Creation
and the Fall
By
Stephen Terry
Commentary
for the February 9, 2013 Sabbath School Lesson
“but
each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and
enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when
it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” James 1:14-15, NIV
Perhaps the story of mankind’s fall into sin is another
aspect of creation. If nothing else, it certainly marks the creation of drama.
The protagonist, Eve, is confronted by the antagonist, the serpent, and chooses
to cast her lot with this nemesis. Then if that is not enough, she entices,
Adam, her paramour to join this gang of anarchists. Is the piece of fruit
significant? Probably, it is not. It may only be a stage prop for the playwright
to hang the story on. While so many have focused so much attention on the
fruit, seeing some sort of intrinsic evil in that single piece of produce, any
prop would have performed equally well for progressing the story to its
conclusion.
Some might wonder whether this play was predestined to
produce the outcome it did. The writer of Genesis, chapter one, identifies God
as the source of light, interjecting it into the darkness of the earth. This is
parallel to the revelation of the nature of Jesus found in the Gospel of John,
chapter one. However, the denouement of the sacred library, the Bible, has the
righteous living in a perfect world where there is no darkness, only the light
of God. It further states that the Sun and Moon are not needed as a result.[i] If perfection is defined
as no darkness, sun, or moon, then wouldn’t that mean that the world as created
was less than perfect? Perhaps we should not look behind us for a utopian
blueprint, but instead we should be looking forward to that day of promise.
Maybe creation itself was as much about an Edenic choosing as the tree in the
midst of the garden ever was. For it was in the very first week that the author
sets the stage for the ultimate choice between darkness and light. The choice
metaphorically may not be between eating or not eating a piece of fruit, but
between light and darkness.[ii] That choice was not
created in the Garden of Eden but from the very first day of Creation. Perhaps
Creation was never meant to be a scientific exposition on origins, but was
instead intended to be more of a legal brief outlining the criminal behavior of
the defendants, mankind.
The case could be made that from the very beginning,
every effort was made to provide opportunity for choice between light and
darkness, and mankind chose darkness. Good and evil were present from that
beginning, the tree in the midst of the garden notwithstanding. Light is good
and darkness is evil the Bible tells us.[iii] So God himself, who made
darkness a part of the creation, may have purposely introduced evil into the
world. This is also supported by the verses in Revelation, chapter twelve, that
tell us that the Devil, whom, many have identified as the founder of evil,[iv] was “cast out into the
earth.”[v] Who cast him out? God did,
of course. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, whether metaphorical or
literal, did not bring evil to mankind. It appears it was already here.
Some, who opt for a literal tree and an innocent and
pure creation, have suggested that evil was only allowed in the vicinity of the
tree and the rest of the world remained pure. It that is the case, it must have
been a very big tree indeed. For not only was the serpent, the Devil, cast into
the earth, but one third of the angels with him. If we take some numbers for
angels from the Bible and multiply them out, one third of the angels could
easily amount to well over 50 million of them.[vi] Mankind was surrounded by
choice. He could choose the light and trust God, or he could choose the darkness
and all that came with it. The fact that the Bible tells us that God placed
mankind in the Garden of Eden where the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was,
even if it is taken metaphorically, indicates that God had no intention of
allowing man to escape this choice without committing to either darkness or
light. Light would not be allowed to be a default position. A choice must be
made.
That this was a tree of knowledge might imply that this
was a choice made without knowledge.[vii] If so, it was no doubt a
surprise to Adam and Eve that so many dire things happened after they chose
darkness. First and foremost, once the choice was made, the Garden of Eden was
no longer necessary, it was taken away.[viii] The lovely garden that
God had planted was to be replaced with one man must scrabble from the earth.[ix] Eve was to bear children,
in pain per the Bible.[x] However, there is no
indication from the Bible that she ever gave birth otherwise. One might think
that child birth itself was the curse in the absence of any prior experience.
But would God have commanded them to “multiply”[xi] if they did not have the
ability to do so? The biblical account gets a bit murky on this issue, as the
command to “multiply” was given on the sixth day of creation, yet there is no
possibility for man to comply until he has a woman. The chapter one account
says God created both male and female, apparently on the sixth day. Yet, per
the chapter two account, Eve does not appear to have been created until after
man was put in Eden and had named all the animals. Furthermore, Eve’s creation
is a very special event, unique from Adam’s. One almost gets the feeling of
“Oops! We messed up! We told Adam to multiply but we forgot to make it
possible. We better create a woman!”
In any event, oversight or not, procreation would not
have been possible without both genders. Therefore, if procreation were not
possible until after mankind chose his moral direction, then Eve’s creation
could have been an anticipation of the choice. Then as our Mormon friends
assert, mankind’s fall would have been expected, maybe even required.[xii] This, however, may be
nothing more than speculative fancy based on a literal understanding of the
events and their sequence in Genesis, albeit from a non-traditional
perspective. We can only speculate that procreation was possible before the
encounter with the serpent based on the command to “multiply” being
ante-Edenic.
To refer back to my previous commentary on this choice making
in the paradigm of the morality play, the “knowledge of good and evil” may
simply be referring to a relativistic morality based on an implicit trust in
human knowledge as a foundation of understanding to determine the appropriate
moral direction in every circumstance. Otherwise we might choose an absolute
morality founded in an unquestioning trust in knowledge outside of our
understanding, divine knowledge, as a basis for moral direction. This latter
would be a “faith based” morality that places the onus for untoward results of
that morality on God rather than ourselves.
There are downsides to either understanding. Relativistic
morality, which relies on our understanding, cannot remove guilt because,
although we must make a moral choice, we almost never have all the facts we
need. Therefore, we will most likely make poorly informed decisions that will
produce negative outcomes, and we will bear the burden of the guilt that
results. On the other hand, an absolutist has the danger of becoming cavalier
about the results of his actions because, after all, he is only doing God’s
will and following divine orders. His dangerous presumption is that he can
always understand God’s will and has God under obligation to reveal His will in
every circumstance. This type of reasoning has given us the Crusades and the
Inquisition. Both were considered by most to be moral failings.
Perhaps God expects us to choose a middle ground
combining faith and reason. While it is true that He expects us to live by
faith,[xiii] God also tells us to
“reason.”[xiv]
Maybe we are to reason according to the ability He has given us, while trusting
ultimately to His guidance where doubts exist. Maybe the experience of
Christopher Columbus is instructive.
Christopher Columbus relied on reason when he set forth
with his three ships for the East Indies. Believing the world to be round, he felt he
could reach the far east by sailing west. But his calculations were wrong. The
journey was taking much longer than he expected based on his flawed reasoning.
But he continued to sail on in faith. Eventually, that faith was rewarded but
not as he expected. Instead of reaching the East Indies, he discovered the islands of the
Caribbean. In spite of not having the facts he needed about the true size of
the earth and what lay across the Atlantic Ocean, he sailed on in faith and
found that the doors opened to a whole new understanding of the world.
Maybe like Columbus, we can begin our journey into
morality based on the facts we can cobble together, knowing that they are most
probably flawed due to an incomplete perspective. Then we can set sail across
that sea of moral ambiguity with our sails filled with an unremitting faith in
the understanding that God will see us to a morality that is right where it
should be whether we knew it or not. New worlds of understanding may await us.
