The Realm of Death Pt 6

Blaming

            The second manifestation of the realm of death into which Adam and Eve entered followed closely on the heels of the first. Indeed, it is really just a variation of the first manifestation.

            When our judgment against God turns into a judgment about ourselves, producing shame, we engage in another judgment, this time against others or against God. This is simply another way that we hide. We blame others. When Adam told the Lord that he was hiding because he was naked and afraid, the Lord asked, “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Gen. 3:10–11). Rather than taking responsibility for his action, confessing his sin, and repenting, Adam attempted to protect himself by blaming God and Eve for his actions. He said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate” (Gen. 3:12, emphasis added). When the Lord turned to Eve, she essentially did the same thing: “The serpent tricked me, and I ate” (Gen. 3:13).

            This is a manifestation of our stolen knowledge. We employ our knowledge of good and evil in service to ourselves. The statements of Adam and Eve were technically true, but they were intended to conceal rather than reveal. The humans, we see, have begun to take on the craftiness of the serpent. The one who is the Accuser (Rev. 12:10) has made them into crafty accusers. They have lost their innocence. Adam and Eve speak truth, but they speak it to deflect truth—the truth that they are altogether guilty. In deflecting guilt, they accuse. In our fallen state, we point out dust particles in others’ eyes in order to deflect attention away from the tree trunks in our own eyes (Matt. 7:3).

            The knowledge of good and evil is also at work in the fact that throughout their dialogue with God, Adam and Eve clearly persisted in the judgment that God was untrustworthy. They continued to embrace the serpent’s deceptive depiction of God. As a result, they were afraid of him and were not honest with him. If Adam and Eve could have realized that the serpent lied to them, confessed their sin, and returned to their simple confidence that God was good, there would undoubtedly have been consequences to be suffered, but God would have granted them his mercy.

            As it happened, Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, had placed themselves in the center of the garden, and thus were filtering everything through their self-centered and self-serving knowledge of good and evil. So, instead of returning to trust and vulnerable honesty, they acted out of their own self-interest and continued to judge God rather than humbly letting God be the judge. Hence, they tried to protect themselves by blaming others.

           

Instead of trusting in God to love them and defend them in their sin, Adam and Eve became their own defense attorneys. They trusted their own knowledge of good and evil to protect them rather than trusting God. They trusted their own ability to justify themselves rather than trusting God. Like Job and his friends, they were willing to accuse God and others to escape condemnation themselves (Job 40:8).

            We learn how mistaken Adam and Eve were in taking this judgmental stance when we look at the cross. Here we see what God looks like as our defense attorney, our “advocate” (1 John 2:1–2). To restore union with us, God himself bears the guilt and punishment of our crime. Christ pleads the case of sinners, as it were, before the justice of the Father. In doing this, Christ breaks the Enemy’s deception about who God is and reveals himself to be the God of unsurpassable love and mercy. In other words, God is an unsurpassably loving and effective defense attorney. God ascribes infinite worth to us even when we don’t deserve it.

            But we can never experience this mercy so long as we rely on our own knowledge of good and evil. If we live off the fruit of this stolen knowledge, our lives have to be derived from our estimation of ourselves, which is itself dependent on whatever worth we can suck from people, things, and our deluded conceptions of God. To feed our emptiness, which the knowledge of good and evil itself created, we must rely on our knowledge of good and evil and seek to justify ourselves. We must therefore hide by rationalizing ourselves and blaming others. We judge others harshly in order to judge ourselves with approval.

            This is the opposite of love. We simply cannot ascribe unsurpassable worth to those we judge, any more than we can derive unsurpassable worth from God when we judge him as out to get us. Like a computer virus, the Accuser’s introduction of accusation in the scheme of things quickly infects everything. It filters and therefore blocks our receiving, experiencing, and giving God’s infinite love. It replaces this love with judgment against God, ourselves, and others.