Our Life in the Lord Part Three: The Refusal
The serpent comes into the garden and asks the woman a question. He does not argue and he does not threaten. He asks, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden’?” (Gn 3:1). The question is about God’s motives. The serpent is suggesting that God is keeping something good from the man and the woman, and that God’s command is a fence around that good thing. When the woman answers him, the serpent denies God’s word outright: “You certainly will not die!” (Gn 3:4). His lie appeals to pride and to the senses. The woman “saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom” (Gn 3:6). Eve believes the lie. She takes the fruit and eats it, and she gives some to her husband, and he eats it.
The Great Reduction
Stated exactly, the serpent’s lie is absurd. God had already made the man and the woman in his image and likeness, and the serpent told them they could become like gods. He offered them a trade: the truth of what they were for a fiction dramatically smaller, pitched as a promotion. This is the great reduction. Underneath the offer, the serpent made an accusation that’s still believed in every generation since: that God, who gave the command, does not really know us or care about us, and that the hard and good thing is not as good as it seems.
The serpent’s method has not changed since. He stays hidden and works by suggestion, in increments, sweet as honey by degrees, moving the fence a hand’s width at a time until the forbidden looks ordinary and the ordinary looks dull. He tempts us toward anything but God, even lesser goods (not necessarily even objective evil). He speaks out of spite, an envy with nothing left to gain. He seeks only to deprive God’s children of their purpose and their rest, because he has refused his own. He is perfectly willing to sound pious while he works. In a desert far in the future he will quote scripture, chapter and verse, to the Word made flesh himself.
The Death of Trust
The heart of man’s refusal came prior to a forbidden morsel. Before the man and the woman touched the fruit, their trust in God had already died. Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart, and abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. The interior failure and the exterior act are one sin and not two. At the core of this is the presumption that we know the whole story, and that our creaturely reading of the situation is more reliable than the instruction of God who made us. God comes into the garden searching. The man and the woman answer him. The woman answers, “The snake tricked me, so I ate it” (Gn 3:13). The man replies that the woman gave him fruit from the tree, and he ate it (Gn 3:12). Each answer lays the choice on somebody else and leaves conscience out of it. The choice was free; both excuses are failures. Everything after the garden depends on this choice. The choice of evil is a true exercise of freedom, freely made and culpable in full, even though it rests on a deception and abuses the freedom which permits it. A choice made under compulsion would condemn no one. The man and the woman chose freely, thus standing condemned.
God asks a directed question first, before the man and the woman make their excuses. God walks in the garden at the breezy time of the day, and he calls to the hiding humans: “Where are you?” (Gn 3:9). He knows the answer already, for nothing is hidden from him. He is doing what he will spend the rest of the story doing. He is coming after the ones who preferred to hide. God’s first recorded words to fallen humanity are a search. He asks that same question again in every summons since, to Abram, to Moses, to Samuel in the night, and to a tax collector in a tree.
Missing the Mark
The Hebrew for sin, “chata,” means missing the mark. It’s an archer’s word, for an arrow loosed at a target yet landing somewhere else. That is, sin is first the missing of a purpose, and not first the breaking of a rule. A creature needing to aim at God, landed on himself, with every sin since repeating that trajectory.
Evil as Privation
We keep imagining evil grander than it is. Evil is a lack, a privation, the way a hole in a roof is not a second kind of roof. Evil is no rival power, no dark substance. Whatever exists is good insofar as it exists and is aligned to its purpose, and the less a thing is aligned to its purpose, the more it is deprived of good. This is why evil creates nothing and can only spoil what is. It is always easier to destroy than create, as destruction is not a rival act of manufacture. The same truth is why freedom was never a license to go in every direction at once. We have free will toward something and for something (even someone), never merely from something: freedom is the capacity to choose the good we were made for. The choice against it, though free and fully ours, is freedom’s abuse rather than its fulfillment.
The Threefold Loss
The man and the woman lost three things. They lost friendship with God first. They had walked with God in the cool of the day, and now they hid among the trees. They lost the harmony of the creature with itself along with it, so that from then on desire runs ahead of reason and the flesh wars against the spirit. The tradition calls that inclination “concupiscence.” It is a wound and not a sin. It cannot harm those who withhold consent and resist it by the grace of Christ. They lost immortality last, for “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23). A creature who had cut himself off from the source of life began, from that day, to wither and die.
The Garden’s Gate as Description
God sent the man and the woman out of the garden. The expulsion reads at first like a sentence imposed. It is better read as a condition described. They had refused the priestly vocation. The garden was a sanctuary for the priests of the earth. The gate marked in geography what they had already made true of themselves. A sanctuary is no place for a priesthood that refuses to offer the necessary sacrifice.
Original Sin and Its Structures
Our first parents had lost holiness, therefore preventing themselves from handing on what they no longer had. They instead handed on what they had become. The Church describes the mechanism: original sin is transmitted with human nature itself, by propagation and not by imitation, a deprivation of the holiness and justice in which the race began. Original sin is contracted and not committed, a state and not an act. That is why it becomes part of even a newborn who has done nothing at all, the way a child born in exile is in exile through no fault of her own. Human nature was wounded in its powers, not destroyed at the root. The structures of sin grow alongside the inherited condition and are fed by it. They are patterns of pride and malice, repeated and reinforced across generations and built into households, institutions, and whole cultures. Every child arrives into a world already leaning the wrong way, and the world malforms him before he ever chooses anything.
The reverse of that picture shows the same truth. A single generation raised inside a community that visibly lived faith, hope, and charity every day would feel what the world was meant to feel like. That unbroken transmission is what the in-breaking of God’s Kingdom will one day restore. Over most of history and in most places, people hand on the ways of the world. That is, every sin reaches beyond the one who seemingly initially commits it. Every sinner plants seeds in somebody else’s soil, and every generation tills what the last one planted.
Cain, the Flood, and Babel
In the chapters that follow the garden, the wound spreads quickly and at scale. God looks with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he does not look with favor, and Cain’s face falls. God himself comes to warn Cain before anything has happened: “sin lies in wait at the door: its urge is for you, yet you can rule over it” (Gn 4:7). Cain kills his brother anyway. The first death in human history is a murder inside a family. The quarrel behind it was about worship. Abel brought firstlings - his firstfruits - the best of what he had. Cain brought … something, eventually. The primary difference lay in priority against leftovers and in the devotion of the giver, and not in produce against livestock. The pattern outlived the field it happened in. Men in every generation since have resented a brother whose offering God accepts.
Even so, men keep forming the shape of worship in those first generations. People begin to invoke the LORD by name. Noah’s first act on dry ground will be to build an altar and offer back to God from the animals he preserved. All of it is liturgy before there is a word for liturgy, and worship before there is a single commandment about worship.
Generations later, violence has soaked the earth. God sends the flood as judgment and rescue at once, and he draws one family through the waters. Later still, men gather their ambition on a plain and build a tower to make a name for themselves, and God scatters and confuses them. It reads like punishment and functions like protection. For when man does what is against his purpose in God, he is less than fully alive, and the Lord protects man from himself.
The Cost of the Gift
One question must be met directly. Why would a good and almighty God permit any of it? Part of the answer is locating the fault correctly. The discord was our doing and the tempter’s, and God neither created it nor sponsors it. The harder part goes to the root of the gift. God wants creatures who can share his own life, and his life is love. The capacity to love as he loves is inseparable from the capacity to refuse. A creature engineered so that refusal was impossible would be a robot kept safe, and not a child. No one would surrender the ability to grow in love in exchange for an automatic existence that could never go wrong because it could never really go at all. So God bears the cost of his own gift. He leaves our freedom in our hands even when it wounds him. He will sacrifice anything toward our return except our freedom itself, for taking that back would make the return meaningless.
The Remedy Announced
God stayed with the man and the woman, which impacts everything that follows. The commission he gave in the garden still stood, and the generosity in creating the garden remained abundant. The wound was now inside the creature and inside every generation the creature would produce. And so God would bring the remedy where the wound itself was. God had plans to fashion a remedy for our wayward choice out of mortality itself. But first God would make a people ready to receive it, and that would take longer than anyone would have guessed.
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