2024-09-11_And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden

Genesis 3:8: And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

And they heard the voice of the Lord God: Superficially, the word voice is better translated as sound, and yet in either instance we are referring to the willingness of God to lower Himself to the sensual modality by which humans first know and to which humans most intimately relate. God creates in and through His divine Word, for the expression of a word (or in the case of God, the Word) is the abstract will put into effect. By definition, there is no division between the will of God and the effectuation of that will. God does not second guess Himself. His self-knowledge and His action are the same. Nevertheless, for humans to understand that Word and to worship that Word (man worshipping God being the highest relationship of man to God), that Word has been made anthropomorphic to some degree. Hence, we hear a voice/sound that calls to mind feet walking in the garden. We may presume that God has taken on a human form and that He did so when He presented the animals to Adam for Adam to name, and when He brought unto Adam the Woman in the manner of a father bringing his daughter to her groom. Of course, God knows what Adam and his wife have done, but He first approaches them in a manner that calls to mind His prior intimacy with them. Perhaps, by coming unto them as their loving Father, He is giving them one more chance to undo the sin by coming clean and by asking for forgiveness. From this we learn something more of the nature of sin and forgiveness: The effect of sin is not localized but rather has untold ripple effects. The sinful act may seem trivial on its own, but if it is not countermanded by forgiveness and grace, the effect can be like a supernova explosion. In contrast to sin, where the trivial gives way to the supernova very quickly, forgiveness is slow to anger, patient, and kind. Forgiveness implies giving the sinner a chance to wake up from himself and to come back to his senses. Forgiveness is not explosive but rather quiet, subtle, and slow, which allows for the forgiveness to be much more deeply rooted than the sin if, indeed, there is the occasion of actual forgiveness. As much as God maintains an objective standard of what is right and what is wrong, He tips the scales in favor of forgiveness over sin. It takes a lot of sick, twisted obstinance in sin for a sinner to cast himself into Hell, or in this case, for Adam and his wife to cast themselves out of Eden.

Walking in the garden in the cool of the day: The coolness of the day refers to the wind that is picking up as day transitions into evening. The wind is a common metaphor for the Spirit, and in this instance, we see the Spirit of God approaching, and we see the spirit of sinfulness snapping up a cauldron of fears and emotions. There is a choice: The coolness of the day can be a return to tranquility after the heated embrace of sin, if Adam and his wife receive with humility God’s approaching Spirit. Or the coolness of the day can be a descent into the cold darkness of a sin that is repeatedly compounded. The evening may descend into nightfall, but with God it is just as possible for the evening to ascend back into daytime. It depends upon how the sinners react to God’s approach.

D. Reynolds on Why Dante encases Satan in ice in the lowest rung of Hell in The Inferno: Satan lives in a frozen world because his soul is frozen and loveless. The worst sin in The Inferno is deception or lying, and Satan is the Prince of Lies. Deception is ice cold because it is premeditated and calculated. It is why, for example, a person who kills several people in the heat of anger is punished less severely in Dante's hell than someone who cold-bloodedly defrauds someone of money. Sins of passion at least show warmth and emotion, even if twisted and misplaced. The worst kind of deception and cold heartedness is to betray a benefactor, which is why the three figures endlessly chewed in the three-headed Satan's mouths are Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. Judas betrayed Christ, while Brutus and Cassius betrayed Caesar. Satan betrayed and turned on God, the ultimate cold-blooded sin. Dante uses contrapasso, which is the idea that the punishment fits the crime. Satan's cold environs reflect his utter cold-heartedness in turning lovelessly on God, the creator of all things, the ultimate provider of all bounty.

The snapping cauldron of fears and emotions implies a kinetic mind wrestling with what to do. It is an aggrieved mind, but it is not yet a totally calculating mind impervious to grace, and so in this evening of the soul, Adam and his wife may turn back to the loving Father who is walking to them. For Adam and his wife, though, it is critical that they respond to God’s approach with real humility and no attempt at dissimulation. They have burned themselves already with their lying and so can see that lying is as likely to damage as it is to conceal. If they lie again, then given the knowledge that they now have, that next lie would be wanton. They would be embracing the lie as preferable to the possibility of forgiveness, and with that they would be dragging the evening into the night.

Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God: Adam and his wife react to the experience of shame by hiding from one another. Specifically, as mentioned before, they construct aprons over their genitalia to hide from their own minds the consequence of their sin over the generations to come. This is the first indication that they are aware of procreation and of passing on a legacy to descendants like themselves. The sadness is that they come to realize this in the context of their shame. The progression of mankind is rooted in their own minds in a shame that God had never intended for mankind. In a sense, they are already seeing the future of mankind as outside of Eden, even before God has rendered judgment on their sin. With that in their minds, Adam and his wife next react to the experience of guilt by hiding from God. This is futile, of course, for how can man hide anything from an omniscient Father? Nevertheless, in even trying to hide from God’s imminent presence, Adam and his wife exhibit two contrivances with which they had been unfamiliar before the sin: First, they presume that God is not actually omniscient and that, therefore, they can get away with hiding from Him. Secondly, and as a flip side of the coin, they presume themselves able to outsmart God. Thus, for all their guilt, Adam and his wife have not relinquished the underlying sin, namely, the belief that they can know as God and, in a way, supplant Him. They are experiencing in real time how ruinous this idea is but refuse to let go of this idea, nonetheless. We see here how sin contorts the mind to hold onto the sin, and this in turn contorts the mind into a perversion of itself. Therefore, as St. Paul says, the wages of sin is death, for what maddens the mind invariably drags the soul away from God. The perversion is made manifest in the ridiculously of the scene: Adam and his wife presume to hide behind the trees as they are hiding behind their fig leaves. They presume the trees to be in the service of their self-deception rather than in the service of God.

Amongst the trees of the garden: Before sin, the trees had been there for Adam and his wife to explore and from which to learn. Even the tree forbidden to them had been put there as a way of teaching them to obey God over their own emerging proclivity for temptation. Now, trees in Eden are an attempted (and futile) means of obscuring. They are imagined to be extensions of the lie that Adam and his wife told themselves and insist on embracing. Adam and his wife are reimagining Eden to be a tabernacle to a false “god,” who we saw earlier is just a magnification of their own egos invested in the ability to lie and to outsmart, rather than a Tabernacle to God. If they can make the trees in Eden to join with them in outsmarting God, then the false “god” of their imagination has real power, or so they will be able to insist going forward. Remember that the Gnostics conceive of the Demiurge, a dark emanation from “the One,” as the real Creator of the universe. For the Gnostics, God being wholly spiritual, and matter being intrinsically evil and irredeemable, it is inconceivable then for God Himself to create a material universe. Therefore, a material universe must be the offspring of a lesser angel – not just any lesser angel, but a dark angel who conceives of the material universe as a kind of twisted joke. We are seeing here then the beginning of the Gnostic mindset: Adam and his wife are not only investing so much in their false “god,” they are embracing the ridiculousness of the scene with a kind of solemnity that by an outside observer at least would look as mischievous as guilt-ridden.

Genesis 3:9: And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

God knows where Adam is. God insists that Adam come clean because that is necessary for the possibility of forgiveness and restoration. Where is Adam? In one sense, he is hiding behind one or more trees. More significantly, he is in a state of spiritual turmoil that is on the edge of diving into the kind of spiritual coldness that we see with Satan. Remember that if the serpent is really not Satan at all, but rather a manifestation of the Woman’s emerging self-consciousness egging her toward temptation, then even here Satan is not part of the picture. Man is responsible here for his own fall. He will not be able to blame Satan. Thus, if man descends into a Hell of spiritual coldness similar to Satan’s twisted spirituality and psychology, then it is because man has done so. Satan can and will take advantage of man’s descent into sin later, but man has to carry in his heart the burden of knowing that he is in a prison of his own making.

Genesis 3:10-12: And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

Adam is afraid, but he is also proud. His futile attempt at deception manifests a pride that he is not willing to let go for the sake of forgiveness. Therefore, he is half-lying when he says that he had hid himself only out of fear. God sees through the deception, but He focuses on asking the kinds of questions that may convince Adam to give up on his self-deceit and to come clean. God would have had every right to call him out on his failure to be totally honest about his motives, but giving Adam a last chance to turn back to Him is more important than calling him out of the repeated sin. God wants Adam to admit that he convinced himself to do what he did. He wants Adam to take ownership of his self-deceit and the wrongful actions that came from that. For if a man can concede that he is the author of his own imminent ruin, then perhaps he can step back from the edge and accept the help offered to him.

The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat: Notice that Adam does not just blame the Woman. He blames God, for it is God who gave him the Woman. In essence, he is saying to God that you made this happen as much as she made this happen. He is playing the ultimate victim card. God had given Adam authority over Eden and, later, over his wife. In manipulatively playing the victim card, Adam is denying that authority and the grace he had been given to exercise that authority righteously. He is denigrating himself in trying to put the blame on someone else. From this we learn that sin denigrates the sinner as much as sin in time denigrates so many other people that the original sinner cannot even conceive. God made us to live, and yet the wages of sin is death. God makes us to be noble in the use of our minds and bodies, and yet sin perverts the mind and the body into acclaiming what is not good in the eyes of God. Having denigrated himself as he has, Adam is denying in essence that he can and should continue to exercise dominion over Eden, since he is denying his capacity to exercise a dominion over Eden to the glorification of God. He may not yet totally understand this, but by playing the victim card, he is insisting on his own banishment from Eden. For if he is unfit to be exercising dominion there, then he is unfit to be there at all.

Genesis 3:13: And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

The Woman is more honest, for indeed she had been beguiled by her own self-dialogue into an embrace of temptation in service to an emerging self-identity that would be at odds with God’s will. And yet, she is supposed to be obedient to her husband, and ultimately to God, over being beguiled by her own maturing mind. She fails in her lack of obedience, but the greater sin here is in Adam not exercising dominion over her. When she brought the fruit back to him, Adam at that moment had the authority and the responsibility to take the fruit from her and to insist on her going with him to the Father to seek forgiveness. Instead, he indulges her in her failure and consummates a new marriage between them rooted in their shared participation in that sin. In this sense, then, the Woman is the first victim of Adam’s sin even more than a sinner herself. In the Woman’s testimony, we see Adam’s sin already rippling out from him to her, which means in time that it will ripple out from her unto others.

Genesis 3:14-19: And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain: The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt. … And pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.