Did Adam and Eve Sin Before the Bite?
00:00:00.000 | Welcome to a new week on the Ask Pastor John Podcast with longtime author and pastor John
00:00:09.480 | Piper.
00:00:10.920 | First up this week, we have a question about the original sin that was committed by Adam
00:00:14.720 | and Eve, and it's an insightful follow-up question to something that you have said.
00:00:18.960 | "Hello, Pastor John, and thanks for taking my question.
00:00:21.240 | My name is Alex from Dallas.
00:00:23.820 | According to your sermon at Passion 2017, you said the ultimate essence of evil in the
00:00:29.000 | Garden of Eden was not eating the fruit.
00:00:32.840 | You said they lost their taste in God, so they sinned before taking a bite.
00:00:38.940 | Can you explain this, please?
00:00:40.320 | I thought there was a difference between temptation and giving in to sin."
00:00:46.720 | Let's clarify two things.
00:00:48.760 | One, the difference between the essence of sin on the one hand and sinful actions of
00:00:55.520 | the body on the other hand, and two, let's clarify the difference between temptation
00:01:02.120 | and sinning.
00:01:03.120 | It seems like those are the two levels of Alex's question.
00:01:09.320 | First, there's a difference between the essence of sin and the outward act of sinning.
00:01:15.560 | The essence of sin is not what muscles do.
00:01:22.280 | It's what the heart does, and by the heart, I mean the inner faculty of willing and desiring
00:01:29.600 | that give rise to actions.
00:01:31.740 | If some very strong person took hold of your arm against your will and by force caused
00:01:39.800 | you to stab somebody while you resisted with all your might, you would plead that you did
00:01:46.800 | not commit wrong.
00:01:48.760 | But if your heart moved your arm to stab somebody, you would have done wrong, and you know it.
00:01:57.200 | So the essence of sin is not the movement of the physical members of your body, but
00:02:04.960 | the desires and purposes of the heart.
00:02:08.840 | External, muscular movements are morally evil only insofar as they are expressions of an
00:02:18.360 | evil heart.
00:02:20.040 | So when Adam and Eve used their biceps and triceps and hand muscles to reach for the
00:02:28.600 | forbidden fruit and then used their jaw muscles to bite it, those outward acts of the muscles
00:02:36.440 | were evil precisely because they were expressions of a heart that had lost its taste for the
00:02:45.440 | superior satisfaction of God and had become dominated by desires for something more than
00:02:53.320 | God.
00:02:54.320 | And that sinful condition of the heart preceded the muscles and their movement and the biting.
00:03:02.920 | That was the point that I was trying to make.
00:03:06.680 | Now, the second clarification, Alex seems to think that that distinction that I just
00:03:13.560 | made somehow contradicts the distinction we usually make between temptation and sin.
00:03:20.680 | So let me try to give a couple biblical glimpses of how to understand temptation and its relation
00:03:27.540 | to sinning.
00:03:28.680 | First, we know from Luke 4, 2 and Matthew 4, 1 that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness
00:03:37.900 | by the devil.
00:03:38.900 | It's said explicitly he was tempted.
00:03:42.600 | And we know from Hebrews 4, 15 that though he was tempted, he did not sin.
00:03:49.360 | Now my conclusion, therefore, just from those few facts, is that Satan's temptations are
00:03:56.600 | very often external offers of pleasure, which if we embrace them would be sin.
00:04:05.480 | But hearing and seeing the offer is not sin.
00:04:10.980 | So in Adam and Eve's case, there were things about the tree, the fruit, that offered pleasure.
00:04:18.320 | It was an objective offer and Satan was boosting it.
00:04:23.440 | Perceiving that external objective offer is not sin.
00:04:28.120 | Jesus saw it.
00:04:29.600 | He heard it.
00:04:30.600 | Adam and Eve saw it.
00:04:31.740 | They heard it.
00:04:33.520 | Perceiving the offer of pleasure, which if we embraced it would be sin, is not sin.
00:04:41.060 | But Jesus did not embrace it.
00:04:43.500 | He thrusted away by the Word of God.
00:04:46.420 | Adam and Eve tasted and embraced it, savored it, preferred it over God, and acted on it.
00:04:58.440 | In savoring it, the offered pleasure became so compelling that the desire for it was greater
00:05:05.760 | than the desire for God.
00:05:08.100 | At that point, the essence of sin had happened in their heart.
00:05:14.020 | Then the muscles kicked in and made it visible.
00:05:17.700 | Now I'd like to just stop right here because I think that's relatively simple, straightforward
00:05:23.840 | distinction between temptation and outward sinning.
00:05:29.520 | But as so often the case in Scripture, James won't let us stop here.
00:05:35.520 | He makes things more complicated.
00:05:38.540 | So we got to deal with James 1, verses 13 to 15, because James bores in.
00:05:44.340 | Let me read what he says.
00:05:46.520 | He defines temptation differently than what I have just said.
00:05:52.600 | Here's what he says.
00:05:54.000 | Let no one say when he is tempted, "I'm being tempted by God," for God cannot be tempted
00:06:03.720 | with evil.
00:06:06.480 | And he himself tempts no one.
00:06:10.000 | But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.
00:06:20.560 | Now there's a key difference from what I've said so far.
00:06:24.600 | He continues, "Then desire, when it has conceived," literally becoming pregnant, "then desire,"
00:06:33.600 | becoming pregnant, "gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth
00:06:41.560 | death."
00:06:42.560 | Wow, that's complicated.
00:06:45.960 | So here's what James seems to be doing.
00:06:49.440 | He's digging down into the heart to analyze what happens between the external offer of
00:06:59.320 | pleasure that I've called temptation, and the moment when our internal desire becomes
00:07:07.160 | pregnant with a preference for that pleasure.
00:07:11.240 | I think James realizes that there are often good desires in the heart which do correspond
00:07:19.560 | to the desire being offered in temptation, which are not yet sinful.
00:07:24.200 | For example, if somebody offered you $1,000 to lie to the police about something you had
00:07:30.520 | seen, and your wife and children were starving because you couldn't afford food, you would
00:07:37.840 | feel a desire for $1,000 that could buy food.
00:07:43.640 | "Oh yes, I want $1,000 to buy food for my family."
00:07:48.720 | That desire that you feel in that moment need not be sinful, even though it corresponds
00:07:57.280 | to the evil pleasure being offered you, because you draw a line, you draw a line.
00:08:03.400 | And when that desire starts to cross over to a preference for the bribe, more than trust
00:08:10.880 | in God and His way, you cut it off.
00:08:13.120 | You cut it off with the Word of God.
00:08:15.560 | You put it to death with the Word of God.
00:08:18.800 | I think that's exactly what Jesus did.
00:08:21.360 | The Bible says He was hungry.
00:08:23.800 | He hadn't eaten for 40 days.
00:08:26.600 | Good grief.
00:08:27.600 | He was hungry, and Satan offered Him bread.
00:08:33.080 | No doubt Jesus felt a huge desire for bread.
00:08:38.960 | In other words, His desire corresponded to the pleasure that was being offered in the
00:08:45.720 | temptation.
00:08:46.800 | But Jesus never allowed the desire to become a preference for bread over the will of God.
00:08:55.640 | Now, what James says is that each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his
00:09:08.040 | own desire.
00:09:09.880 | And I think he means that this alluring and enticing at some point crosses the line into
00:09:20.360 | sin.
00:09:22.440 | And he describes it as becoming pregnant, pregnant with sin, because that's what you
00:09:27.240 | give birth to.
00:09:28.240 | You give birth to what you're pregnant with.
00:09:30.280 | He gives birth to sin.
00:09:32.880 | The reason I think this is because he says God cannot be tempted.
00:09:37.760 | Well, wait a minute.
00:09:39.560 | We know Jesus was tempted.
00:09:43.120 | So James is defining temptation to include the point of allurement and enticement that
00:09:51.760 | crosses over into sin.
00:09:54.680 | That's why God cannot be tempted in that sense.
00:09:58.880 | Jesus couldn't be tempted in that sense.
00:10:02.200 | So here's the upshot.
00:10:03.600 | Sorry to make it so complicated, but that's just what we're stuck with as God is entrusting
00:10:09.200 | us some glorious things here in His Word.
00:10:12.520 | "Ordinarily, we understand temptation to be the external offer of a pleasure, which
00:10:19.740 | if we embraced it would be sin."
00:10:21.880 | I guess the ordinary use of the meaning of temptation.
00:10:25.360 | "We may experience desires that correspond to that pleasure, which are not yet sinful,
00:10:32.520 | like Jesus' hunger in the wilderness.
00:10:35.080 | But sometimes the New Testament understands temptation to include the crossing of the
00:10:43.600 | line between an innocent pleasure that we experience, that we have, that we desire,
00:10:50.240 | and the preference of that pleasure over God and God's will, and therefore how vigilant
00:10:58.520 | we should be."
00:11:00.320 | Indeed, the utmost vigilance.
00:11:03.000 | Thank you, Pastor John, for this deep exploration of the complex relationships between our affections
00:11:08.760 | and our temptations and our sins.
00:11:12.480 | And that is a really great follow-up question, Alex.
00:11:14.900 | Thank you for sending that in.
00:11:16.360 | And thank you for listening and making this podcast a part of your day.
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00:11:32.120 | something he's written in the past.
00:11:33.400 | You can do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:40.160 | And many of you are probably familiar with the Desiring God slogan, "God is most glorified
00:11:45.680 | in us when we are most satisfied in Him."
00:11:49.800 | You could hear all of the entailments of that in this episode today, but you may not be
00:11:54.200 | aware of the history of the slogan and how it came about.
00:11:57.600 | And a listener has asked to hear the backstory, and John Piper will share it with us on Wednesday.
00:12:02.840 | Where did the DG slogan come from and how did he write it?
00:12:06.040 | That's Wednesday.
00:12:07.040 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:12:08.040 | Thanks for listening to the podcast.
00:12:09.560 | We'll see you then.
00:12:10.160 | [BLANK_AUDIO]