Repost from May 22 2007. I got this from a Greg Boyd sermon and found his approach to understanding sin through the story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil very creative and helpful in understanding how sin makes us blind.

I’ve already mentioned the sermon by Greg Boyd “Leading with a Limp” or “Bottom Feeder Leaders”. (First half of the sermon mostly) One of the things he said in that sermon which caught my attention, gave me pause and has continued to intrigue me was his take on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2 and 3.

This is an outline of how he processed the story to apply it to the Jesus’ story of the log and the speck.

1. God is full and overflowing with life. That’s why He made the world.

Comment (All comments by me, not Boyd): Like “Just wants to share a good thing” says Shug in the purple flower field scene in Spielberg’s “The Color Purple”

2. God creates in us a hunger for the life he gives at the core of our being.

Comment: At first this might seem a bit selfish or controlling on God’s part. We might look at it like the dinosaurs in the “Jurassic Park” movie, also Spielberg, who are created reliant upon a particular chemical which the masters of the park will give in order to secure their dependency on their masters and make sure they are never independent from the zoo keepers. But if you look at it through a Piperesque, Christian Hedonism perspective God is hard wiring our brains to share his joy and by definition there can be no greater joy in existence (to tweak the Ontological Argument.)

3. In the fall/rebellion we chose an source of life independent from the creator.

Comment: This of course is foolish. Since all is made by the creator our rebellion is the kind of rebellion by a child who decides to run away from home to the back yard. You can’t escape the creator when the supposed independent source of life also finds its source in the creator. It reminds me of Israel and Judah looking to the Baals and trusting Baal for rain and fertility when of course God is the source of it. It’s the wife cheating with the accountant who has embezzled the master’s money and the thrill she has at all the fancy gifts he gives.

4. The tree of the knowledge of Good and evil then becomes the grid which we impose on reality, our perception of reality, which use to determine what will feed us, that which we can try to draw life from independent of God, and what threatens us, often others also in the same pursuit. The world then becomes a feeding frenzy of us seeking to draw life from idols. (I thought that was a vivid and powerful image.)

Comment: This reminded me of stuff in Larry Crabb’s two books: Connecting and The Safest Place on Earth. We try to address the hunger but since we’ve decided to cut ourselves off from God we have to feed off of the things around us, often others. This “feeding” is becomes idolatry in terms of deriving our identity (big Keller theme too), security, pleasure, etc. from the things around us.

5. This feeding frenzy, this panic we experience at realizing that having cut ourselves off from the source of all life brings us to constantly assess everything around us through this grid. We assess everything and label as “good” that which we think will feed us and “bad” that which threatens us or our access to our feeding grounds.

6. We think our judgment is objective but it obviously isn’t at all. We are judging out of our own neediness, our filter, our hunger.

Comment: This of course is why it is always easier to point out the sin in another rather than our own. (Boyd here is preaching on Jesus telling about the log and the speck.) This becomes highly active in religion (in the pejorative sense of the term, Boyd and Keller tend to share that perspective).

One of the things that comes through clearly in the comments on the CT Goddess piece is the sense of imposing the grid of our own neediness and our religion coming from that. Freud and others of course reduced religion to this but what strikes me from many of the comments is how blatantly pragmatic and utilitarian we have become in these regards. Does this find its source in very deep secularism where religion has become so clearly instrumental that we no longer blush that we in fact have constructed our gods by our own hands? My sense of ancient paganism was that they really didn’t believe their gods were wood and stone, the statues were simply instruments of communication and influence rather than the gods themselves. (Even so it must have shaken the Philistines terribly to find Dagon prostrate before the ark.)

That impulse though is so deeply in all of us. “I refuse to worship a God who _____________.” Fill in the blank. Is a man, is a woman, is straight, is gay, kills Philistine children… We would rather have a god of our own making than bow before a God who differs from us or won’t accommodate to our particular corner of hunger. It is addiction. We can all spot each others but are blind to our own.

It is the blindness to this feeding frenzy, this grid on our own parts that is so disturbing to me. A careful reading of the Bible shows us that sin isn’t simply a string of discrete freely chosen willful rebellions, it is a pit we fall into, a trap that has sprung and we become helpless in its grasp. Yes, we took the first step and continue to freely chose rebellion but so much of it is abject lostness. If you have ever been really lost you know how scary it is. How about if you are truly lost but don’t know it. Watching that, as we do in how many movies or novels can make your blood run cold.

We so under-estimate sin. Think of all the wrestling we find God the creator, and Jesus his son doing with sin. Jesus talks and talks and does miracles and signs and on and on but hardly anyone sees. If it took Jesus going to the cross to deal with sin, what makes us think it will be easier for us.

pvk