Fryeburg New Church Assembly

Fryeburg, Maine
August 9, 1999

My job this morning is to talk about how we got into this mess in the first place.

I'd like to start at the very beginning. But as fun as it would be to go over the seven days of creation, we have a problem. In the last verse of Genesis 1 we read, "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." That's just the problem. Our topic this week is "Holy Disasters"--and the first chapter of the Bible is 100% disaster-free! Each day, as the work of creation progresses, God sees that the things created that day are good. And in the end, all of creation is pronounced "very good."

Yet this does give us the background in which our story unfolds, and provides our first point on the subject of disasters: Everything that God creates is very good. And as we go along in this lecture and throughout the week, we will find that when disaster strikes--especially human disaster, it is not because of what God does, but because of what we do. God created the universe and everything in it--including human beings--to be good. If anything is not good, we are the ones who must take responsibility for it.

Now that we have the first point under our belt, it is time to introduce this lecture. For this hour, we will go through three disasters that take place in Genesis chapters 2 through 9: 1) Eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and being expelled from Eden; 2) Cain and Abel; and 3) The Flood. We will focus especially on the first.

In terms of our spiritual history, these events tell the story of the fall from our original "celestial," or heavenly, heart-centered stage to the point where our early spiritual, or head-centered stage begins. To use Swedenborgian jargon, we are covering the decline of the "most ancient church," or as I prefer to call it, humanity's very earliest religious era. And we will discover as we go along that just as our early childhood sets the tone for much of what comes later in our lives, the events of this period establish a key spiritual and psychological pattern that remains with us to this day.

So my goal for this morning really is to shed some light on how we got into this mess in the first place. I have also found that our teachings tend to stand out in a clearer light if they are put in contrast to traditional Christian concepts. So along the way we will explore the controversial issue in Christian theology of so-called original sin and the sinful nature of humankind. Is that enough disaster to get the week started?

In our culture, there is there is no greater symbol of the long-lost golden age of human innocence and peace than the Garden of Eden. Over the ages, many utopian dreamers have looked to Eden as the blueprint for the ideal human society--a simple, agrarian community in which people are close to one another, close to the earth, and close to God. It is the situation into which God himself put the first humans he created.

Yet in the very second chapter of the Bible, Eden is also the setting for the "original disaster" that started humankind on its later course involving war, injustice, cruelty, hardship, sorrow, and pain. The stage was set by God himself. We read:

In this verse, we have not only the seeds of all evil and disaster, but also one of the first points of confusion in the Bible. It has to do with the placement of the two trees. Some translations gloss over the ambiguity with readings such as: "In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." But the Hebrew is better represented as: "The tree of life in the middle of the garden, and also the tree of knowledge of good and evil." At this stage, the tree of life is clearly in the middle of the garden; we are not told just where God planted the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

This is not just nitpicking. The spiritual issue is summed up in a skeptical question that I have come across a number times: "If God didn't want us to eat from the tree of knowledge, why did he put it in the middle of the garden?" The answer is, "God didn't put it in the middle; Eve did. When the serpent is tempting Eve by focusing her attention on the one tree that God had commanded Adam not to eat from, Eve responds:

God made no mention of the tree being in the middle of the garden. But by the time the serpent came along, Eve had transplanted the tree of life out of the middle of the garden, and replaced it with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

What does this mean? Spiritually speaking, the middle of our inner garden is the focal point of our will, or motivation. Our motivation is made up of what we love. And whatever is at the center of our motivation is our "primary love"--what we love above all else. This primary love determines our life's direction.

So the question of which tree is in the middle represents a question that faces each one of us: What will we put in the center of our garden: God's will or ours? God's will, as expressed in his original arrangement of Eden, is for the tree of life to be in the center. But when our will starts to dominate, as it did with Eve--and Adam along with her--then the tree of knowledge of good and evil gets put in the center instead.

Let's look at what these two trees represent so that we can understand the spiritual issue we are dealing with. (The correspondences in this lecture come from the first volume of Arcana Coelestia, in which the spiritual meaning of Genesis 1-9 is explained.)

First, it should be obvious that these are not literal trees, but symbolic ones. A literal tree cannot "make one wise" (Gen. 3:6). In the Bible, trees represent our growing insights and perceptions about life and reality--especially about spiritual reality. In particular, the tree of life represents faith that comes from love, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil represents faith that comes from sensory evidence and knowledge.

To flesh this out a bit, the tree of life represents how we perceive what is true and good when we wish to follow the Lord in innocent trust, believing and doing whatever the Lord shows us. But the tree of knowledge of good and evil represents how we perceive what is good and true when we want to decide for ourselves what is true and good using our own rational abilities, based on the things we learn through our physical senses. Put simply, the issue Eve and Adam faced was whether they would live in simple, inward love and trust in the Lord, following wherever the Lord led them, or instead trust their own intellect and their outward experiences to guide them.

It may help to grasp the meaning of the tree of knowledge of good and evil if we realize that the Hebrew word used for "knowledge" has the sense of "knowledge through experience." Put colloquially, Eve's eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil was a choice to learn in the "school of hard knocks" of trying things out for ourselves and finding out through (often painful) experience that good really is good, and evil really is evil. That choice put humankind on the course that it has been traveling ever since.

In a word, the original disaster involved a choice to follow ourselves instead of following the Lord. And although in one sense the early humans represented by Adam and Eve made that choice for all of humankind that followed after them, each one of us also faces that choice individually.

To see how this works, let's address the issue of original sin, and the sinful nature of humankind. Traditional Christian theology teaches that because of the sin of Adam (what about Eve?!?), we are all born guilty of sin. The sin of Adam is transferred to all succeeding generations, so that right from birth we are guilty and deserve to go to hell. The Biblical basis for this teaching is tenuous. There are passages that can be read this way, but only by violating a very clear principle set out in the book of Ezekiel:

If we take this teaching to heart, then we get a very different sense from a passage in Paul that is often interpreted to support the idea of original sin:

Those who teach the doctrine of original sin tend to ignore the final phrase of this verse. It says, "and so death spread to all because all have sinned." Further, the sentence structure would make much more sense if this verse were translated as:

In other words, it is not that we inherit an inborn guilt from Adam--an "original sin." Rather, following the trend that Adam and Eve started, which has been passed down from parents to children ever since through an inborn and in-bred tendency toward sin, we all fall into the same trap: we all sin. We all say and do things that we know are wrong. We all make bad choices. We all listen to our physical senses and our own reasonings (shall we be honest, and say "rationalizations"?) instead of listening to the still, small voice of the Lord that we hear within us, and in the Bible, when our ears are open to it.

The story of Adam and Eve is our story. It is the story of what each one of us does when we are faced with the choice of trusting the Lord in simple innocence and faith, or trusting in ourselves and what our physical senses tell us. If we are honest with ourselves, we will recognize that all too often, when that choice is in front of us, we choose to follow what we think is right rather that what the Lord is telling us is right. And although Eve may try to excuse herself by saying that, after all, God was talking to Adam when he gave that command, she was quite able to repeat God's command to the serpent--albeit with her own little twist. She knew that she was not supposed to eat from that tree. And oftentimes we know even as we are making a choice that it is the wrong choice.

So we come back to the truth that when disaster strikes--especially spiritual and interpersonal disaster--it is not God's doing, but ours. We are the ones who do the wrong thing when we know better. This does not mean that we personally bring upon ourselves every disaster that strikes us. There is no strict karma here. Other people's wrong choices can bring disaster upon us, and our wrong choices can bring disaster upon others.

Before we move on to a much briefer consideration of the other two major disasters in the decline of our spiritual "Golden Age," let's deal briefly with what is, after all, a legitimate question. Even if God did not plant the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden, he did put it in the garden. Why? Doesn't this mean that God originated evil, and not us?

Not at all. God made both trees grow in the garden in order to create a very good thing: human freedom. The planting of both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil represents God making us an offer. God says to us, "I would very much like it if you would love me and follow me. I am putting the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and you are welcome to eat from it. But I recognize that for this relationship of love between you and me to be real, it must be your own choice whether to be in it. So I am opening up the possibility of another choice. Please do not make that choice! If you do, you will create what did not exist before: spiritual death--or evil."

It is true that God created our human garden with the possibility of evil. But in itself, the tree of knowledge of good and evil was not evil, but good, since it made possible the great good of human choice and freedom. It was only when we ate from that tree, trusting in ourselves instead of following the Lord, that evil came into existence.

We have spent the bulk of our time on eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil because that truly was the original disaster. From that fateful point, the decline was swift. First, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Symbolically, through choosing not to follow God they fell from the original state of heavenly wisdom that they had enjoyed when they loved and trusted in the Lord first. No longer did life flow smoothly, easily, innocently for them. Their life now involved the labor of spiritual indecision and struggle, and the pain of separation from God and from one another.

This separation from God and from one another was immediately expressed in the conflict between their first two children, Cain and Abel. Cain, as a tiller of the soil, represented faith, or the intellectual side of our nature. Abel, as a keeper of sheep, represented kindness, or the love side of our nature. We humans were originally created to have love be primary, and faith to flow from that, as it did at first with Adam and Eve.

However, just as Adam and Eve, in disobeying the Lord's command, had begun to put their thinking and reasoning ability ahead of their love and trust in the Lord, events show that Cain, their firstborn son, did not have his heart in the right place. He acted from argumentation and self-justification, not from love. In a negative sense, being a "tiller of the soil" means someone who acts from "faith" (so-called) that is separated from love and kindness toward our fellow human beings.

We have our own little Cain inside of us whenever we think that being right is more important than being kind and loving. Consider the times we get into arguments with our husband or wife, our parents or children, our coworkers, boss, or friends. What are we trying to prove? All too often, we are trying to prove that we are right, and they are wrong. And all too often, the first casualty is the mutual love, kindness, and respect that had formerly been in the relationship.

And so, like Cain, we kill Abel within ourselves. In our efforts to prove how right and how good we are, we kill the feelings of mutual love, respect, and kindness that God has placed in us. And in the process, we create even more separation and distrust between ourselves and the people around us. Like Cain, we become spiritual fugitives and wanderers, having thrown ourselves out of our own household--the household of living together with one another in mutual love and service.

After Cain and Abel, things continued to go downhill until finally, God looked down and saw that "the wickedness of humankind was great on the earth, and every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil all the time" (Gen. 6:5).

How could we have fallen so quickly from the Eden state of wisdom and love in God's presence to a state where we were entirely corrupt? The answer to this question involves a fundamental difference between the psychology of the people before the flood, and that of people after the flood.

Before the flood, there was no separation between heart and mind. People's minds and hearts were so united that whatever they wanted, they immediately believed in and acted upon. We can still see this psychological stage in babies: every feeling is immediately expressed, with no evaluation or masking along the way. So as soon as Eve desired the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she ate it--even though she knew God had commanded her not to. As soon as Cain became angry with his brother, he went out and killed him, even though God had warned him about the evil lurking within him. They were simply not able to desire one thing and think another. And when their desires turned toward self-centered and worldly things--as they increasingly did--they could not restrain themselves from following those desires. They rushed headlong into carrying out every evil and destructive desire within themselves, until they finally reached the stage where there was no goodness or spiritual life left in them.

That is why the flood happened. The flood was the final self-destruction that occurred when people whose minds and hearts were one turned their hearts in the wrong direction. The destruction was almost complete. Only Noah and his family survived.

In order to protect us from ever having that happen again, the Lord brought about a fundamental change in our psychology: the Lord made a separation between our heart and mind--our motivation and our understanding. To this day, we are able to want one thing and think another. Unlike those earliest people, we can now recognize a wrong desire within ourselves and use our thinking mind to stop ourselves from acting upon it. We can say, "Yes, I would very much like to slug so-and-so in the face for what he did to me, but I know that would be wrong, so I am not going to do it."

That new ability to use our mind in directing our heart is what makes it possible for us to make our way back slowly and painfully from our original disaster of turning away from the Lord. It is what makes it possible for us to struggle against every wrong desire that we have, and, with the Lord's help, turn ourselves back toward the Lord. This divided mind is the lasting legacy bequeathed to us by those early humans represented in the stories of the first nine chapters of Genesis. And it is both a curse and a blessing.

The people of the earliest religious era, once they had tasted the tempting fruit of following themselves instead of the Lord, could not help rushing headlong into complete immersion in their own evil tendencies, bringing disaster and death on themselves. But we can. And that just happens to be the subject of my next lecture: "Nineveh: The Disaster that Wasn't." But you'll have to wait until Thursday morning to hear it!

Lecture Index	HomePage	Lecture #6



Music: Dimensions � 1999 Bruce DeBoer

The Original Disaster: Eden to the Flood

Lectures delivered at

Fryeburg New Church Assembly

Fryeburg, Maine August 9, 1999

The Original Disaster:
Eden to the Flood

Fryeburg, Maine
August 9, 1999