The three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary by Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

Genesis 3:22-24

²² And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’ ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side^[a] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

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Last week’s post discussed Adam’s naming Eve the mother of all the living and God’s provision of animal skins for the couple to wear: the first sacrifice in the Bible, because an animal had to die. It was the first death mankind would experience.

That sacrifice was the first example of substitutionary atonement.

John MacArthur explains that there is an introduction to the doctrine of salvation in those verses as well as in this week’s. They introduce God as Saviour (emphases mine):

Now, as we approach these verses, the five verses that end this great chapter, I want to remind you that God is by nature a Savior of sinners. In fact, God bears that title. First Timothy chapter 1, He is called, “God our Savior.” Titus chapter 1, verses 3 and 4; Titus chapter 2; then again in Titus chapter 3, God is called God our Savior. First Timothy 4:10, “God is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe.”

And when God came into the world in human form, Jesus Christ, He also is called our Savior. He came to seek and to save that which was lost. And one of the things that is very clear in Scripture is that God has a disposition in His nature to save sinners, to save them from sin, to save them from the consequence of sin, to save them from the power of sin, to save them even from the presence of sin. This is not foreign to the nature of God, this is true to His nature.

And I’ve told you in the past, there is no other deity in the pantheon of human and demonic religions, there is no other deity that has ever been invented who is by nature a savior of sinners. This is the utter uniqueness of Christianity, that our God, the true and living God, the only God, is a Savior of sinners by nature.

… This is the first time in the Bible that God is presented as a Savior. Right after the fall, early in the chapter, following immediately upon the curse that comes in the middle of the chapter, God is introduced to us as a Savior. Here, in that amazing fullness that God can put in a few words, we find Him being introduced as the Savior. We find here the introduction of His plan of redemption. We find here the indication that He is bringing salvation to sinful people.

Now, all of the components of salvation are present in the text that I read, and I admit, they’re are not immediately present at the first reading. You’re probably wondering where I see those things. Well, I’ll tell you in a moment. But everything that is essential is here. From man’s side, there are essentially two things: faith and hope – faith and hope. Those are the two things that are necessary with regard to man’s side of salvation. We have to believe in the Lord to be saved.

We have to believe His Word, put our trust in what He has said and what He has promised, and then, having believed, we live in hope for something we have not yet seen or received. And so it is required that we be characterized by faith and hope. That’s on our side. On God’s side, two things are necessary – atonement and security – atonement and security. God has to provide a suitable atonement to cover our sin and then He has to hold onto us to keep us saved until we get to glory. So from man’s side, faith and hope, from God’s side, atonement and security, those are the essential elements of salvation.

That is the necessary mix in the plan of God, and you find all four of them in this text. The salvation of sinners, their deliverance from sin, their deliverance from death and hell has always been by faith and in hope and always been through divine atonement and security. Now, not all the fullness of those great truths is here, but the first glimpse of those truths is here. This is the first glimpse of what is progressively revealed in Scripture and perfected in the coming of Christ and the New Testament.

This is the hope element:

God had made one great promise, and the promise was that Satan would be at enmity with the woman and that her seed would engage in battle against his seed, and her seed would triumph by bruising Satan on the head and Satan would only be able to bruise her seed on the heel.

God promised, then, that the woman would have a child and that out of the loins of that woman would come one who would defeat Satan, literally crush Satan’s head. That is the first promise of a Savior.

Now, by now, Adam and Eve know that Satan is a liar. Satan said, “You’ll not surely die, God is hiding things from you, He’s not a good God, He didn’t tell you the truth. I’m the good one, I’m telling you the truth,” et cetera, et cetera. They, for the time, believed Satan, were then catapulted into a cursed environment. They were cursed themselves. They now know Satan lied and God told the truth. And God made one promise, “I’ll give that woman a seed. Out of that woman will come One who will destroy Satan, who will crush his head, destroy the enemy, destroy the one who brought sin into the human realm and give back paradise to the world.”

This is the faith element:

When Adam named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living, he was stating by that name that he believed God would fulfill His promise. As I said, at the time she wasn’t the mother of anybody. He was naming her Eve by faith. They had believed Satan and not God, but no longer. They now know Satan was a liar and God told the truth. Faith was planted in their hearts. They believed God and consequently he names her Eve, which means life, and she accepts the name.

Also, there is built into that penitence (or repentance). They were sorry that they had ever followed Satan. They were sorry they had ever turned to disobedience against God. They were sorry that they had ever fallen to that temptation. And there was remorse and there was certainly a deep sense of penitence. They both repented for their trust in Satan, who destroyed their paradise and destroyed their lives.

And so you see, then, in verse 20 by the name that Adam gives his to wife that he now believes God. Though the promise was death, he believes there will be life because God said there would be life out of her womb, life in the form of One who would come to destroy Satan. They now believe God. Salvation comes to those who believe God. Now, what did they have to believe? Anything and everything God said. God hadn’t said very much, He’d only given one promise, really, one great promise with regard to salvation and that is that Satan would be defeated, he would be destroyed, he would be destroyed by someone born of woman, and they believed that.

And as far as they could, then, they believed in the Savior who was to come. They believed that God would provide a savior, a deliverer, one who would overturn the fall, crush the serpent’s head, and bring back paradise. That was their part.

God provided atonement, which means covering, in the form of an animal sacrifice that provided skins to clothe Adam and Eve, because they now knew shame through their sin of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil:

We also saw that the first element on God’s part is atonement. It doesn’t do any good for a man to believe unless God provides a means for salvation. Man’s faith and repentance mean absolutely nothing without God’s provision for sin. And so you come to verse 21 and you see here in a beautiful picture God’s provision, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them” …

Sin brought guilt. Sin brought shame. Sin brought all kinds of illicit feelings. And so they, feeling guilty, tried to cover themselves but that’s inadequate. No man can cover his own shame. No man can cover his own guilt, no woman can, either. And so God here in symbolic action says if you’re going to be covered, if your shame is going to be covered and your guilt is going to be covered, I’m going to have to do it. And here, I’m going to have to do it by killing something.

And who does He kill? Well, He kills an animal, obviously. Can’t take the skin of an animal without killing the animal. And here is the first time you have death in the Bible, first time in history. Up to this point, they were vegetarian. They only ate of the food of the ground. They didn’t eat any animals. There was no food chain in terms of animals eating other animals. The whole creation was vegetarian up to this point.

This is atonement. Why? God requires death for sin. Sin brings about death. The wages of sin is death … because God is by nature a savior, merciful, and gracious, He brings a substitute, slays the substitute and covers the sinner’s shame and guilt by the death of a substitute. His judgment, His justice, His wrath being satisfied by the death of the substitute.

… And that is exactly what the death of Jesus on the cross means. He is innocent, He is spotless, He is without blemish, He is perfect, He is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and yet God takes Him and puts Him on the cross. He, who knew no sin (2 Corinthians 5:21) became sin for us and He becomes our substitute.

Now we come to today’s verses and another of God’s provisions, security, although that might not be immediately evident.

The Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever‘ (verse 22).

MacArthur explains how God provided security for the couple:

God knows that now the man has the knowledge of good and evil experientially. Not in the way that God knows it … God knows evil outside of Himself. But in the sense of knowing good and evil inside. He knew what man did because he experienced it.

Man knows enough now to be in danger. He’s experienced good and he’s experienced evil. He doesn’t like evil. He doesn’t like it. And he would like to mitigate its circumstances, wouldn’t you? I mean, if you were Adam, you’d be immediately looking for some way to get out of the mess you’d gotten yourself into, right? You were feeling things you’d never felt before, you were dealing with attitudes and impulses and lusts and desires you’d never experienced before. You felt shame. You knew you were dying. You knew there was a moral, spiritual consequence as well as a physical consequence to what you had done, and you now understood the impact of that consequence.

And you would want to do anything you could to rectify that, to turn that around, to reverse that … You’d say to your wife, “You know, we’ve got to get back to that tree of life because if we can get to that tree of life, we won’t die. We just get back to that tree of life, we’ll be okay. You eat of that tree, you live forever. That’s a great – maybe that’s why it’s here, isn’t that great? We’ll just get back there to the tree of life” …

So verse 22 says, “The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now lest he stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever” – and the Hebrew never finishes the sentence. There’s an introductory clause but there’s no completing clause. It’s God just saying, “I know exactly what He’s going to do, he’s going to go right to the tree of life and he’s going to reach out and he’s going to say, ‘If I can just get that tree of life and eat it, I will live forever and I’ll mitigate all the consequences of my sin.’”

So the Lord God banished Adam from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken (verse 23).

At this point, we think that there’s no provision of security there. It’s a terrible state of affairs.

However, MacArthur explains how being banished from the Garden of Eden was better than living in it and eating from the tree of life. God provided security by banishing them and promising them a perfect life after death rather than an everlasting life in sin on earth:

Now, what this indicates, first of all, is that Eden existed for some time after the fall. It was still there. I mean it took a while for all that perfection to feel the effects of the fall. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was still there, the tree of life was still there. All the rest of the paradise of God was still there. The rivers that flowed through it were still there. It existed for some time.

We don’t know how long it existed. It would have been destroyed ultimately at the time of the flood, but it could have died off long before that. We don’t have any way to know that. But at this particular time after the fall, the tree of life was still there. And if they ate of it, they would live forever. Now, remember this, the eternal life in the tree of life is not in the botany of the tree. It’s not in the DNA of the tree. It’s not something in the chemical of the fruit. It is simply by divine decree that the tree would give life. It’s simply because that’s what God said it would do and, therefore, that’s what it would do.

You say, “Well, isn’t that a good thing? I mean wouldn’t it be great? They could just run over there and they could just eat and they would – and it would neutralize the effects of death and they would live forever.” Problem: They would live forever – listen to this – as wicked, depraved, fallen sinners. You see that? That’s not good. That’s not good. It’s tough enough to get through your forties and fifties and into your sixties and you get pretty sick of it, but to live as a fallen, wretched, wicked sinner forever, that is not a blessing. God has something much better. You know what He has? Just go die and I’ll raise you in a new kind of life without sin, then you’ll live forever. Better? Much better.

You know, eternal life as a fallen sinner, that’s what hell is – no hope of deliverance from decay, no hope of deliverance from wretchedness, in a condition where the worm never dies, the fire is never quenched, where you’re weeping and wailing forever and gnashing your teeth because there is never any end to your wretched wickedness. And if Adam and Eve had remained in the garden, the temptation to overpower death by eating would have been overwhelming, and they would have gone straight to that tree thinking they could neutralize the effects of death by eating from the tree of life, and they would have sentenced themselves to the most gruesome kind of living …

Now, God didn’t want them to do that, not in that condition. It would have been a just punishment. Yes, it would have been a just punishment if God had said, “Okay, have at it and sentence yourself to a hell of perpetual, eternal wretchedness.” But He wouldn’t do that. You know why? I believe He wouldn’t do that because they belonged to Him. It’s an affirmation that His atonement had been applied to them, even though Christ hadn’t, of course, yet died, but the effects of Christ’s atonement w[ere] applied to them upon the evidence of their faith in the promises of God.

And now they belong to God. God had applied the symbol of His covering in the skins that He made for them. And here is further evidence of their regeneration, further evidence of their justification, further evidence of their salvation, God prevents them from ever going to hell. He prevents them. “Better that you get out of the garden and never touch that tree and go ahead and die, and I will raise you again in a new kind of life, and that way you can live forever but not in wretchedness, in holy perfection.” That’s better. Instead of eternal sorrow, you can experience eternal joy. You get the point? …

This is a wonderful picture of security. We aren’t yet ready for His presence, but He prevents us from ever being damned. Do you understand that? We aren’t yet ready for entering into the Holy of Holies, we can’t go into His presence the way we are, but believe me, He will never let us fall.

“Now unto Him” – Jude 25 – “who is able to keep you from falling.” Psalm 97:10, “He preserves the souls of His saints.” “Great is His faithfulness,” Lamentations 3. Or if you like, Romans 8:31 – wow, that is the great passage on security, isn’t it? – “What shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus?” What? “Nothing.” That’s security. We are sealed unto the day of promise. John in his gospel (chapter 10, verses 28 and 29) records the promise of Jesus that every believer belongs to Christ and he is in the hand of Christ, kept by God, and “no one is able to pluck them out of my hand because my Father,” of course, “is greater than all.”

And one of the great doctrines of the Scripture is the doctrine of security. I mean look at it very simply, folks. We don’t have what it takes to save ourselves, and we certainly don’t have what it takes to keep ourselves saved. Do you understand that? The only way you will ever get to heaven is if God in grace saves you and God in grace keeps you. You would jettison your faith, you would plunge into sin, you would fall victim to Satan if it were left to you. He guards His own. John 17, He [Jesus] prays to the Father and He says, “I’ve kept those you’ve given me.”

After God drove the man out of the Garden of Eden, He placed on the east side — or the front — cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life (verse 24).

MacArthur explains:

For however long that garden remained, the temptation would have been greater and greater in the mind of man to run back in there and try to sort of reverse the power of death by eating of the tree of life. That would have been a witless act could he have done it because all it would have done, as I said, was make him permanently wicked. So the Lord stationed cherubim there.

Wherever you see cherubim – this is the first time angels are mentioned in the Bible, a lot of firsts in this section. The first time angels are mentioned. But wherever you see cherubim, they’re always associated with the throne of God. They’re always around the throne of God, Ezekiel 1, Ezekiel 10, 2 Samuel 6:2, “The Lord of hosts dwells between the cherubim.” That’s why the cherubim were put on the Ark of the Covenant, a symbol of His presence. So they are the angels that protect the presence of God, they protect the glory of God, the throne of God.

And all that Adam could do was hope for the day when he could go into the throne of God, when he could go back into the presence of God, when he could go back to paradise and commune with God as he once did. Second Kings 19:15 says, “The Lord God of Israel dwells between the cherubim.” He wanted to go back to the presence of God and he hoped and he hoped and he hoped. When would that day come? When could we go in to the presence of God? The angels, these angels, cherubim, are guarding that Holy of Holies, they’re guarding that place of God’s presence. That’s the place that Adam and Eve wanted so much to be.

They couldn’t go there. They had to sweat and suffer and struggle and live with hope that someday – they couldn’t do it in their present condition but someday they would be able to enter in to God’s presence again.

It was a double protection, kind of interesting, in verse 24. The flaming sword also was there, turning every direction. In other words, no matter where you would go, the flaming sword was there. There was absolutely no access to God’s personal presence. You can’t enter into His presence, the fullness of His presence. Oh, of course, His Spirit is there, and we’ll see that later, and God is appearing from time to time to man. We see that in the early part of the Old Testament as well as later on, ultimately in Christ.

But you can’t get in to His presence because in this case, going back into the garden – end of verse 24 – would mean they would go right to the tree of life, and that would destroy them forever. He protects them. This is security, and He makes them live in hope. Even though they were believers, even though they had repented, even though they had been forgiven, even though they had been covered, they were still sentenced to live a life of suffering and sorrow and pain and death, so they had to live in hope.

That’s the way we live, isn’t it? We hope for heaven. We hope for the fullness of the presence of God. God sent them out and said, “I want you to feel the curse. I want you to feel the blast of sin. And I want you to feel that so hard that you begin to have a deep longing for heaven.”

The Keil & Delitzsch, the Hebrew commenta[ry], says, “Man must till the ground in which he will, after a short span, decay. In the soil which he turns over with his spade, he has before his very eyes his origin and his future. You will die, you will suffer and you will die. But that suffering and that death which will free him to enter the presence of God becomes the source of his hope.”

Why does God want us to live in hope? Because 1 John 3:3 says, “Hope purifies. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” This purifying hope is our anchor. In the words of Hebrews 6:19, “This hope is an anchor for the soul.”

Both our commentators say that what Adam and Eve probably missed the most was fellowship with God.

MacArthur says:

They knew that the garden was the place of fellowship with God. I think they wanted fellowship with God. I think, you know, that lapse when they plunged into rebellious unbelief and turned their affections and their trust toward Satan, that was over. They saw the truth of Satan, and now they were prepared to believe in God.

They were God’s now, and they had repented. And they had put their trust in God, and God had covered them. And they knew that God was true and Satan was a liar and a destroyer. And they wanted fellowship with God and they desired God’s presence and they wanted to see God’s glory, and the garden was the place where they had always known that.

God says, “You’re not suitable for my presence. Out. I accept your repentance, I accept your faith. I cover you with my atonement, but you are not suitable for my presence. I’m going to protect you from eternal hell. I’m going to secure you by throwing you out of the garden because you would do such danger to yourself and because you are not suitable for the fullness of my presence.” And that’s how it is with us, isn’t it? You believed and you repented and the atonement of Jesus Christ, the substitute on your behalf, provides a covering that cloaks you and righteousness covers your guilt and shame.

Matthew Henry says of Adam:

His acquaintance with God was lessened and lost, and that correspondence which had been settled between man and his Maker was interrupted and broken off. He was driven out, as one unworthy of this honour and incapable of this service. Thus he and all mankind, by the fall, forfeited and lost communion with God … Observe, then, that though our first parents were excluded from the privileges of their state of innocency, yet they were not abandoned to despair, God’s thoughts of love designing them for a second state of probation upon new terms.

… God revealed this to Adam, not to drive him to despair, but to oblige and quicken him to look for life and happiness in the promised seed, by whom the flaming sword is removed. God and his angels are reconciled to us, and a new and living way into the holiest is consecrated and laid open for us.

Next week Eve bears sons, and we begin the story of Cain and Abel.

Next time — Genesis 4:1-7