It's always bothered me, how easy it seemed for the serpent to deceive Adam and Eve, resulting in sin and having the entire creation and future generations deeply impacted. I've thought sin was the source of all problems and pain. This is what I've been told and believed. I've even repeated this to others, but now I'm questioning it and seeing the limitations of its application. Sin makes for an easy and rather plausible (at first glance) scapegoat though, especially other people's stinkin sin (sarcasm). The source of heartache and pain in the world is related to sin, no doubt. But there was a time in creation's history when sin was absent, yet it was insufficient to prevent humanity and creation from a curse that is still being played out today, causing generations of devastation to varying degrees.
I'm inclined to observe and explore a little deeper some facts I'm aware of about creation, specifically about humanity BEFORE sin entered in.
The first male and female...
- were created as adults, not children
- had unbroken fellowship with their Creator, God
- were naked and felt no shame
- had no other humans around for fellowship other than each other
I'm realizing that Adam and Eve were vulnerable, even as sinless adults who had unbroken fellowship with each other and with God. They didn't have "dysfunctional parents" to point the finger at when they sinned. They had what none of us have ever had - completely shameless vulnerability and unbroken fellowship with one another and with God.
Yet, given all these advantages that we don't have today, Adam and Eve still fell. They still bit the bait and fell. Sin doesn't make humanity vulnerable to itself. Freedom to believe does, but there is no love without freedom, but with freedom comes risk. To God, the benefits of freely loving and being freely loved must have outweighed the risk, especially when the risk involved His own blood being shed to cover over those who freely choose him. Love needs freedom to exist, freedom doesn't necessarily need love to exist though because hate and indifference is also an exercise of one's freedom. God is love (1 John 4:16) and created us in love, so He gave us the freedom to exercise what we do with it based on what we choose to believe, about ourselves, Him and creation (just like Adam and Eve did).
I'm left to struggle with this: The greatest threat factor to humanity isn't sin. It's how we use our freedom to choose what is true for us and what is not, then choosing how we act out what we choose to be our truth. Eve believed the serpent and his insidious lies about herself (that she wasn't good enough), God (that He isn't trustworthy) and about the tree of knowledge of good and evil (the solution to all these conflicts lays in her knowledge that's within her reach, but requires bypassing trusting God).
The truth she chose to act on didn't become true because she chose it. As humans we can create lots of things. We were made in the image of our Creator, we can create new life, we can create tons of materialistic stuff based on truths that already exist. We can create genetically modified foods because the raw materials are already in existence. Invention of the Airplane was a possibility because brilliant people used the truths inherent to the laws of physics and worked with them. They didn't create the law of physics though, they acknowledged them and worked around them. But there is something we as humans cannot create, and that is truth from lies.
So, why do many of us Christians put so much emphasis on not sinning? Sin can't get all the credit for the pain and loss in our world, banking on lies precedes it. Sin is the result of investing in lies by operating from a place that's dependent on lies working for us, not against us. Trying to create our truths from lies. There are truths that already exist, we cannot create them, but we can choose to operate in respect to them or reject them. The same goes with lies. There are lies that already exist, we cannot create them (I cannot just make the law of gravity not true), but we can choose to operate in respect to them or reject them.
The truth isn't reduced to giving intellectual accent to doctrinal statements, but rather in what your heart agrees with regarding identification statements
- Who are you?
- Who is God?
- How do you operate based on the truths you choose regarding those questions?
There is a role we play in helping to protect one another from deception, and only having one other person available to do that with and for doesn't seem very hard for the serpent to get around. Eve only had Adam, her husband and vice versa. If sinless Adam and Eve who had unbroken intimate fellowship with one another and with God were at risk for being deceived by believing lies about themselves and God, all the more are we who live in post-fall creation and who've been deeply impacted by generations upon generations of sin, Christian or not. Fellowship with others is critical, and we have that option where Adam and Eve only had each other..more should be written on this, but perhaps in a future post..
