20 - Surely you shall die

Surely You Shall Die

Nakedness and vulnerability are not the only bitter epiphany revealed by the fruit of knowledge. God’s warning that you will surely die now comes to the forefront. In light of the experience with the serpent, how do Adam and Eve interpret this? How should they interpret it given their prior experience with God?

On the former question, Adam and Eve have just experienced trauma. They are stunned and are not necessarily thinking clearly or able to reason out using past experience. What if the power of God is really like the power of the serpent? Would that not mean that God was going to cause their deaths in retaliation for eating of the tree? They cowered and hid because they expected God to smite them dead.

Returning to the latter, God patiently dealt with the consequences of their choices, both that to eat of the fruit (a mistake), and that to deny responsibility (the true fall). God simply states what knowledge has been revealed to Adam and Eve. This is not an existential change in our being, this is not the revoking of some magical protection, this an epistemological revelation. The “curses” in Genesis 3 are not so much curses as bitter epiphanies. Humanity finds out that it is not eternal, but limited.

We find that we will surely die. Every ‘curse’ is a consequence of this. Since we will die, we have to reproduce to continue humanity. We have to leave the garden because a single geographic location cannot sustain a rapidly multiplying population. Humans need to spread out to use resources. Similarly we will need to work for food and shelter, since we no longer are in a garden overflowing with resources.

If Adam and Eve had actually had the correct response to the mistake of eating the fruit, what would it have looked like and what would it have changed in the narrative? The correct response would have been to take full responsibility for their mistakes and repent. Ask “God we messed up, how do we fix it?” This would not have changed the ultimate results of the mistake, as these are knowledge of creation that cannot be unlearned. However, the relationship with God at that point would have stayed intact and our concept of God would not have morphed into the serpent god.

The key is that the knowledge cannot be taken back. The child has become an adult.