The Bible is a big book, a long read and sometimes we ask ourselves, What’s it all about really?

Something in us wants a simple and categorical answer that we can store in our minds and give us a reason to keep reading it religiously. Like most things, the truth is complex. There is an answer, but the problem is that while we often think of the Bible as the background of life, it’s really just the background of human life, and so because there are aspects of the story that push back beyond the Garden of Eden, we can get confused.

To put it another way,

when you watch some TV show, the actor will try to create an idea of a person with some sort of quirk. Why does the person have that quirk? Something in their history caused it way back, but what you’re watching is the aftermath: a quirky fellow. Without the quirk the character would be flat and unrealistic, because in reality gradual experiences of the past set the scene of today, we sense this. Likewise the Bible is a story of history, but it isn’t really the beginning of history, just ours.

In Genesis 1:26, right smack dab in the beginning of the book, God speaks to somebody,

saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Fascinating, Yahweh was speaking to somebody, but who? It could have been Jesus alone, after all, in Proverbs the Word also known as Jesus, as first of creation calls himself a “master worker” being with Yahweh, and it is reasonable that he would have said that to him as instructions since Jesus was the one everything was being made through. However, if you look at Job 38: 7 it speaks of the sons of God, or spirit beings shouting for joy at the idea of Yahweh’s creations, so it also could have been a massive crowd of spirit beings including Jesus. Either way, our beginning was clearly not the beginning of history.

So lots of spirit realm stuff, maybe a big explosion,

compressing followed by other exploding, shaping, shifting and rotating, all hypothetical stuff, but sure, it could have happened that way. Suddenly, or not so suddenly, we enter a unique time in history. You have a super awesome garden, lots of cool docile animals and the first human, Adam is up and about. Life’s pretty good for Adam, the weather is nice, he has pretty low job stress, just naming animals when he can get to it and there isn’t a lot of fuss over work dress codes. Food is good, readily available with lots of varieties of fruit and nut trees to choose from, even a tree of life, but also there’s an odd “knowledge tree” too. That knowledge tree might have looked similar to other trees, at the very least, the fruit looked decent. But eating from it was a no-no, Dad had been clear on that. Okay, cool, don’t eat that knowledge tree of good and some weird thing called bad, a concept that might have confused Adam at the time, but he knew that it wasn’t good.

Although life was pretty fun in that garden,

Adam could see the animals with families, males with females and their young following them around. He got lonely over time, there was nothing like him. All his spirit buddies he might have got to know probably only came around to chat every once in a while, considering that for a mind that could easily be trillions of years old, Adam didn’t even know what pants were and was unlikely to be stimulating their intellects with banter. So, all alone, Adam goes to sleep.

The next morning, there’s an incredibly gorgeous creature lying on the grass beside him,

and possibly a weird sense that something is missing in his body. After finding out what happened and likely saying, “Thanks dad, but please don’t ever perform surgery on me in my sleep again!” (who wouldn’t say that?) he happily met his wife. Life was cool, Adam could have told her what he named the animals, show her the best swimming spots, and discuss not eating from the bad tree. At that point in time life was simple, very simple and smooth.

But it just wasn’t perfectly simple. One rule, just the one, yet there was a trap here.

A talking snake enters the scene. Who is this talking snake? In Revelations the Devil, Satan, is referred to as the original serpent, and it just makes the most sense that it would be him. Who is Satan and why did he do this? Satan is a spirit being, but an evil one. Was he born evil? No, just like Adam and Eve, Satan was born to be perfect.

It is easy to say that, but what does perfect really mean?

It just means not flawed from its design, or fully and properly functioning. Sin, in essence, is flaw, the failure to function according to the original purpose and design, or instincts. Humans were designed as “free moral agents” having the ability to override their instincts, but generally speaking that’s not a good idea. Instincts are God’s way of getting you to function in your environment in the way you were designed to do. Men and women experience chemical effects in their bodies at various times throughout life to help them perform a task they were designed to perform. God is no prude, we were designed with sexual instincts, but we can choose to cultivate weird sexual interests that break away from the original instinct and purpose behind that instinct. At some point in time Satan was perfect, and his name wouldn’t even have been Satan, because that means resister. Satan was a name given to him after becoming the first to resist Yahweh, others, called demons, would eventually be recruited by him, as many as “a third of the stars” or a third of the spirit beings.

Now the plot thickens, a villain with a backstory arrives, quirks and all.

When the resistance began exactly, we can’t say, but it happened first in the spirit realm before it came to earth. We need to note an important point here, this was a political movement. In heaven, before it happened on earth, there was a power struggle. It was the Creator versus one of his creations, Yahweh declaring his right of leadership as founder, the Resister claiming that creation should self-govern.

Was Satan really a freedom fighter?

Maybe, but he also wanted power, and he got it. The Bible says that “the whole world is in the power of the wicked one” and so we can see that Satan’s revolution was in some part successful. But did he defeat God in battle for the power? No, nothing indicates that, in fact, Yahweh is clear in the Bible about the fact that he can and will destroy Satan. Then how did Satan’s regime come to its reign? A piece of fruit…

What if Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten the fruit?

The Bible shows us what Yahweh had in store for Adam and Eve, in his first command to them they were to multiply as a people, subdue the earth and have dominion over animal life. They would have eventually had children, their lives would have perpetuated because perfect humans have the favor of life and don’t die of old age or illness. But if that had happened what would have happened to Satan’s regime? Satan had already become the Resister, a creature not functioning as designed to do, since obedience is a part of our design, disobedience is sin. The price of sinning is death. Satan was playing a dangerous game, much like all revolutions after it. If he didn’t take power he would likely face a speedy execution.

At some point in time, Satan proposed that creation is better without its founder’s authority,

and once the idea got out there, everyone (spirit beings) would reasonably wonder if it was true. This is why Jesus said that the vindication of Yahweh’s reputation was more important than the salvation of all humans, because the vindication of Yahweh’s reputation doesn’t just mean the salvation of humans, but every sentient being. There are myriads upon myriads of spirit beings, and our human population is probably quite small compared to their numbers. If Yahweh just destroyed the resistance, the spirit beings might be moved to believe God was actually a tyrant. So, knowing his creations better than anyone else, he knew what would work and what wouldn’t, and he chose to let the resistance fail in front of everyone. How? By allowing them to give it a try.

So what’s with the fruit?

Here comes an unpleasant reality of the current situation for humans. We are, essentially, lab rats. How do you perform an experiment without impacting the surrounding area? You create an isolated testing environment: Earth. Yay for us… Life in the maze begins with a tree. Sounds like a good idea given the circumstances. There are only two humans alive at the time, really, the experiment could probably not have a more ideal situation for testing. The damage is kind of minimal if things go poorly.

It’s a simple challenge,

the two humans are not being tortured into disobeying God, all they have to do is not eat from that one tree. In fact, the test is so easy they obviously aren’t going to eat from it. Who would eat from a tree of death? So that resisting scientist has to stick his hand in and move things along. Since Satan’s side is obviously the resistance, let’s call the good guys team Flow. There is some risk on team Flow’s side, of course, but everything can go so smoothly if the humans just say no when Satan takes his shot. If he tries and its a crash-and-burn moment, all is well that ends well. The he humans would go on to make perfect babies, team Flow executes the bad guys and everybody in heaven goes out for some ether tacos. But that didn’t happen, Satan had lined up the dominoes just right…

Satan didn’t just challenge them,

he plotted his attack well. Let’s consider a point. Why might he not have gone after Adam? No, I’m not about to say something sexist like that men aren’t as easily fooled. We don’t really know, but I would guess it was about total life experience. Let’s contemplate another question, Adam received more blame than Eve for eating the fruit, but why?

We really have no idea how old Eve was,

she knew enough to know that eating from that tree was disobedience, but we really don’t know how close her relationship was with Yahweh. Adam had been around longer, how much more we can’t say, but longer. Yahweh would talk with him during the “breezy time of day” so it is safe to say Yahweh had cultivated a bond with him. I’m not saying Yahweh wouldn’t have tried to cultivate a bond with Eve, I’m sure he wanted to do that, but Adam simply had more time to build a relationship. If some stranger told you something terrible about your father, after you had spent years knowing him to be a good person, how easily could that stranger convince you? Trying the tactic Satan used on Eve might not have worked on Adam, because Adam possibly knew Yahweh too well already for that.

Eve, who might not have been alive for much time was easily convinced by the idea that God was hiding something from her.

In fact, I doubt she even had all that much experience with snakes, because she never seemed to pick up on the fact that snakes don’t usually talk! Adam named snakes, he probably observed them for a long time and knew that if a snake talks to you, its probably good to wait for that breezy time of day and have a heart-to-heart with Dad about talking snakes.

Satan’s strategy wasn’t just to get Eve to doubt Yahweh’s good nature,

that was just the set up. His primary tactic was the very same lure that turned him into the Devil: ambition. Satan intrigued Eve with the same seductive thought of self-importance, that she could be God’s equal. Satan convinced her that if she ate from this tree of knowledge of good and bad, this would put her on the same level as God. Glory was her trap.

Adam was different. Here’s where the domino effect played out,

Adam was not “deceived” the way Eve was, he knew Yahweh wasn’t lying to him. So what took him down? At first glance you might think, well, hey, Eve was naked, maybe he wasn’t even paying attention to what fruit he was being handed. That would have been a good trap, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Adam knew what he was doing was wrong, and it wasn’t because he loved Eve more than God. How do we know that? Because when God confronted them the little backstabber tried to pass all the blame on Eve. Maybe he figured that he had one more rib he could spare, either way Adam didn’t seem to be all that loyal to either one of them. Really, it seems he chose the pleasure of impulse and infatuation over his father.

But still, we’re talking about fruit… How can fruit become such a big issue?

The fruit was such a small matter that it was able to become a big one, and Satan made it big. The fruit was just a catalyst, Eve sinned for mistaken glory, Adam sinned knowingly for impulsive pleasure, but the fact that they would disobey their father over such a small thing was anything but. Although they had been given everything, the one thing, a small thing, that was not for them, they stole.