The Lie: You Must Become Pt 1

The Shifting Centers

  

            We've seen that we cannot know and love the truth about God without knowing and loving the truth about ourselves and our neighbors. Loving our neighbors as ourselves is part of what it means to love God. In the same way, we cannot reject the truth about God without thereby rejecting the truth about ourselves and our neighbors. And we cannot refrain from loving God without thereby refraining from loving ourselves and our neighbors.

            It’s not surprising, therefore, that in Genesis 3 the very act that brought a false judgment about God also brought a false judgment about Adam and Eve, and thus about all of humanity. The serpent’s accusation that God isn’t a reliable source of life involved an accusation that God’s creatures weren’t adequately alive. The heart of the lie about us is that we humans are not okay simply living in union with God. Our lives cannot simply revolve around enjoying God’s provision—the Tree of Life—and honoring God’s prohibition—the Tree of Knowledge. We can, and we must, provide for ourselves.

            This lie follows directly from believing the lie about God. If God is in fact unloving, untrustworthy, and threatened by what he forbids, as the serpent suggested, Adam and Eve must be on their own to find life. The serpent convinced Eve that she and Adam had been duped by God in their previous innocence. The fullness of life she and Adam had enjoyed simply living in fellowship with their Creator was actually the ploy of a threatened deity securing his position on top. Their eyes were not yet opened, the serpent said, for the threatened Creator was keeping them shut (Gen. 3:4–5). Adam and Eve were seduced into believing that there was something they could get that would improve their lot in life, something the Creator was holding back from them out of fear. This presupposed that something was lacking in their lives up to this point and that it was up to them and them alone to get it.

            In reality, the moment Eve entertained the possibility that she lacked something, she did lack something—but not what she thought. Eve was in the process of turning from God, breaking fellowship with God, and thus creating a vacuum in her heart where there previously had been fullness. The lie she accepted about God and about herself was creating its own truth. The very act of believing she was on her own was causing Eve to be on her own. The very act of believing she was deficient was creating a deficiency.

            By accepting the serpent’s lie, Eve was beginning to create her own alternate, godless reality. It is a rebelliously motivated, idolatrous, illusory reality that opposes reality as it is defined by God. The reality God wills is that of an eternal fullness overflowing to, in, and through everyone and everything. The reality Eve was in the process of creating—the reality we humans have been creating ever since—was the reality of a vacuum in which she attempted to get life by having everything flow into it. Instead of reality being centered on the fullness of God, reality for Eve became centered on her own, now empty, self.