The New Eve (9 page)

I appreciate Rebecca's courage and bold faith. This is inside-out living at its best. When you keep God's core callings in focus, ordering your outside according to your inside, life will increasingly gain momentum and freedom. It invites God's blessing. On the other hand, embrace the outside-in way of life, and you are most often ordering up a serving of dead ends and regrets. I hear this from women all the time: “Why did I think life was all about me? Why didn't I take God's Word more seriously? Why did I wait so long to try and have children? Why did I relate to men the way I did? Why did I think my husband could make it without my help and involvement? Why didn't I invest my single years in something more productive? Why did I believe my kids wouldn't notice I wasn't there?”

It doesn't have to be this way. But it will take bold moves on your part to secure a better outcome. As I told you earlier, these bold moves are in essence big-picture faith strategies to help you successfully navigate the challenging terrain of the modern world. Rather than just guessing your way through life as so many women do, these bold moves help point the way to a wiser and more satisfying life. So now that our gender journey through Genesis is complete, here is your first bold move for managing life successfully as a New Eve:

Live from the inside out.

The first Eve, of course, went a different direction. Her story in Genesis 3 stands as history's most convincing witness to the wisdom of inside-out living … but for all the wrong reasons. So let's take a look.

Eve and the Fall

P
ast to present, the landscape of womanhood has included many history turners. These are women of uncommon influence who have changed the world by their unique imprint and left it a different place.

Esther was one such woman. When she was called from obscurity by a Persian king who needed a wife, her shrewdness and courage as his queen saved her fellow Jews from execution and extinction. Another history turner was Florence Nightingale. In an era when medicine was considered “man's work,” Florence went against the grain and pursued a career in health care. Through hands-on involvement in wretched medical clinics and military infirmaries, she discovered that poor sanitary conditions were the root cause of many needless deaths. Today, nurses and doctors all over the world trace their life-saving emphasis on sanitation to Ms. Nightingale. Then there was Rosa Parks, a courageous black woman who took a front seat on an Alabama bus and changed race relations in America forever. There were many others: Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Mead, Emily Dickinson, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine the Great, Indira Gandhi, Cleopatra … the list goes on and on.
History is full of women who have reshaped our world in one way or another. But no woman has turned history so significantly or as permanently as the first woman: Eve.

Eve's first claim to fame is simply that she was the mother of us all. Interestingly, biologists now believe this. Recent discoveries in genetics have led scientists to conclude that all humans are descendants of the same woman. The proof, they say, is in our shared mitochondrial DNA. In a
Time
magazine article titled “Everyone's Genealogical Mother,” Michael Lemonick writes, “If family trees were charted indefinitely backward, they would eventually converge on a small group of ancients who were ancestors of us all. Now biologists suggest in a report to
Nature
that a single female living between 140,000 and 280,000 years ago in Africa was the ancestor of everyone on the earth today. Inevitably—and to the probable delight of creationists—many scientists are calling her ‘Eve.’”
¹

Yes, Eve was a real person. Hard science is edging closer to the biblical plotline. And while DNA now offers us a genetic link to her, Genesis 3 offers us a much fuller picture. So take a look. No, you won't find her physically described there. You'll have to imagine that for yourself. In your mind's eye you may see her as I do: as a dark-haired beauty with strong physical features; sharp wit; and an energetic, determined personality. But the social and spiritual images of Eve in Genesis 3 are eye-popping. These pictures have been purposefully preserved for you and for women of every generation to gain insight. Look closely enough at them, and you'll even notice traces of yourself in Eve. Yes, you are a unique individual, but at the same time, it's important to recognize your connectedness to your supragreat-grandmother and how she predisposes you as a woman to certain tendencies, traits, and temptations. That's why Eve is so important. Her past is your present.

In Genesis 3 Eve discovered for the first time that there was something else in life besides God's will and calling for her. Life had options! Everything was not fixed or guaranteed. Choices could be made.

Offering one major option was a crafty serpent with an exceptional marketing strategy. In their encounter he pressed Eve from the outside to abandon those callings God had given her to embrace on the inside. And the emotional buttons this serpent pushed to tempt her in that direction should sound familiar to every modern woman.

• God and the man speaking for Him are holding you back. Don't you know that?
  
• You've been lied to.
  
• Do you call this fair—having these limitations placed on you?
  
• Can't you see how second-rate you are right now? Why are you doing this to yourself?
  
• It's time for you to take control of your own destiny and maximize your potential.
  
• You need to know that what you don't have is so much better than what you do have.
  
• Stop worrying; you won't die if you strike out on your own. You'll excel!
  
• Don't let others keep you from your best.
  
• You can have it all!
  

Theologians will tell you this serpent was actually only a puppet. Speaking through it was the master of all evil we know today as Satan. In the wonder of the original garden, a snake was certainly an appropriate disguise for Satan to use to approach
and engage the first woman. In this agrarian setting it made sense. But to target modern women, the puppets for marketing Satan's voice have had to change. Talk-show hosts, movie stars, college professors, advertising agencies, songwriters, authors, and social critics do nicely. These outlets are craftily manipulated and appropriately placed for maximum impact. But the messages themselves have not changed. Look at them again. Today's tempting voices use the same old Genesis 3 pickup lines. And every modern woman who listens to them becomes Eve all over again.

Satan's deception of Eve brought us to a cataclysmic moment that today still affects us all. Most of us know it simply as the Fall. It was a moment when all of God's original intentions and core callings for you as a woman (and for me as a man) became twisted, distorted, and—most of all—difficult.

Genesis 3 should have featured Adam in the starring role of a courageous protector. After all, he was supposed to head this relationship with the same loving leadership with which Jesus would later cover His church (Eph. 5:23). Instead, Adam was strangely missing from this dramatic scene as Eve dangerously entertained the serpent's overtures. Where was he? The tragedy is, he was actually around, though we will have to look closely in this moment to find him. After six long verses of satanic dialogue with Eve, we finally catch a brief glimpse of Adam. Almost as an afterthought, Genesis 3:6 says he was “with her.” In other words, the whole time this evil madness was being unleashed on Eve, Adam was right there, watching his wife's strength wane as Satan deceived her into abandoning God's command not to eat the forbidden fruit.

We are not told why Adam was so passive in this life-or-death moment or what he was thinking, but we can guess. Clearly, Adam was no dummy. He was an ingenious, creative, natural-born leader designed by God to rule the world. He was also keenly aware of what was happening and what was at stake. For those reasons it seems clear that Adam was testing God and selfishly using his wife to do so. By letting his wife take the fruit without his direct involvement, Adam had already reasoned that he would win, regardless of the outcome. If she ate and died as God had previously warned (Gen. 2:17), he could profess innocence by not having participated. On the other hand, if Eve ate and didn't die, then Adam had proof that God was, in fact, holding back on what was best for them. In that case Adam still had time to join his wife in this new life. Obviously, Adam thought he had outwitted everyone, including God.

It was a huge mistake.

The truth is, as Adam stood and watched his wife entertain sin,
he
sinned! Not overtly but covertly. Adam denied God even before Eve's deception was complete. He shunned his leadership responsibilities, he abandoned his helper, and he embraced evil in his heart. But rather than outwitting God, he discovered a higher reality he should have known: “God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7).

This doesn't mean Eve was innocent in these events or a victim of them. She knew the rules, but she freely and fully disregarded them. As the conversation advanced with the serpent, it was clear to her that Satan was calling her to make a momentous decision that went contrary to her design and God's clear commands, and yet she continued to take ownership of the situation. She disregarded her husband too. Rather
than looking to Adam and insisting that he take his rightful place as her head, she made this fateful choice alone. Then, after she ate, she turned to her husband and instructed him to do the same. Sensing that Eve had gotten away with it, Adam complied.

In a tragic role reversal, Eve led, Adam followed, and the world fell. Spiritual death, not a better life, immediately descended on Eden, and humanity's relationship with God was severed.

Along with this separation from God, gender wounds were also unleashed on Adam and Eve and on their posterity. Authentic manhood became mangled. The negligent and selfish passivity Adam displayed in the Garden now becomes the passivity of all men. Everywhere you look today, you see men take charge in sports, business, and politics. They are aggressive warriors when it comes to their personal pursuits.

But when it comes to social and spiritual responsibilities, passively standing there like the original Adam becomes more their norm. The wife waits for her man to lead at home, but after a while she falls into prodding him: “Let's go to church. Let's do something with the kids. What about our relationship? Where are we going in life?” His response is the same as Adam's was to Eve: “You decide. You lead. You take the responsibility. I'll watch.” It never fails that when I say things like these to a male audience, the men hang their heads because they know it's true. In the substantive things of life, social and spiritual, men are naturally passive. It's our inheritance from Adam.

Authentic womanhood also took a major hit in the Garden. Eve lost her feminine nobility when she fell into Satan's deception. And precisely as Adam's passivity still lives in men today, Eve's vulnerability to deception still carries on in all her daughters. In every generation women are enticed with the same forbidden fruit: to neglect, compromise, or abandon altogether
God's core callings for what the world convincingly promises is better. If anything, the deceptive fruits of a modern world are more plentiful than ever before, and as a woman, you are naturally prone through Eve to take and eat. This is the inheritance Genesis says Eve leaves you—the tendency to believe that there is something better out there for you to pursue than what God has already prescribed. But it's all a painful lie.

The fall also created a new reality of woundedness between men and women. Life between the sexes is cursed and infected with personal agendas and power plays. Look at God's words to Eve in Genesis 3:16: “In pain you will bring forth children; yet your
desire
will be for your husband, and he will
rule
over you” (emphasis added).

You will miss the significance of this divine pronouncement if you don't stay with this verse word by word. Pay special attention to the two words I highlighted in italics. The “desire” God said Eve will now feel for her husband and the “rule” Adam will now exercise over her are both desperate and tragic. They are corruptions of God's original design of Adam as a caring head and Eve as a supportive helper. Because the first couple chose to abandon God's design for them, every future man-woman relationship will be undermined with difficulty. That includes yours and mine. These corruptions are at ground zero of the struggle we often refer to as the battle of the sexes.