Kanye gets Adam and Eve right

If you follow pop culture at all, you know who Kanye West is, and you know that he is now a professing Christian. His recent album, Jesus Is King, is a Christian album filled with surprisingly orthodox lyrics. No blatant heresies or misuses of scripture are detected. In fact, they are quite good insofar as they reveal where Kanye is in his faith.

As I listened to the album, the following lyrics – from the song “Everything We Need” – stuck out to me in particular:

What if Eve made apple juice?
You gon’ do what Adam do?
Or say, “Baby, let’s put this back on the tree,
‘Cause we have everything we need”

These four short lines are immensely profound, for they correct a common misunderstanding about the fall of man (i.e. the doctrine of original sin).

It’s become a popular notion that Eve is to blame for mankind’s first sin. In the biblical story (Genesis 3:1-6), the serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. Eve ate and gave the fruit to Adam. Adam ate, and the rest is history.

Because Eve was the first one to eat, and because Eve was the one who gave the fruit to Adam, it’s concluded that Eve is the one at fault. People say, “If only Eve had not eaten the fruit,” or “If only Adam had not been tempted by his wife.” The lyrics to Elvis Presley’s “Hard-Headed Woman” describe this sentiment well:

Now Adam told Eve, “Listen here to me,
Don’t you let me catch you messing ’round that apple tree”
Oh yeah, ever since the world began
A hard-headed woman been a thorn in the side of man

This notion, however, is completely false and unsupported from the Bible. Ironically, when people promote this interpretation of Eve, they are repeating Adam’s sin of blame-shifting. When God asked Adam if he had eaten the fruit, Adam responded, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). Adam blamed Eve and men have been doing it ever since.

The truth is that Adam is to blame for the fall; he bears the greater guilt. The Bible tells us that Eve was deceived by the serpent but that Adam wasn’t. This is a very important distinction.

When God asked Eve what she did, she said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Genesis 3:13). We might think that Eve is doing her own blame-shifting here, but that isn’t the case. The apostle Paul agrees with Eve in 2 Corinthians 11:3. He writes…

I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.

Also, in 1 Timothy 2:14, Paul says “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived.” This means that when Eve ate the fruit, she did so in ignorance. She thought the serpent was being truthful when he said, “You shall not surely die.” Adam’s sin, however, was high-handed. He knew what the serpent said was a lie, yet he went along with it anyway.

This was especially egregious of Adam for two reasons. First, Adam was given the prohibition from the tree by God directly, before Eve was even created (Genesis 2:16-18). He had no excuse to go along with what the serpent said. In contrast, Eve likely learned of the prohibition from Adam. We have no record of God giving her the prohibition directly. That wouldn’t excuse her sin, but it would mean that Adam’s was greater.

Second, Adam had been put in charge of guarding the garden (Genesis 2:15), which would have certainly included his wife! Adam did not guard Eve from the serpent’s deception. Man was created to have dominion over “every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28), but Adam let the serpent have dominion over Eve.

It’s for these reasons that the fall is to be blamed on Adam. Romans 5:12 says, “through one man sin entered the world,” not through “one woman,” not through “Eve” – but through one man, Adam. Kanye’s lyric alludes to this when he says, “What if Eve made apple juice? You gon’ do what Adam do?” The responsibility was on Adam to lead rightly, but he led wrongly. It’s what he did that had devastating consequences for all of humanity.

Had Adam done the right thing, he would have said something like this to Eve: “No, God said we aren’t allowed to do this. We need to trust him. This serpent is lying, let’s walk away and ask God what we should do about him.” Or perhaps Kanye says it better: “Baby, let’s put this back on the tree, ’cause we have everything we need.”

Adam and Eve did have everything they needed, after all. God did not leave them hungry. They had full access to every other tree in the garden, including the tree of life (Genesis 2:9, 16). When God prohibits you from something, it’s not because he’s withholding from you. It’s because he has something better for you. We need to find joy and fulfillment in the things God has given us, not in the things he’s prohibited from us. Trust that the prohibitions are for your greater good, and walk away when you hear a serpent talking.

apple juice, everything we need, jesus is king, kanye