temptation is itself the act of creation

Sunday March 9^th, Genesis 2: 15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶ And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” As the story goes, the loving God places the first humans in a place of idyllic beauty and cares for them.  They are loving and kind and loved and cared for and go about their days without a worry in the world.  Instinct guides their every move and blissful happiness fills their every moment.  They are happy to eat and sleep and play and know they are surrounded by love and a loving God.  But off in the corner is that tree and the inevitable will happen.  We all know the story, whether in the Bible or in our lives.  Humans will want more, even if, and especially if told not to.  What is death, they wonder, and why should it be feared.  In the meantime, these happy, idyllic instinctual beings just live day by day without a care in the world, except for wondering about that tree and what death might mean and why it is always on their minds.  The creation story continues down to our day, down to our lives.  The being has been recreated, but not quite in the image of God.  Can poetic prose really describe scientific theory?  Can our move from instinctual beings to reasoned beings be simply an evolutionary shift, or a moral shift, or perhaps there is more?  Perhaps it is the move from mere beings to the children of God.  Perhaps the fall into temptation is itself the act of creation of beings a little lower than the Angels.  There is a bit of a difference between knowing we can eat of the tree and perhaps even be like gods to deciding not to because we sense it will be a downfall somehow.   But perhaps it is the choices we make along that journey that moves us closer to the image into which we were created, the image of God.