Cosmic consequences

If God is fully and completely Love, why could God not just have forgiven Adam and Eve there and then (assuming they were “sorry”) and returned to their previous love relationship with God? Surely if God is really Love, he was ‘man enough’ to have simply forgiven them? After all, Love is not self-seeking, nor is it easily angered.

Because God is Love, he did forgive them! Forgiveness is not acting as though it didn’t happen or didn’t matter. Forgiveness is all about not holding someone else’s actions (and the consequences of those actions) against them. There was reconciliation of a sort with God: God clothed them, continued to provide for them and helped them learn to farm the land. He continued to communicate with them and with their children and desired to be part of their lives. God had not cut himself off from them in anger and frustration! It wasn’t that he was now sulking in a corner waiting for Adam and Eve to somehow make amends. God continues to love proactively.

It is just that eating of the fruit was more than a breach of trust. The underlying issue here is not the fact that Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s instructions, neither is it that God was angry towards them or required to be kept apart from them. Yes, of course Adam and Eve had disobeyed God’s clear instructions. They had deliberately turned away from Him when they took of the fruit. Of course that is at the heart of it all. Of course this broke God’s heart and it wasn’t that God felt impassionate about that.

It is just that there is a deeper issue - through man’s choice, the matrix of everything changed. Turning away from God and doing things Satan’s way, even for a short time, had been enough to allow Satan to step into God’s place in man’s life. There was now a ‘new regime’ and this new dictator was not going to step down any time soon.

When Adam and Eve listened to Satan, when they followed his advice rather than God’s, when they did things out of self-interest rather than out of love, it had opened the way for Satan to ‘step on the throne’ as it were. He not only took God’s place in man’s life. He also usurped man’s God-given role to rule over and subdue all of creation. In this way he had crowned himself “Prince of this World”. From this position of authority in the world, Satan would to continue to prevent man from encountering God’s Love. It was now easy for him to deceive man into believing that God was no longer interested in relationship and to persuade man into continuing to trust him, Satan, rather than turning back to God. From this position as “Prince of this world” it would be much easier to entice man to copy his ways of power and domination rather than God’s ways of Love. And of course he could subdue creation as he wished.