Humans are exceedingly capable of being evil. Have we evolved in our capacity for evil or has it always been there? Has it been hiding like a latent monster beneath the darkness of our subconscious just waiting for the proper combination of elements to spark its arrival? Human history is a history of war and malevolence. It would appear self-evident that humans are very much capable and inclined toward great evil and destruction. Utopia seems inevitably far out of reach if it were ever possible. Paradise has been lost. Little is sacred or innocent these days. Is there a greater tragedy than losing innocence? It’s almost as if it’s the human thing to do.

The beginning of the biblical narrative paints a really sad story of humanity. The first humans were banished from paradise due to their decision to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil rather than the tree of life. But it was not always this way. Before they were banished, God and the first man named Adam walked together in the garden enjoying unbroken harmony.Yet, something was amiss in the heart of man. Something happened on the day man decided to partake in and ingest the knowledge of good and evil. He was no longer innocent. He had full knowledge of good and evil and the evil that he had come to know was now inside of him.

Evil does not exist outside of choice. Evil is when you know what is the right thing to do and you do the wrong thing. Evil does not exist by itself so much as it exists opposite of that which is good. You cannot participate in evil unless you are knowledgeable of it and to be knowledgeable of evil is to be simultaneously knowledgeable of good. We live in the crossroads before two paths. One path is full of darkness and the other is illuminated by light. Being able to distinguish between the light and the dark (good and evil) and still choosing the dark is evil. At that point the darkness is inside you drawing you towards the darkness in front of you. Choosing the path of light is called righteousness.

Not being able to distinguish between light and darkness is called innocence. It’s when you dont know better. It’s that state you live in before you have eaten of the tree of knowledge and good and evil and can discern right from wrong. Children are like this. Children are innocent. Where there is knowledge there is responsibility. Where there is responsibility there is guilt.  Adam was no longer innocent. He was guilty.

Now the evil within Adam causes him to leave the garden and travel a path away from God. Away from God is the way to Hell and the further you get from God the closer you get to Hell. Yet, despite the evil within him, and the road to Hell that he walks, there is still a chance at redemption. The rest of the biblical narrative unfolds God’s divine rescue plan and makes it possible once again for God and man to walk together. Redemption is possible but not inevitable. Sadly, the prerequisite of redemption is destruction. Things have to be broken before they can be restored. You cannot be healed unless you have been wounded.

So what happens in the in between?  What happens to humanity on our road to perdition? We continually march towards Hell’s gates creating war and destruction in our wake unless divine intervention leads to our salvation. Seems pretty grim. It appears as if we create a lot of unnecessary pain on our path away from God. It seems with the overwhelming wickedness that is flooding the earth, humanity is in a great state of duress.

 In the aftermath of World War I, many of the ideas birthed from the Enlightenment and continued through social positivism took a serious hit. Maybe we were not progressing as a species. Maybe we were devolving as a society if all of our collective intellect and creativity led us to create weapons to more thoroughly slaughter each other than any previous generation. Maybe we were not getting better but getting worse. Maybe we were much more on the road to Hell than to heaven. Maybe the structures we created were just our own faulty tower of Babel that would ultimately fall down upon us and destroy us.

Maybe we have not stopped leaving Eden.

What if everyone one of us, in our own way, is destined to leave Eden? We all begin like Adam. We are born innocent knowing neither good nor evil. We live in our garden-state for years protected by our parental covering. But eventually at some point childhood leads to adolescence. Eventually, we begin to understand the difference between good and evil. Consequently, where we are knowledgeable we are responsible. We eat from the tree so to speak. And as we eat from that tree more and more we lose our innocence and leave our garden state of Eden. God lives in the garden. When we leave the garden, the place of innocence,  we leave God behind. We choose a broad path that leads to destruction and damnation. So we live our lives on this broad road of destruction without the garden anywhere in sight while the world is worse for it.

Why did God allow this? After all, he made the garden. He planted two alluring trees in the middle of the garden each of them offering up a taste of their own potential future. Why two trees and not just one? I think he wanted to give us the choice. Love grows in the soil of free will. Adam’s love was weak and he chose evil and to leave God and walk in darkness. By contrast, after Adam’s fall, we see God’s love was strong as he chose Adam and pursued him in his darkness as the rest of the biblical narrative unfolds.

What if God thought that there was a better way for us to make choices than out of the ignorance of our innocence? What if having knowledge of the path of darkness and still choosing light is a more noble choice? What if righteousness is more valuable than innocence? In other words, what if knowing the right thing ( in contrast to the wrong thing) to do and doing it is better than knowing neither. Love is not understood in a vacuum unto itself. Love, truth, good, evil, all of these realities and more are understood in juxtaposition to their opposites. It’s as if our free will glues them adjacently together revealing their fierce dichotomy; the metaphorical fork in the road.

What if God allowed two trees in the garden so when given choice we could find out what is truly inside of us compared to just living in a childlike garden- innocent with no temptation to choose between good and evil. Is it not more virtuous to choose good when tempted with evil than to never know the difference between either? Babies are innocent. But no one would call a child righteous because that would imply that the child knows right from wrong. The moment a child knows right from wrong, in theological terms, is called the age of accountability. It is their moment in the hero’s journey where they eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They can now see the crossroads between the paths of light and darkness.

Humans live in our post- garden state, armed with the knowledge of good and evil, trampling along our dark paths leaving mayhem and destruction everywhere we go. Yet, we are capable of being redeemed. We have walked in paths of darkness yet, God, in his wisdom, believes he can chase us with his love so thoroughly that we would choose to leave our dark paths and follow him into his paths of light.

For love to be found true it must be tested. You cannot be tested unless you are presented with choices. So man chose sin and left the garden in his fallen state. But God would choose man.I think God thought that a love that could voluntarily choose to leave or stay was infinitely better than a love that never knew there was an exit door in the garden.Even with all of the darkness and violence that besets the world by so many humans that have left the garden, God thought it an infinitely more beautiful story that those who had left would one day return to him rather than a people who stayed because they never knew they could leave. The human path is always leaving Eden. God’s path is always back towards Eden. To the place of intimacy and companionship between humanity and the divine. Even though we wander down our paths of darkness, his voice calls out to us, hidden in the whispers of the wind. In the gentle promptings of everyday life. What if it is time to return to the garden?


Home. It’s the place where you grew up and the place where you belong. It’s the place where you are always welcome even if you don’t show up very often. What if Eden is our home? What if the garden is where we belong? What if the redemption we are longing for is in a place where we belong with whom we belong? What if instead of leaving Eden it’s time we return. What if our hero’s journey from innocence to adolescence to sojourner doesn’t end with us victorious on a mountain top but instead we follow the voice that has been calling us to return to where it all began?
Maybe it is time to return to Eden. Maybe it’s time to return to God.