Crisis
in Eden
Stephen
Terry
Commentary
for the January 9, 2016 Sabbath School Lesson
“But
if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this
day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the
Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as
for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15, NIV
Between 1908 and 1927 Henry Ford produced over 15
million Model T Fords. While other cars had been made prior to this by other
inventors, his invention of assembly line production made the car easy to
produce and affordable for the middle class.[i] While full of quirks we no
longer deal with in our modern automobiles, it put a generation of Americans on
wheels and made the hobby of automobile touring available for the common man
and woman.
Of course in order to meet the demand and price point
for the consumer, some compromises were made. As Ford himself famously quipped,
“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is
black.”[ii] This would perhaps not
have been so humorous had it not been that mankind is proverbially choosy and
values having the opportunity to choose colors when buying a car or a truck,
something commonly done today. Perhaps this harks back to our creation, for God
has filled the world with color and has given us the ability to see much of it.
It would have maybe been simpler to create a black and white world with “cookie-cutter”
people, plants and animals. But it says something about the character of God
that He did not. He wanted us to enjoy the diversity around us and among us. He
appears to have wanted our dear sisters to be able to choose between the red
dress and the blue one, and for our brothers to notice the difference.
Interestingly, when mankind chooses to turn away from
God, one of the things that often disappears first is this ability to choose.
For example, the notoriously atheistic Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union is
also associated with a gray drabness that is reflected in the architecture of
the era. Notwithstanding the monumental forms seen in some of these buildings, some
have felt the overall impression rather depressing. When we look at Nazi
Germany and its extreme nationalism, we also see abhorrence of artistic
diversity as expressed in modernity, perhaps seeing it as a challenge to
authoritarian demands for obedient conformity to an ideological ideal.[iii] How strange it is that
authoritarian regimes created by man are so opposed to the idea of choice and
diversity even though they come to exist in a world filled with both. Maybe
this tells us something of the nature of the cosmic struggle between good and
evil. Could it be that God in all His goodness wants us to have the ability to
choose, while Satan prefers to restrain our choices?
According to the biblical account, an essential part of
Creation was to include the element of choice. Whether one sees the tree in the
midst of the Garden of Eden as literal or metaphorical, it still boils down to
an illustration of the free will placed within the heart of every man, woman
and child. Like a person who buys a new car, we may choose to follow the
instructions the manufacturer kindly put in the manual for us, or we can choose
to ignore it and go our own way. If we choose the latter, the car may drive
fine for a while, but after a few missed oil changes and perhaps improper fuel,
the car will break down and leave us stranded. We may rail about how evil the
manufacturer was for allowing us to end up stranded by the side of the road,
but in the end, it comes down to our choice to follow the manual or not.
In the case of the tree in the garden, instruction was
given by our Creator that the tree was harmful. As with the car we could have
chosen to follow those instructions, but we decided we knew better and chose
the more perverse option. Yes, the serpent was there and helped prod us, but in
the end, the choice was ours. Interestingly, the woman added some to the instructions
God gave to the man.[iv]
She stated that she was not allowed to touch the fruit.[v] Since the Bible does not in
the original account say that God spoke to the woman about this, I cannot help
but wonder if some embellishment was added when Adam passed on the instructions
to Eve. To this day, when we are worried about what the outcome might be if a
child is allowed near something, we tell them not to even touch the item.
Surely, this is only speculation, but how typically human it would be for Adam to
do that.
One might wonder why she would even bring up the idea of
touching the fruit when speaking to the serpent. That detail might seem
irrelevant if she wasn’t supposed to eat it anyway. Perhaps if she saw the
snake touching the fruit, it brought to her remembrance that she had heard something
about that. Or maybe she simply indirectly intended to reprimand the snake for
its impertinence in touching the fruit or the tree. But in doing so she may
have been faced with a cognitive dissonance in hearing the snake actually
speaking to her. As far as we know, animals did not have that ability. How
could this be? The serpent was telling her that the fruit had special
properties. Could that be the reason? Man had been given rule over the rest of
the created animals.[vi]
Yet this snake was speaking to her apparently as an equal. If the fruit did
that, could it, as the reptile suggested, elevate her to equality with God?
One can follow the logic that may have led her to
partake of the fruit, but the problem with logic is that it often has little to
do with faith. Logic is based on perception, but faith may be placed in those
things that are unseen.[vii] God may be the ultimate
unseen, not because He does not exist, but because human perception is not
equal to the task of visualizing the infinite. I cannot even picture the end of
an infinite number line, let alone a God who is far from linear and transcends
every moment of space and time. When confronted with such a being, especially
one that requests something of me, I am left with two choices. I may act as
though such a being does not exist or is irrelevant and direct my own path
accordingly, or I can inform my choices based on what I understand from
perceptions of a Being that exceeds my own perceptions by infinite orders of
magnitude.
Even apart from questions of faith in God’s existence,
something Eve never questioned, I cannot help but ask why she would eat the
fruit? If my neighbor came to me and said don’t eat the berries off my bush,
they are poison, would any normal person rush over and start eating the
berries, even if someone else told them it was OK? So why would Eve do this,
except that she chose to trust the serpent. In our cynical age, we tell
ourselves that we would never do that. But we might consider for a moment that
just like the angels of heaven before Lucifer’s rebellion, Adam and Eve may
have never been lied to before. In such a naïve state, they may have had no
reason to doubt what the serpent had said.
How do they resolve the paradox of believing that two,
God and the serpent, profess to both be telling the truth but are not in
agreement? The answer may seem obvious to us with the advantage of 20/20
hindsight, but perhaps we should remember that prior to this, Adam and Eve
apparently did not have a knowledge of good and evil. It may even be possible
that the fruit is not what magically endowed them with insight, but rather the
experience of being lied to and acting on that lie may have given them wisdom,
even though they later regretted the experience. Even today, if someone tells
us something and we choose to believe someone else instead, relationships can
be damaged, sometimes irreparably. In some small way, this may help us to
understand the hurt that God must have felt when his creation chose to believe
a lie rather than come to Him about the serpent’s claims.
In spite of that, God continues to seek a relationship
with His creation. He has gone to great lengths to make that possible, even sending
Jesus to die on a cross and suffer the separation of death that was our lot,
not His. Because of that we do not have to endure an eternal separation from
our loving Creator. We can begin healing what was broken in Eden, today. We
need only take a moment to ask God to make that reconciliation real in our
lives. We can choose to start believing God instead of the lies that constantly
assault us. We can choose to walk away from our knowledge of evil and seek the
peace that lasts for eternity. God is only waiting to hear our longing cry, and
like any loving parent, He will come to us. Even so, Lord, come.
