To be one with God, to understand the reasons you were created and to experience the Creator . . . the joy I'm describing here of being able to talk with God in "the cool of the day" rather than having to undergo the pain and torture of allowing ourselves to be conformed to his likeness from a state that is less than holy, this joy is not imaginable to anyone in a society whose postmodern cultural notions and technologies have made it possible for human beings to ignore this fundamental quest for truth and meaning within their souls.
The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life--and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel."
Whether or not the "serpent" in the minds of the ancient culture that heard these words symbolized an actual animal or something more sinister, it is clear that human beings and animals began to exist in competition with each other at this point. Serpents do, after all, strike at the heels of human beings in order to defend their territory (and themselves), and human beings instinctually know that killing a serpent is simple--destroy the head, and the body dies. If there was a literal "serpent" in the Garden (which I doubt) talking with "Adam" and "Eve," it would not have originally been designed to slither along the ground.
I suspect, however, that the ancient Israelis (or at least the ones who finally wrote these scriptures down after reciting them for generations) understood the "serpent" to be a symbol for the evil "it" I spoke of in my previous post. If so, then at this point, it is important to highlight the fact that this evil, whatever it is, is a subject creature. The words "cursed are you above all cattle" equates this force (or "Satan") with everything we know to be created by God. Moreover, God's words to the effect that this "creature" will be doomed to crawl on its belly and eat the dust of the Earth place it firmly in a subject position to God, just like animals, plants, and humans.
This is an importnat point because, while institutional Christianity has almost given "the devil" a position of deity in popular culture, the Bible makes it clear that whatever he is, he is a creature just like we are. Later, in the New Testament, we will see that Christians--and indeed Christ himself--identify Satan as an angel who (along with his cohorts) denies the authority of God and instead attempts, through subjugation and terror of God's creation, to be a pseudo-god himself.
It is not, however, his fault that his plan for the Garden of Eden succeeded.
It is ours.
To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain you will bring forth children--yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."
This verse has become excessively controversial these days, and it is important to note 2 things:
1. Childbirth through the centuries has always been an arduous--indeed dangerous--process, and one that throughout much of human history came without the comforts of anesthetics, hospitals, or even sterilization. Women during the Middle Ages, for example, were often grateful for the option of becoming nuns, not because of their lack of desire for sex but because of a palpable (and plausible) fear that they would die in the process of bringing a child into the world. Again, within our genetic code, we seem to understand that this level of danger, pain, and terror associated with pregnancy and childbirth are not what should accompany the beauty of new life. (This inner sense is what has prompted the use of midwives, hospitals, and surgical wards over the past few centuries--the purpose of which is to make labor as "painless" as possible.)
2. As we see in the classic story of the girl who runs away with a man who catches her fancy, a woman's desire is for her husband, and (in a sense) her husband does rule over her. I do not mean this in a dogmatic sense--the husband being the head of the household--but rather in a more fundamental, essence-level context. As a result of the "fall," the very core of feminity itself changed in relation to masculinity.
This final aspect of God's "judgment" of Eve can be seen in the great wealth of literature on the problematic dynamics of sexual relations between men and women during the past 6000 years of human history. Divorce, homosexuality, and suspicion between males and females had their precursors in the bizarre sexual behaviors of the ancient civilizations (such as Babylon, Greece, and Rome) from which our own cultural matrix springs. Every man and every woman, it seems, has a "heartbreak" story--a reason to distrust and suspect the motives of the opposite sex--and these suspicions manifest themselves in almost every facet of human interactions between the sexes. Yes, a woman's desire will be for her husband, but that desire, by necessity, leads to pregnancy and childbirth, which are at once wondrous and terrifying for women--this dichotomy has bred a great many heartaches, divides, and focal points of hostility between men and women, a logical consequence of a "fall" in which the first man and woman found themselves at each other's throats when confronted by the presence of God.
Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it,' cursed is the ground because of you. In toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you--and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you will eat bread 'ill you return to the ground, because from it you were taken--for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
We often forget that these "judgments" spoken to Adam and Eve were actually designed to be methods of bringing them--and their descendants (this means "us")--in subjection to their Creator. For example, women--desiring husbands and enduring terrible pain in pregnancy and childbirth--are forced to trust in the Lord for two things: (1) that the husband who rules over them will be a good one, and (2) that their pregnancy will not end in death or a debilitating physical condition. Similarly, men (who have been "given" rule) must trust the Lord to bring about good produce as they apply their fortunes, sweat, and blood to the soil of the Earth in the name of feeding their families. God also pinpoints another reason for increasing (by magnitudes) the amount of work required to plant, raise, and harvest a crop--it is to remind us that, while we may pretend in our hearts to be gods, we are not far removed, both cosmically and genetically, from the soil we till.
I have said in previous posts that human beings are, genetically speaking, not far removed from the soil of the ground--in fact, the molecules that make up our cells are of the same "family" (carbon-based molecules) as the molecules and nutrients that inhabit the "dust of the Earth." It is a fact most unpleasant to our species that when human beings die, they decompose and (essentially) break down in form until they become indistinguishable with the soil in which they are often buried. The use of objects such as vaults and caskets to preserve the form of the dead simply slows this process--it does not prevent it. We understand--regardless of who we are or what we believe about God--that the mortality of human beings is the one aspect of our species in which we can never be "gods."
Now the man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.
This is the first point in the Bible at which one of the two human beings in the Garden are named. It is important here to note that "Adam," the name generally associated with the man, is not really a name--it is simply the Hebrew word for "human" and applies both to male and female members of the species. (Thus, we see the "rule" of men implied in this verse from Genesis 3--the man names his wife, just as he had spent time naming the animals in Genesis 2.)
The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.
It is significant here that "skin" is used to clothe "Adam and his wife." For the first time in human history, blood was shed between humans and animals--and animals were used, and destroyed, for humanity's needs. The enmity that has existed between humans and the other animated species of the Earth begins in this verse.
Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil--and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"--therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out--and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.
Two things to note here:
First, the "Us"--as we will see, it is used later in the book of Genesis in the context of the dividing of the human race into tribes and nations. If God is singular, how can He be referred to as "Us?"
Simple: The New Testament clearly outlines a Godhead that is Father/Son/Holy Spirit, or what we call the Trinity. God is one Person, but He is also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three distinct identities. The Hebrew Bible uses the word "Elohim" in Genesis 1:1 to refer to God, a word which is plural--yet the ancient culture in which the Bible was produced had the saying, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one." It is therefore not a contradiction for God (in the Hebrew Bible) to refer to Himself as both "Me" and "Us," and neither is it a contradiction for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to refer to each other in the New Testament as three distinct entities, even though they are understood to be the same God manifesting Himself in different ways.
Now for the harder concept: Why is humanity's acquisition of eternal life so dangerous in the eyes of God?
Remember the impulse for attaining the knowledge of good and evil in the first place--to be like God. The fruit of this tree was not taken with God's permission or consent--the action was simply a product of humanity's arrogant attempt to assert its powers of reason, deduction, and free will. In addition, the outgrowth of our knowledge of good and evil over the past 6000 years has been a plethora of depredations, tyrannies, and institutional matrixes, each more insane, destructive, and idiotic than the last.
What would the outgrowth of immortality--taken without God's permission or consent--be?
If the existence of fallen angels serves as any indication, it would make our species irredeemable. After all, the "fire reserved for the devil and his angels" in Matthew 25 is the only logical answer to an immortal creature's obstinate refusal to subject itself to the will of God--and if we were to adopt immortality ourselves without acknowledging our Creator's right to order our bodies, minds, and souls as He sees fit, we would in an instant earn the same fate. It is not our potential to harm or "rival" God that the Creator is concerned about here but rather our potential to harm each other. Immortality, in the wrong hands, can be abused to such a degree that humans would essentially have (in their minds) final authority over other humans, simply by obtaining a quality that their brethren lack. Unfortunately, our species seems heedless of this prospect of eternal desolation in its continued quest to prolong life by gaining power over the atom, electricity, and even the human genome itself.
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