And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and the wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"
And he said, "I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; so I hid myself."
And God said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I told you not to eat from?"
The man said, "The woman you gave to keep me company, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate."
Then the Lord God said to the woman, "What have you done?"
The woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate."
1 comment:
So this is our "Knowledge" of what seems to us "Good and Evil."
We think we have to hide ourselves from God's sight, we are ashamed to be simply ourselves--and most of all we have the knowledge of other people's evil.
"The woman YOU gave me MADE me do it!"
That bad SNAKE made me do it!"
Raymond Smullyan quotes God to the effect that "I am not punishing Adam and Eve's descendants for their disobedience! The fruit in question is poisonous, and the effects last for many generations!"
So Who left that poisonous plant around where the kids could get to it, and called their attention to it, and let them play with the snake? (I'm not passing the buck, just pointing out that this looks either like plotting or negligence, and negligence seems out of character. This was an inside job!)
So part of God's creation of us- -was including this tension in our makeup. We wouldn't be complete without it! But we don't altogether understand what it is; we trust it when we ought to be skeptical; we take it at face value when we'd do better to ask- -"What's really going on here?"- -and "How can I get rid of the poison (without turning into some sort of criminal monster)?"
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