Genesis – The Tao of Holy Orthodoxy

October 16, 2017October 16, 2017

18. The Crucifixion of Christ

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At the appointed time, Jesus Christ entered the city of Jerusalem to submit to suffering and death. Soldiers twisted a crown of thorns and placed it on His head. They nailed his hands and feet to a wooden Cross and raised up his body for all to see. A sign above his head mocked him as a false king. Christ’s enemies did not realize that He had entered into the world for the purpose of ascending the Cross for the salvation of our human race.

In His human nature, Christ suffered and died on the Cross, but in His divine nature as God, suffering and death cannot touch Him. The Cross killed a man, but with this Cross, the King of All crushed the power of death. We speak poetically of the Mystery of the Cross: Although Hades (the place of the dead) took a body, it came face to face with the infinite God. Hades swallowed up a body it has seen, but it was destroyed by the uncontainable God it had not seen.

Through the Cross, death was changed to life. The old Adam had died by death because He had rebelliously eaten from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but the New Adam trampled down death by death through obedience. Christ transformed the Cross bearing His body into the Tree of Life, planted on the earth for the healing of all who would share in its Life-Giving Fruit.

On the Cross, Christ again showed us an image of what a healed human person looks like. The perfected human being is victorious through humility, transforming that which is meant to crush and destroy into something beneficial and healthful. A healed person, united with God, is moved by self-denying love.

Jesus Christ is both our Divine Physician and our only saving Antidote. He alone is capable of saving us from death.

Read: John 19; Philippians 2.1-11

September 30, 2017October 16, 2018

13. Our Summary Diagnosis

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The disease of death shows itself through a variety of interconnected illnesses. Holy Scripture summarizes the effects of death on our human race by describing the how the various consequences affect humanity. These consequences include the darkening of the heart, pride and delusion, misuse of a rational mind disconnected from the heart, forgetfulness of God, the influence of chaotic passions that lead us toward suffering and death, and the struggle to choose good instead of evil.

Near the beginning of his Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul summarizes the disastrous effects of sin and death on our ancestors in the past. Since we have inherited death, we still experience these affects today. This particular passage (Romans 1.18-32) explains that when our ancestors lost knowledge of the true God, they forgot what it means to be true human beings, made according to the image of God with potential to become like Him. Relationships between the Creator and His creatures, relationships among human beings, the relationships between males and females descended into chaos.

When reading Holy Scripture, understand that the sacred writings sometimes attribute human characteristics, including emotion, to God. The language of God’s wrath in this passage, for example, provides an image humans can understand to describe a Mystery that is beyond understanding. God does not really have anger or wrath, which are human passions, as we do. God is passionless. Besides, the “wrath” of God mentioned is not turned against human beings. The divine wrath is turned against the unnatural sin and death afflicting humankind, which prevents us from receiving the Love and Grace of God and keeps us from following the Way toward our healing, purpose, and potential. Holy Scripture says that God gave us over to do evil, which means that God allowed human beings to turn away from Him and His Way. (God created us with the freedom to choose.) Men and women wanted to follow their own desires, so God permitted them to do so. God is Love. The human being decided to forsake God in order to pursue his own opinions and follow the passions, which lead toward chaos, suffering, and death. (Throughout history, God sent his prophets to remind people that He loved them and desired for them to return from the path of destruction so that they might enjoy goodness and life in relationship with Him.)

If you want to be healed, you need the One Physician who knows your diagnosis perfectly and possesses the Power to cure you from death in both soul and body entirely.

Read: Romans 1.18-32

September 19, 2017October 25, 2019

6. Death: Our Ultimate Diagnosis

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.

September 17, 2017October 25, 2019

5. In the Garden: Healthy Humanness

Read: Genesis 2.4 – 2.25

The first chapter of the Book of Genesis shows us the wide, panoramic view of the creation of the whole universe, then focuses in on the creation of humanity. The second chapter of Genesis keeps this close-up focus on the creation of our human race.

God created the earth and then formed Adam, the first man, out of the earth, and placed him in the Garden of Paradise. In Paradise, Adam served as the priest of creation since, being body and soul, he bridged together the two dimensions of reality: the physical The first chapter of the Book of Genesis shows us the wide, panoramic view of the creation of the whole universe, then focuses in toward the end on the creation of humanity. The next chapter of a Genesis keeps this close-up focus on the creation of our human race.

God created the earth and then formed Adam, the first man, out of the earth, and placed him in the Garden of Paradise. In Paradise, Adam served as the priest of creation since, being body and soul, he bridged together the two dimensions of reality: the physical (material) dimension we encounter with our five senses and also the invisible (immaterial) spiritual dimension.

Adam gave names to the animals, but none of the animals were compatible with him as an equal partner who could could fully compliment and complete him. So, placing Adam in a deep sleep, God took part of Adam’s side, healed the wound, and crafted a woman from the portion of his body. When Adam saw her, he said, “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” He named her woman since she was taken out of man. Here, God established marriage as an mystical union between man and woman as one.

The man and his wife, Adam and Eve, were clothed in the radiant Light of God’s Glory. (To say they were clothed in God’s Glory means that that God Himself – His Presence – covered them. We also call God’s Presence at work within the creation the Uncreated Energy or Divine Grace.) Adam and Eve lived together in the Garden with the purity and innocence of children, still on the Path toward full maturity and perfection. They had been created according to the image of God, but they still had not become like God (so far as a creature can become like the Creator). If they stayed on the Path toward becoming more like God, they would fulfilled their potential and purpose as human beings.

In the middle of the Garden stood two great trees, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and also the Tree of Life. The first man, our first ancestor, took care of the Garden. Adam could eat from any tree in the Garden, except one. Only one. God warned Adam that if he ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he would die by death.

As flight is natural for a bird and swimming for fish, every impulse and inclination of Adam and Eve was for doing what was good and healthful for their souls. They naturally followed the stream of the Divine Will. This natural obedience to God kept them safely on the heavenly Way that led toward continued maturity and progress. Still, since God endowed the human being with a free will, they possessed the ability to choose to do what would be completely unnatural and self-destructive. But, why would they do that?

The Book of Genesis reveals to us that a healthy human being is one with a pure heart who actively experiences the Life-Giving Uncreated Energy – the Grace of God. We have been created to harmoniously bridge the visible, material aspect of reality and the invisible, spiritual aspect of reality. So, we are designed to live in such a way that nurtures spiritual harmony between body and soul. This harmony is created by the experience of Grace that results from living in harmony with God. When we experience this inner harmony, the desire to live in harmony with others and the whole creation naturally grows. Then, we can attain to greater heights of spiritual health and live daily in a way more in tune with our purpose in this world.

Genesis also teaches us what God has created marriage to be. A man and woman are equal as human beings, but each is different from the other and complementary to the other. Marriage is this beautiful Grace-filled gift from God to help a man and woman progress along the Way together as they grow in spiritual unity with one another.

The relevance of these first two chapters of the Book of Genesis, properly interpreted, may be summarized like this: The description of creation in the Book of Genesis offers us a glimpse into Who God Is and what a healthy human being, full of Life, looks like. Genesis also teaches us that being human and achieving our full potential requires each of us to maintain a proper, healthy relationship to God and to other human beings.

September 8, 2017October 25, 2019

4. “In the Beginning”

Read: Genesis 1.1 – 2.3

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

These are the first words of the Book of Genesis, the first book of Holy Scripture. If you try to analyze the Genesis text as a scientific treatise, a mythological fairy tale, historical fiction, or just an example of world religious literature alongside the creation stories of other cultures, the inner meaning of this Book will escape you.

Genesis is Holy Scripture, through which the God Who created everything that exists out of nothing, Who fills all things, and Who, being present everywhere at once, moves all things, reveals something about Himself and us in simple human language. Genesis gives us a peak into the depth of reality that our rational minds cannot reach. It is a window into the Mystery. Genesis first shows us our universe in a far different condition than the one we know, which we can’t even comprehend because it’s so foreign to our experience. Then, the book moves on to describe the universe as we know it now with both beauty and ugliness, life and death. As a sacred painting (an icon) portrays an event in the past symbolically, not as a photograph, the story of creation in the Book of Genesis is an icon in words rather than paint.

Genesis begins by introducing us to our Creator. Before God created, nothing existed, but the Uncreated One Himself – the One God, Who is without beginning or end. He created everything in existence – time, space, matter, energy – everything – from the tiniest subatomic particle to the vast array of galaxies, both already know and yet to be discovered, as well as the invisible spiritual dimension of reality inhabited by angels and demons.

God created by his Word, that is, by His Tao. Another way of putting it is that God the Father created through His Son. The One God is Father and Son together. The Father has always been the Father because His Son has always co-existed with Him.

In the beginning, the Holy Spirit of God hovered over the waters at creation. This Holy Spirit, who is also Uncreated with the Father and the Son, cooperated with the Father and Son in the work of creation. These Three are One God. However the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit equally is God. The Three are distinct from one another since the Father is not the Son nor is the Son the Father, yet the Three cannot be divided from their indescribably united as One. As you can tell if you try to wrap your rational mind around it, God is a Mystery. We know nothing about God, except what He reveals to us.

With these first simple words, In the beginning, the Story of all existence unfolds. The Creator gives existence to everything that exists and life to everything that lives. The contours of the planet’s surface and living beings to inhabit it, from simplicity to complexity, emerge at the command of the Creator. The grandness of creation inspires us to stand in awe and wonder of the beauty of the Earth and vastness of the universe.

Your own story as an individual human being doesn’t just begin with your birth, but here in the beginning. The Uncreated One said, “Let us make the human being according to our image and our likeness.” Notice here that (1) the One God referred to Himself as us and also (2) that the human being is special among all the creature of the universe. God made our first ancestors after His Image and granted them the potential to become like God, as far as it is possible for a creature to be like the Creator.

We see that God made humanity male and female. In their humanness, the man and woman are equal. However a man a human being, a woman a human being equally. They are equal in their humanness, but not the same. They are different and distinct from each other so that in their difference one might compliment and complete the other.

The man and woman were commanded to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth, and to oversee it. God appointed them as benevolent caretakers and priests over creation on the Way of spiritual progress toward perfection, becoming more and more like God.

Through this first chapter of Genesis, you can begin to learn Who God Is and who we really are. We learn also about our relationship to God, our relationship to each other, and our relationship to the creation around us.

In this first part of the Story, we see a distant panoramic view of the whole creation, but the second part of the Genesis story takes us in for a close-up, focused view on our human origins and the life of our first ancestors in the Garden of Paradise.