The first use of this freedom to love was, as you might expect, made by the first humans, Adam and Eve. The tree in the middle of the garden stood as the great authenticator that the love between the first humans and God was real.
Then they chose to eat the fruit.
The Lover was spurned.
And all hell broke loose.
The decision the first humans made to reject God’s leadership and an ongoing intimacy within a relationship with Him radically altered God’s original design for how the world would operate and how life would be lived. Theologians have termed this “the fall,” and talk about how we now live in a “fallen” world.
In other words, we live in a world that is not the way God intended it to be. When Satan told Eve if she ate of the fruit in the garden that she would not die, he lied. It was the day death and dying was born in to the human race. They had chosen to sleep with another on the night of the honeymoon, and forever stained the relationship of loving intimacy that had been intended for eternity within the Lover’s heart.
Langdon Gilkey observes that few of us find it easy to believe one act of disobedience brought about a fall for the whole race that is now continued in us by inheritance. Yet reflecting on his experience in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, where prisoners representing a cross-section of humanity were forced to participate in a living laboratory of community, Gilkey noted the theological idea of a pervasive warping of our wills is the most accurate description of the reality of life. “What the doctrine of sin has said about man’s present state,” Gilkey concluded, “seemed to fit the facts as a I found them.”
The results of our collective choice to turn away from God run so deep that it isn’t just moral sin and evil we face but natural evil as well.
The whole world is sick.
In the Bible, we’re told that: “…the whole creation has been groaning” (Romans 8:22, NIV). Which is why we have earthquakes and tidal waves, volcanoes and mudslides, wildfires and birth defects, famine and AIDS.
And, yes, hurricanes named Sandy.
Our world is “The Stained Planet,” writes Philip Yancey. The pain and suffering and heartache is a huge cosmic “scream … that something is wrong … that the entire human condition is out of whack.” These are far from original insights, much less contemporary ones. The medieval Christian philosopher Boethius aptly noted that “evil is not so much an infliction as a deep set infection.”
