Modern people, behind the avalanche of worries and problems that fill their consciousness, rarely think about heaven. What kind of Garden of Eden can there be if from morning to night they think about how to provide for themselves and their children, help their parents and fulfill all their duties at work? But for those who, in this whirlwind, find the opportunity to stop and think about the eternal, spiritual, and divine, the question of a blissful life with God in the Garden of Eden seems to be one of the most important questions. Why are people excommunicated from paradise, why did the Lord act so harshly with our first parents, expelling them from His presence? Could he forgive them and the life of humanity would have turned out completely differently?
Life in paradise
Photo: Temples.ru
Adam and Eve, created by the Lord for a blissful life in the Garden of Eden, did not remain for long in the state in which any person would like to be today. Their life is peace, carelessness, constant presence close to God, filling life with meaning and making it complete and in continuous improvement. They were filled with unsurpassed love that came from the Creator, pure and untainted by sin. What else did a person need to be happy?
Moreover, during the period of people’s lives in paradise, they could communicate with angels who were incorporeal, but their souls inhabited the space around God. That is, they had the most complete spiritual life, which is unfamiliar and unattainable to people on Earth.
Yes, the spouses had certain prohibitions that the Lord placed on them so that their inexperienced souls would not receive too much information until He gave them the understanding and experience to accept the knowledge brought into their lives by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was also created for people. But these truths must be learned in the process of development, and not at once. Human souls were not ready to accept such a layer of knowledge as it was intended by the Creator.
And Adam and Eve took the ban on eating the fruits of this tree for granted. How they accepted on faith everything that He put into their minds and hearts.
The Fall of the Forefathers and Their Expulsion from Paradise
The blissful state of the first people in paradise did not last long. The spirit of darkness, the devil, tormented by envy,123 decided to deprive them of paradise and the love of the Creator, just as he himself was deprived of heaven and rejected from God. As a result, he entered the serpent and, through this wise animal, began to tempt Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and thereby violate the commandment of her Creator. Thus, “those words (which we hear from the mouth of the serpent - Gen., III, 1. 4. 5.) belonged to the devil, who was excited by his envy to this deception; and he used this animal (serpent) as a capable tool in order to, covering up the deception with his bait, seduce first his wife, who, as always, is more capable of seduction, and then, through her, the primordial one” 124. And indeed, “having become arrogant With the hope of equality with God, Eve transgressed the commandment” 125 and took Adam with her. – As soon as the ancestors broke the commandment given to them, the words of the Lord126 came true over them: they and all their descendants became mortal. “As in human courts, when someone, having been sentenced to beheaded, will then be put in prison; then even if he stayed here for a long time, he would be no better than the dead, having already been sentenced to death: in the same way, the ancestors from the very day on which they received the death sentence, although they still lived for a long time, were already sentenced to death died (became mortal)….” 127. “This is how Symmachus also translated: “from the day on which you eat of the tree, you will be mortal”” 128, whereas, without breaking the commandments, they could be immortal, since “God created him (man) neither mortal, neither immortal, but, as they said above, capable of both, so that if he strives for that which leads to immortality, fulfilling the commandment of God, he will receive from Him as a reward for this immortality and become a god; if he deviates from the works of death, disobeying God, he himself would be the author of his own death. For God created man free and autocratic” 129. Consequently, “it was not the tree, as some think, that was deadly, but disobedience to the commandment.” 130. If man had resisted temptation and not violated the will of God, then, according to St. Ephraim the Syrian, This same tree of the knowledge of good and evil would not only cease to be harmful and dangerous for a person, but, on the contrary, would bring undoubted and great benefit to him. “If the serpent, says the Holy Father, had not drawn them (the first parents) into crime, then they would have tasted the fruits of the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would no longer have been forbidden to them; from one of these trees they would have acquired infallible knowledge, and from the other they would have received eternal life and become godlike in humanity” 131.
But, unfortunately for Adam and all his descendants, the crime was committed, the will of God was violated; Consequently, retribution for sin had to appear, as required by God’s justice. And it appeared. The same One who gave the commandment itself deigned to appear to announce the punishment for the sin of disobeying the commandment. But, “in order to give the ancestors the opportunity to prepare for prayer (and repentance), the Judge (several time, until the evening) hesitates to come” 132. When, during this time, it became clear that the ancestors did not at all reveal a feeling of repentance in themselves, but As soon as they try to hide from the Omnipresent, God appears to them and pronounces His righteous judgment upon them. First, God turns to Adam - “and (this) in order... so that the blame would be transferred to the wife, and again asks her in order to transfer the blame to the snake... But He did not ask the snake, for he knew that he was the culprit of the crime" 133 The imposition of punishment begins with the main culprit of the crime134. True, such a culprit was not actually a snake, but the devil, but “like a loving father, punishing the murderer of his son, he breaks both the knife and the sword with which the murder was committed and breaks them into small pieces; In the same way, the All-Good God, when this animal (serpent), like a sword, served as an instrument of the devil’s malice, subjects it to incessant execution, so that we can conclude from this sensory phenomenon in what dishonor the devil himself is” 135, having long been punished by the Creator for your pride. - On the other hand, in imposing punishment primarily on the serpent, God had another motive - namely, to give people time to come to their senses, repent and thereby earn forgiveness for themselves. “Although by the very justice,” says St. Ephraim the Syrian, the ruling of the court should first have been spoken to the serpent, because where the crime began, there the punishment had to begin; - but God began with this despicable thing, of course, so that while the wrath of justice was directed at him alone, Adam and Eve would come to fear and repent, and thus the opportunity would be opened for goodness to free them from the curse of justice” 136. But since in sinned, and after that, no feeling of repentance was noticed, then the word of judgment turned to them. Eve was told: “The birth of children, a source of great consolation, will begin with sorrow, so that you (the wife) in the suffering and illnesses that inevitably accompany childbearing will have a constant reminder of how great this sin and disobedience is” 137 and how great those the disasters that you brought upon all your descendants. In addition, “since you did not know how to lead, then learn to be a good subordinate” 138 to your husband. Finally, God turned to Adam and said: “Because you listened to the voice of your wife” and transgressed My will, “cursed is the ground for your sake; in sorrow you will eat from it all the days of your life. She will bring forth thorns and thistles for you; and you will eat the grass of the field. By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you will return.”139 “However, here too,” says St. Gregory the Theologian, (a person) acquires something, namely death – in the suppression of sin, so that evil does not become immortal. Thus, the very punishment is done by love for mankind." 140. "God delayed sin, putting death and transforming sin and making an end to it through the destruction of the flesh that should be in the earth, so that man, once ceasing to live for sin and dying to it, began to live for God " 141. So, “man, like some meager vessel, again decomposes into the earth, so that, after the removal of the filth he has now received, he can be recreated in his original form by resurrection." 142. Also, the compatibility of the wisdom and love of mankind of the Creator is revealed in that that the earth was cursed for the sin of our ancestors. “Since the earth was created for man so that he could enjoy its fruits: therefore now God, because of man who sinned, places a curse on it...... for the whole age, so that not only the first parents themselves benefit from this, but also those who follow the generations learned by experience why this punishment befell them." 143. - Having pronounced this sentence, the Lord expelled Adam and his wife from paradise, "so that he would no longer dare to touch this tree (the tree of life), which constantly supports life, and did not sin endlessly” 144, and settled them near Eden, so that, looking at the latter, “they would hate the sin that deprived them of so many benefits” 145. Just as “the sea, when it sees the corpse of any animal in its bowels, does not leave it in itself , but throws them out” 146, so Adam and Eve, who died spiritually, were expelled from the Face of the Lord. And so that they would not commit a second violation of God’s commandment by returning to their former home, the Lord “placed in the east near the Garden of Eden a Cherubim and a flaming sword that turned to guard the way to the tree of life”147. “The Just One saw that relaxation would make Adam impudent; He knew that if the reins were loosened, Adam would stretch further and cross the small and weak barrier. Therefore, out of necessity, he set new obstacles for him. The word and the commandment were the fence of the tree, and the Cherub and the edge of the sword became the stronghold of paradise” 148. – In the fact that both a complete man, consisting of soul and body, entered paradise and left it, the Holy Fathers see an image of the future resurrection. “When the Lord, says St. Ephraim the Syrian, completed the creation of Adam, then he took him and settled him in paradise. Neither a soul without a body, nor a body without a soul could enter there, but the pure and perfect entered together into this perfect abode. Together they came out of it, becoming unclean. And this shows that together they will enter the day of resurrection" 149.
To protect man’s mortal body from air changes, God commanded him to wear “robes of leather”150. When the commandment was violated, “sin and transgression came, and shame overwhelmed them (the first parents). For an impartial judge, i.e. conscience, having rebelled against those who had sinned, began to cry out with a loud voice and reproach them” 151; then “Adam actually showed his repentance152 by girding himself, covering himself with fig leaves153, although there were many other leaves that could have bothered his body less…. And he would always have worn these clothes, humbling himself, if the Merciful Lord had not clothed them with leather clothes instead of fig leaves.” 154. Shame, which prompted Adam and Eve to sew clothes for themselves from leaves, was, however, still far from a feeling of complete consciousness of being guilty before God and saving, then, repentance before Him for sin: therefore the Lord “commanded them to put on leather garments for the constant remembrance of disobedience” 155 and of their unrepentance. – In addition, according to the teachings of St. Gregory of Nyssa, these leather vestments in which our first parents were clothed after the fall can be understood in a purely allegorical sense. “When the first people, he says, touched the forbidden and exposed themselves from... bliss, then the Lord imposes
on the primordial “robes of leather,” as it seems to me, the meaning of the speech is not directed to these skins (for from what slaughtered animals were the skins removed and clothing invented for people?), but since all skin separated from the animal is dead, I think that After this, the Healer of our depravity, so that it would not remain in us forever, of course providentially,
imposed
on people the opportunity to die, which was the difference of the dumb nature. For a robe is something imposed on us from the outside, serving the body for temporary use, not akin to nature. Therefore, according to a special view, deadness was transferred from the nature of the dumb to the nature created for immortality, covers its exterior, not its interior, embraces the sensory part of man, but does not touch the very image of God. And the sensual is decomposed, not destroyed” 156.
Man expelled from paradise was no longer the same ruler and king of the nature surrounding him as he was in paradise. “As soon as sin entered, both honor and power were already taken away (from man) ... While he had boldness before God, until then he was afraid of the beasts; and when he sinned, he himself began to fear the last of his fellow servants...... (But) God, who loves mankind and conquers our sins with goodness, did not take away all the honor (from him) and did not completely deprive him of his dominion, but only those animals he removed from his power him, which are not very useful to him for life; on the contrary, he left those who are necessary and useful and provide many services to our life in subordination and obedience to him...... He acted exactly like a merciful and caring master who, having punished his slave, also applies healing to wounds. So God, having punished the sinner, wants to ease this punishment in every possible way: he condemned us to constant work and sweat, but, to ease the work, he gave us many dumb people.” 157. – Having lived 130 (230) years, Adam died158 and was, according to legend, buried on the site of Golgotha, and precisely on the very spot where the Cross of Christ was subsequently erected, saving the descendants of Adam from sin, curse and death introduced into the world by Adam159. - “If anyone wants to carefully find out on which of the seven days Adam died, he will reveal this from the dispensation of the Lord. For, restoring the whole man in Himself from beginning to end, He repeated his death. Therefore, it is obvious that the Lord, obeying the Father, accepted death on the day on which Adam died, disobedient to God... And the Lord came to suffer on the day before the Sabbath, i.e. on the sixth day of creation” 160 - therefore, Adam died on the same day. “Adam did not die on that (very) day on which it was determined for him to die (i.e., on the day of eating from the forbidden tree); and this goodness, which canceled such a sentence, preserved his life, so that he would be comforted when he saw Enoch enter paradise and receive it as an inheritance. Adam tasted this goodness, realized that he too could enter there with the help of another Eve, and knew that he too had hope of returning to his inheritance. In Enoch, Adam saw the image of our Savior, Who opened paradise and led the exiled into it, saw the secret of the Vertogradar, Who keeps grace with Himself - the key to paradise" 161.
Delving into the educational meaning of the story of the fall of our ancestors, St. Cyril of Jerusalem exclaims: “The truth of the foreshadowing truly surprises me! In paradise, fall is salvation in Vertograd; From the tree is sin, and sin to the tree. In the afternoon they hid themselves from the walking Lord, and in the afternoon the thief
introduced by the Lord into paradise...... Adam was condemned: “Cursed is the earth for your deeds; thorns and thistles will grow for you.” Therefore, Jesus takes upon Himself thorns in order to destroy condemnation (curse). He was buried in the ground for this purpose, so that the cursed earth, instead of a curse, would receive a blessing. During the time of sin they put on fig leaves; That’s why Jesus gave the fig tree as the end of the signs. For, preparing to go into suffering, he curses the fig tree, but not every fig tree, but only that one (i.e., from the leaves of which the girdle was made in Paradise) alone, in her image saying to her: “No one can bear fruit from you” (Mark XI. 14). Let condemnation be destroyed! And since they were then clothed with fig leaves, then (Jesus) comes at a time when there was no food to eat. Who doesn’t know that in winter the fig tree does not bear fruit, but is only covered with leaves? Is it possible that what everyone knew, Jesus did not know? On the contrary, He knew, yet He comes, as if with the intention of finding the fruit, knowing very well that He will not find it, but showing that this fig tree serves as an image of the curse only by its leaves... (Further,) since the woman became the first culprit of sin, created from a rib, then Jesus, who came to grant forgiveness together to husbands and wives, had his rib pierced for the wives, so that they would be given absolution from their sins” 162. The idea of the educational significance of our ancestor Eve is considered in particular detail by St. Epiphanius of Cyprus. “She (i.e., the Virgin Mary), says the Holy Father, was foreshadowed by Eve, as a prototype receiving the name “mother of the living” (Gen., III, 20). She was called the mother of the living, and moreover, after having committed a crime, she heard the words: “you are earth and you will go back to earth” (Gen., III, 19). It is surprising that after the crime she received this great name. And from the external side, from that Eve, every human birth on earth began. In the same way, from Mary life itself was truly born for the world, so that Mary, having given birth to the Living One, would also become the “Mother of the living.” So, Eve is called “Mother of the Living” educationally. - For it is said about two wives: “Who gave” to the woman “wisdom or cunning” (Job 38:36)? Because the first wise Eve sewed sensual clothes for Adam, whom she made naked: this work was given to her. Since nudity occurred through her, it was given to her to clothe the sensual body due to sensual nakedness; Mary was given by God to give birth to us a Lamb and a Sheep, and from the glory of this Lamb and Sheep, as if from a fleece, the garment of incorruptibility was wisely made for us by His virtue. But something else is surprising in relation to these two wives: Eve and Mary, to think about it. Eve was the cause of death for people, for through her death entered the world (Rom. V, 12). And Mary became the cause of life: through her life was born to us. And for this, the Son of God came into the world, and “where sin abounded, grace abounded” (Rom., v. 20), and from where death came, life came, so that instead of death, life would be born, destroying the death that came from the woman, - those. Born to us from his wife, like Life. And since there Eve, while still a virgin, discovered a deviation towards disobedience; then here again, through the Virgin, obedience to grace was revealed, when the descent from heaven of the Incarnate and Eternal Life was announced. There God says to the serpent: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed” (Gen. III, 15). But the wife's seed is nowhere to be found; therefore, only allegorically, Eve refers to the enmity between the one born from her……….. and the devil and envy who was in the serpent. “But everything cannot be fulfilled perfectly in Eve, but truly had to be fulfilled in the Holy Seed, the chosen, the only one, revealed only from Mary, and not from conjugation with a husband” 163.
Betrayal in paradise
Photo: Flickr.com
The devil, who was guided by the lowest feelings - envy, anger, meanness - decided to once again harm the Lord by showing him that his creatures are imperfect. That a man and a woman will easily decide to betray the relationship that connected them with the Creator. And with his characteristic meanness and cunning, he entered into the image of a serpent, who was considered wise and, in modern language, solid, the creation of the Lord.
In this image, which did not arouse suspicion, he began to seduce Eve, telling her that if she ate the apple of paradise, she would become equal to God. After this, the woman will be able to command not only her husband, but also the Creator himself and all the heavenly forces. The devil brazenly slandered God, completely openly lied, but she believed him. And since, nevertheless, she was afraid of becoming an outcast alone, she involved her husband in betrayal. And, having tasted the forbidden fruit, the first people immediately became mortal.
Hope for repentance
Photo: Pravlife.org
Of course, everything that happened was known to the Lord from beginning to end. But he still allowed evil to happen, because he initially created people free to express their will. People could and can choose between good and evil, starting from Adam and Eve and ending with people of the 21st century.
The fall happened in the morning, but the Lord gave time until the evening to see if repentance would overtake the couple, if they would come in repentant tears to ask for forgiveness. But that did not happen. The couple tried to hide from God, which looked rather stupid, since He is omnipresent.
But out of his love for his foolish children, the Lord, even after appearing to the perjurers, tried to push them to repentance, asking one by one who was to blame for what had happened. Had they repented and admitted their guilt, forgiveness would have been immediately given to them. But instead, the people who betrayed God began to betray each other, blaming the wife on the husband, and the husband on the wife. And here, the most important betrayal happened - man betrayed himself, handed himself over from the hands of God to the hands of the devil.
And this act could no longer reconcile the Lord with the unreasonableness of his creations. The people did not take advantage of the three chances He gave them. And after that, forgiveness became impossible.
Lost heaven
Photo: Hramsergiy74.ru
And so, the first people are deprived of paradise and begin to live on earth, earning their own daily bread. It was then that repentance overtook them. Not so much the hardships of the physical plane, but precisely the meaning of life - communion with God, which Adam and Eve lost, became the main component of the loss. People lost spiritual communication with God and the angels, their souls became empty and cold.
But the Lord did not deprive humanity of the hope of returning to the Garden of Eden. He made people mortal because the evil that has settled in them since then should not last forever. And he sent his son to earth in the form of Jesus Christ. It was the Savior who atoned for sins, giving people hope for resurrection, just as He was resurrected. But for this it is necessary to bring souls into a state that will not seem disgusting to God. Cleansing souls with repentance, good deeds, and prayer is the path to finding the lost paradise for any person.
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Adam and Eve: A Biblical Story
The story of the creation of man and his fall has remained one of the most important problems throughout the history of mankind. The plot of the Holy Scripture “Adam and Eve in the Bible” is still relevant today. After all, the issues he raises remain unresolved for many.
Adam and Eve after expulsion from Paradise (bas-relief on the wall of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourviere, Lyon, France)
God created man at the very end of the creation of the World. The earth, like a royal abode, was prepared and decorated in advance for one who could take care of nature and be in communion with God. The Creator created man from the dust of the earth (clay) and breathed life into him. God created man in His image, rational and free, with an immortal soul (Gen. 1:27, Gen. 2:7). By this He elevated man above all previous creation. With our physical body we belong to the visible, material world. An immortal soul - to the invisible, spiritual world. The main goal of human existence is to be in complete harmony with God.
The name of the first man is Adam, which translates as “taken from the earth.” God placed Adam in the beautiful Garden of Eden. There, animals of all kinds came together to the first man. They came to Adam as a loving shepherd, without fear, and he gave each creature a name. So Adam took power over all living things and became the ruler of the Earth, like God (Gen. 2:19-20).
