The Plan

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:4-5)

Deceiving Adam and Eve on this matter was not a difficult task. They, tragically, had no way of knowing and thereby appreciating through experience, that they were already as close to ‘like God’ as they could ever hope to be. Only the stark reality of suddenly becoming less ‘like God’ could bring such a realization to the forefront. And ‘naked’ is probably a painfully accurate description of what they must have instantly felt in that moment. Imagine appearing in a crowded shopping mall naked. Wouldn’t we instantly experience horror, shame, guilt, and vulnerability. Covering ourselves would be our instinctive urge. Our response would be, in part, through experience. Adam and Eve knew no sin until that moment, and the instant change in their spirit must have been truly horrifying.

If the tempter had been honest, he should have said, “You will become like me, knowing good and evil.” God might know of sin, but God is pure love, light and goodness. There is no sin in Him. The tempter apparently knew God well enough to successfully plant doubt in the mind of Eve through the half-truthful assurance that, “You will not surely die.” My suspicion is that the tempter offered this assurance with a mixed attitude of resentment and envy based on God’s obvious love for Adam and Eve.

Church doctrine, over the decades, has portrayed this as a tragic event ‘The Fall’ with catastrophic consequences for all mankind. And in a sense, Adam and Eve did experience a tragic form of death, for the spiritual oneness they had known with God was now compromised. But through Old Testament stories and characters, and the teachings of Jesus and The Apostles in The New Testament, a softer more endearing assessment of what happened through Adam and Eve can emerge.

One of the gems of Old Testament scripture in my mind and heart is that all the characters we find there are pictures of us, and the stories are our stories. Would we have been deceived by the serpent? Probably so. Could we have been Cain or Abel? It is possible. Do we have a faith in God’s word like Abraham? Some of us do. Do we wrestle, in a sense, with God like Jacob (Israel)? More than we know. Do we experience the staggering complicated highs and lows of the life of David and his family? David’s life is in fact our life.

What the tempter did not and could not possibly understand is that everything that occurs is part of God’s greater plan. God, being omniscient, knew that by creating us as free-willed creatures it was merely a matter of time before we would falter. Free willed humans are destined to experience failures and errors in judgement.

God knew therefore, from the very beginning of our creation, that the only way we could ever fully comprehend the depth and breadth of His love for us was through first permitting us to become well acquainted with all the pain and sorrow that sin produces. Through Abraham we gain a sense of God’s grief in sacrificing his only beloved son. And through Isaac we gain a sense of the fear and suffering that can come with obedience. Isaac was a young man and could have easily fled from his father, but he obediently and faithfully carried the wood for his own sacrifice up the mountain, just as Jesus carried his cross to Golgotha.

John is clear that The Son (pre-incarnate Jesus) was with God from the very beginning of creation. Adam and Eve are then the beginning of a long spiritual journey, exemplified by all the Bible’s characters and stories, that all of us must take. It begins with the Lord (pre-incarnate Jesus) calling out to us in the garden, “Where are you,” and ends as we pause at the foot of the cross, where Jesus was ‘lifted up,’ like the serpent in the wilderness, so we could live to become reconciled children of God Our Father. One might therefore say that the tempter quite unwittingly offered Eve a prophetic eternal spiritual half-truth in assuring Eve,

“You will not surely die.”