The Truth That God Told Our Founding Fathers

by Jim Moore

05/7/2003

Today is Presumption Day. The day I have chosen to presume things which will either make readers shake their heads in disbelief, write me off as a self-indulgent nut case, want to pray for me hoping to save my soul, or, upon reading the title of this article, tremble with anger that someone can be so incredibly, well, presumptuous.

Today my subject is Creation. No, not writing poetry, building monuments, or making babies. I mean THE creation. The creation of the universe-or more specifically, the planet Earth-as God decided in the beginning to put it together.

Before we start, you and I will have to agree on a few basic things. Otherwise this whole thing is a bust. Here are the things, and I'll keep it short and simple.

The first thing we should agree on is that there is a God. Myself, I know there is a God because of an obvious fact. We didn't make the universe or anything in it. And we certainly didn't make it ourselves. So some "life force" must have made us and everything else. Call "it" what you will.

The second thing is, that God made the universe perfect-- including our world, even us. Being perfect Himself, how could He do otherwise? After the sixth day, God saw everything he had made and pronounced it good, If it was good in God's eyes it had to be perfect. Only a fool would argue with that.

The third thing is, something got screwed up along the way. Imperfection set in. Since God is perfect, we know He's not to blame, so it must have been ourselves. 

If you can agree, in principle, with those three things, let's proceed.

The big question is, what made imperfection set in? Why did our "original parents" suddenly see the Garden of Eden in a "secular" light? Where did they goof? What opened their eyes? What made them see each other as different sexes? What caused them to wrap fig leaves around their vital parts to hide them from each other in shame?

Right here is where my presumptuousness goes into high gear.

The devout Christian, fundamentalist or otherwise, will tell you that a serpent told Eve that if she ate a certain apple she would be as smart as God. Eve took a bite, gave the rest to Adam and, well, you know the story.

And here's where my presumptuousness goes into an even higher gear. 

You will forgive me, but I think the Fall in the Garden was preplanned. God wanted his Two People to multiply. But, He also wanted them to be free. However, if people aren't free to ever do wrong they won't be truly free. They will be walking machinery, emotionless automatons, puppets without strings, flesh-and-blood robots, incapable of doing anything but God's bidding. 

But God didn't want that. He wanted his people to have the freedom to make mistakes and learn by them, to choose right from wrong on their own, without interference from Him.

So God had no choice but to cut them loose, to open their eyes, to let them see what was out there, and choose the good from the bad, and learn to live with the choices they made.

Whether He used a serpent and an apple from the "tree of knowledge" to complete His divine plan will be argued until doomsday. It is not my objective here to arbitrate the point. Rather, it is to introduce the main point. Which is, that freedom to make choices about what to do in this life is an incredibly beautiful concept that could only come from a Divine Mind.

But that very freedom that is so precious to us also has a price, often a very high one.

When Mr.and Mrs Innocent (Adam and Eve) woke up one morning and realized they were naked they suddenly knew that the blinders were off, They were no longer in paradise; no longer in the spiritual realm, but now they were in the physical world. 

And from that moment on they were free, free to give or take, associate or alienate, love or hate, nurture or kill.

From now on it was up to them, their call, their choices, their destiny.

It must have been a terrifying time for that Original Pair. They could no longer count on God to move them, do things for them, decide for them. It would be up to them forevermore to take the freedom that God gave them, along with the trials and tribulations that He knew they would encounter, and handle it themselves, for better or worse.

Yes, God would always be with them, watching over them, helping them however He could, but never doing it for them. What they did from then on would be what THEY decided to do, not what God decided for them.

As I write this, I ponder the Declaration of Independence, in which our founding fathers wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness",

That statement, to me, has relevance to that incident in the Garden of Eden, when Almighty God decided that even perfection wasn't good enough for His children, because it cheated them out of the opportunity to find perfection---life, liberty and happiness---for themselves.

The fact that some of us in this world have yet to find it is no fault of God's. He gave us the freedom to do so. The rest is up to us.



Jim Moore
Jmoore1819@aol.com