REconceiveIT

A journal of imagination, experience, and discovery

Did the serpent lie to Eve in the Garden? If he did I don’t see it. I don’t think the serpent wanted or intended to lie to Eve. I think the serpent was doing what it does -looking for opponents who don’t know the rules. Eve was tricked into playing round one not knowing all the rules. This is the wisdom of serpents. 

The serpent was too crafty to tell a lie. A lie would make the serpent legally accountable for a fall from grace. What the serpent said wasn’t untrue. There is no accusation to make against Eve if she believes a lie. That’s like blaming the victim for the crime. Eve must choose to disobey out of desire if she is to hold any responsibility.. So rather than lie, the serpent investigates Eve’s knowledge of the rules and asks ‘Did God really say that you must not eat from a tree in the garden?’

Eve responds; “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.”

Now the serpent becomes aware of Eve’s misunderstanding of God’s warning. He knows she doesn’t quite comprehend the consequence of feeding on this fruit. She’s unaware of the legal accountability that will be demanded of her from taking the understanding of good and evil into herself. She imagines a physical death, outlined by the extension “We must not touch it or we will die” as a measure of protection that compliments her perception of the warning. She doesn’t seem to realize that her life with God in the spirit is the basis of the warning, and that death is the very absence of such things. Of course the serpent knows this obscurity very well but Eve does not. She cannot imagine life absent from God. Her spirit has always been with God and her soul has not yet existed apart from either.

Let the games begin…

“Oh Eve, you surely will not die (how you imagine). Your eyes will be opened to a new knowledge and a new reality (that I am all too familiar with). You will become like God (the serpent god).

Eve finds (her false interpretation of) this desirable. Understanding that Eve’s spirit has existed far longer than her body and soul, it’s reasonable to assume she believes that returning to the heavens in spirit with the knowledge of good and evil is worth shedding (perceived death) the new body and soul for. After all she’d be returning where she came from with more than she left with (she assumes). She certainly was not expecting that part of her consciousness would remain in the soul, separate from her, destined to wander the earth alone! But Gods word is a two-edged sword dividing soul and spirit and this is exactly what happened. A veil of death (dissociation) was placed between Eve’s soul and spirit so that she no longer perceived her spiritual components (spirit & spirit body). Adam suffered this same spiritual (dissociation) death.

With their incorruptible spiritual bodies and spiritual histories inaccessible, they are left to interpret the world through the lens of a lost soul. Feeling naked and ashamed without body and spirit, they sew fig leaves together in a laughable attempt at covering their naked souls.

God, being just to his word, allows this death (separation from Him) to remain. But out of compassion He fashions new skins for them (literally) before sending them out of the garden and veiling Himself from them. Their new bodies, absent of spirit and absent of God, require the constant consuming of life to be sustained. Eating and drinking which was joyful and pleasant in the garden has become a curse. Abundance has turned to scarcity as survival is introduced. This is the curse. Adam, Eve, and the serpent will toil for survival. Expansion of the human family will be excruciatingly painful. Man will till the earth to eat. The serpent will till the man (dust of the earth) to eat.

 I have often wondered why God would not want His children to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I like knowledge. I like insight and understanding. I like to learn about things, many things, all things. And it bothered me that God would want to limit us from having the knowledge of good and evil. I assumed this is what separated us from the animals. That without this fruit our consciousness would be less than it is now and closer to the consciousness of an animal… And so a part of me was glad that they ate that fruit. 

But then God showed me that my understanding was inverted, that the warning was a protection against our consciousness collapsing into the low state that it is today – a state slightly above the animals. It’s true that animals are not accountable to sin for their lack of knowledge, and I assumed humanity was created under a similar clause. Animals are not accountable to sin because they cannot understand the knowledge of good and evil. Their consciousness is too low. But Adam and Eve were created in God’s image, to share in His goodness. How could they share in His goodness without knowledge and understanding of His goodness? The serpent would have me believe that awareness was suddenly expanded and they perceived this wonderful new knowledge they had lacked before. A knowledge God was trying to hide. But this is not true at all. The knowledge of good and evil were small potatoes, not worthy of human consumption.

There is nothing wrong with the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a part of Gods creation and according to His word it is good! It provides shade and beauty. It highlights the vast goodness of God. It is a place of meditation. A device for understanding. It was to be enjoyed as a decorative centerpiece in the middle the garden. It is only the “fruit” of the knowledge of good and evil they were forbidden to eat. 

This type of fruit cannot sustain a human. Good and evil are concepts for teaching and learning, not ideals to integrate inside of us. Adam and Eve gained nothing from eating that fruit. They internalized the knowledge of good and evil and it became a part of them. They took it way too far. They consumed the fruit. And the fruit consumed them!

The fruit of a thing is the very nature of it. You do not “try” to produce fruit as there is no effort involved in the production. Every faculty, action, response, decision, mechanism, resource, function, and feature is totally devoted to the purpose of fruit already. You cannot stop producing. It is the very essence of a thing. And it will live and die accordingly. We know a thing by its fruit. Spiritual fruit is no different. Peace, love, joy, understanding, self control, generosity, patience, etc. were not written down as ideals to be practiced. They are descriptions of the nature we share in Christ. An apple tree does not “practice” apples. It just does it. That’s its nature. It takes no freedom of judgement to make decisions over this. It seeks no other way.

Humanity was created to be sustained by a higher quality of fruit than that of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Where we once lived by concepts of better and worse, we now live by concepts of good and evil. This collapse into the lower dimension of the knowledge of good and evil has positioned us in the realm of sin.

The moment they ate that fruit they allowed the will of the soul and the will of the spirit to act independent of one another. This was not how we were designed to operate. This severing of soul and spirit is the death God warned of in the garden.