The Garden of Eden is not history. The biblical Garden of Eden is a literary device that says to us something so important that insisting on a factual garden misses the point. The Garden of Eden is a message from the voice of God, a message that accurately summarizes who we are, it is our story and the story of every human being since the dawn of time. It is our sorted story since all of us have taken from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and bitten down hard on the forbidden apple. It is the story of our rebellion from God. The self centered failure to respect God has mutated to our DNA so that each of us was born in rebellion, it is who we are. As a result, even today, God asks each of us the timeless question … what is this that you have done?
Also in our DNA is our unease with this question, we recoil to hidden places to avoid the voice of God. Adam and Eve tried to hide in the bushes so as not to hear the voice but there was and is no hiding from the certainty of our situation nor of our moral culpability. Chapter three in Genesis is a tale of crime and punishment, it is our tale, so what is the crime? The crime is Godless selfish living in this God given moral world. Our world is now amoral because of the self destructive choices we inevitably and consistently make in the midst of the good. Prior to the apple there was no morality for all of creation was good, the world of plants and animals was good because there was no self centered behavior to excess within nature. Death was only about the survival of the fittest so there was no killing to excess as has been the forte of the people of the apple. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil says that the human experience is most unlike all other life forms in that we are capable of extreme selfishness that puts us at war with God and his creation.
God does not actively punish our selfishness, he does not have to, hiding behind all the evil is a moral world that rewards the good and punishes the bad. Each of us has asked for the rocky soils and the daily toils of life with the hope that we might learn from the direct results of our selfish choices, the stars and their courses are so ordered as to dissuade us from our self involved perversion. We use denial in an attempt to put us beyond the reach of the voice of God but we are only deluding ourselves. All of mankind has a history of compensating and excusing our extreme selfishness by conforming to the demands of religion, any religion will do. We slow learners are intent on pushing the voice of God aside, ready to pay any price for our own short term personal gain. The tragedy is that this gain will always be taken at the expense of others, others who are equally under the care of the Almighty. It has been stated in our own cultural mindset, “the world is comprised of two kinds of people, we are either hammers or nails, so be a hammer”. The third chapter of Genesis tells us that there are, hopefully, three kinds of people, hammers, nails and listeners to the voice of God. Such listening persons respect God and his creation, the welfare of others and by extension, themselves.
Is this not plausible and simple? The above understanding of the Garden of Eden makes sense to this dunderhead but the detractors will call it foolishness. Detractors who insist on a historical Garden of Eden have make this biblical truth a humorous punch line for the disbelieving comedians. Twenty first century man can only laugh at claims of historical accuracy and these claims are used to disembowel all believers, including those of us who look for truth behind the words of scripture. A literary device is not the truth, the point being made by the literary device is the truth. The disingenuous detractors who paint all believers with a broad brush of foolishness are only comedians who are themselves the joke.
G.Goslaw
Landers, Ca
