The First Sacrifice
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2019 · 3 February 2019
Genesis 3:14-24, “The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all livestock, and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life; 15 and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’
16 To the woman He said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing, in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you. 17 Then to Adam He said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it”; cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
18 thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; and you will eat the plants of the field; 19 by the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ 20 “The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. 21 Then the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin, and clothed them.
22 Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand, and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever. 23 Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden, to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden He placed the cherubim and the flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”
Let us focus tonight on verses 20-24 because it is literally full of rich meaning. We essentially have the elements of salvation--the elements of redemption--so that as soon as man falls, God sets in motion the means to redeem him. He falls at the beginning of Genesis 3 and he is cursed in the middle of it, and the plan for redeeming him unfolds at the end of Genesis 3 in immediate sequence.
Verses 20 - 24 point to Christ. There are four necessary components of salvation: faith and hope from man’s side, and atonement and security from God’s side. The salvation of sinners, their rescue from sin and death, and judgment has always been by faith and hope. And it has always been through God’s work to provide atonement and security. Our response is faith and hope.
So not all the aspects of these four realities are fully revealed here. So we say the Bible does not go from error to truth. The Bible goes from incompleteness to completeness so that the complete understanding of things that are initiated even back in the book of Genesis. This requires the fullness of Scripture, all the way through to the end of the New Testament.
But as we study these verses, let us focus on the four words that we discussed. The first one is faith. We all know that salvation is by grace through faith. We are not saved by works; we are saved by faith. We all understand that. Now if I were to define faith in a saving sense, in a biblical sense, I would say that faith is believing the Word of God, right?
And believing the Word of God means believing everything God had said up to that time. So people who lived in the time of Genesis couldn’t believe things that hadn’t been written. Whatever the body of divine revelation was, faith was accepting and believing that, having trust in the Word of God, and having trust in the promises of God that whatever God says is true.
And we see that kind of faith right away in verse 20. When Adam and Eve were first created and placed in the garden, they believed God. Then along came the serpent who told them lies about God. God didn’t want them to know good and evil because they would then be equal to God. Satan also said that God lied and said that you won’t die. Satan convinced them that God is withholding something good from them.
So they begin to believe Satan and not believe God. They have experienced God’s perfection and fellowship. But now they don’t trust Him. And the moment they stopped believing what God had said and started believing what Satan said, they were catapulted into depravity, sin, sorrow and death. Consequently, starting in verse 14 the woman is cursed through the pain of childbearing and conflict in the marriage.
And the husband is having to work by the sweat of his brow to get food and eke out a living from toxic soil and plants that in a very real sense were fighting against him. All of this happened because they didn’t believe God. But in verse 20 something changes our understanding of Adam and Eve. “Now the man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.”
The name Eve means life. This is a clear contrast with the sentence of death just imposed by God. God told them when you eat of that fruit you’re going to die. And the death principle went into activity immediately upon their sin. And now Adam calls the name of his wife Eve, “because she was the mother of all the living.” Now the creation promise in Genesis 1:28, to have children and to fill the earth was not abolished by the Fall.
Adam knew life would come from the womb of his wife. Adam knew that from verse 15, “I will put enmity,” God says to Satan, “between you and the woman [Eve], and between your seed and her seed.” Based on that promise, Adam knew that that would be the beginning of the fulfillment of that prophecy, which would stretch all the way to the coming of the Messiah, the true seed of the woman.
He also knew that the seed that would come out of the woman would crush the head of Satan. Satan was the one who had destroyed paradise. So Adam names his wife “Life,” and this is Adam’s response to God’s sentence of punishment. He trusts in the promise of God to bring through his wife a seed who would crush the serpent’s head, rescuing humanity from the devil.
What has happened here then is Adam believes God now. He was saying, “I believe You; I believe Your promise; I believe the seed will come; and I believe the seed will crush the serpent.” Because he has now come to believe God and not Satan. He has faith in the unseen Christ, not with New Testament clarity. The essence of faith is simply believing everything God has revealed.
So the original command to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth was still in place. One of those that will be born out of Eve’s loins will bring deliverance, salvation, redemption, and crush the head of the enemy, Satan. Adam and Eve hate Satan now. They’re experiencing paradise lost. They are feeling the effects of the curse, and they now put their faith in God.
A believer only trusts God, and refused to follow the serpent, God’s enemy--the lying devil. And in naming Eve, Adam demonstrates that he believes God’s word and is anticipating its fulfillment, including the destruction of Satan, his former master. So here you see repentance and faith. And Eve had the same conviction that Satan was the liar, because she accepted her name.
And with the acceptance of her name, Eve also embraced the hope of redemption and the destruction of the one who had brought this calamity on her and on her husband and on the world. Since she is the mother of all the living, it eliminates the idea that there were any other humans anywhere. She’s the mother of all the living. Put your trust in God; embrace the promise of God that He will send a Redeemer.
Secondly, salvation also requires atonement. We move from man’s response to God’s provision, verse 21, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” God’s grace is expressed in a symbolic way toward the unworthy couple who deserve death, because God said, “In the day you eat, you will die.” But immediately God is gracious, and He instead of killing them, covered them.
God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. This is new. In Genesis 2:25, “The man and his wife were naked and not ashamed.” In Genesis 3:7, when they sinned, “their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” Once they sinned they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves loin coverings because they had thoughts that they never had before.
Because of lust and because of sin, people need to be clothed. Nakedness is acceptable to God, but nakedness is not acceptable to man, because he understands that it can solicit shameful things. They felt shame for the first time. And here God reinforces that, verse 21, by making permanent garments out of animal hide. God provides for man’s physical clothing in this symbolic gesture.
God covered them with the skin of an animal, which means the animal had to die. God clothes the naked sinner, covering the sinner by the sacrifice of an innocent victim. He provides atonement, satisfaction to His own required justice with a substitute. This introduces for the first time in Scripture the matter of atonement, by covering of the sinner through the death of an innocent substitute.
God killed the animal. God took the skin of the animal and covered the sinners. This is the first death in the world. The first death is the death of an animal killed by God to cover sinners. What a beautiful picture of the Lord Jesus, who is the Lamb slain by God from before the foundation of the world, to provide covering of all sinners who trust God as their Savior.
And that point God institutes the animal sacrifice as a picture of the fact that an innocent life has to be given to cover sinners. Throughout the Pentateuch: Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy--there are many examples about the necessity of offering sacrifices. Dead animals were offered to God as a picture of the necessary death of an innocent substitute in the place of the sinner.
But sacrifices don’t mean anything if the heart isn’t in them. The sacrificial system was to picture the necessity of a substitute to take the place of sinners, to be killed to bear the wrath of God. And, of course, none of the animal sacrifices ever given in the past could do that; they just was looking toward the One that was to come, who was Christ. Jesus is God’s Lamb who became the atonement sacrifice.
Salvation requires faith on the part of the man or the woman; salvation requires atonement on the part of God; and thirdly, salvation requires security on the part of God. God made the promise of the seed of the woman crushing the serpent’s head, and in that is salvation. That’s the first gospel. God then makes the model of atonement, an innocent death for the sake of covering sinners.
But there’s more. Verse 22, “Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” The Lord God now acts graciously to protect Adam and Eve from a devastating possibility: “Behold, the man has become like one of Us”--only in the sense of knowing good and evil.
We’ve got a problem because now man might stretch out his hand and take from the tree of life and eat and live forever. Why would it be bad? Because he would be eternally evil. Why would he chose to do that? Because for the first time he understands what death means, because God has just killed an animal. Now he’s going to be tempted to avoid death and to eat the tree of life and live forever.
So, verse 23, “Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden.” As you know, Adam lived to be over 900 years old, which meant that the decay was very slow. Which also means that Eden was still paradise. God not only provides atonement, but He secures His people from ever falling. God secures believers from eternal damnation.
Do we believe in security of God for the believer? This is illustrated in the Old Testament. Psalm 97:10 says, “He preserves the soul of His saints.” Psalm 89:33, “I will not be false to my faithfulness.” Lamentations 3:23, “My mercies are going to be new every morning, great is Thy faithfulness.” So God is driving them out of the Garden of Eden, so that they will not end up eternally evil.
There is a final element of the gospel that appears in the middle of verse 23 then verse 24. Salvation requires hope, it requires faith, it requires from God atonement and security, but it also requires hope. Adam for 930 years was to live working by the sweat of his brow. Eve was to live that whole time being the mother of all living, bearing children painfully. The sinner then is left to suffer in hope.
Every day would remind them of what they had lost and could never regain in this life. The cherubim, guardians of the holiness of God, are stationed at the front of paradise. And the suffering of their lives expanded. Their son killed his brother. Their offspring would become so bad that by Genesis 6 God would drown the entire world with the exception of eight people.
But they lived in hope that one day they would reenter the paradise of God. Because hope is a purifying reality. First John 3:3, “Everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” Hope is the perfecting ground. The greatest glories of heaven are reserved for the people who suffer most. Adam and Eve couldn’t enter paradise but they were living in hope that one day they would.
We too are outside the paradise of God, but some day we will enter. We have come into salvation by faith, because there has been an atonement provided for us. And we live in hope. And if you ever questioned the grace of God, then ask yourself, “Is not God gracious, who provides grace immediately on the heels of the Fall and the curse?” God loves to save us. Let us pray.