheep.  He wants to gather; He wants to save; He wants to bless.

He also wants truth between us.  Sometimes, we want a relationship so badly that we sort of misrepresent ourselves, make ourselves out to be something more than we truly are, someone else—more exciting.  More affluent.  More carefree.  More experienced.  Yet we also know that love is based upon truth, and the one who truly loves us truly takes us just as we are, imperfections and all.  That God loves us is powerfully demonstrated there in the Garden after the Fall.  God calls out for Adam and Eve, knowing they had sinned, knowing they had freely chosen death over God.  How would that make you feel, if the one you loved said, “I prefer death to you”?  He calls to them and asks them to confess, admit fault, to begin to re-establish truth as the foundation of their relationship, because love cannot survive where there is no truth.  Love loves the truth.  God is love.

Love, as truth, knows there are consequences for the misuse of freedom.  Truth, as love, rejoices in the responsible use of freedom—this is the use that builds up.  God, in perfect love and perfect truth, tells Eve and Adam, again, that there are consequences, necessary, unavoidable consequences, because of their free choice.  To Adam, particularly—for Adam bore the greater responsibility in failing to instruct and lead Eve in the way of faith, because Adam abdicated his responsibility to nurture, protect, and defend Eve—to Adam, particularly, God declares the consequence of Adam’s free choice, telling him he, now, will, must, “return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (3:19).  Made from Adam, Eve must, too.  So, all of us descended from our first parents.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Adam had declined to be more, refused to be the more God had made Adam to be, and Eve with him.  If you want to be dirt, dirt you shall be.  If you want to be dirty, you shall be dirty.  God won’t stop us.  There are more than enough today who entertain the belief that death is the end, so make the most of the time you have.  And I don’t say there is zero wisdom in that.  But I do say it doesn’t tell the whole story, and to that extent it isn’t true.

When God pronounces the curse Adam has brought upon himself, upon Eve, upon all, it sounds final, fatal: the zero of oblivion.  But that’s not the end of the story, as we know.  Remember, God called to them.  He did not call to them to curse them—they had cursed themselves!  He called out to them to restore them, according to His own way, in His own time.  Oh, sorrow and love, all bound together.  We want love to fill us with joy, total, constant joy.  And that time will come.  Until then, if we would learn from Scripture, let love be mingled with sorrow.  Let love, sorrow, joy, and faith lead you home.  You are dust and to dust you shall return, and in Christ Jesus, that isn’t the end of the story.