When God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, He warned them that if they ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, then they would surely die. Adam and Eve’s eventual succumbing to the serpent’s temptations and partaking of the forbidden fruit and condemning themselves and all of their descendants to die is seen as a tragedy. It is not. God intended for Adam and Eve to partake of the fruit and to die. He was not warning them against eating it in the hopes that they would listen to Him and avoid dying. He was warning them because death is hard and painful and terrifying and He didn’t want them to be completely blindsided. Adam and Eve transgressed the rules because the game was too small for them. They lived in a perfect paradise and didn’t have to struggle or to try or learn or grow. They had to get out of there. They had to let their pampered and naive and unchallenged selves die and be born again into a new world, a harder and more complicated world, but a world in which they could work and toil and bring new life and order out of the chaos into which they had been thrust. We have to die as well. Over and over again. Every time that we find that our lives have become either too paradisiacal, so that we are bored and unchallenged, or too unmanageable, so that we are overwhelmed and hopeless, we have to let that version of ourselves die, so that we may be born again. “Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin.” (Romans 6:4-7). When we renew our baptismal covenants, we bury the old version of ourselves and surely die, so that we may be freed from sin and walk in the newness of life. If we are to be a part of the Plan of Salvation, then we shall surely die. I hope all of us will follow the examples of Adam and Eve and partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil so that we may die and find new life.
