The Great Hiding (Day 2: Roots & Shoots)

• The Ornament: The Apple / The Fruit
• The Scripture: Genesis 2:4-3:24

The Surface Reading

We know this story better than almost any other. A snake, a woman, a man, and a piece of forbidden fruit. When we read this on the surface, it reads like a simple morality test: God made a rule. Humans broke the rule. Humans got punished.

It’s hard not to see the exile from the garden as God being angry and slamming the door shut because we couldn’t follow instructions.

A Closer Look

Guides: Lawrence Boadt / Margaret Nutting Ralph

To read this text as an adult, we have to get comfortable with a word that usually makes us nervous: Myth.

In our modern world, we use “myth” to mean “a lie.” But scripture scholar Margaret Nutting Ralph gives us a much better definition. She teaches that a myth is an imaginative story that uses symbols to speak about a reality that is beyond a person’s comprehension.

Societies compose myths to orient themselves in a moral and spiritual world. Ralph points out that this story isn’t trying to teach us history; it is wrestling with the oldest, hardest question of human existence: Why do we suffer?

If God is good and the world is “Very Good” (as we saw yesterday), why is there pain in childbirth? Why is work so hard? Why do we die? The story uses symbols (a snake, a tree) to explain that suffering isn’t God’s invention; it is the result of human choices to define reality apart from God.

Lawrence Boadt helps us place this in history. This text (which is actually older than the account we just read yesterday in Genesis 1) was likely written or compiled during the 10th century B.C.E., under the new empire of David and Solomon.

Israel had become a major power, which meant they were constantly bumping up against other nations and their seductive pagan beliefs. They faced a national identity crisis: Why did God choose us? And why shouldn’t we just follow the gods of our neighbors?

They needed a preface. They needed a story to place God’s saving action for Israel in the light of His care for the whole world. This story argues that while the pagan nations chased power and autonomy, that path only leads to brokenness. It tells us that before there was an Israel, there was a Humanity. And that humanity has a universal problem: we choose autonomy over trust, and the result is suffering.

The “Me” Story

Lens: The Story of Growing Up

But the story isn’t just a mirror for ancient Israel; it is a mirror for us.

For Irenaeus, Adam and Eve represents every human soul growing up. Think of it like car keys. Driving is good, but if a toddler grabs the keys and tries to drive, they will crash. God wasn’t saying ‘No,’ He was saying, ‘Not Yet.’

There is a dense phrase from biology that captures this truth perfectly: “Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny.” Put simply, the development of the individual mirrors the history of the species.

We all start in the Garden — innocent and trusting God to define our reality. But eventually, we all reach for the fruit. We hit that “Car Key” moment in our development where we reject the limit. We decide we want to know. We want to experience things on our own terms. We are Adam. We are Israel. Every time we seize an experience we aren’t ready for, we are eating the fruit all over again.

The Loss of Shalom

Guide: Lisa Sharon Harper

Yesterday, we looked at the web of Shalom (wholeness). Today, we watch that web snap.

Lisa Sharon Harper points out that the “Fall” is actually the breaking of relationships in four specific directions. Look at the text again:

1. Relationship with Self: They realized they were naked. (Shame enters).
2. Relationship with God: They heard God walking in the garden and hid. (Intimacy is broken).
3. Relationship with Each Other: When asked what happened, the man blames the woman: “The woman whom you gave to be with me…” (Community is broken).
4. Relationship with the Earth: God says the ground is now cursed and will bring forth thorns. (Stewardship is broken).

This is why the world feels the way it does. It’s not just because an ancestor ate a fruit; it’s because the essential connections—between us and God, us and our bodies, us and our neighbors, and us and the earth—have been severed. We have been hiding in the bushes ever since.

The Question

The first question God asks in the Bible (after the fall) is not “What did you do?” but “Where are you?”

God is still asking that today. In what area of your life—your marriage, your work, your prayer life—are you currently “hiding in the bushes,” afraid to let God see the truth of where you are?