Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall...

The serpent said to Eve that the fruit of the tree of knowledge was better than non-toxic, the serpent actually said it was good. Going quite against the word of the Maker, who said that to eat of the tree of knowledge was to bring about death, the serpent said, "when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God." Eve followed this advice, as did Adam, and they found the fruit to be tasty indeed.

Yet, it brought about a state of things that ended up leaving them no better off - and indeed worse. It brought about not only an awareness of good and evil - as the serpent suggested it would - but also a new tendency to seek one's own priorities first. It brought about a degree of knowledge yes, but a lack of wisdom. It entered the mythic man and woman not into a degree of maturity in their being 'like God,' but rather into a degree of seemingly permanent adolescence, of seemingly endless rebellion, of seemingly endless dissatisfaction with blessings and gifts, of seemingly endless contention and strife with what one's Maker has bestowed.

As C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, "What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could 'be like gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

My interpretation on the story of the Fall is not that it's about how Eve was worse than Adam, or that Adam was innocently dense and Eve diabolically clever, or that snakes are bad, or that the story is in anyway supposed to be a "factual account of what happened onetime." My interpretation of the story of the Fall in Genesis 3 is that it describes my own internal fallenness, by which I cannot on my own, overcome a desire to "become like God on my own terms." The truth is that God has already made humankind in his image, "in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." (Gn 1:27) Yet, by an impulse of infernal origins, call it Satan (that's what I call it), we wish instead to abide not by the terms of our Maker, but by our own, seeking to know and define our own image, on par with God. And that we cannot do. We cannot rightly put ourselves in the place of God.

The proof of this is that we simply cannot know peace, or joy, or happiness, or fulfillment, of our own making. We cannot know enough to be our own makers - or on par with God - or even close. No, we are creatures, blessed by God for joy, not by ourselves.

As such, C.S. Lewis continues, "God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” This is why we must always seek to renew our repentance and obedience to the One who made us for sacred joy.