Jesus’ death on the cross as the payment for the sins of the world leads us to the story of the first sin, the “original sin” in the garden of Eden.  The scriptures describe how Jesus’ “obedience to death on the cross brought righteousness to many which counteracts the condemnation that came to mankind through Adam’s trespass in the garden.” (Romans 5:15-19).  Why was Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit worthy of death? Isn’t capital punishment a bit severe for petty theft? What was the significance of ingesting the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil?

“you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” Genesis 2:17

Why then, would God prohibit Adam and Eve from partaking of such fruit?

There are actually two ways of looking at the prohibition that God laid out – one focusing on an object, the other is focusing on an action. If the prohibition was chiefly concerned about an object,  it would clearly be the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But if God did not want Adam (and Eve) to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, why did God create the tree and the fruit in the first place?  Couldn’t God have just omitted creating the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil and spare Adam and Eve of the possibility of transgression? We know that everything God created, including all the plants and vegetation was good. So why would eating that which was created good, be all that bad? Without an understanding of good and evil, how could anyone fathom God’s goodness? It would seem that wisdom would be something God would want to share with the very creatures who could appreciate the qualities of his goodness.

When we focus exclusively on the fruit (the commodity), it is easy to miss other more important dynamics which can lead us to fall prey to the same error that befell Adam and Eve. A critical underlying question is, did God originally intend for Adam and Eve to gain wisdom (the knowledge of good and evil)? And if so, how were they supposed to obtain it?

Things begin to make a little more sense if the intent of the prohibition was not  an object, but an action.  Ingesting food is the way we internalize an external source of power and make it a part of ourselves. What if the real focus of the prohibition was against eating the fruit, not just having possession of the fruit. If there were a different mechanism for obtaining wisdom than through eating, then perhaps it was the act of eating, or metaphorically ingesting as the means to obtain the prized commodity of knowing good and evil that was the problem. Eating fruit can be done by one’s self, in solitude, and certainly in this case was done apart from God’s presence. What if there were a different mechanism that God intended to use for passing on to Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil? What if wisdom were intended to be transmitted through daily walks and conversations in the garden, fully within God’s presence. If this were true, then the emphasis of forbidden could apply to the eating in solitude, apart from God, rather than on obtaining the fruit itself.

If this were true, ingesting fruit would symbolize man’s attempt to obtain a valued commodity apart from its creator. Could it be that the “original sin” at its heart was really Adam (and Eve’s) choice for independence from God instead of dependence, trust, and communion with him?  In fact, every sin can trace it’s roots to this dynamic – an attempt to improve one’s lot apart from God – and often at the expense of those around us. This striving for independence goes beyond the striving for emotional independence we often see in children, “Leave me a lone, I can do it myself, I can do it myself…” and into a spiritual independence where we think we (mankind) can be the ones to define the parameters of what constitutes right-ness (or good-ness) and therefore work our way into achieving that righteous state by our own efforts. Indeed every single religion in the world that prescribes a path of specific behaviors to reach to heaven, nirvana, or some form of “enlightenment”   falls into the same fallacy of the “original sin” – that it can be up to man’s effort to define and also reach rightness.

The reason why this is deadly was hinted at in the story of creation, when after a string of proclamations that what God had created was good (including the fruit trees in the garden of Eden), the scriptures said “it was not good for man to be alone.”

If God created man (and woman) with an innate problem to address of aloneness, any time man(kind) chooses to be independent of God, it would exacerbate that aloneness.  In fact, it is such a serious problem, God equates the move toward self sufficiency and away from dependence on him as death.

The very first question asked in the entire Bible, is “where?”,   “Where are you hiding, Adam and Eve ?”and it also is the most important question in the Bible – even more important than “Why?”.   This question of “where” also becomes the ultimate question that man will ask of God when man encounters suffering and evil. “Where is God in the midst of suffering and injustice?” and it becomes even more poignant in light of the fact that much of the suffering and injustice of the world comes about due to someone’s choice toward self sufficiency and independence from the Creator. Whenever our focus shifts from the Creator toward self sufficiency and grasping at that which was created, mankind inevitably begins to harm one another and even the environment.

This started even in the Garden of Eden, when Eve blamed the serpent instead of owning up to her disobedience, and Adam blamed Eve instead of confessing his own culpability, which destroyed any semblance of trust they could have for each other and proved that the two of them were not sufficient for addressing each other’s aloneness problem.

In this light, the Biblical concept of sin might be viewed not as a deviation from a perfect standard of behavior, (theft of forbidden fruit)  but as a move toward self sufficiency and independence from God often at the expense of our fellow man and our environment. Sin and righteousness should not be viewed transactionally (imperfections that accumulate and which must be purged or covered over to restore perfection), but relationally, where one is either moving toward God in dependence and trust or away from him towards self sufficiency and independence.  The difference may be easier to understand if we see sin not as a noun – a quantity that exists outside of us that we try to avoid accumulating, but as an preposition – a descriptor of how our actions and appetites are placing us in closer proximity to and dependence on God, or farther away from him toward independence.

Consequently, the result of death from eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil (and by extension, every other sin) is not so much a punishment for infraction, but a consequence of choosing independence from the source of life. If it is God who gives us life and sustains us, our choices towards independence from him will leave us with nothing but increasing aloneness and ultimately death.

This also could illuminate what happened on the cross when Jesus died and took on the sins of the world. If sin is defined as independence from God, then Jesus became the Aloneness that everyone deserved as the natural consequence of their choices towards independence from God. It also explains why, in that moment of Aloneness on the cross, Jesus cried, “Oh my God, why have you abandoned me?” For the first time, one member of the triune Godhead was split off from the other two. And died.

Why did a part of God have to die?

Before we dive deeper into the tree in the Garden of Eden, I want to take a quick glimpse at another significant tree described in the Bible. The scandalous event of the New Testament portion of the Bible is undoubtedly the killing of one part of the Triune God which happens on a cross. This man made “tree” was the torturer and executioner’s tool of choice used by the most powerful state in the world at the time (the Roman Empire).

There is a curious cry by Jesus Christ just moments before he died during his execution on the cross. It is a clue to the darkest suffering, the deepest terror that he endured while he was alive on this earth. While the physical pain must have been tremendous (and certainly illustrated in its most gory detail by a recent motion picture depiction) – crucifixion was tantamount to state sanctioned torture and Jesus would ultimately die by asphyxiation while suspended by nails in the wrists and feet, our attention is drawn to a different concern. At this point in time right before his physical death, Jesus is preoccupied by his sense of abandonment. He cries out “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani”, which means, “O my God, why have you abandoned me?”

If we take Jesus’ cry at face value (“Why have you abandoned me?”), it implies that he felt abandoned by his heavenly Father during his death on the cross. Some theologians have explained this by saying that at the point on the cross when Jesus took on the guilt of the world’s transgressions, the heavenly father could not be sullied by the imperfection and thus turned his face from his own son leaving him to die alone on the cross. In this line of reasoning, dying alone is the just punishment for missing the mark of perfect intentions and perfect behavior. This death penalty was meted out against Jesus who was substituted for every other person in the world who deserves to die as a result of Adam and Eve’s transgressions in the garden of Eden (the partaking of forbidden fruit) and the inheritance of their guilt and proclivity for disobedience. Because Jesus never exhibited imperfect intentions nor imperfect behavior, his payment of the death penalty could be applied to everyone else in the world who did deserve that penalty.  One conclusion that this line of thinking could lead to is that God is supremely interested in perfection, and that Jesus’ death was just a mechanism for transferring perfection back into  an imperfect world. It is as if God made a perfect world, (plan “A”), man messed it up in the garden of Eden, and God had to come up with plan “B” to fix it by sending his son as a cosmic payment [to whom?] to cover over the unsightly mess of imperfection. I believe there is a much more compelling story than God’s attempts to maintain perfection in the universe, and it centers around the concept of aloneness – the aloneness that Adam (and Eve) were created with, and the same aloneness that Jesus felt on the cross as he died.

Jesus’ cry of abandonment was not a single isolated statement, but rather, the opening line to an age old Psalm of lament, Psalm 22.  Psalm 22 opens with a three stark questions of “Why?”: Why has God has abandoned, why is he so far from saving, and why does God not answer? A careful look at these three why questions, however reveals that they are really questions about proximity. Where is God in the midst of the suffering? (abandonment implies that God is not near). Is he too far away to save one from the suffering? Is he too far away to hear the cries and groans and answer them? (Surely if God were close by, he would answer the cries and save one from the suffering)

These “where” questions are followed by an admonishment and reminder to trust in God. The first supplication in Psalm 22 is for God not to be far away (verse 11) which is repeated again in verse 19. It is followed by an entreaty for God to come quickly, and then to be delivered from the sword, rescued, and saved.  The Psalmist wants the concern about (God’s proximity) to be addressed before anything else.

It is not a coincidence that the very need that Jesus expressed at the point of his death was the same need that was alluded to in the Creation story – “it was not good for man to be alone.” These two illustrations of aloneness – Adam (and Eve’s) at the point creation and Jesus’ feeling alone at the point of his crucifixion and death bind the two together under the same need and demonstrate that God, in the person of Jesus, has himself experienced the sense of alone-ness we humans all struggle with, and can therefore relate to our suffering out of his personal experience.

Psalm 22 highlights the tension between feeling abandoned (and alone) with an admonishment to keep trusting in the God who delivers those who trust in him. The resolution of this tension is revealed in verse 24:

For he has not despised or disdained (ignored) the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.

This is a reminder that God is very near to those suffering and is attentive to their cries  is not far away as first considered.

While the Psalmist requests for his life to be spared of the sword,  to be rescued and saved, Jesus’ deliverance does not come before his death, but after it when God raises him from the dead.

What is most remarkable is that the triune God of the universe chose to limit his power to such an extent that the Son “part” of the Trinity required a power outside of himself in order to be raised back to life. A definition of death is the point where one’s capacity to maintain one’s own life and and one’s own existence ceases. The Son’s willingness to die forced him into an utterly dependent state as well as an utterly alone state when he became the sin of the world. This is the scandal of the New Testament, that the God of the universe would give up self sufficiency and become dependent on another.

Jesus became the example of entrusting one’s self to the heavenly Father. Indeed, the Greek word for faith, pisteuo, means “to entrust.”

This act of entrusting is central to the Christian faith, and becomes the mechanism of salvation – both for Jesus and for all who would become his followers. The degree to which one entrusts things of value to the Creator is the degree to which one is saved. Until one releases control – or the need for control – over something of value, and transfers it to another, no faith has been exercised.

Taking a step back, we see that the most important question is not Why, but Where [is God]. And the answer is that God is in fact near, and that our only recourse is to entrust ourselves to him.

The creation story culminates in the interaction between the Creator and the pinnacle of God’s creation, humankind. This is represented in the story by Adam, and by extension, Eve. (I use Their to describe the Creator, because the text in Genesis states that the Creator proclaimed, “Let Us make man in Our image, in Our likeness….” Genesis 1:26)

The Pinnacle has a need from the start – man is incomplete himself, so the glaring question that must be addressed about Adam is, how should that which is not good (that man is alone) in an otherwise good creation be satisfied?

The Genesis narrative describes attempts made to address man’s problem of alone-ness. A search was conducted for a help-mate to satisfy that need for companionship, and it was quickly determined that anything created up until that point, including animals was insufficient to meet that primordial need for companionship. If One by himself was a problem, perhaps Two would be sufficient to ameliorate aloneness…?

The Creator fashions an “other” from the man: perhaps it takes another of the same kind to satisfy alone-ness?  A clone identical to the first man apparently would not suffice (a man plus a man), so a counterpart was created – of the same kind, but intrinsically different, yet dependent upon each other for continued propagation. Would two pieces from the same puzzle be enough to satiate the need? (A man plus a woman?)

It takes a garden and some trees to find out the answer to that question.

Much has been written about the events that transpired in the Garden of Eden. Many would say that at this point, before any fruit in the garden were harmed, perfection prevailed. It was the theft and ingestion of some forbidden fruit that led to the the shattering of the ultimate ideal, they would say. Taken to its logical conclusion, such a viewpoint would espouse that mankind should seek to return to that perfect state in Eden – man and woman, happily ever after in the garden, content to abstain from the forbidden fruit. Perfection would be defined by the absence of disobedience (the absence of “sin”, in some circles). If this were true, mankind’s potential would be fulfilled by somehow attaining perfection, whether by self effort, or by transference from another source. Indeed, there are some who believe that the goal of “salvation” is to reach perfection – and that if one can’t reach perfection (the absence of infractions against a cosmic law) by one’s own effort, then one must depend on another, even Jesus, to provide that perfection. But this line of thinking fixes the goal of humanity’s existence to be attaining “perfection”, the absence of “sin”.

Did the Creator expect Adam and Eve to forever obey the prohibition and avoid the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Was the Creator surprised that the prohibition was ignored and that God’s perfect plan was forever ruined by the theft and eating of some fruit? Was God’s plan A interrupted by an unforeseen circumstance (theft of fruit), and that God had to resort to a plan B to carry out his intentions? Did the Creator intend for Adam and Eve to never taste the knowledge of good and evil in the first place?

If so, why did the Creator invent that particular tree? Couldn’t the garden of Eden have been created without a Tree of the knowledge of good and evil to begin with? That would have guaranteed that Adam and Eve could have remained “perfect” and unblemished by disobedience. They could have lived through eternity oblivious to evil (and also to good) – but would have been safely tucked away in their cocoon of Eden. If it was God’s intention for them to be perfect, it would have been trivial to ensure that by not even creating a forbidden fruit.

The fact that God would go to the trouble to create a tree, even a forbidden one, indicates that there is more to the tree’s purpose than being a target of abstinence.

The Judeo-Christian holy scriptures (Torah/Tanakh for the Jewish, and the book of Genesis in the Bible for the Christian) are derived from the same texts and recount a narrative of creation with the famous phrase, “In the beginning…”  In those brief three words, we are introduced to the concept of time which has a very peculiar quality in that it is the one dimension in which one can travel in one direction only. (Our universe also has length, width, and depth, along which we can freely move forward and backwards – in space) Once there is a start, everything else within this universe can only travel in one direction – forward. This strange limitation is a pre-requisite for a history to be recorded and a story to be told. Once something comes to pass and is recorded, the story can’t change (which would not be true if one could travel backwards in time and thus alter the story).

This also hints that the Creator who made this universe, has chosen to enter into the constraints of His/Her creation, thereby choosing to limit themselves while operating within that realm. While creating time out of nothing, or perhaps out of a reality bigger than time, the Creator has fashioned a stage with which to record a story about the Creator and Their interaction with that creation. This is the first time we begin to comprehend that the Creator has chosen to limit themselves, and it is not the last.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth….”  “…and it was good.”

In fact, in the Judeo-Christian story of creation, everything created was deemed “good” at the point of its creation. Light and dark,  land from the waters, heavenly bodies, plants, animals, humans – all were good. In the six days of creation, there were six statements of “and it was good.” But then, a jarring statement interrupts all this goodness and sticks out like a sore thumb.

“It was not good for man to be alone.”

This was the ONLY time in the seven days of creation that anything was deemed not good. This revelation is significant because it lays the groundwork for understanding the ultimate need that the Creator has built into His creation (and into mankind, in particular) It is this very primordial need that the rest of the story of the Tanakh and the Holy Bible try to address, and it becomes the axis around which everything else turns as we learn more about the Creator and humanity.

If this is true, mankind’s greatest need is not to avoid or minimize suffering, it is to address Aloneness. Everything else is subordinate to dealing with that which was not good since the beginning of creation.
Photo: Alone on a Salt Flat (Bicycle on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah)

This blog’s “theology of suffering” finds it’s source in the juxtaposition of two key revelations from the Holy Scriptures known as the Tanakh (which includes the Torah, used by the Jews) and the Bible (used by Christians). Both scriptures recount in the book of Genesis (which they share) the story of creation in which everything created was proclaimed “good” except for one factor that was lacking: it was not good for mankind to be alone. Aloneness, therefore, was a primary need built into mankind at the very beginning of creation. The next key revelation comes one book later, in the book of Exodus, when God is asked for the very first time to show himself (and herself – God likely encompasses both genders, but for the sake of readability, we will use the masculine gender) for who God is. The way God answers this questions will become his calling card that is used throughout the rest of the Torah and the Old Testament of the Bible. “I am Compassionate and Gracious.…” is God’s answer to the question of who he is.  The first word that God chooses to describe himself is Compassion, which means to Suffer With. This is a most unexpected descriptor for a being as powerful as one who could conjure up an entire universe. It is not a coincidence that God’s description of his essence (compassion and graciousness…) has a direct bearing on the primary need that was built into the mankind, the pinnacle of his creation. Suffering just happens to be the most ruthless and efficient tool that exposes a person’s aloneness.

If mankind’s in-built need is to address his aloneness, and suffering is the one circumstance that will strip away everything else to expose man’s aloneness, then God’s  primary characteristic of being the Suffering-With God not only describes how God intends to meet mankind’s  aloneness by suffering with them, but also hints at the depths and cost that God is willing to pay to do so. It is not a coincidence that the only aspect of Love that God could not demonstrate within the perfection of heaven was compassion. This particular aspect or quality of love needed suffering to exist before it could be demonstrated. God needed to create a realm in which their creation suffered, so that he could join in that suffering to demonstrate the extent of his Love. In this sense, compassion is an extreme demonstration of love.

The same could be construed with regards to Creativity. It is one thing to create something beautiful out of nothing. It is another thing entirely to create something beautiful out of something ugly, broken, or disfigured. In fact, one might argue that it requires more creativity to fashion beauty out of brokenness than out of nothing. The natural world around us has ample demonstrations of the kind of beauty that God can create out of nothing. A trip to the Sierra Nevada Mountains or to the coastline along California’s Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1)
can provide countless examples of that. But there is another quality of beauty embodied in human stories of redemption and compassion which rival and surpass the beauty of the natural world. Mother Theresa’s and Julie McGown’s work among the destitute and dying (the Living Room in Kipkaren, Kenya) are examples of such redemption, and are testaments to how God can create beauty out of brokenness. Just as compassion takes love to a whole new deeper level, redemption takes creativity to a new and deeper level as well.

What if God did not stop creating after the six days described in Genesis? What if his creative skill is being demonstrated through finding new ways to bring beauty out of pain, brokenness, and tragedy today?

If this were true, then the God of the Bible has revealed to us two existential needs: to demonstrate his Love (through compassion) and to demonstrate his Creativity (through redemption). This blog will explore in much more detail evidence throughout the rest of the Torah/Tanakh and the Bible which supports this assertion.