Does God Lie?
A reader question about God's trust-worthiness
Question: Why don’t Adam and Eve die right away when they eat the fruit God had told them not to? Isn’t the snake right in saying that they “won’t die”? Did God lie? It kind of seems like it. - Dubious
Dear Dubious,
This story of Adam and Eve in the garden is so brilliant (read here). It honestly amazes me that it’s so short, so succinct (I struggle!) and so pithy. We can ponder this short story for the rest of our lives and continue to understand it in new ways each time.
One of the things that I think is pretty vague is the actual words of the temptation from this talking snake (?!). It’s also worth noting the ways in which the words are twisted first from Eve in her retelling/remembering and then back to Eve from the snake. It’s so much like the ways we have to navigate life and our own choices about who’s right and who’s wrong and all the other choices that don’t even seem to have a clear right and wrong. Life is tricky, and we’re making a million choices in every moment based on a framework we’re barely aware we’re operating upon.
What is the framework? This is the question I think under your question. Is the framework of Christianity good? Is the God of the Bible good? Can He be trusted?
For some people the answers to these questions is a hearty, “NO!” and given the ways that humans have twisted the Truth I can respect that people have sometimes rejected bad teaching and bad religion and a God that doesn’t seem trustworthy at all.
But before we toss off the whole thing, what if we got a crucial part of the story wrong?
God actually tells them they are free to eat from any tree, including the tree of Life. But (!!) if they choose to eat the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil, they, dying will die. “Dying they will die” is a strange phrase, and it’s not really something easily translatable. It’s not something we even really understand, but it is something we live with every day.
Basically in every moment of every day (post puberty), dying we die. Our cells are degrading and we’re all on a slow march to the grave. And even apart from that inevitable death, we compound that with our other choices. I like to use the example of smoking, because 100% of the time smoking causes health complications and disease. It doesn’t 100% of the time cause lung cancer, but it will cause issues. That said, you don’t stick a cigarette in your mouth and fall over dead. Just like you don’t die if you fail to exercise or if you eat ice cream every night. But these choices compound. Sinisterly, they compound so slowly that it’s easy for us to feel like we “got away with it this time!” We humans are terrible at making long term decisions, and choices for the long game. We’re in pain/hunger/tiredness NOW and we want fixes NOW! Even if those fixes are crummy, as long as they make us feel better right this second.
So on the surface it might seem like the snake is right when it says to Eve, “God knows you won’t die…..” which is in some ways true, since God’s directive was never, “If you eat it I’ll smite you dead with a lightning bolt that second!” but rather, “if you make this choice you start a long domino chain that ends in a terrible place, precisely that place of the knowledge of good and evil.”
The accusation is really much more about whether God can be trusted to tell the truth. Can He? The snake sure doesn’t seem to want Eve to believe God. And it’s using a lot of half truths and twisted logic to get her confused. We stand almost in the same place every day, faced with the same questions. Will we trust God? Is He telling the truth? Will our choices really have the outcomes promised to everyone else? Maybe we’re special, extra smart, can “get away with it” unlike everyone else!
As I continue to consider this story, I start to realize more and more what God means when He says, “Dying you will die” because the opposite is also true, “Living you will live.” Both of these are slow and compounding ways of being, neither revives you or kills you instantly. To me that feels like God’s deep and merciful grace. He plays the long long long game, and so does all of creation, so does the very fabric of the Universe. And thank God! I can eat a piece of cake once in a while and enjoy it tremendously without instantly becoming diabetic. I can weather all kinds of things in this life because I’m also part of a longer story, where things move slowly both towards life and destruction, giving me ample time to switch courses and change directions!1
I think someday on the other side of this life we’ll look back and weep (both sorrow and joy!). It will be so obvious to us, so clear. We’ll wonder why we struggled, why we were so easily taken in by these false choices. But until then, here we are. Will we trust God? Will we trust Him with our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our souls? Will we trust Him with our relationships and our money and our resources, with our talents and our gifts and our time? Will we trust Him with our kids and our families and our friendships? And if bad things happen was it because our trust was misplaced?
This story is a brilliant opener for the Bible to start the conflict right away. What is the answer? What will humanity pick? We really don’t know how old the Earth is, we really don’t have any idea how much time has passed. The Bible isn’t trying to tell us. It’s more like a highlight reel of this big story of God and His creatures, specifically humanity. Will His creation trust Him? Can He be trusted?
Sometimes we act like we moderns are so cutting edge, we are dealing with FAR more complex issues and problems than those humptie hicks of the past. Like teenagers who scoff at their parents and say, “YOU COULDN’T POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND THE CHALLENGES I FACE IN MY LIFE NOW, YOU OLD FOGEY!” only to get a little bit down the road of life and realize our foolishness, our presumption. Of course they understood, of course they saw so clearly what we cannot.
I hope that we won’t be too quick to toss away this story, this conundrum. Perhaps this doesn’t seem like an answer to your question, but only more questions. I don’t think God deals with tricks, and sleights of hand. He’s not bending the universe to suit His whimsy. If God Himself is the framework of the Universe, then how could He? The much more likely answer is that we’ve misunderstood the premise, we’ve misunderstood the whole story. So, no, I don’t think God lied. I think He was exactly telling the truth. Dying we die. We distrust Him in each moment and we continue to die. But even in this life, when we trust Him we begin to see His care and hand moving and healing us and the situations around us.
For me this is why our atonement theory (what we believe happened at the Cross) is so vital. Because many people tell the story like Jesus does some trickery and magic to con God out of giving us our just desserts. But what I believe Jesus actually does is show us the Father so clearly, so vividly that we understand that even through our choices of death and murdering our own god, that He will pursue us and make Himself available. Nothing can separate us from His love. Nothing.
So we stand at the tree ourselves, and are faced with the same invitation. Will we trust Him? There are two ways, life and death. That choice under-girds all our other choices.
Dubious, I hope you continue grappling with this question. I hope you continue to see that God is trustworthy, as so many previous generations have understood.
with love,
sierra
Ask A Priest
Question: Why doesn’t your church/you take a stand on issues like X, Y or Z that I find crucially important to the health and well being of the church? I’ve looked at your website but it seems like you try to skirt around issues that are really important to me, instead of having a clear policy or statement about these topics.
My Thoughts: I have come to believe that in these polarizing times it’s vital for us to wrestle through hard things, alone, and together, and especially in community. We’re not good at that, and it’s really hard to do. We have all lost relationships with friends and even family members over political, social and other kinds of disagreements and so it’s super scary to try and talk about stuff in public with people we suspect disagree with us. It’s so much easier if we can just wear/put up/make obvious clear statements about our thoughts so that everyone knows where we stand and we can avoid all conversations regarding those things.
But relationships are messy, and ideally invite us closer into conversations that are difficult. I think you should always feel a little bit like the church you attend is a smidge too conservative (if you’re liberal) and a smidge too liberal (if you’re conservative). We’re not looking for a nice comfy place to find exact like minded people, but to be slightly challenged to think about things from a totally new and different perspective as part of God’s Kingdom - which is neither liberal nor conservative.
Sometimes it feels like it’d be so much easier if we had clear ideas where the church and everyone inside of it stood, but that’s not realistic. I want our community to be a place where we are open to God’s leading and discernment. I don’t have the end all, be all answer to every current cultural issue and political thing. And when I look back on Church history I can also see that things they felt were hills to DIE on, turned out to be pretty obvious to us after a few hundred years. So I’m (attempting to be) playing the long game, not giving you the answers I think are best, but coming along side to talk about what God might have in mind, and to wrestle out what those differences teach us about being in closer relationship together and with God.
I firmly believe that if we ask Him He will give us guidance and input and we will move forward on all the things we aren’t sure about step by slow step. This is hard, it challenges us to trust Him on a new level that we most of the time feel deeply uncomfortable with. Believe me, I get it. I’d way rather be able to have policy and statement and verbiage for exactly the right thing. But I can’t in good conscious and I think having those clear ideas have only separated us further and kept us from being in actual long term relationship with our Creator.
So in the meantime we hold each other with respect and love and continue trying to practice talking about hard things in close relationship, trusting that nothing can really break us apart from the love of God and hopefully the love we have for each other. How we do that…. it’s an ongoing invitation to more growth and maturity.
Bits & Bobs
I received so much heartfelt feedback on sharing my divorce story last week. Sometimes it’s hard to know if sharing our deepest mistakes and wounds is appropriate for the interwebs. Is it towing the line of sharing our “dirty laundry”? But it is true that there is great healing power and not feeling so alone, and understanding that everyone has vulnerabilities. I think it’s why we love personal essays and stories. I was reminded of this this week when I stumbled across a woman writing about the terror of going to a book club for the first time and feeling like she talked too much, said awkward things and everybody hated her. I don’t know her from Adam, but I definitely feel this awkwardness. At the end of the essay she talked about how people never really remember 90% of the stupid things we say, and most people are too worried about themselves to worry about us… so true. It was funny, poignant and moving to me. Long live the personal essay!
I finished the “Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family” by Robert Kolker. It was dark but not overly dark, because it’s more like a science book about the study of schizophrenia. But it has enough story that you don’t feel like it’s a dry straight facts based textbook. I’ve always had an interest in psychology and the mind, and maybe at the end of the day it makes me even more appreciative that (for now at least) I’m stable, and grateful to be kickin’ in reality.
Spring is really here! The air is full of that lush green grass smell, and hot pine needles and the wild blooming trees. I’ve enjoyed it tremendously this week, though next week we are in for some much colder weather and possibly snow again. But that’s okay, it’s looking like a long hot dry dry summer, which always makes us tschezy worrying about forest fires. I think the North-East stole all our snow this year!
I’d like to think that Eve actually does come to this realization post Cain’s death at the birth of Seth. A deeper reading of her responses to these births indicates to me that she finally might understand some of this bigger story.