Tentpegs

I can’t believe we are at 187! Oh well, there are still about a dozen questions sitting in tentpegsquestion@yahoo.com and some of them are growing whiskers as they wait to be answered. Here is an intriguing one…

When we ask why there is pain, sickness, and suffering in the world, Christians tell us that it is because Adam and Eve sinned and that brought “the fall” to the world. They say we live in a fallen world and that all of the billions and billions of people who have lived here had to suffer and die because of Adam and Eve’s sin. When I looked it up, all they did was eat some fruit they weren’t supposed to. For THAT everybody has to die, have pain in childbirth, and deal with mosquitoes and thorns?

The standard Sunday School way of telling the Adam and Eve story certainly makes it look like God overreacted… but the standard story doesn’t cover what really happened. Here is the real story.

God created the heavens and the earth. The first time we get a look at it, it is in chaos. Wild, deep, and dark waters cover earth. As we’ve noted before (“Your Own Personal Jordan”) the Old Testament uses waters to illustrate the work of evil, the coming on of depression, war, and pain. It is clear that something happened after God created the heavens and the earth. War had broken out between God and some rebellious angels and His creation was in danger of sinking beneath the waves of a cosmic conflagration.

God sends His Spirit down to clear an area, shoving back the darkness and bringing order. The waters were separated from the land — banished to their place. After God created a garden on the earth and filled the planet with creatures that He loved, He made creatures who shared in His own nature — in His own image — and put them in the garden. This is important: they weren’t tossed randomly onto the planet. They were placed in a very special place. They were given orders to tend the garden and guard it. Guard it??? Yes, most versions of the Bible will say something like “dress and keep it” but the word “keep” there is the same word used after the Fall when God placed cherubs down on earth and told them to “guard” the entrance to the garden.

What were Adam and Eve supposed to guard the garden against? Encroachment by God’s enemies, those angels who had rebelled. Over a period of time (we have no way of knowing how long), Adam failed in his duty to guard the sacred, safe place God had created in His cosmos for him. In fact, the leader of the rebellious angels was now a guest in the garden, free to carry on conversations with Adam and Eve about their needs and the veracity or adequacy of God!

When they decided to switch their allegiance to that Serpent, the leader of the rebellious angels, God needed to show them — and us — what that meant. He shoved them out into the devil’s territory and put incredibly powerful angels called cherubs into place to make sure man didn’t run back into the garden. If man wanted to be loyal to the rebellion, then he would have to live with the rebels. (NOTE: cherubs, in art, are little babies with rosy cheeks. In the Bible, they are terrifying creatures — armed to the teeth and full of fire, thunder, earthquakes, and power)

Man now had to live in the world Satan had planned. It was a chaotic, fallen place just as it was before God shoved all that aside to create the garden. He was allowed to maintain contact with God, but it would take sacrifice, time, and sweat to do so. Soon, and we might say predictably, all mankind was in allegiance with the Serpent except for Noah. God then sent a flood into the world — hitting the cosmic Reset button — to give man a better chance of escaping the clutches of the agents — the angels — of chaos.

Should mankind learn the lesson of Adam and Eve and refuse to repeat it, we would no longer be a fallen people. The problem is, we continually do what they did! (just as Stephen told the Sanhedrin in Acts 7) We are told to guard our hearts, our minds, our mouths, and our actions and, yet, we slowly allow the devil access until we start believing his lies — lies about God not adequately loving us, providing for us, and caring for us. We reach out and take what is not ours to take — another person’s wife or daughter, another woman’s man, a dollar that “won’t be missed”. We stop our sacrifices, refusing to give at church because of our obligations to the world or because we have decided we don’t like our church any more (but we’ll still attend). We let the Serpent worm his way in.

The reason the world is Fallen is because the people on it are Fallen continue to Fall. They make decisions that harm themselves and others and, as often as not, they blame God for the consequences of their own actions. God did not overreact. He had to show us what happens when we choose to walk outside the barriers He has placed there for our safety or when we invite in our enemy because he has convinced us he means us no harm. Until we learn this lesson, we will be doomed to repeat it in every single one of our lives.