Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden is SUCH a familiar Sunday School lesson that it will have you pulling your hair out.
From the moment you realize you are teaching it you can just imagine the moment the kids realize they know the entire story and completely check out on you.
Yeah!! :/
So here’s a fun way to start…some clever one-liners, and a video object lesson to jazz up the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden just a bit!
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden Introduction / Activity:
Today we are going to talk about a story that many of you already know..the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. So I want your help in telling the story.
Who brought their Bibles?
If you have your Bible find Genesis chapter 1, it’s at the very beginning of your Bible.
Here’s what we are going to do. I want you to find verses in Genesis 1 that talk about what God made. For instance one verse in Genesis says, “And God said let there be light, and there was light.” When you’ve found a verse that talks about God making something stand up and I’ll choose some people to read for us.
(Read verses)
Very good. So at the end of 5 days, God had made a beautiful world. There were trees, and flowers, fish, and whales, elephants and lions.
Then on day 6 God made Adam from the dust of the ground. And when God made Adam do you remember where he put him? Right, he put him in the most amazing Garden you could ever imagine, The Garden of Eden.
Genesis also tells us about what was in the Garden:
The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. Gen. 2:9aSo this Garden of Eden had the most beautiful trees and those trees were full of good food!
Imagine a food court…
Imagine what it was like to be Adam…maybe it was something like this:
Imagine yourself in the middle of the food court at a mall. You are surrounded by all your favorite restaurants. What if you, like Adam, could choose whatever you wanted to eat? You could go to any restaurant you wanted and choose whatever you wanted to eat.
What do you think you would choose to eat? Adam is in the middle of the world’s most amazing Garden, and has all of the best food to choose from! How cool would that be!
Then God gave Adam a rule for living in the garden:
And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” Gen 2:16-17So Adam could eat of every tree except for the one in the middle, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As long as Adam didn’t eat from that tree everything would be good.
Soon after this Adam did what I bet many of you like to do. He went to sleep! As Adam slept God took one of his ribs and made the very first woman, and her name was …?
Eve! Correct!
Did God REALLY say…?
And then this is where the problem starts.
Genesis tells us about a snake in the beginning of Chapter 3, listen to this:
Now the serpent (or snake) was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
Gen. 3:1
So the snake sees Eve walking around the Garden one day and stops to ask her a question… By the way, can you imagine if a snake talked to you? I think I’d be pretty freaked out! But the snake talks to Eve and asks her if she was SURE of God’s rules.
“Did God REALLY say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” Satan wants to see if Eve remembers God’s rules.
I bet you’ve heard this kind of thing before.
Maybe your mom tells you, “I don’t want you to look at the Christmas presents under the tree until it’s time to open them.” You nod your head yes and continue on with your day. Then one evening your mom isn’t around and you see the Christmas presents just sitting there. And you think to yourself,
“Did Mom REALLY say I couldn’t look at ANY of the presents? Just one little peek won’t hurt!” Or maybe you are playing outside and you get pretty close to the street and your Dad says, Don’t play in the street, you need to stay on our lawn. You nod your head, but after your Dad disappears you think to yourself, “Did Dad REALLY say I couldn’t play in the street AT ALL? Just a few minutes won’t hurt!”
Even though we might not be talking to a snake about eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil we still have all been tempted to disobey.
So what does Eve do?
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ” Gen. 2:2-3Eve passes the test! She tells Satan exactly what God said.
Is God looking out for you?
But Satan, the serpent, has one more question for her:
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Gen. 2:4-5Satan suggests that God isn’t actually looking out for Eve. Satan tells Eve that God is worried. He says if Eve eats the fruit from this tree she is going to become really smart and know good from evil. That will make her like God who also knows good from evil. And that will be a threat to God’s power. If Eve knows good and evil and God knows good and evil then Eve will become like God! And God doesn’t want His power threatened.
So Satan tells Eve the real reason God doesn’t want her to eat the fruit is because God knows it will threaten His power.
Now of course, we know better because who made the tree and the fruit to begin with? God! Right! And if you think about it, we know good from evil, but are we like God? No!
But Satan tries his best to trick Eve with this question. And I bet you’ve heard a similar one before.
Perhaps your mom has said, I don’t want you eating any more candy today. You’ve had enough. A few hours go by and you find yourself in the kitchen, alone, with the candy. You think to yourself, “Mom just doesn’t me to enjoy life! She doesn’t want me to have the good stuff like candy. I think Mom just wants it all for herself.”
Of course, we know that isn’t true, but we’ve all heard that little voice in our head before.
So Eve hears Satan talking and she begins to reevaluate,
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom Gen. 2:6aEve looks at the tree, and sees that the food on it looks really good. She sees how beautiful the tree is, and thinks about how much smarter and wiser she could become…
So she eats it, and then gives some to Adam, and he eats it.
Here’s how we all die when we sin:
Do you remember what God had said would happen if Adam and Eve ate from that tree?
Right, God said they would die. So did Adam and Eve fall over dead as soon as they took a bite?
No.
So was God lying?
No.
Here’s what was going on.
As long as we have a relationship with God, as long as we are connected to God, we have access to Heaven. We know that when we die we will go to Heaven to be with God and live forever, and never die.
The problem is, when we sin, or do bad things, we break our connection to God.
And if we don’t have a connection to, or a a relationship with God when we die where do we go?
Hell, correct. And what is Hell, but the worst kind of death?
So the instant we do something wrong, we break our connection to God and are headed for Hell, or death.
Like Adam and Eve, as soon as we sin, we die because we are now doomed to Hell.
But the story doesn’t end there.
We can fix our relationship with God, by asking Jesus to save us. That’s why we use the words “save us” We ask Jesus to save us from the bad things we’ve done, and from Hell. We ask Him to repair our relationship with God and allow us to go to Heaven when we die.
God made us to be in a relationship with Him, and when we admit that we have sinned and ask Jesus to forgive us, we fix our relationship with God and guarantee that when we die we will go to heaven!
So just like Adam and Eve’ we’ve all done wrong. But just like Adam and Eve, God is there to rescue us, if we just ask.
Object Lesson:
YouTube video explanation:
We start off life perfectly connected to God.
(Show the rope)
Our relationship with God is perfect and nothing is in the way.
But the problem is, we do bad things. We sin. We tell a lie. We take something that isn’t ours. We hit someone. We go where we aren’t supposed to.
This causes us our relationship with God to break.
(Cut the rope)
Because we are no longer connected to God we are separated from Him and on our way to Hell when we die. We can no longer go to Heaven because we have done what we aren’t supposed to.
We try to fix it.
(Tie ropes together)
But our relationship is still broken.
But God offers us a way to fix it.
(Put hand over knot in the rope and slowing begin removing knot as you talk)
If we ask Jesus to forgive us of the bad stuff we’ve done (sin) and come into our heart and save us our relationship with Him can be fixed. We now have access to God and a way to get to Heaven when we die.
Sin breaks our connection to God, but asking Jesus to save us fixes it.
