Corruption, Part 2: Exile and Damaged Relationships

If what we said in Corruption, Pt. 1 about sin being a disease that has infected human nature is true, then a retributive response to sin wouldn’t help anything. After all, if a student doesn’t complete their homework because they are sick, would it make sense to give them a detention in response? No, because that would not solve the underlying issue. So why does God seemingly respond to Adam and Eve with punishments?

Exile: Punishment or Mercy?

Let’s revisit the stove analogy from part one. If a parent told their child not to touch a hot stove, and the child did anyway, how would the parent respond? They would be upset, not just because the child didn’t trust them enough to listen, but because they didn’t want to see the child get hurt. The parent might say something like “now it’s going to be harder to play with your toys,” because they know that it will be harder to play with a burned hand. They might also ban the child from the kitchen for a while, at least until the burn heals, so that the child doesn't do something to make the damage permanent.

It is the same with God in this story. Recall what Eden symbolizes. It is a God-soaked, life-soaked garden land. With their actions, Adam and Eve pulled themselves away from God and damaged their relationship with God from the human side. If God is the source of life, then what is the consequence of cutting yourself off from that relationship? It becomes harder for you to bring forth life, and death becomes inevitable. Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden is a physical manifestation of what they have already done to themselves on a spiritual level. When God says “I will make…” to Adam and Eve, he is anticipating that exile, knowing that removal from the Garden will make it harder for them to fulfill their life-bearing responsibilities as humans.

At this point, God could no longer trust Adam and Eve to listen to him, and if they remained in Eden, there was a chance that they would permanently damage themselves by eating from the Tree of Life while in a corrupted state. Exile, therefore, was not a punishment from an angry God, it was a form of mercy from a God who desires restoration. It was a boundary set so that the corruption in human nature would not be immortalized. Humans could not return to Eden until the disease was healed. To emphasize this point, the story sets angels with a flaming sword to guard the entrance back to Eden. This communicates clearly that the corruption in human nature needed to be cut and burned away in order for humans to enter back into full relationship with God (the Israelites later called this a “circumcision of the heart”).

Broken Relationships

Due to Adam and Eve’s sin and the corruption of their human nature, we can see that the relationships that humans had with God, each other, and Creation have been damaged in the following ways:

• God
  • Adam and Eve hide themselves from God; they pull away from their partnership with him and thus, damage the relationship. God seeks intimacy and understanding, but they respond with deceit and blame-shifting.
• Each Other
  • Interpersonal: Adam blames Eve instead of taking accountability for his actions. Eve’s equal partnership with Adam shifts to a relationship of dependence.
• Creation
  • Themselves: Adam and Eve learn shame, a disliking of the self. Their desires are bent out of line with God's desires.
  • The World: It becomes harder to grow food and more painful to give birth, two of the life-creating activities of God's representatives.

Unfortunately, instead of working towards the healing of their sin-disease and the restoration of these relationships, the generations of humans following Adam and Eve caused the corruption and harm to get worse, as described in Genesis 4. This chapter highlights two of Adam and Eve’s children: Cain and Abel. Though they both offer sacrifices to God, he appreciates Cain’s but does not appreciate Abel’s. In response, Cain gets jealous and kills Abel. As a result, Cain is no longer able to grow food from the ground. Cain flees, has a son, Enoch, and builds a city named after his son.

Already, we see more damage being done to human relationships. Adam lied and hid from God, but Cain openly mocks and runs away from God. Adam and Eve damage their partnership, but Cain completely severs his partnership with Abel through murder. The ground became harder to work for Adam, but the ground becomes completely uncooperative for Cain.

On top of this, Cain introduces disorder into social systems. In Genesis 2, God designed marriage so that when a man and woman got married, they would become a separate family unit with the same social standing as their parents. In other ancient cultures, and in many today, when a man and a woman get married, the woman leaves her family and becomes the lowest ranking member of the husband’s family. She essentially becomes a servant for all higher-ranking family members. This structure makes it difficult for women in those cultures to hold any kind of power or authority outside the family, because they don’t have much power or authority inside the family.

In Genesis 2, the man leaves his family, not so that he can join the woman’s family, but so he and the woman can become a new family, a new Adam and Eve that have an equal right to God’s blessings in Creation, on par with their parents. Cain, however, did not respect this vision of marriage and family with his son. Instead, he used his son as a tool to satsify his own needs, building a city named after his son in order to entice Enoch to live there and farm for him.

A Downward Spiral

In Cain’s family, anger and distrust towards God continued to grow, shown by the names of his descendants. Enoch’s grandson is named Mehujael, which means something like “smitten by God” in Hebrew. His son is named Methushael, which means something like “death of God.” His son, Lamech, whose name might relate to being “low,” further damaged the system of marriage by taking two wives. Lamech also boasted to his wives of killing a “young man” for “striking” him, which might be meant to intimidate them! Because of Cain’s family's surrender to the corruption in their nature, human relationships were in dire shape:

• God
  • Humans are openly hostile to God. They have retreated from his presence. They have fully turned away from their responsibilities as Images of God.
• Each Other
  • Interpersonal: Humans are willing to murder each other out of jealousy and small conflicts. Far from seeing each other as partners, they see each other as rivals to be killed or controlled.
  • Societal: Marriage and social systems are structured in a hierarchical way that unbalances the dignity, value, and freedom of its members
• Creation
  • Themselves: Humans are infected with the sin-disease, which has disordered their desires. They have an overinflated view of their own importance, and they have trouble controlling their emotional outbursts.
  • The World: Humans have isolated themselves from Creation in a self-contained city. They are disconnected from the land and unconcerned with spreading God’s ordered goodness throughout the Earth.

Humans were trapped in a vicious feedback loop. Their actions caused further corruption to their nature and damage to their relationships, which in turn led them towards worse and worse actions. If nothing had changed, the only possible outcome of this downward spiral would be a complete loss of humanness and total self destruction. Fortunately, that is not the end of the story. God’s goodness meant that he would not stand by as we hurtled towards that fate, but his love meant that he could not force a fix on us. He needed a group of humans to partner with who could diagnose the problem in themselves and begin work toward a solution. That is the topic of the next C: Clinic.