Seven lessons from the Garden of Eden

We can glean many insights from the events in the Garden of Eden if they are understood in their proper perspectives. Here are seven.

1. God’s spirit is the source of life

The imagery of Genesis 2:7 likens God to a potter who creates man out of the earth. Since non-living material things can only result in other non-living things, mankind would not be alive at all unless life was infused into him. Therefore it is the “blowing” of life into man’s nostrils that make him alive. It can be literal, but we should understand it in a more fundamental way: God is the source of life.

It is interesting that in John 20:22, Jesus also “breathes” on the apostles and tells them, “Receive the holy spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven...” thus giving them a new life as ministers of forgiveness. This is repeated on Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4) when a strong wind blows life into the Church. So as God blew life into Adam’s body, so does God blow life into the mystical body of Jesus (the new Adam) – the Church.

2. It delights God that man helps him

Genesis 2:5-15 gives us an agricultural allegory of man’s purpose, and that is to be stewards of creation. God shares with us the responsibility of harnessing nature – not exploiting it – in a sustainable way for all generations until the end of time. He delights that we, his children, help him the way a human father delights in the achievements of his children. We should not be surprised, therefore that Pope Francis would write an encyclical (Laudato Si) that urges us to care for our “common home.”

In the same way, Christ delights that his Church “assists” him in bringing people to heaven – our real home – when he authorized the Church to forgive, strengthen, feed, heal, and authorize through her sacraments.

3. Bridegroom and bride are inseparable; so are Christ and his Church

God placed Adam under a deep sleep and from his side took out a rib and fashion woman out of it, which is why husband and wife come together as one body (Genesis 2:1-25). We understand this as the inseparability of husband and wife because they have become “one flesh” through matrimony.

It is interesting to consider that God continuously presents himself in the Old Testament as a bridegroom and Israel his bride. (Isaiah 54:5, Jeremiah 31:31-33 for example) In the New Testament, Christ also makes many references to himself as being a bridegroom (Matthew 9:15 for example), and the Church his bride.

This idea comes from a strong imagery of the crucifixion when the side of Christ is pierced and he dies but later resurrects like Adam’s “deep sleep”. From his side comes blood and water – the Church, his bride the same way Adam’s bride came to be.

Adam and Eve being one flesh is the foreshadowing of Christ and his Church as being inseparable: they are “one body.”

4. Human nature is perfected by our participation in God’s grace

We were meant to live with God forever with both body and spirit. If that were true, then the human body must last forever. Although immortality of the body is not part of human nature, God gave mankind the gift of the immortality of the body. It is a grace (from “gratis” = free = gift) that perfects human nature.

Other gifts were given by God to mankind. Infused knowledge is one, and unity of mind and body is another. The most important gift God gave mankind is Sanctifying Grace that allows us to share in his divinity. It is a supernatural grace in the sense that it is above human nature to have a divine nature – but that is exactly what Sanctifying Grace shares with us.

We lost all these graces as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. Genesis 2:9-17 explains how disobedience took away the gift of immortality. While Sanctifying Grace is restored through baptism, the other graces are lost forever. But God gives us other graces! Today we are perfected by participating in God’s grace the same way it perfected mankind did before the fall. But Participation is the key; since grace is a gift, it won’t be effective until we use it.

5. Engaging in conversation with the devil will most likely lead to sin

It is interesting how the devil tempts through doubt: “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees in the Garden?’” because he tempts us in the same way. Genesis 3:1-7 provides an image of how the devil lures Eve into a conversation by making her doubt.

Eve took the bait and fell into the devil’s trap by believing lie after lie. We have to remember that the devil is a fallen angel whose nature is imbued with complete knowledge of the natural universe. Angels can also act their will on the material universe as much as God allows them. So a devil has a far superior nature to humans and our mental and physical capacity is no match to theirs. By unwittingly entering into a dialogue with the devil, Eve entered into a conversation she had little chance of getting out of unscathed.

We can learn from this. The moment we entertain a temptation it is like having a dialogue with the devil: we stand little chance of winning. The only way to come out a victor is to avoid the dialogue at all.

6. God is the master of history

When God told the serpent, “I will but enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; they will strike your head, while you strike at their heel” (Genesis 3:14-15), he proclaimed the protoevangelium – the promise of a messiah.

God could have reset the universe and start all over again but he didn’t. Blessed Archbishop Fulton Sheen said it best: the only way God can fix a discordant note is by using that note as the first one in a new symphony. So when man fell from grace, God wrote a new “song” wherein a man and a woman would undo the disobedience of Adam and Eve. In religious art we see Mary crushing the head of a serpent. We also see Christ doing the same thing, sometimes in “limbo” where he breaks open the door of Sheol and crushes the devil whose works have prevented man from entering heaven, our natural home.

As we read the foreshadowing of the Old Testament being fulfilled in the New Testament, whatever original design of God that was thwarted is restored. Things like these don’t happen by some weird coincidence but by some master planner.

In that way, the entire history of mankind has already been “predestined” by God in the sense that he knows the outcome for each of us. It doesn’t mean that we have no choice in it – that would be “double predestination”, which we don’t subscribe to. Instead, God influences history through our free will. So from the beginning of creation to the end of time, it is the actions of our free will that cooperate (or not) with God’s plans that make history. It would be interesting to think that God already foresaw the fall and allowed it because there was an “opportunity” to become man. It is as if our loving God “planned” to walk with us even in our fallen state.

7. The Holy Spirit is the author of Scripture

Genesis and Revelation are like bookends, where we read of God walking with mankind in the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and God as a bridegroom coming to walk with his bride – a New Jerusalem – in Revelation 22.

Genesis was believed to have been written sometime around 1400 B.C. while the Gospels and Revelation around 70 A.D. There are 1470 years that separate the writings and yet they fit perfectly as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that would take generations to complete.

One can say this can be done if there were some legendary conspiracy of humans to perpetuate a hoax for that long. However, the idea of a conspiracy is too messy to entertain because it is absurd to think conspirators can influence events for all of history. Of course, the other explanation is that God inspired different human writers across time, which would explain how consistently poetic the larger story is when all the books of the Bible are read as a single narrative.