Weren't We Perfect?

So we're stuck with a confusing picture of human life. If we were made perfect, created in the image of God, there appears to be no earthly reason why we would walk away from paradise, defy the one who made us, and seek independence to "find ourselves." Weren't we already found?

The Bible is telling us that we were made for one purpose/lifestyle, in which we lived under God's protection and control, but we chose freedom from him instead. Not that God was a cruel taskmaster, so we had to escape him, but that we thought he was keeping us down, knowing that we had the potential to be as powerful as he is. We wanted to be God ourselves.

So we rebelled against the one who made us, and out of that rebellion, so the Bible tells us, was unleashed all the evil in the world. Our independence destroyed the perfection of the first creation and led to the tragedy of the human condition.

This means that we must have had a flaw in us, so we weren't perfect to start with. Or our creation in his image gave us the potential to become too much like God. Or God made us so well that it was possible for us to move beyond our original boundaries, but God wasn't paying enough attention to that possibility to stop us in time. Or...

I could go on, but the fact is that I don't know. I think we want to know the answer to this dilemma because it would be so comfortable to blame God for all the pain in the world. He made us, he messed up, and we have to live with the consequences. It's his fault.

I don't think it's that easy, though. If we really believe we are free, then we can't argue that we make the choices we do because God designed us wrong.

The Bible says we were perfect. It doesn't say how it was possible for perfect people to walk away from the one who made them. All it tells us is that this is what happened.