We all grew up with the story of the Garden of Eden and of how Adam and Eve were tempted and ate the forbidden fruit. Looking at this story again recently, I was struck with how many misunderstandings and distortions surround this famous story. I grew up in an Adventist home, raised on Ellen White’s writings that were read for family worship alongside the Bible. It eventually occurred to me that I needed to study the Bible again with a new attitude to learn, no longer assuming I knew Scripture well.
The story of the Fall is especially important to our understanding of Scripture and salvation theology. To relearn this story—like the rest of Scripture—after growing up with distorted teachings, however, requires humble, prayerful study. It helps even more if one can study Scripture with other Christians who understand one’s upbringing. So saying, let’s look at some familiar deviations we learned in the Eden story.
We can imagine an ordinary day in the Garden with the happy couple strolling among the trees together, not a care in the world. Their territory was wonderful and vast, with so much to explore. The sun shone warmly overhead, and as the twosome talked together that morning, they delighted in how many kinds of fruit trees they could find. They stopped to rest, and the woman suddenly said,
“Oh, look there! That tree with its fruit!” The man smiled, mildly amused at his wife’s enthusiasm, and closed his eyes, thinking of another tree.
Eve walked over to a great spreading tree, branches bowing down, heavy with ripe fruit. She began to talk to someone in the tree, although no one could be seen speaking with her. “Well, there goes Eve, talking to the animals again,” Adam mused to himself. Then he stopped and looked again. Wait, this was not just another tree. This was the tree that God had warned them about. He heard a strange voice coming from the low branches,
“You will not surely die!” The voice said, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Eve picked some of the fruit and brought it over to her husband, and smiling, held it out for him to see. The record tells us:
“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”
We can wonder, why Adam was so passive, silently watching the wife he loved eating fruit that God said would result in death? We are not told, but as Genesis 3:6 says, he was with her and could have stopped her, and he did not. His passivity was not due to his being deceived by the serpent, for Paul tells us,
“Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1Timothy 2:14).
Some Bible commentators, such as Joseph Benson1 and Matthew Poole2 have surmised that Eve had wandered away from Adam, trying explain his failure to stop Eve. Ellen White expands on that idea in some detail:
“The angels had cautioned Eve to beware of separating herself from her husband while occupied in their daily labor in the garden; with him she would be in less danger from temptation than if she were alone.”3
Angels play a prominent role in White’s version of the Fall, for according to her, they were apparently more active in the couple’s daily lives than God. White’s angels are in the garden, teaching and warning the innocent pair about Satan: “Heavenly messengers opened to them the history of Satan’s fall and his plots for their destruction…”4 White’s great controversy theme between Christ and Satan is frequently injected into the story. Satan and his powers are a continuous concern from even before the Fall. “The angels warned them to be on their guard against the devices of Satan.”
In Scripture, however, God himself instructs them about the trees, the animals, introduces Eve to Adam, and gives them their responsibilities. An angel doesn’t enter the story until the cherubim with flaming sword is stationed at the garden’s entrance (Gen. 3:24).
She ate and gave the fruit “to her husband who was with her,” and he ate. However, White has Eve talking alone with the serpent, who flatters her beauty, and tells her the fruit gave it the power of speech. In these and other passages from Ellen White, we see the influence of John Milton, author of the epic poem, Paradise Lost. In Milton’s tale, Book 9, there are many similarities with Ellen White’s version of the temptation scene. In both Milton and White, Adam has conversations with angels about Satan. Also in both authors, Eve is seduced by the serpent to wander away from Adam and come to the tree. The serpent flatters her beauty, and boasts that by eating the fruit he was given the powers of speech and reason. When Eve brings the fruit to Adam, he perceives her as lost, and out of love for her, determines to perish with her.5 Ellen White was evidently quite familiar with John Milton’s work.
Nowhere does Scripture suggest that Eve succumbed to temptation because she wandered away from Adam. Nor does is it suggested that the fruit gave the serpent the power of speech. These changes to Scripture can have subtle effects on how we read other parts of the Bible. When we add to or change the Biblical account, distortions of truth are inevitable. The Bible’s story telling tends to be sparse and direct, and many of our curious questions remain unanswered. It is always a temptation to look for prophetic revelations into the secrets that God didn’t reveal.
There are some other troubling additions by Ellen White to this story. When Eve brought the fruit to Adam and he realized she had been deceived, White wrote that he experienced a “terrible struggle in his mind.” Adam might now lose Eve, and he couldn’t bear the thought. From the verses in Genesis, Adam’s mental dilemma is a plausible interpretation. However, White adds that Adam hesitated and fell because he valued Eve’s company too much, and was willing to give all that up to share Eve’s fate.
“He did not realize that the same Infinite Power who had from the dust of the earth created him, a living, beautiful form, and had in love given him a companion, could supply her place.”6
Evidently for Mrs. White, if Eve alone had sinned without Adam and she perished, then there was no salvation for her; she was lost forever. She was dispensable and could have been replaced with someone just as lovely. Adam could have learned to deal with it. Of course, such speculation is useless; Adam and Eve fell together, and God had another plan already in place.
What is useful is to understand the plan of redemption that God gave to Adam and Eve. A Son would crush the serpent’s head in victory. That gospel hope was no afterthought, but the eternal plan of the Trinity, before the tree or the world was created (Ephesians 1:3-5). This wasn’t just the Son’s plan, made after Adam and Eve sinned. Ellen White stated that the Son of God had to persuade His reluctant Father, and it was “a struggle” for the Father to agree to allow His son to suffer and die as a man.7
The real gospel of Scripture is our glorious, sufficient light for today. There we see the Father’s total love for us, sending Jesus, the Son of God who was the Lamb slain before creation. All those He redeemed were already written in His book of life (Rev. 13:8). The Father gave us His Son without hesitation or reservation:
“He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” Romans 8:32
Sources
- Joseph Benson, Commentary of the Old and New Testament, https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/rbc.html
- Matthew Poole, Commentary on Genesis 3, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/genesis/3-6.htm
- Ellen White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 53, https://www.preparingforeternity.com/pp/pp03.htm
- Ibid, p. 52
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Books 9, https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_7/text.shtml
- White, p. 56
- White, p. 63.
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