2022/06/06

42. Until the Fullness of Time

As I wrote in the previous issue, we will examine how the fact that God and people have a parent-child relationship has become ambiguous. In Genesis, we see God is meticulously caring for the people he created. God is the true parent of people from the beginning. God, who had known that when living things become plural, accidental information arises because of their spontaneity (cf. this blog №4), prepared "enmity" for when people fail to comply with his command forbidding them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (cf. this blog № 23, № 24). Also, it is written that at expelling them from the Garden of Eden, "the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them" (Genesis 3:21). God was always the parent who accompanied people and helped them evolve even outside the Garden of Eden. The man, on the other hand, after getting knowledge by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in his interaction with God, heard that God said to the woman, "your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you" (Gen. 3:16), and had the illusion that he was to rule over her. The man created the fiction that "she was the mother of all living" (Genesis 3:20) and gave her the name Eve. By naming her and ruling over her, the "mother of all living," the man wanted to become as authoritative as God, just as he had given "names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field" (Genesis 2:20) to rule over them. Thus, he judged the word of God by the knowledge he got by taking in accidental information and made it an act, which was the decisive cause of his expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The word of God: "[T]he man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:22), means that the man became one who knows good and evil not from God but by taking in accidental information. Jesus pointed out this situation as follows. "Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires" (John 8:43-44). It was the same with Eve, who was expelled from the Garden with the man. Eve, who bore a son Cain through intercourse with the man, became under the illusion that God was the cause of her pregnancy and said, "I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD" (Genesis 4:1) because God had said to her, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing" (Genesis 3:16). This illusion eventually created a fictional world in which people would overlap the image of the marital relationship with the relationship between God and people and dream of its future. Humans, who became "Lords" replacing God, having authority and power, established the institution with contracts and guarantees, called marriage, in a society based on blood relations. Women were seen as part of the property of men, and the relationship between God and people was left more and more ambiguous. Meanwhile, God, the true parent of people, had been waiting for the fullness of time while people evolved, continuing to accompany them and their history. (To be continued)

Maria K. M.