Corruption, Part 1: The Disease in Human Nature

Imagine you are the conductor of an orchestra, and a few performances in, you notice that the violins have started to play out of harmony with the rest of the instruments. What do you do? It depends on why the violinists are doing that. If they are fully capable of playing the right music, but they have chosen not to, then you might kick them out and never work with them again. If they are earnestly trying but their violins are all damaged for some reason, you get them new instruments. If their violins are fine, but they all have the flu and can’t physically play the complex music, you isolate the violinists and give them medicine until they are well enough to play again. In any case, if you fail to identify the problem correctly, then your solution will not work, since you did not end up addressing the real issue.

Similarly, if we notice that humans are out of harmony with God’s intentions for us, it is important to identify why this is happening. What is the root cause of the issue? Answering that question will help us to better know ourselves and better understand how God has worked to fix the problem.

In our post on the first C, Creation, we saw God’s vision for humans on Earth: creative, life-bringing rulers and caretakers that were in right relationship with God, each other, and Creation. It is easy to see in the world around us that humans have deviated from that original plan. But what went wrong? And what were the effects? That is the subject of Genesis 3 - 4. Understanding these chapters is the key to understanding the rest of the Bible’s story.

The End of the Beginning

Genesis 2 highlights two special trees in the Garden of Eden: the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We discussed the significance of these trees in the Creation post, but recall that God gave a warning to not eat from the latter, saying that the person who eats its fruit will die.

In Genesis 3, a serpent (the most “crafty” animal) persuades Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And while they do not die immediately, there are consequences for their actions. It is harder to work the ground, childbearing is more painful, and death comes into the picture. At the end of the chapter, Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden, and the entrance back into the garden is guarded by angels and a flaming sword. It’s easy to read this story in a retributive way: Adam and Eve disobey God, which makes God angry, so he punishes them and kicks them out. But that would be a mistake. Understanding this chapter hinges on answering two questions:

1. What is the effect of sin on humans?
2. Why were Adam and Eve exiled?

In part one of this post, we will look at the first question, and in part two, we will answer the second.

The Internal Effects of Sin

We all know not to touch a hot stove. Chances are that an adult told you not to when you were very young. Did you fully understand why at the time? Probably not. It might not have been hard for a mean older sibling to convince you that the rule was arbitrary, only meant to control you. What, then, would happen if you went and planted your hand on the hot stovetop? You would get burned pretty badly.

This is the way to read Genesis 3. Our actions have natural consequences. When God tells us not to do something, it is not because he is trying to hold us back from something good. It’s because he is trying to prevent us from harming ourselves. When Adam and Eve chose to distrust God and willingly disobey him, they damaged something inside of themselves. Athanasius, a key theologian in the Early Church, put it this way:

Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun [humans] came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God.¹

In other words, if Adam and Eve had just made an honest mistake and gone to God to apologize, things might have turned out differently. Instead, by eating from the tree and putting their desire for self-serving knowledge and power above their desire for partnership with God, they introduced corruption into their human nature.

The Ongoing Effects of Sin

This corruption has passed to every human since, and it’s why we are failing to play our part of the music in God's orchestra. We are all sick with this disease. With the corruption, it is difficult to see the music. It is hard to determine if the music is actually good. But most of all, it is impossible to play the music well. We may be able to string together a few notes or phrases at a time, but we can’t keep it up for long. With the disease, our desires are disordered and misdirected. We desire happiness, but we look for it in the wrong places, or we seek short-term indulgence at the expense of long-term fulfillment. We desire comfort and security, but we are willing to overlook others’ wellbeing to get them. When confronted, we are always ready to blame someone or something else, just as Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent.

This sin-disease, this corruption of our human nature, is the root cause of human evil and suffering in the world. It started with the first humans, and we are still experiencing its effects today. This is what the Bible means when it calls humans “sinful,” not just that we often do the wrong thing, but that there is something in us that we must constantly fight against pulling us towards the wrong thing. That does not necessarily excuse our actions, but it adds an extra layer to our predicament.

Any attempt to rid the world of human evil must deal with the corruption in human nature. Some think we could solve the world’s problems if we had a better system of government or economics, but any system can be abused by humans with a corrupted nature. Some think that the problems would go away with some combination of more knowledge, better medicine, and more advanced technology, but knowledge, chemistry, and engineering can be used for good or evil purposes. That’s not to say that we should give up on trying to make our systems better or advancing civilization. Doing those things aids in our ability to fulfill our responsibilities as God’s representatives on Earth. If what the Bible says about human nature is true, however, then none of those pursuits on their own will lead to the end of all human evil.

For that, something more is needed. The disease in our hearts needs to be cut away. Counterintuitively, the first step towards the restoration and healing of humans was exile from the Garden of Eden, which is the topic of our next post, Corruption, Pt. 2: Exile and Damaged Relationships.

References

[1] Athanasius, *On the Incarnation of the Word* (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2010), chapter 2, section 7.