"It is Good" to Evil

Most everyone agrees that there are problems on the earth. And most everyone agrees that humans are the source of the problem. How did we get to this place? The Bible tells the story of all of us, and it is found right at the beginning of Scripture.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God is a powerful guy. He can make whatever He wants and all things we see and touch and understand was initially made by Him. It could have been done immediately. It could have taken eons and a long process. But He did it. At the same time, He made all the angels and spirits who inhabit the spirit world. There are lots of them, and people call them names like Hades, Michael and Lucifer. They are important characters in our story, so don’t forget them.

After creating the universe and the earth, over time, the earth was “void”, which is just another word for chaotic and meaningless. God looked at the earth and said, “That’s not right.” So God decided to make order out of this chaos. He cleaned things up, put the seas and rivers in their place, planted a bunch of flowers, got some livestock and there we go—a wonderful place to spend your retirement. And God did. He took a break, looked around and said, “This is good. A nice place. Glad we made it.”

Then the question arises, Who should take charge of this place? God put spirits in charge of the heavenly bodies—sun and moon and stars and such. Why not the earth as well? But it’s such a magnificent, complex creation. It’s got to be someone really powerful and wise. God drew into himself and then decided: “I’m putting humans in charge of the universe.”

This was a grave disappointment to the spirits. They all wanted a piece of this action, and now it looks like they aren’t going to get a piece of it. But no one wanted to say anything to God, because… well… He is God. But one spirit gets the guts to speak up. Some people call him Lucifer, but he’s known around the spirit world as The Dragon. Dragon says, “Most High, I speak for all the spirits when I say that I think that putting humans in charge of the world is a really bad idea. They are weak, naked, stupid and pathetic. I mean, just look at them! They are naked and helpless and you put them in charge of the whole world? You should really reconsider and put a spirit in charge of the world.”

But God’s decision was irrevocable. Once He makes a promise, He keeps it. And he promised all of the earth to humans. So Dragon decides to do something about it. He’s going to show God just how pathetic these humans are. So Dragon goes to earth in the guise of a… well, a Dragon. And where does he find them? Hanging out by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Now we need to have a little background knowledge here. Just as God set the humans in the garden, He gave them one rule that wasn’t instinctive to them: “You can eat of any tree in the garden, but not of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. On the day you eat of that tree, you will certainly die.” This wasn’t actually a tough rule. The garden actually covered thousands of square miles, containing millions of trees. There is only one tree in all that land, amidst all those trees that they couldn’t eat. No problem, right?

But when the Dragon found them, they were hanging out right by that one tree they shouldn’t eat. So it wasn’t a tough proposition to get them to eat of it. The Dragon deceived Eve, but Adam ate of the tree willingly. He told them it would make them like God. And, in a sense, it did.
When the people ate of the tree, the text says, “Their eyes were opened. They saw that they were naked and they were ashamed.” They weren’t ashamed of eating the fruit. They weren’t ashamed of disobeying God. They were ashamed of that which they were from the day they were created. There was nothing wrong with being naked, or desiring another person or having sex. It was just a married couple and God. Perfectly natural to be naked. But they were ashamed.

Why?

It has to do with the properties of the tree. To eat a tree’s fruit is to take it’s properties into oneself. And the tree was that of knowledge of good and evil. This doesn’t mean that one objectively knows what good and evil is—rather, it is creating within one’s mind what is good and evil. Until the humans ate of the tree, they didn’t try to understand good and evil. Whatever God said was good was good. Whatever God said was evil was evil. But when they had the ability to guess themselves what was good and evil that everything got screwed up. Because that which was good was immediately called evil. They were ashamed of that which was good.

This process continues to this day. The Roman Catholics call it “scruples”. This is considering something neutral or good to be bad. To have traditions that are inflexible. Calling good evil. Calling evil good. From the beginning of creation to today we have done this until we have ended up with the United States Income Tax Code—the largest collection of stupid rules ever created. Why do we have this? Because it is in the nature of human beings to created stupid, pointless rules. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a real good or evil. There is. But humans like to make up their own rules, not try to discover what is really good.
What is really good? Well, God set it up right from the beginning. In the nature of a man is the desire to love a woman, no matter how different she is. It is in the nature of a woman to love a man, no matter how strange he acts. And when God is present, it is in the nature of both of them to love God. Thus, the basis of all ethics is to love those whom you are with—whether another person or God.

But humans screwed that up. They decided to make ethical decisions out of their imagination rather than what God actually knows. So the last part of what God said had to take place. “On that day you will die.”

The problem we have with the story at this point is that the humans didn’t die. They didn’t even get sick. God threw them out of the garden, but they thrived—they cultivated land, had children, eventually built cities. So did God lie? Not at all. We just have to understand what the ancient world means by death.

Death is not just an event, something that happens to one’s body. Rather, death is a person—or, rather, a spirit. Remember Hades, Michael and the Dragon? Well, Death is just one of these guys. And he kills people. So rather than the cessation of the humans’ bodies, God put them under the control of Death.

Now Death’s master, it just so happens, is the Dragon. So they were talking and Death said, “So I’m in charge of these humans now. I think I should just kill them off, then the creation can be handed off to someone else.” But the Dragon was certainly crafty, and he had another idea, “Wait a minute, Death. How about this. Instead of killing them off, let’s let them live. We can make them as miserable as we want, and we can rule this world through them. God will never revoke his promise. So we’ll be in charge of this creation always.” Death knows a good idea when he hears it.

So now, according to the Bible, the Dragon and Death are in charge of the world through the humans. Death loves to play with the humans—causing things like tsunamis, plagues, earthquakes and famines. Encouraging the occasional war now and then. So that life on earth is complete death. And this makes humanity forget about love more and more. Love is put aside when death reigns.