Our Defining Stories: The Fall
What's wrong with the world?
This is part two of a series on key stories of the Bible. Each entry can stand alone. But, if you missed it, you can read part one here.
There’s no denying that something is wrong — terribly wrong — with the world. But, I just wrote an article where I talked at length about the goodness of creation and the goodness of God. So, what gives?
If God is really good, and if the world was good and peaceful when he created it, what went wrong?
Anyone remotely familiar with the story of the Bible already knows that immediately after the story of creation comes what we call “The Fall.” God placed humanity into an abundant garden with everything they needed to survive and thrive. They could do anything they chose… except.
Except for eating the fruit from this one particular tree.
Why not? The story doesn’t say beyond a warning that to do so would cause death. But if that’s the case, why would God create such a tree? And why (why?!) would he put it right in the middle of the garden?! (Genesis 2:9)
Debates about those questions have raged for thousands of years. I don’t pretend for a moment that I can settle them once and for all. (But I’ll offer one possibility a little later.)
We all know what happens next. A talking snake appears in the garden and convinces the woman that God is holding out on her. She becomes convinced, eats the forbidden fruit, and gives it to the man. The man eats it as well. God confronts them, and they play the blame game. They each — man, woman, and snake — suffer a curse as a result of their disobedience. And God banishes the man and the woman from the garden, lest they eat from the tree of life and live forever in their fallen state.
It is the darkest moment in human history. The moment that has given rise to every dark moment since.
However, if we can bear not to turn away from the darkness, I think it has important things for us to think about.
Why?!
I’d mentioned the endless debates about why God would even make such a tree, or such a rule about a tree, in the first place. I’ve been convinced by various positions over the years (and I reserve the right to change my mind again if convinced otherwise) but, right now, I think it boils down to three words: Freedom, Trust, and Love.
Freedom
This is where the Calvinists in the room might disagree with me (and please don’t tune out if that’s you!), but I think God intended for humanity to have freedom of choice. So he gave them a real choice. A choice that mattered. A choice with stakes. Blaise Pascal called this the “dignity of causality.”1
God wasn’t after mindless automatons, robots that would execute his will. He wanted partners. He intended for us to rule with him. He intended for us to be able to take actions that would have a meaningful effect on the world. But, to do that we had to have real freedom of choice. And with that freedom came both dignity and responsibility.
If you disagree with me on this, I welcome your (respectful) comments. Please let me know if (and why) you think I’m wrong!
Trust
God told them not to eat from the tree and said that death would be the consequence. But that’s all we’re told. There’s not a long drawn-out rationale. No, “You see here Adam, I’ve done this so that…” The restriction is stated simply and then the story moves on.
I think, ultimately, the lack of exposition is an invitation to trust God. We don’t always get an explanation in life. Often we find ourselves in the position where we must simply trust God’s wisdom and guidance, and we may never get an explanation.
Love
Love is, I think, the most fundamental reason for the presence of the tree. Love is the reason God created, to begin with. (I made my case for that in part 1 of this series.) And this relates to freedom and trust.
Freedom is required for love. If God is our only option, if there’s no alternative available to us, then love isn’t actually present. Without the ability to choose otherwise, our love for God would be nothing more than cosmic Stockholm Syndrome.
Trust is also a necessary ingredient for love to flourish. Now, yes, it is possible to love someone you don’t trust. However, trust is required for true intimacy and vulnerability. You can’t be close to someone you don’t trust, or who doesn’t trust you. So the trust we see on display in the garden — God trusting humans to obey his restriction and them trusting him by obeying it — creates fertile soil for love to flourish.
And perhaps it would have, but another character enters the scene…
The Serpent
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. (Genesis 3:1)
Who knows how long this Edenic experience of freedom, trust, and love lasted? Before the serpent shows up, there’s no indication that the man or the woman ever questioned their trust in God. But then this creature shows up, and it is dead set on disrupting the harmony of Eden.
We know what happens next.
What Does Your World Look Like?
Most of us have a vision of the world, and the moral forces acting in the world, that looks something like this:
In this vision of the world, whenever something bad happens, we have three potential actors to blame:
God (“If he were truly good, or truly powerful, then the bad thing wouldn’t have happened.”)
Ourselves (“I’m being punished.” Or, “I don’t have enough faith.”)
Others (“You did this to me!”)
Not great options.
The reality, and the reality displayed in various ways throughout scripture is something more like this:
So who’s fault is the bad stuff in this version of reality:
It’s complicated.
We see this from very early on in the story. It’s not just God and humans influencing the course of world events. There’s a Serpent.
So what?
Why does this matter?
I think most of us — operating from an assumed world that looks like the first option — revert to either blame or shame when things go badly. We look outside ourselves to God or to others and blame them for what we see going wrong. Or we look at ourselves in shame, believing that whatever’s going wrong is because of some sort of shortcoming and failure within ourselves.
But, understanding this more populous moral universe gives us more possible interpretations. And with that, more options to respond.
Maybe something is a consequence of my failures and there’s something I need to repent of. Maybe I’m facing some sort of spiritual warfare. Maybe another individual is responsible. Maybe there’s a broader pattern or institution with an issue that needs to be addressed. Maybe all of the above are at play, to some degree, in the situation I’m considering.
The moral universe is complicated. Most of the evil we face in life has complicated origins.
Natural disasters are a great case study. Whenever one happens it’s not difficult to find someone declaring that the event is “God’s judgment” on the victims. Someone else points to climate change. Another points out failures in infrastructure that could have saved lives. Someone else propagates conspiracies about people controlling the weather. In many ways these events function like ink blot tests: Your interpretation often says more about you and how you see the world than it does about the functioning of the moral universe.
The biblical case study is the story of Job.
Job loses everything, even his health. His friends — and I use that term loosely here — are certain that Job is to blame, and Job demands an answer from God. And God does come and talk to Job, but Job doesn’t get an explanation. We, the readers, get to take a peek behind the curtain, and we see that Satan has been allowed to test Job’s faithfulness through the hardship he’s facing. But Job never hears about it.
What Job does get is an encounter with God. He gets a deeper understanding of God than he ever had in all his comfort and prosperity.
How We Respond
The story in Genesis 3 is relatively straightforward. God placed a boundary. Adam and Eve violate that boundary, after being tempted to do so by the serpent.
And how do they respond?
They hide. Then they start pointing fingers. Shame and blame.
The challenges we face are often much more complicated than the one Adam and Eve faced in the garden, but often our responses are the same. The invitation in this story is to choose differently than they did. To turn toward God in the face of pain and failure instead of choosing shame and blame.
I sometimes wonder how the story might have gone differently if Adam and Eve had made that choice.
Remember, you were created for a world of freedom, trust, and love. There isn’t something wrong with you when you’re deeply pained by all the hurt and brokenness on display in the world. You’re longing for the world you were created to inhabit. Your story doesn’t start in Genesis 3, even though none of us are free its fallout.
https://ccel.org/ccel/pascal/pensees/pensees.viii.html