Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God by Gregory A. Boyd

Author:Gregory A. Boyd [Boyd, Gregory A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Practicing the love of Jesus Christ, REL012000, Judgmental religion
ISBN: 9781585589487
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2004-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

chapter 8

The Lie about Us

“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

Genesis 3:5–6

Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

Romans 14:23

Originally man was made in the image of God, but now his likeness to God is a stolen one. . . . What God had given man to be, man now desired to be through himself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In Christ, there was re-created the form of man before God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Lie: You Must Become

The Shifting Centers

In chapter 3 we saw that we cannot know and love the truth about God without knowing and loving the truth about ourselves and our neighbors. Loving our neighbors as ourselves is part of what it means to love God. In the same way, we cannot reject the truth about God without thereby rejecting the truth about ourselves and our neighbors. And we cannot refrain from loving God without thereby refraining from loving ourselves and our neighbors.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that in Genesis 3 the very act that brought a false judgment about God also brought a false judgment about Adam and Eve, and thus about all of humanity. The serpent’s accusation that God isn’t a reliable source of life involved an accusation that God’s creatures weren’t adequately alive. The heart of the lie about us is that we humans are not okay simply living in union with God. Our lives cannot simply revolve around enjoying God’s provision—the Tree of Life—and honoring God’s prohibition—the Tree of Knowledge. We can, and we must, provide for ourselves.

This lie follows directly from believing the lie about God. If God is in fact unloving, untrustworthy, and threatened by what he forbids, as the serpent suggested, Adam and Eve must be on their own to find life. The serpent convinced Eve that she and Adam had been duped by God in their previous innocence. The fullness of life she and Adam had enjoyed simply living in fellowship with their Creator was actually the ploy of a threatened deity securing his position on top. Their eyes were not yet opened, the serpent said, for the threatened Creator was keeping them shut (Gen. 3:4–5). Adam and Eve were seduced into believing that there was something they could get that would improve their lot in life, something the Creator was holding back from them out of fear. This presupposed that something was lacking in their lives up to this point and that it was up to them and them alone to get it.

In reality, the moment Eve entertained the possibility that she lacked something, she did lack something—but not what she thought. Eve was

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