When Desire Drifts Off Course
Setting the Stage
In Article 1, “Birth of Desire,” we explore God’s take on rightly ordered desire but now in Genesis 3-4, humanity’s desire drifts off course. The text presents Adam and Eve, humanity’s representatives, in a garden designed to enjoy abundance and relationship. Their desires pointed in the right direction: a desire for God, for one another, and for the goodness of creation. Yet the introduction of the serpent and the subsequent act of disobedience illustrate how desire can go off the rails, misaligned with the relational order God intended.
A Subtle Shift
Furthermore, notice the effect of a subtle change in direction: the story doesn’t describe desire as defective from the outset. Instead, desire becomes a competition; wanting self-reliance and control apart from God’s oath ordering. Before long, we watch this turn trigger fear, shame, and alienation. These are the first fractures in human relationships and in humanity’s relationship with God.
Once again I draw our attention to the Hebrew perspective. From that understanding, moral action is a choice of allegiance, not only an emotion, instinct or feeling. Even when Adam and Eve experienced emotions like fear (and feeling like they were in danger or under threat from an angry God) or shame (feeling like there was something wrong with them), God holds them to account. Even though their desire is misdirected, that doesn’t override their agency.
On the other hand, this is a clear contrast with many modern Western readings, which often interpret desire primarily through psychological or emotional frameworks. Modern Western thought sees desires as drivers; emotions to be managed rather than choices to be discerned and aligned with God’s intention.
Now let’s again step into the world of Genesis.
A Counter-Narrative to the Ancient World
As we enter Genesis 3-4, we need to remember that Israel told its stories in a world already filled with stories. Across the ancient Near East – from Mesopotamia to Anatolia (western Asian part of Turkey) to Egypt, creation stories and ancestral epics spoke about gods as unpredictable, competitive, easily provoked, and unmoved by human welfare. After all, humanity existed to serve the needs, appetites of the gods and mitigate their mood swings. Most ANE myths shared a similar view of the world – the world is built upon competition. Competition among gods and among humans. Ultimately, the cosmic order is held together by a kind of edgy equilibrium that could easily kick off.
A Counter-Cultural Worldview
Genesis responds by not only offering a slightly improved version of the same worldview. Instead, it turns the ancient imagination on its head. God seems to like doing that!
In Genesis 1-2, we see a Creator that doesn’t compete. God blesses. God gives. God speaks life without needing praise or obedience motivated by fear. Desire in Genesis isn’t divine hunger demanding appeasement; it is divine generosity drawing creation into fullness. Talk about counter-cultural!
Furthermore, Genesis 3–4 presses the story deeper. It doesn’t explain human brokenness by blaming the whims of the gods or locating conflict in the divine realm. Instead, it turns the spotlight toward the human heart – its longings, its suspicions, and its shifting allegiances.
Therefore, Genesis doesn’t offer a philosophical explanation for the existence of evil so much as a relational account of how it enters human experience. Evil isn’t the creation of an unloving God. Rather, it’s the tragic consequence of misdirected desire, when trust gives way to suspicion and relational faithfulness gives way to self-protective grasping.
In Hebrew anthropology, desire itself isn’t sinful; it’s directional. What matters is the allegiance it chooses. God doesn’t coerce your allegiance, yet neither are we pictured as helplessly depraved. The story infers real agency. In other words, this is the capacity to lean toward God in trust or to turn away in self-reliance – and it’s within that turning that distortion takes root. Ultimately, Genesis tells a radically different story. Distorted desire, not cosmic conflict, fractures the world.
Stepping into a Different Study of What Makes Us Human
Before looking at the text, there’s a huge barrier we need to try and get past – a wall of interpretation. The Hebrew study of what makes us human (anthropology) is relational, not psychological.
As modern Western readers, we almost default to categories like:
- Feelings
- Inner drives
- Self-actualization
- Internal conflict
- Trauma responses (fight – flight – freeze).
I don’t diminish these real and important frameworks, but they’re not the frameworks used in Genesis, nor as we will see in future articles, anywhere in the biblical story.
Hebrew Understanding: What it Means to Be Human
Instead of seeing individuals as self-contained storage units, Ancient Hebrews understood people as relational beings whose identity is formed by attention, attachment, loyalty, covenant belonging, and mutual alignment. Desire isn’t an inner sense or a romantic or loving feeling but an action; it’s a direction of devotion; a relational movement. You desire whom you’re attached to; what you’re turned toward; where you place your trust and allegiance. Hard to wrap your mind around right?
This is what Genesis 3-5 tells us:
- You can aim your desire, as well as redirect your desire.
- Furthermore, you can disarm your desire, and ultimately, misdirect your desire.
- This means you can betray your relationships.
Think about that. Through this lens, the serpent’s strategy and God’s warning to Cain suddenly becomes clearer – and much more profound.
The Serpent and the Seed of Suspicion (Genesis 3)
The serpent doesn’t play on Eve’s emotions. It casts doubt on relational trust. Its power play isn’t to offer pleasure or power; instead it plants a seed of suspicion in how Eve understands God:
“Did God really say…?”
“You won’t die at all…”
“God knows…”
See the serpent re-frame God as withholding, restricting, protecting His interests; looks more like the competing gods of surrounding cultures. This re-frame is destructive because it redirects the flow of desire away from God’s generosity toward a posture of self-preservation and grasping.
The woman saw that the tree was good to eat from and that it was an object of longing for the eyes, and the tree was desirable for giving insight. Genesis 3:6 – John Goldingay Translation
How Desire Went Off the Rails
Nothing in that verse tells us what broke desire in the world. In itself, that desire is good. What broke the world was redirecting the desire away from God – from trust to worrying that God was holding out on them.
Notice the subtle move:
- Perception shifts from God’s abundance to fear of missing out.
- Desire moves from relational intimacy self-managed security.
- Action pivots from shared obedience to individual grasping.
- Relationship Fractures – with God, with others, with creation.
Hear this. Humanity’s representatives didn’t just “break a rule.” This is desire mis-aimed, desire turned against itself. Look what happens, what always happens. Distorted desire always produces hiding, fear, blame, distance and self-justification.
Modern readers can easily miss this but Israel’s first hearers recognized the pattern immediately. In their world, trust determines survival. Suspicion corrodes bonds. Community life can unravel really fast when desire slips from mutuality into self-interest. Genesis 3 names this with captivating clarity.
When Desire Crosses Over to the Dark Side (Genesis 4)
If Genesis 3 shows us what it’s like when desire turns toward ourselves, Genesis 4 shows us what it’s like when desire is explosive. Cain’s story isn’t just a tale about anger but a revelation of how distorted desire evolves. Here’s the process:
Cain compares himself to Abel > Cain interprets God’s love through a lens of rivalry, not relationship > Cain’s face falls (a Hebrew expression for relational withdrawal) > Cain’s desire grows into envy, resentment, and violence.
How does God respond to Cain’s becoming enraged, going off in a huff and stonewalling God? Instead of condemnation, God responds with remarkable insight into human desire:
“If you do what’s good, there’ll be honoring, won’t there? But if you don’t do what’s good, wrongdoing is crouching at the entrance. Towards you will be its desire, but you – you’re to rule over it.”
Desire As Force, Not Emotion
Here’s another place where our modern, Western instincts misread the text. We hear that word “desire” as an emotion. Hebrews hear it as a force of attraction, like the pull of opposite magnetic forces – pulling together in a direction of loyalty and attachment.
God’s warning isn’t psychological advice for Cain to “look inside himself.” Instead it’s a relational requisition; a bit like the requisition form you get when your doctor wants blood work done:
- Cain, you stand at a crossroads of allegiance.
- One path leads back into mutuality and a right relationship.
- The other leads toward rivalry and rupture.
- You have agency. Choose how to align your attachment.
The image of desire “crouching” is very powerful. The verb conjures up the image of a predator lying low, ready to pounce. Cain experiences burning anger but not fear. He didn’t feel under threat or in danger but his desire now moves in a direction that will consume his relationships if he gives into it.
Cain tragically misreads God’s words through the related rivalry framework the serpent introduced in Eden. As the story unfolds, he doesn’t resist the gravitational pull. Cain steps into envy’s orbit and is carried all the way into murdering his brother.
This is the bold claim in Genesis: violence emerges when desire is severed from trust and turned toward self and rivalry.
Why This Still Feels Foreign to Us
Many modern readers struggle with Genesis 3-4 because we default to describing desire as almost entirely internal and individual. Most people imagine making a moral choice is like some inner drama of an isolated inner self – like a negotiator (as in the “Ransom” TV series on Netflix), we try to navigate impulses, weigh consequences, listen to the conscience and manage emotions.
As difficult as it is to wrap our minds around, the ancient biblical writers didn’t see a fragmented mind/body human being; they saw a psycho-somatic unity. When God addresses a person, He addresses the whole person – body, mind and will as a single, integrated self.
But to the Hebrew understanding of what it means to be human, moral choice is is grounded in relationship:
- Which voice do you trust?
- Which relationship shapes you?
- Whose word has the last say?
- To whom are you positioned toward – God, neighbour, self, or rivalry?
This might sound strange but Adam and Eve’s actions aren’t reduced to the psychology of temptation. Likewise, Cain’s choices aren’t explained simply because he failed anger management 101. Distorted desire is a breakdown in the alignment of our relationships. And the Bible insists this breakdown lies beneath the fractures of the world.
Odd how Genesis doesn’t blame the serpent for Cain’s act. Instead it blames misdirected desire. It blames mistrust. It blames the turn toward self. Ultimately, from Israel’s earliest storytelling, the human problem isn’t that we have flawed emotions but we have disordered allegiances.
The Ongoing Echo: Desire in Two Movements
Genesis 3-4 sets in motion a theme that echoes through Scripture:
1. Desire flows outward – positioning oneself toward God and neighbour which leads to life, trust, togetherness, and shared flourishing.
2. Desire turns self-ward – towards a competitive posture of grasping and closed hands which leads to fear, blame, domination, and violence.
This is the filter through which the entire biblical story interprets human behaviour. It’s also the framework Jesus reclaims when he speaks of loving God and others as ourselves as the deepest repositioning of the human heart.
Genesis 3-4 isn’t a primitive fairy tale, nor is it a scientific diagnosis of human emotion and behavior. However, it is a profoundly perceptive mapping of the human condition – written in a relational language that’s fundamentally different from our Western psychological vocabulary, yet keenly relevant to our world of suspicion, rivalry, and anxious self-protection.
Now, the stage is set for our next act, where distorted desire becomes collective. Next time we see where human wanting outgrows human wisdom and fills the world with confusion and violence.