Seeing our Bodies # 5 - Eating the Forbidden Fruit

Seeing our Bodies

Part 5 – How are we to understand the eating of the forbidden fruit?

 

 

Partaking of the forbidden fruit, expulsion from Eden

Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel

 

            It would seem that there is mystery involved in the Genesis account of mankind’s fall into sin.  Whether one takes this story as the factual occurrence, a literal historical account, or as God’s story describing what took place in a way in which we can understand the story and its implications for all of us, the story has mysteries not easily explained.

God made it clear to Adam and Eve that they were not to partake of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The Serpent suggested there was more to this command than God was letting on.  The Serpent told Eve “God knows when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  This would be an easy enough story to understand if the story showed us in a clear-cut way that God was truth telling and the serpent was deceiving.  But deception seldom works by telling a simple lie.  Deception speaks truth aimed at hiding a significant element of the truth.  Deception is a confidence scheme using some truths as a hook to win one's confidence until the scheme has them sucked in.  The serpent was accusing God of a confidence scheme, of holding back something important from Adam and Eve.  When the story is told there is enough truth in the serpent's words to make us wonder because God acknowledges that in some way Adam and Eve had become like God able to distinguish good and evil.  There is mystery involved here, but there is enough of this story that when taken with the rest of Holy Scripture we can begin to see how the serpent was a deceiver, and how the gaining of an ability to distinguish good from evil did not necessarily give us much of an ability to redeem ourselves from a fall into sin.

Many a reader of the Biblical account is taken back by how the serpent seems to express more about what the forbidden fruit would do for Adam and Eve than God's simple command not to eat of the forbidden fruit had indicated.  So when Adam and Eve do eat of the forbidden fruit we would perhaps expect the story to explain that the serpent's promise was all a lie.  But instead God banishes Adam and Eve from Eden while saying “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” - - therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.” (Genesis 3:22-23)

There is a mystery of what took place in this transaction, but it seems to me that a couple of explanations perhaps make some sense of the story in a way that relates to what we are elsewhere given in the Scriptural teachings regarding the nature of man.  The serpent is a deceiver because he failed to tell them that this understanding of good and evil would come with a price tag.  That price tag would be that they would have knowledge of good and evil not as innocent persons having done neither good nor evil, but as transgressors having become sinners.  Adam and Eve gained an understanding of good and evil and became like God in that sense of understanding or sensing the distinctions between good and evil, but that understanding was an understanding twisted and turned by man’s fall into sin.  I think S. Bruce Narramore in his work No Condemnation perhaps has understood what happened in this transaction as well as anyone I have read.  Adam and Eve obtained through their partaking of the fruit an autonomous conscience functionally capable of distinguishing through reason the distinction of good and evil.  But this autonomous (rooted in our own individual beings) function had come to be as we fell into sin.  So from the beginning, not quite like the serpent told it, Adam and Eve had not only a conscience through the transaction, but a defiled conscience through the transgression.

 If we read the Bible carefully regarding our human consciences we will discover that they are not necessarily speaking divine truth.  There are those as Narramore carefully pointed out in his book that had well informed strong consciences.  There were those who had weak consciences wherein people feel condemned in a certain action that is not actually a sin whatsoever.  Then there are those who have seared consciences that have been silenced and reshaped so that they do not sound an alarm when sin is near or when a transgression is committed.  Narramore was concerned that too many Christians viewed conscience as a wholly divine voice within human experience rather than an autonomous conception of good and evil that was not only acquired in what is described as the original transgression against God, but has a tendency to try to work out salvation in a human manner separate of God's work of redemption.

That is what we see Adam and Eve trying to do in Genesis 3.  They see that they are naked and they make garments to cover their nakedness, a nakedness perhaps itself representing that they are no longer whole persons wholly integrated within God's creation.  They are instead defiled creatures needing a covering.  But the autonomous nature of conscience drives Adam and Eve to seek ways of clothing themselves, and of hiding themselves from God.  This is the very opposite of what we will be taught through the Gospel.  We are told in the Scriptures that he who covers his transgression will not prosper.  But Adam and Eve make for themselves garments from the fig leaves and hide themselves when God speaks.  The Gospel describes for us the need to confess our sins and to receive forgiveness and to be healed through God's provision of redemption.  But conscience will often lead us to try to cover our sins, to make up for evil with trying harder, and with some other way than looking to God for his provision of forgiveness and discipleship through his word, his Spirit, his church, and his people for restoration and sanctification.

For this reason Narramore became convinced that there were many ways in popular Christian teaching that Christians were being driven not to the Gospel for restoration from sin but to our own human consciences.  The human being confronted by his conscience can be driven to a remorse for sin, but as long as it is only a human conscience directed dealing with sin will always be trying to work harder to overcome the fault and will be characterized by hiding, by shame, and by a sorrow that falls short of repentance.  But the Gospel directs us away from an autonomous work of salvation directed by our individual consciences.  It describes a redeemer who has come into the world, taken his place in our lives by becoming God with us, and taking on human flesh in the incarnation.  He who has done this has made himself manifest to us in the life of Jesus Christ and has expressed an invitation as he says to us, "Come, follow me."  He is committed to being our Savior, our Redeemer, our teacher, our great high priest, the lamb sacrificed for our sins and the risen Lord capable of instructing, teaching, and discipling us not from the sense of guilt taught to us by our consciences but by the certain success of his resurrected life and eternal power, the proclamation of His Holy Word, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit to the pleasure of God the Father.

We sometimes read in our days of dressing in accord with purity codes.  But we need to watch carefully that we do not put on the clothes of an awakened but autonomous conscience like that which Adam and Eve wore when they saw themselves as naked and so put on the garments they made from fig leaves.  Instead, we are to wear those garments made for us in the life and righteousness of Jesus Christ.  These are garments made for us by the love of God and wrapped around us without shame or deceit in the promise of salvation.