More Implications of the Fall

Inherent in the parabolic language of Scripture is the flexibility to cover lots of territory with the same narrative.
A picture replaces a thousand words, but only if those words are reduced to clinical descriptions. If you are trying to pass on something of moral importance, concrete images reduce the meaning; they get in the way. A fundamental reason why God forbid images in worship was to avoid narrowing revelation down to something humans could manage and control. This underlies the Eastern fascination with abstract art, because it doesn’t distract from the message. Truth is too big for concrete images. Concretion of ideas confines them by eliminating other ideas; revelation is pervasive and alive.
The Hebrew language was evocative and inculcated a wild imagination. When you told a story, you were transporting the individual back to that time and place to experience things for themselves. Any talk of God doing this or that was not a matter of relating facts, but characterizing Him from a particular context. In the next narrative He would be characterized in some totally different fashion, because the God behind the narrative was too big for any human grasp. They weren’t describing God, but indicating things we need in order to serve Him.
Whatever it is you want to make of the Garden of Eden story, don’t get wrapped up in the details of the narrative. That business of “the Serpent” was just a metaphor, an established device for indicating the Devil, the embodiment of temptation. It was a characterization, not a description. Hebrew language was indicative, not descriptive. It could be used to describe, and it’s pretty plain when the writer means to do so. But to the Postmodern mind, it’s often too subtle, woven together skillfully in a fashion foreign to any Western tongue. The business of trees was part symbolism, because the story motif was folks living in a private park with well managed greenery. It was God’s private garden, and Adam and Eve were gardeners, managers God employed while He pursued more important matters.
I’ve established the whole issue was not picking fruit, but choosing to live by human logic as opposed to revelation. Until that moment, Adam used the same means to manage things as were used to create them. The Scripture uses the metaphor of “God’s Word” in the sense of His express command. Perhaps Adam simply spoke to Creation and kept the Garden in shape, but that’s not what matters. All God’s revelation for quite some centuries was buried in stories and narratives which all pointed back to some particular commandment, or collection of commandments. This is how the Hebrew people thought of it. Narratives merely illustrated varying levels of obedience within a purpose, a calling, an assigned mission from God. The whole thing is built from the ground up in a culture dominated by the lifestyle of nomadic tent-dwellers in a semi-arid region of earth, ruled by Eastern potentates. Thus, the sin was not so much in picking literal fruit from a literal tree, but choosing a means of operations forbidden by the Sheik.
By choosing the method of human logic and talent to get things done, Adam and Eve were no longer in communion with Creation itself. The picture drawn is a sudden loss of enlightenment, the higher spiritual faculty dying inside them. They no longer even understood the Creation around them, nor the God who ruled it. They had made themselves foreigners to the place. So God cut them loose, because they could not begin to comprehend what was required of them any longer. He denied them access to the Heavenly space, which the narrative calls the Tree of Life, because they had chosen a much lower and weaker existence.
They were cast out upon a world which now resisted their efforts to manage things and draw their physical needs. They must of necessity find ways to conquer a resisting Creation. They chose human reason; they would need all it could offer just to survive. There is no going back to Eden without leaving behind this broken world. You have to go back and embrace that Flaming Sword of Truth, let it take your sinful life, which will then take you to another world. It’s both symbolism and reality, a subtle blending of figure of speech with a much deeper reality, and applicable on multiple levels.
On the first, most obvious level, you have to surrender your human pride in the reasoning ability and embrace revelation. That’s just so you can make a good life here on this plane. You have to conquer reason and place it in the executive — to execute — but leave the fundamental decisions to the Stockholder (a modern equivalent metaphor). The mind was supposed to plan how it would implement what was revealed, not pass judgment on it. The mind was required to be still and know there was a Creator, and give Him room to speak in the way He chose. It required the discipline of contemplation to suspend the reason just enough for the inner soul to hear from God. The mind’s arrogance had to die.
That’s all pretty much a different way of saying “nail the flesh to the Cross.” The “flesh” is not your physical hide and what it contains, but the human capacities and talents.
On another level, you cannot experience a spiritual rebirth, or reawakening, or resurrection without embracing revelation. You have to repent, turn away from the ways of humanity and embrace the ways revealed by God. We cannot pretend to understand how God does that, but we are told in His revelation He uses His commandments and Laws to set things up for this reawakening. You have to pass under that Flaming Sword of His Laws to find access to that Tree of Life.
But in a very real sense, if you don’t die and leave this plane of existence, you cannot enter that level of existence which characterized the Garden of Eden. How do you describe a life so far beyond this ugly existence here? We call it “Paradise” — a word borrowed from the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. The meaning is mostly inscrutable to us here in the West, but we can safely equate it to the Garden of Eden in some sense. We also call it “Heaven” which is the Hebrew metaphor of the sky as some place physically above this plane of existence. This we managed to keep, but dirtied up the meaning a bit, by investing the word with a baggage not included in the Hebrew term itself. In the biblical language, Jehovah is God of the Sky Kingdom, traveling about in clouds He wears, not for the sake of modesty, but to indicate we can’t handle the full revelation of His Person. His Presence forces the evaporation of fallen existence. That means if you want to walk in the Sky Garden with God, you have to shed this mortal existence.
As a type of that sort of translation to another kind of existence, we talk about breaking free of our fallen limitations by focusing on the Spirit Realm and the values which characterize the Sky Kingdom. By regaining spiritual life here on this plane, where the grace of God breathes His Spirit back into some part of us beyond the flesh and intellect, we have a citizenship and a reservation in Eden. When we finish the assignment here, or rebel so much it seems obvious to God it won’t be done, He ends our mortal existence and that part of us which belongs to the Spirit Realm claims our full focus and consciousness.
The idea is we voluntarily strive to exercise that spirit faculty as much as possible before the transition, so that God can use us to testify of His revelation.