Beyond Death

I was raised believing that original sin, the sin of Adam and Eve disobeying God in the Garden, brought death into the world.

And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” - Genesis 2:16-17

I wonder.  If there was no death and certainly no knowledge of death prior to the act of sin, what would Adam have understood God meant when he told him that eating of the tree would cause him to die?

For Adam to understand death, death had to exist in some form.  Surely he witnessed the animal kingdom and saw how the lion sought food for her cubs.  It would have been a part of life, a natural event, a necessary compliment to life.

When we talk about inviting death into the world, what do we think of?

Probably not this natural version, but an evil, selfish death that is the result of murder, violence, war.

The way the story goes, God felt man needed a partner.  So you would think he would have created another just like the first, but he didn't.  He first created all the animals and discovered they made pretty bad partners for man.  So he put Adam to sleep and drew out from him a woman.

But she wasn't a clone.  She was different, created not in the image of man, but in a way that complimented him and provided a means for reproduction that had been left out of the man.

She was built with a purpose in mind, to have more generations.

Was the intent to have all those generations live together forever in the garden?  So, here is the problem I see with the way we have come to understand the story.  If all the animals had been created as both male and female so they could reproduce and provide more of each as predators dwindled the population, why not do that with man from the start?

Another possibility is God created all the females of every species when he created Eve, thereby bringing into the world the potential for survival beyond death.

So far as we know, though, of all the species God created, only humanity concerns itself with death.  Few other species wage war, and fewer kill for a reason other than survival.

Once we became preoccupied with death, we lost our way back to the garden, and we became victims of those who are more powerful, stronger than we are.  Those who could threaten us with death became the masters, and we were no longer God's.

This is where Jesus steps in and brings us back to the reality of God's eternal love for us.  Because God created us to parent many generations, he wanted all of us to be his.  And that is important, because we can forget whose we are.

So, Jesus promised us we will not die, despite the fact that we started down the path of death because of our sin.  We will live.

Knowing this, we can move beyond good and evil, beyond death, and stop being victims to the rule of those who are evil.

But that is up to us.  We have to decide whose we want to be.  The invitation to become one with God exists.  All we need to do is accept it.

That is what I think the message of this lesson is.  We can go home again, if we choose the right path.  I believe I know the way.  Care to join me?

More to come...