The Gospel According To SatanExemplo

We create our own craters of dysfunction and disease by our own disobedience, to be sure, but this is the point at which the contagion at work within us entered the world. The Garden of Eden, at the precise moment Adam’s perfect teeth broke the skin of that forbidden fruit, is Ground Zero. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (Genesis 3:7). 

The repercussions are swift and vast. God calls them to account. You can hear his footsteps in the garden. They are perhaps the footsteps of the pre-incarnate, uncreated Christ, seeking out his created siblings for their reckoning. The rest of Genesis 3 shows us that Adam and Eve are brought back out into the light to have their sin accounted for. Their sentence is pronounced, and it includes exile. They are cast out of the garden.

We’ve been trying to get back in ever since.

But you and I are not as clever as we think we are. We keep reasoning that the way back—the way to peace, fulfillment, wisdom—is the way that got Adam and Eve kicked out in the first place. We can’t get in the same way we got out. But we try. And the serpent is still more than happy to oblige with his coaching. He is more cunning than we think he is.

See, the prospect of the fruit promised the three things—fulfillment, beauty, and enlightenment—that we have been chasing in every tree ever since. . . .

We live our lives in exile, but we play “garden” every day. We drink the mirage’s sand and call it living water. We indulge our flesh and call it glory. We worship ourselves and call it living at the “next level.”

Our hope is as it has always been—knowing God and living in communion with him—but we pretend that the divorce isn’t real, that the disconnect is negligible. Or worse: we call the devil’s lies the God’s-honest truth.