A genius of the Old Testament is how it enables us to extract many lessons from short accounts that often comprise of only a single paragraph or two. Let’s consider the Adam and Eve narrative for example. Follow along as I imagine that I am the first man on earth. I wake up in a protected garden and begin to wonder: “Who am I? What am I? Why am I here? After a short period of time, I notice that I have a pain in my belly. “It hurts.” Just then, a transcendent voice speaks and says, “You see all those plants and trees? They are there for you to eat.” I don’t know what eat means, but I grab one of the round things and begin experimenting. After I put it in my mouth and swallow, I begin to feel better. “That was great,” I think. The transcendent voice speaks again. “Make sure you don’t eat from that one tree over there. It will open your eyes to know the difference between good and evil. In the day that you eat from it, to die you will die!” I wonder. What is good? What is evil? What is die? I don’t understand. I see creatures running about, and it is fun to describe them with names appropriate to the way they behave. Then, the transcendent voice speaks again. “Be fruitful and multiply.” I wonder again. How do I multiply? What is multiply? I notice that the creatures are in pairs, enabling them to produce offspring. But I’m alone. I don’t have a pair. A day later after sleeping, I wake up and my side hurts. Lo and behold, another one like me is standing right in front. How did this happen? She must have come from the transcendent voice. Wow! She has bones and flesh, just like me. This is great! I call her woman. Maybe we can multiply now. After a time, the serpent (that’s what I named him) is crawling on the branches of the forbidden tree that the transcendent voice spoke about. He is even eating the fruit. We never thought much about it before, but now we begin to. The woman thinks: “We shouldn’t even touch the tree or its fruit. This extra rule will surely keep us from temptation.” Nevertheless, she looks closely and sees that the fruit on the tree looks really nice and it is good for food. She thinks: “If we eat of it, we will learn about good and evil, whatever that is. Maybe we’ll be able to understand all of the mysteries of this place. Eventually, we might even know as much as the transcendent voice. But we will die, whatever that means. Maybe we won’t; the serpent seems to be okay.” So, the woman eats and she changes. She appears to be so smart now, and I feel so inferior. Nothing bad happened to her. Nothing happened to the serpent. I want to be smart like her. I eat too and everything seems okay. But then, shortly after this we see one of the animals lying still on the ground. We check it out. It doesn’t move. Oh! This is what die means. We are going to die! This is not good; I don’t want to die. As we are thinking about things, we hear a wind blowing. We hide. We don’t want to die like that animal. The transcendent voice will probably kill us. We cover ourselves and hope the voice won’t know. Everything changes from this point. We realize that we are mortal; we will die. Before this we didn’t understand time; now we do. It is now ever before us. Every moment is precious. And eventually, we certainly will die. How does this narrative relate to us now in the 21st century? The Genesis account applies to everyone. When a child is born, they don’t understand good; they don’t recognize evil; they don’t know die. They don’t even perceive the concept of time. But they will. At some point they will realize that they can scream to force their parents to give them something. They’ll see that as they can be hurt, so they can inflict hurt. They can choose to be generous or they can decide to be stingy. A moral code begins to form as they mature. Eventually, the knowledge of death and sin crouch at the door. Time becomes important now as they become mortal. The Genesis account teaches that we are all Adam; we are all Eve. This means that there are questions that each of us must consider. How do we spend our time here while we are alive? Do we seek to be good, or do we walk a path towards evil? Do we love others, or do we use them and in some cases seek to destroy them? Most of all, what happens after we die? This last question is too much to consider here; it deserves another post of its own. For now, let’s turn back to the Adam and Eve account. Christian debate about this flared up at the time of Augustine and Pelagius. It was the 4th century after Christ when Pelagius proposed that humanity was basically good. If true, this means that it is possible for a person to exercise their free will to always choose the good and therefore live a sinless life. Taken to the extreme, this hypothesis asserts that the sacrifice of Jesus was not universally necessary. Some people can actually earn their place in the new Heaven and Earth by their own goodness. Naturally, Augustine and the church fiercely pushed back, and perhaps overreacted. They postulated that Adam’s sin carried with it far more than the immanence of death. He and all of his descendants lost their ability to freely choose to do good. Human nature became irredeemably evil. In other words, people without God’s grace are totally depraved. Unfortunately, the strong push-back quickly brings with it a series of difficult theological issues. If we all inherit a fallen nature, didn’t Jesus also? After all, his mother Mary was a descendant of Adam, was she not? The only way I see around this problem is to embrace the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. By grace, Mary was kept pure and sinless. This is not the only philosophical issue; others emerge as well. If the sin nature transmits through the generations by inheritance, sexual procreation becomes suspect. This is why over the centuries, many religious leaders thought it a good thing to remain celibate. A third problem concerns children. If a child inherits an evil nature, they are guilty from birth, and even before. Therefore, when they die young, they deserve judgment. This premise seems harsh. Finally, doctrines of total depravity can easily cause believers to look down on those who are not. If we see others as totally depraved, it is not a big step to persecute and even kill them. I think we can concede that this in fact happened all too often in history. When I read of past atrocities, I sometimes ponder the words of Jesus: “Whoever kills you will think they offer service to God.” The question here is: “who is the you in the verse, and who are the they?” Rabbinic Judaism rejects the entire concept of original sin, as many denominations define it. Rabbis assert that children are born with a clean slate, completely innocent. They also believe that if a person falls short at certain times in life, sincere repentance will bring forgiveness. Finally, they stress that sexuality is a gift from God. Any effort to downplay having a family directly violates God’s first command to humanity: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” So how do we unravel these things? Proof texts don’t work. David tells us in Psalm 51 that in iniquity his mother conceived him. What iniquity was he talking about? Was she raped? Are there things in David’s life that we don’t know? We simply can’t draw rational conclusions. The Bible teaches principles, but often leaves out details that could help us fill in the blanks. Paul teaches in Romans 5 that sin came into the world through Adam. Who else could sin come from if Adam was first? There was simply no one else who we could blame. Paul’s statement says nothing about how sin propagates. What about the Deuteronomy speech given by Moses? Apparently, the Israelites did have the free will to choose to pursue good. For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. So, what do we do with all of this? I think it is easy to over analyze. When we do, we inevitably wrap ourselves into knots. Common sense is in order. I think we all can agree that there is lots of evil in the world. With all the temptations around us, a tendency to evil is the easy choice. Choosing to do good very often comes with a price. In some cases, this can result in ridicule, prison, and even death. I think most of us would agree that the bad we do travels much further than the good. A person may choose the good thing 99 times, and the bad thing once. Which will be remembered? Consider for example, a politician or celebrity that we don’t like. Are we aware of, or do we even remember any of the good things that he or she did in their life? Probably not! This is my conclusion. Who cares about how sin disseminates, or whether Adam is to blame? We live now. We need the example of Jesus and the Holy Spirit to help us be who we should be. We are each accountable for our own actions. Going back to the fall and Adam’s sin. Skeptics often ask: “Why did God create a test for Adam and Eve that he knew they would fail, and then punish them for it?” Perhaps that wasn’t the case at all. There is an ancient Jewish story based on the book of Micah 2:12-13 that maybe can shed some light. The Lord was wondering how he could know which of His servants serve Him out of fear and which of them serve Him out of love. He devised a method that would discover this knowledge. He built a room four by four, a four-square room with only one small peep hole of four by four spans. The Lord put all His servants into this room. Those servants who served Him out of fear stood in that “four by four” room and said, “If the Lord had wanted us to break out of this room, he would not have built it and put us into it.” The servants who loved the Lord said, “We want to break out of this room and join the Lord in the outside in the wide-open spaces.” However, the little peep hole was too small, and they had to make themselves suffer and lose much weight to be able to fit through the small peep hole in the door and join the Lord in the wide-open spaces. They loved the Lord so much that they could not stay closed in the “four by four” room even knowing that the Lord had built it and placed them there. They wanted to “break out” by force and violence from the “four by four” room and join the Lord who was sitting on His throne in the wide-open spaces. Perhaps Adam and Eve were destined to eat from the tree. They needed to come to know and experience both Good and Evil. They needed to struggle with the temptations that followed. They were never meant to be innocent children for eternity. They were designed to grow up and mature. This is true of all of us today as well, is it not? It was all part of God’s plan from the beginning, both for them and for us. Each one of us repeat the experience of the first pair. Thanks for listening, Dan Harvey, author of Wrestling with Faith, Second Look Now
THIS is Brilliant, Dan, you are truly gifted with insight and wisdom, thanks! i LOVE it
Thanks for letting me know this is here, Dan.
I enjoyed the read.