I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.
So God spoke to the serpent after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Our reading did not include the whole story, but I’m sure you know it: God told Adam and Eve that they could eat from any tree in the Garden but one. The serpent deceived them, and they ate of the tree.
Genesis tells us the true story of our origins—the origin of humanity in God’s creation and the origin of the world’s long struggle with sin and death. Something went very wrong, and yet God, from the beginning, has a plan to fix it. Let’s consider those two things, then. First, what went wrong? And second, what is God doing about it?
Probably a lot of us were taught as children that the basic problem was disobedience. God gave a command—do not eat from the tree—and Adam and Eve disobeyed. That is true. But to put it in this way, as a story of law and disobedience, makes it sound arbitrary. God makes law, and our duty is to follow it. We are not allowed to ask why. If this the way of things, many of us may naturally wonder if Adam and Eve were right after all. We resent the idea of arbitrary rule. We don’t want to live in a world where things are the way they are simply “because I said so.”
Perhaps some of us do. But in order to trust any kind of “because I said so” law, we have to trust the lawgiver. We have to trust that the person in authority is not just powerful, but good. And there we have a better hint at what is going on with Adam and Eve in the garden. Adam and Eve had been put in a place of overflowing goodness and life and joy. They were literally in paradise. They were in perfect fellowship with God. They lacked nothing. They ate from the tree of life. They were in a place without hurt, without evil, without hunger, without pain. When they chose to eat the forbidden fruit, then, it was not a choice designed to correct some problem, to escape from a difficulty or improve their lot. The fruit itself was not evil; it was not somehow unclean. It was, as created by God, good. But in choosing this one good, they preferred it to the other goods they had been given. In particular, they placed this lesser good above the greatest good—they chose a piece of fruit over fellowship with God.
So the problem wasn’t evil, per se, or at least not evil as we normally think of it. It was disordered good. It’s not that Eve, when she ate the fruit, stopped loving God—there wasn’t a flip switched between love and hate, as if it’s just one or the other—but she removed that love from its proper position. This is a good description of much of our sin as well. It’s definitely possible to do something intrinsically evil. But a lot of the time, it’s not that we’re doing evil directly; it’s that the good we do is not ordered in its proper place. We love some things way more than we should, and we love other things much less than we should. This is ultimately less a problem of disobedience than it is of disordered desire, disordered affection.
So Adam and Eve disobeyed. But their disobedience wasn’t just the disobedience of an arbitrary command. It was the rejection of trust; it was the choice of a lesser good over a higher good.
We may still wonder why it was that God chose this particular way—why God gave this particular prohibition. The divine will is ultimately inscrutable, but I find myself moved by C.S. Lewis’s answer from his novel Perelandra, where a new Adam and Eve on Venus face exactly the same kind of seemingly arbitrary command. They live in a world of floating islands, and their one law is that they cannot sleep overnight on the fixed land. The figure of Satan, a man from earth, pesters the woman repeatedly about the arbitrary absurdity of this command. There is no reason for it, he insists. It’s all relative. People on his world stay on fixed land all the time. Surely God—that is, Maleldil—did not really intend her to follow such a strange law. Surely its real intention was to test her freedom and reveal her own strength. After all, Maleldil wants his children to think for themselves.
To this the character responds: “I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?” (101).
From the disobedience of our first parents, we lost the joy of obedience. We lost the joy of loving God for his own sake and not only for the many benefits we receive at his hand. It is this loss of true joy—and its cheap substitute in other kinds of love, other kinds of joys—that persists in humanity. It has become part of our human identity, our social and cultural DNA.
How can we restore fellowship and harmony? How can we recover obedience not as duty and burden, but as joy? How can we receive the gifts of God and eat for fellowship rather than death? We’ve seen the problem, and now we can ask: what is God doing about it?
Even in Genesis, God declares that this fall from grace will not last forever.
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.
This passage is often called the proto-evangelium, the original or primitive gospel, because it contains in a hidden way the whole story of Christ. The seed of the woman is Jesus, the incarnate Son. Mary’s son, the new Eve’s son, is hurt—he dies the death of a sinner. But from this death he emerges with a mere bruise, a mark of the conflict that did not ultimately overcome him. By contrast, the devil receives a mortal blow: his power and his deception are caught up in the greater purposes of God. When Mary gives her “fiat,” her yes, at the Annunciation, she steps into that original human calling of fellowship and joy.
The good news of God’s plan is not yet fully known in Genesis, but we know it now in Jesus Christ. He enacted both God’s justice and man’s responsibility, submitting himself to the yoke of mortal obedience. He submitted himself to all the pain of our disordered love so that he might put our loves in order.
This is the story of our fall and our redemption. We, like Adam and Eve, face a choice—many choices, in fact—about whether or not to obey the word of God. But what Jesus has shown us, in his selfless love for us, is that this word is not arbitrary or selfish; it is trustworthy. God is trustworthy. When God asks us to love him above all else, when he asks us to do things that seem arbitrary or hard to grasp, he does this always and only for our good. We know this now more fully than Adam and Eve did.
“So we do not lose hope,” as St. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, “for this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
It’s probably worth saying that, for Paul, this was no question of idealistic principle. He knew suffering, both from his own personal struggles and in his own eventual trial and execution. He wrote in an era when life often was, compared to our current age, short, brutal, and full of misery. But this “momentary affliction,” for Paul, can reveal joy because it teaches us to love what really matters.
Whom do we love? What do we love? To what authority do we give our obedience? The question is not whether to love, whether to obey, or whether to eat—the alternative is not, as we might think, perfect freedom, but perfect nonexistence. Human beings love, obey, and eat—even if they love and obey only themselves and eat only to their destruction. But there is a better love, a more perfect food, and a worthier obedience, in whose perfect will all human stories find their meaning.