Read Genesis 3. You may read it online here.
In the third chapter of Genesis, a serpent slithers into Paradise. This serpent is not just a garden snake, but a highly-intelligent bodiless power – a spiritual creature. (At least, the spiritual serpent is working through the physical snake.) The Old Serpent is known by other names: the Great Dragon, the father of lies, the prince of demons, Satan, Lucifer, and the Devil. Once a beautiful angel, the Devil chose the way of darkness and pride. Enamored by his own beauty, the serpent rebelled against God because He wanted to be a god himself. Since the Creator is All-Powerful, the Devil sorely overestimated his own greatness. Like a bolt of lightning, He fell down from heaven along with the many angels who followed him. These angels, who had been created to be pure and do good, became demons, evil powers who hate God and human beings, whom God loves, and try to corrupt all that is loving and good.
The sneaky serpent approached the woman in the Garden. He deceived her into thinking that God really wanted to prevent her from becoming like Him. The serpent craftily presented disobedience as a quick way for her to achieve greatness and to become a god.
Why did God forbid Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? God’s commandment protected them. The fruit was not yet ripe for eating, or, rather, they were not ready to eat it. Adam and Eve had not yet attained to the maturity necessary to be enlightened through the Tree.
Eve believed the serpent’s deceptive lies. She looked at the Tree and the fruit with the snake’s seductive words in mind. She was tempted to eat from the Tree. Reaching out and taking hold of the fruit, she ate it. Then, she gave some of the fruit to her husband and Adam ate it, too. The fruit had looked sweet to their eyes, but their disobedience turned its taste bitter in their mouths.
This disobedience of Adam and Eve is called sin. Sin means disobeying the instructions the Creator gives us to keep us in good health and keep us on the Way of Life. He designed us, so He teaches us how to live in the Way that is natural for the human person. A sin is an act that is unnatural according to how God has designed us as human beings. Sin separates the human being from the experience of God.
Adam and Eve expected to see with vision of gods, but their eyes were opened to the experience of death. God is Life, so when our first ancestors disconnected themselves from Life Himself, they experienced the absence of Life, which is death. When we sin, we inhibit Life Himself from working within us fully. The consequence is a greater experience of death. Simply put, sin causes death.
When Adam and Eve tasted the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, their eyes were opened, but their eyes were opened in the way they expected.
God had intended for sickness and death to only be a rational concept in the minds of the man and woman. He created them to experience only good health. After their sin, the opposite became true. Sickness and death entered their experience while the good health they once knew remained only in their memory. The eyes of the man and woman were opened to see themselves standing naked and ashamed. That is, Adam and Eve saw themselves stripped of the radiant Light of Grace, the Divine Presence that had once clothed them royally.
The man and woman certainly obtained knowledge of good and evil. They had already known good by experience because goodness was the natural Way of their existence. Even though they only knew good, they possessed (because God created them with free will) the ability to act completely against what was natural for them to do. After they turned away from God, rejecting their natural inclination, their knowledge of good and evil turned upside down. Adam and Eve no longer knew only the experience of good as they had done in their innocence. Their eyes were now opened to a newfound experience of evil because they committed an act of evil. (God is Life, Light, and the Good One. As death is the absence of Life and darkness is the absence of Light, evil is the absence of Good.)
Death afflicted Adam and Eve both in the soul and in the body. It stuck their souls immediately. Their hearts were darkened, causing spiritual blindness. They no longer remained in the Divine Presence they once enjoyed. Although they did not physically die completely for quite a while, their bodies became susceptible to sickness, difficulty, and the wearing down of age.
When God confronted Adam and Eve after their sin, neither the man nor the woman expressed sorrow or a desire to repent. Instead, Adam responded by blaming both his wife and God, saying, “The woman you put here with me gave it to me and I ate it!” In turn, the woman blamed the serpent for deceiving her. God clothed Adam and Eve in garments of skin. They now possessed mortal flesh like the animals. Their Creator exiled them from the Garden of Paradise to keep them from eating from the Tree of Life. As a result of their sin, they had to live very different lives in a very different world than their loving Creator had made for them to enjoy.
Like the lower animals around them, Adam and Eve reproduced. With the help of God, they brought more human beings into the world. All their descendants inherited the disease of death in body and soul.
Why did God throw Adam and Eve out of Paradise and post an angelic guard with a flaming sword to guard the sealed entrance? Why did God want to keep Adam and Eve away from the Tree of Life? The answer is Divine Love. God did not want the human beings He crafted according to His image to eat from the Tree of Life in their sickened condition. If they ate from the Tree in their sickness, they would exist forever as mortals in a perpetual state of spiritual sickness and death. God intended for us to be truly Immortal, sharing in His Life with bodies and souls in perfect health. He wants us to fulfill our potential and purpose. God doesn’t want us to just exist, but to thrive, being fully alive. So, God exiled humanity from the Garden, until He completed His work to cure our disease.
Eventually, Adam and Eve died by death as God had warned. They breathed their last breaths. The souls of our first parents entered into Hades, the name for the place of souls which have departed this life. Their bodies decayed, returning to the earth.
Even in physical death, God’s mercy is evident. Physical death puts an end to suffering in this life caused by sin and puts an end to the many various symptoms of death at work in our souls.
We all have been born afflicted with death, a disease unnatural to our human nature. Throughout human history and across our world today, we see the long trail of pain and destruction death has left behind.
You may think of death in the soul as a syndrome, a collection of inter-connected illnesses present in our souls. The next several entries address various specific sicknesses that we experience as part of our experience of death.
Remember: Death is our primary diagnosis.
Text copyright © 2017 by Fr. Symeon D. S. Kees