Saturday, April 08, 2006

So What's Left?

We walked away from God and caught the penalty - alienation from our maker and a world in which pain in our regular companion. Even our environment suffered as God said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate the fruit I told you not to eat, I have placed a curse on the ground. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it." (Genesis 3:17)

So all is lost, and the world is an ugly place from now on, as ugly as we are. We're to blame for all the tribulation that is our common lot, because God has washed his hands of us and left us to our own devices. Except that this isn't the way the Bible presents it. God hasn't left us, just judged us. And God isn't done with us - he had a plan from the beginning to bring us back.

The world may show the signs of imperfection, but there is still plenty of glory:



Which means that God is still here. And that is precisely why there's so much mystery about why we suffer in this world. Even if we did mess up and walk away from God, the fact that he's still here should make the suffering of the innocent a non-starter. But the innocent do suffer.

So something very strange is going on. God, who made this world and judged it yet is still here, allows us not only to hurt one another but to hurt those who don't deserve the pain. Is he simply leaving us in our self-made payground unsupervised, or is there something bigger going on?

What is left is a lot, but we still can't explain the pain that comes with the joy.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Curse on the Ground?

There are some who believe the Bible presents a terribly negative view of the world as full of sin and tribulation. What about its beauty, its underlying value as an ecosystem made of ecosystems?

Well, the Bible doesn't deny the majesty of the world. If God created it, then it is likely more majestic than we know. What it has become, though, is a reflection of us, of fallen humanity. As such, it bears our curse:

And to Adam he [God] said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate the fruit I told you not to eat, I have placed a curse on the ground. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. All your life you will sweat to produce food, until your dying day. Then you will return to the ground from which you came. For you were made from dust, and to the dust you will return." (Genesis 3:17-19)

There is an interesting play of words here. The Hebrew language in which Genesis was written calls humanity adam, and the ground adama. So Adam, the man under judgment because he defied God, finds that the source of his livelihood, the ground (adama) is cursed along with him.

We don't have to see this as some barbaric relic of and ancient culture that saw its God as angry and needing to be appeased. The message here is more profound than that. God made us to belong to him, and we chose to cut our ties with him, sideline him, go our own way. If, as we shall see, the ground is a reflection of we who walk on it, then the fact that we walked away from God and received his judgment on us, means that the ground had to suffer too.

It's majestic, but now it bears our fatal flaw.

Just a Piece of Fruit?

There are all kinds of explanations for the streak of trouble that cuts its way through humanity - we're lacking education, we're not realizing our potential, we just need to get a little more kindness. It all amounts to the same thing - if we fix ourselves up, we'll be fine. Humanity is like an uncut jewel just waiting for the polisher to arrive. Funny thing, though: After all the centuries of human life, no polisher has been able to fix us.

The Bible presents us as tragic figures, majestic creatures with a fatal flaw. In Genesis 3, we have the encounter between the first humans and the Satan figure:

"You won't die!" the serpent hissed. "God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil."
The woman was convinced. The fruit looked so fresh and delicious, and it would make her so wise! So she ate some of the fruit. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her. Then he ate it, too. At that moment, their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they strung fig leaves together around their hips to cover themselves.
(Genesis 3:4-7)

So this explanation says we made a choice; all of humanity has chosen to walk away from the plan God had for us. The result is like a piece of Kryptonite embedded in Superman. We are royally messed up, not because we need to get our heads straight, but because we've chosen a path we weren't made for and, with God on the sidelines, we find ourselves incapable of following it.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Masters of the World?

A scholar named Lynn White, Jr. back in the 1960s blamed the environmental crisis on followers of the Bible. He based his ideas on the first chapter of Genesis:

Then God said, "Let us make people in our image, to be like ourselves. They will be masters over all life--the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the livestock, wild animals, and small animals."

So God created people in his own image; God patterned them after himself; male and female he created them. God blessed them and told them, "Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters over the fish and birds and all the animals." (Genesis 1:26-28)

There it is in black and white. The first humans, according to the Bible, were told by God himself to be "masters over all life" and to "subdue" the earth. According to White, Western civilization, fed by grand ideas about conquering the world in the name of God, turned the earth into its playground, ravaging it in the process. Beyond the fact that the same ideas had been proposed by the Zen Bhuddist D.T. Suziki decades before, White's charge is a serious one.

Problem is, it's wrong. While some followers of God may have misunderstood him and used the Bible as an excuse for plundering the world, that was never his intention. God clarified what meant in the next chapter, Genesis 2:15:

The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and care for it.

We think too much of ourselves if we think that God made the world just so he could let us trash it. God is in charge, not humans. So his mandate for us to be masters of our world was simply to be the gardeners and animal keepers, to enhance what was there. Not to abuse it.