Immortality
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out with his hand, and take fruit also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” Genesis 3:22 NASB
Live forever – “But two horrible fears haunt man steadily, trailing him like an everlasting shadow: the fear of nihility, of nonbeing—death—and the fear of ignorance. Man wants to live and to know.”[1]
What we need is an upgrade. Wouldn’t it be nice to know everything and to live forever? That’s the story of the Garden. The first appeal is to know “good and evil,” and when you think about it, if you knew the entire range of all good and all evil you would know everything. At least you’d know everything that really matters. The serpent tempted the woman with this appeal, but realized that such an appeal would have no effect at all if the desire weren’t there in the first place. So I guess you could say that the desire to know good and evil was already resident in humanity before anyone acted upon that desire, and that implies that God created us with the desire to know good and evil and then asked us to exercise that desire in relation to His instructions. In other words, one of the basic motivators of the yetzer ha’ra is the desire to know. There’s nothing wrong with that desire. In fact, it’s an essential part of what it means to be human. The issue is how you and I fulfill that desire. God asks us to fulfill that innate need to know according to His directions.
Now look at the second piece of this story. Once the man and the woman fulfill their desire to know without regard to God’s instruction, something follows. They are now somehow equipped for immortality. Immortality doesn’t become an issue until the couple exercises their desire to know. This is quite interesting. Does it imply that had they not fulfilled that desire in disobedience then immortality would also not have been an issue—or a possibility? Doesn’t this verse imply that as a result of knowing good and evil they might now determine to live forever? Had they not broken the commandment, would life have just terminated at some point as it was intended to? It certainly appears so. There is absolutely no mention, or even a hint, that human life was intended to be eternal. There is no notion of the eternal existence of the “soul” here. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Obedience would have kept the desire for omniscience in check and at the same time eliminated the desire for immortality. When Man confronted the possibility of disobedience, something crucial came into being. “The more significant turning point, however, is not the birth of human fantasy but the confrontation with God’s moral will, which resulted in the birth of a moral awareness of man’s own.”[2]
It’s fascinating to recognize that later Rabbinic and Christian theology reinstated the idea of immortality, adopting the thought from the Greek philosopher Parmenides. Until the Greeks, men lived and died. After the Greeks, death was just a doorway to another world and the “soul” was the eternal element of Man. The evangelical preoccupation with death and punishment in another world could never have been justified by Western theology without Parmenides. “Soul-winning” seems to be an attempt to get back to the Garden on Man’s terms.
Topical Index: soul, immortality, good and evil, live forever, Genesis 3:22
[1] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Family Redeemed: Essays on Family Relationships (KTAV Publishing House, 2000), pp. 10-11.
[2] Ibid., p. 11.
Indeed man has always wanted both to live and to know. In the chess match between God and HaSatan the usurper is poised to shout “CHECK” as the point of singularity in both Artificial Intelligence and Medical Science draws near. According to some since medical science has increased the life expectancy of man by 25 years in the last 50 years and by 5 years in the last 10 years it will soon be able to increase life expectancies each year by a year thus achieving medical immortality as new discoveries for diseases, nanotechnology and genetic engineering increase exponentially. Voila-immortality, barring, of course, accidental death. And the promise of Artificial Intelligence directly downloadable to humans via neural networks implanted directly into the brain needs no introduction, only time. It seems that (select) men will become as gods with unlimited access to knowledge and immortality. The only question is how long after science touts Singularity and Satan shouts CHECK will it take YHWH to make the final move and declare CHECKMATE?
“That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘It is necessary for you to be born from above.’” (John 3:6-7)
Here we have it stated succinctly by Yeshua of Nazareth what is the common dlilemna of mankind.
“Obedience would have kept the desire for omniscience in check and at the same time eliminated the desire for immortality. When Man confronted the possibility of disobedience, something crucial came into being. ‘The more significant turning point, however, is not the birth of human fantasy but the confrontation with God’s moral will, which resulted in the birth of a moral awareness of man’s own.’ ”
Amen… and emet.
The problem with “soul winning’ is that on the one hand it, too, is effected by mankind’ s desire, with its emphasis laid squarely on the material benefit of man’s desire for immortality and the fear of death/punishment.
On the other hand, God’s remedy is not material, as is fully and supremely displayed through “the law,” by which the whole power and nature of sin was exposed for what it actually is… a powerless inability to sustain the spiritual conditions of life in the flesh apart from the spiritual quickening by God himself by his spirit… that is, his own being.
Hence, we have manifest the gracious and merciful nature of God’s being, which is love, as given to and for us by means of God’s condescension to take upon himself human flesh, the material of mankind’s own form, and to live with us and among us as one of us in the flesh, by which he condemned both fleshly desire and executed it on the cross of his Christ.
But it is his Christ’s resurrection from the dead whereby God proclaimed this man as no mere, ordinary man formed of the material of flesh. No, rather in this man, the only begotten Son of God, whose live-giving spirit is the very same self-existent spirit of God’s own life, God’s spirit was pleased to dwell, and in his flesh the veil of separation between the God who is spirit, and mankind, who is flesh, was rent… torn apart… and the way was opened into the most Holy Presence of God himself.
Sin, along with the ordinances and regulations by which sin was made known to man in its destructive and deadly power as sin, was nailed to cross of Jesus Christ, and when the time was right for harvest (on the Feast of Weeks), God the Father sent his Spirit by the ascended Jesus Christ to indwell man, who, by the faithfulness of faith in God was empowered to put sin and sinful desire under it proper curse of death, that man might live free of the power of sinful desire and wholly for God by God’s own spiritual means.
This no “attempt to get back to the Garden on man’s (fleshly) terms”; this is Almighty God’s own means of salvation and redemption, by which the “forever living” that is God’s intent and purpose for mankind may be realized through faith in his only begotten Son, Jesus, the Christ, by the Spirit of the Living and Almighty God.