Now the serpent was
more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to
the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The
woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;
but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle
of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” But the serpent
said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it
your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Genesis 3:1–5
Man
took to himself a secret of God which proved his undoing. The Bible describes
this event with the eating of the forbidden fruit. Man now knows good and evil.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The
middle has been entered, the limit has been transgressed. Now man stands in the
middle, . . . now he lives out of his own resources and no longer from the
middle. . . . Now he lives out of himself, now he creates his own life, he is
his own creator.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We
have seen that we were created for unbroken, loving fellowship with God. God’s
goal for creation is to have his perfect, triune love displayed to us, in us,
and through us. God seeks to be glorified—his triune love expanded and displayed—by
how God relates to us, how we relate to God, how we relate to ourselves, and
how we relate to others. As we abide in God and God abides in us, we are to
participate in the unsurpassable, loving nature of the triune God and love
ourselves and our neighbors in the process of loving God, just as God loves us
and our neighbors in the process of loving himself. The goal is for humanity to
dance with and in the triune God.
Sin
ruptured this fellowship and sidetracked the plan. It was restored in Christ,
however, and the purpose of the church now is to reexpress the original goal of
creation by living it before the world. As the church replicates God’s
unsurpassable and unconditional triune love within itself and to all others,
the world comes to believe that Jesus has been sent by the Father. They come to
know that the fellowship has been restored because they see it! God is glorified.
Yet, as we also noted in the last two chapters, the church as a whole has repeatedly failed to fulfill this mandate. In part 2 we explore the question, Why is this so? My conviction is that we have neglected the biblical teaching that the origin and essence of sin is rooted in the knowledge of good and evil. Consequently, we have tended to define sin as that which is evil, over against that which is good, rather than defining it more profoundly as that which is not in union with Christ, whether “good” or “evil.”
- Greg Boyd
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