The LIe: You Must Become Pt 4

From Full Human Being to Empty Human Doing

           

It is also important to notice that there is an element of truth in the serpent’s lie to Eve. (The most powerful lies always contain some truth.) In a sense, the tree really did make Eve like God in knowing good and evil. She was now like God in a way she wasn’t before. The serpent’s lie wasn’t about the nature of the forbidden tree and what it would do; it was in the implication that this was desirable for her. In fact, for finite beings like ourselves, this kind of knowledge is a curse because it blocks the unconditional and unsurpassable life-giving love of God flowing to us, abiding in us, and flowing through us to others.

            If Adam and Eve had continued in their union with God, they would never have known good or evil; they would have remained innocent. Loving obedience in all things would have been enough. God would have led in this or that direction, and that would have settled the matter. There would have been no need to make decisions on the basis of our own independent assessment of how good or evil the outcomes of our decisions would be.¹ God alone would know good and evil and direct us accordingly. Nor would Adam and Eve or their descendants have analyzed their experience in terms of good or evil. They would only have known the unsurpassable fullness and joy of living in fellowship with a God who is unsurpassable love and joy.

            Had Adam and Eve resisted the serpent’s lie about God, and therefore about themselves, the forbidden tree would have remained a helpful “No Trespassing” sign placed in the garden by a God who had their best interest in mind. It would have been a boundary that freed them to focus on the one thing God called them to do: love as God is love.

            However, everything changed when Eve allowed the lie about God and about herself to enter into her heart. She began to see the world through her own eyes, separate from God. Now things started to appear good and evil. God was “evil,” she became empty, and eating of the tree became “good.” So she ate the fruit of the forbidden tree.²

            The moment she ate the fruit, Eve essentially ceased being the wonderful, God-centered, God-dependent human being the Creator intended her to be and became an empty human doing—perpetually trying to get life on her own, apart from God. Like Adam and Eve, the human race now lives life illegitimately trying to become what God had already made us to be. The world has become a stage upon which we perpetually assess things and people as good or evil, depending on how we think they can or can’t fill the vacuum in our hearts. We thus use everything and everyone in the world as surrogate gods, trying to get from people, deeds, and things what only God can give—what God has already given—for free.