Evil Defeats Itself                                                                  4/7/46

 

Scripture:  (Read from Lectionary - Hebrews 2: 1-4; 9-18)

 

I have said before, from this pulpit, that the book of Genesis, first in the Bible, should be read with the eyes and appreciation of a poet.  To read it with the analysis of the scientific historian is to miss its point and potency.

 

To the mind which reads Genesis for dates in history or for geological data, the book of Genesis may present a stumbling block.  Those whose education has convinced them of an evolutionary process in the earth extending back millions of years, and in the development of man from primitive savages, extending back hundreds of thousands of years, may have trouble with the story of Eden -- unless they have also been educated spiritually.  The soul is dwarfed religiously, that leaves religious training behind with the early Sunday School years.  It is just as important -- perhaps we should say more important -- for people to continue their religious study and growth as to develop their scientific and historical knowledge.  And it is fully as important to the so-called adult as it is to the child in church school.

 

The religiously mature person does well to read Genesis in the light of an early verse in the book:  “God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.”

 

Ralph Sockman, minister for many years at Christ Church, New York City, whose thought I have taken and followed this morning, suggests that the first chapters of Genesis must be read as the “history of the soul.”  The Garden of Eden is a spiritual description of the birthplace of conscience.  As such, its date, geography and geology are of such little consequence that they need not disturb us at all.  But the soul and the conscience ought to stir us mightily!  “The date of Adam is eternity and the geography of Eden is the human heart,” says Dr. Sockman.  “The drama of Eden has been played again in our day on the most dramatic and colossal scale ever staged.”

 

Think again of some of the scenes shown in Eden’s story.  The serpent is speaking.  Does a snake talk?  Did a snake ever talk?  Well, does the morning sing?  Have hills ever clapped their hands for Joy?  Do willows weep?  Stick to the ear of the poet, the dramatist, and you can hear the serpent speak!

 

Eden’s serpent represents animal nature.  And that nature is terribly real in present day life - in us - active and troublesome.  Poets talk of killing the ape and the tiger in ourselves.  One writer has suggested that it will take far longer to kill the mule and the parrot from our natures.  With undisciplined minds, we still repeat, like a sea captain’s parrot, the gossip, propaganda, rumors and lies that currently race past our ears, long after logic would lay them low.  The stubborn mule in us balks the road to new and better roads in the arts of progress.  Certainly, after recent tragic world events, we can hardly say that the ape and the tiger have been eradicated from human nature!

 

So-called civilized nations resemble, far too much, the apes in a zoological cage, restless and suspicious of each other.  And the tiger within us has spilled more blood in the 20th century than in any other century of human history.  The animal still lives in human nature.  We are no more rid of Eden’s snake than are the villagers of India free of the jungle animals after their boasted 5,000 years of continuous culture.

 

The Genesis account refers to the serpent as “more subtle than any beast of the field.”  And the subtlety is good as he says to Eve, “Hath God said, ‘Ye shall not eat of every tree in the garden’?”  And Eve replies, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden.  But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ‘Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.’”  [Never mind whether the so-called fruit was apple, orange, pomegranate, or the grapes of wrath!  We should have left that far behind with our early childhood.]

 

The serpent answered, “Ye shall not surely die.  For God doth know that in the day that ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”  How subtle is the appeal!  And how serpentine and devilish the error in Eden, in the class room, or at Los Alamos!

 

The woman begins to question whether there is anything in the Garden which she may not have!  What are our appetites for?  If God gave them to us, why not just satisfy them with the fruit of the nearest desirable tree?  Why not obey each impulse and enjoy it? Why should there by any “Thou shalt nots?”  Aren’t a lot of old restraints and prohibitions “put over on us” by Puritanical ancestors who wouldn’t let anybody else enjoy what they were afraid to enjoy?  And so, without examining any of the dark subtleties and weasel words in the serpent’s suggestion, Even and her spiritual descendants - (that includes all of us part of the time, and some of us seemingly all the time!) decide to live the “free and easy” life.

 

The doctrine of all sorts of self indulgence wormed its way easily into the writings of many who got popular hearing following the first world war.  It made its way into certain national philosophies.  Adolph Hitler has been reported to have said, “It is not merely a question of Christianity or Judaism.  We are fighting against the most ancient curse that humanity has brought on itself.  It’s got to get out of our blood, that curse from Mount Sinai!  That poison with which both Jews and Christians have spoiled and soiled the free, wonderful instincts of man and lowered them to the level of dog-like fright. .. The day will come when I shall hold up against these commandments the table of a new law.  And history will recognize our movement as the great battle for liberation, a liberation from the curse of Mount Sinai ... This is what we are fighting against, the curse of so-called morals ... idolized to protect the weak from the strong in the immortal law of battle; against the so-called Ten Commandments, against them are we fighting.”

 

Well, there -- read without the tone of Hitler’s fanatical passion -- is the Nazi idea of the way to build the brave new world by getting rid of the old moral restraints.  It is a modern version of the old serpent’s invitation to eat and become as gods.  As Nazi ideology, it has had a severe setback.  But it is not dead; it lurks not only under cover in Germany and Japan, but in our secularistic point of view here, and among other peoples.

 

Well, Eve and Adam did eat the “forbidden fruit.”  The record says “the eyes of both were opened and they knew they were naked and they made aprons of fig leaves.  And they heard the voice of God walking in the garden and they hid themselves.”  No need have we to get literalistic here about fig leaves as a clothing fabric, or what kind of thread was used, or what was the color of skin covered up.  That is not the point.  Souls discovered their nakedness before the moral eye of God and feared because of their own inadequacy.  [Genesis 3: 1-8].

 

Men of the year 1945 AD have eaten of the tree of knowledge of atomic fission.  And Adam knew no worse fright before God than man now knows!  Thoughtful people are near terror at the moral inadequacy of men’s souls to handle the new knowledge.

 

But, return to simple, personal conduct.  Why do men blush with shame, or blanche with fear, after yielding to certain impulses?  Some would say it is because of social conventions.  But there is a flaw in that reasoning.  Some conventions are like what people are taught in America or in England about driving a car.  In America we are taught to use the right hand side of the highway.  In England, people are taught to use the left side.  Other conventions are like what people are taught in America or in England about the addition of two and two. In either society, or any other, the teaching is that two plus two equals four.

 

It is true that Jesus did say of some practices, “Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time .. but I say unto you..”  It is also true that he changed not the dotting of an ‘I’ nor the crossing of a ‘t’ in the Ten Commandments.  The Ten Commandments were not invalidated by Nazi codes formulated in a Munich beer hall.  Nor did Hitler’s frenzied, passionate speeches change them.

 

A newspaper editor suggests that there really should be less news talk about the “Big Five” and more news talk about the “Big Ten”, meaning the Ten Commandments.  No nation, or group of nations is strong enough to override the laws of God expressed in the moral commandments of Sinai.  Every government that tries it ends, sooner or later, in ashes!

 

There is something far more profound than conventions represented in Adam’s and Eve’s shame and fear over having eaten the forbidden fruit.  It is conscience.  The “new order” free from the restraints of Mount Sinai turns out to be timid old Eden.  And Adam says -- “The woman whom thou gavest me - she tempted me.”  And Eve says, “It was the serpent.”  And the serpent is not there just then.  And Keitel says, “It was Hitler.”  And if we aren’t careful we will all be saying, “It was the dictators,” or “it was the war.”  The scapegoat complex is rife today as it was in Eden.  Remember what God said there?  To Eve, he said, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow.”  To Adam was assigned “toil” and “sweat of brow” as the penance toward redemption.

 

When the children of God follow their lower animal nature, they unfit themselves for the gardens of cultured, decent, satisfying life.  And they are forced out to the toil and danger of survival fight in the jungle.

 

Kipling describes an imaginary incident called “Letting in the Jungle.”  The picture is that of a village of India surrounded by the animal kingdom.  The denizens of the jungle plot the downfall of the village.  A migration of elephants, lions, wild boars and their bestial brothers moved toward the settlement.  No blood was shed.  But the crops were destroyed, the buildings peeled to pieces, the inhabitants driven away, and the once-thriving village was left like an abandoned anthill.  The jungle lies close to some Indian villages.

 

And the jungle lies very close to the settlements of man today in America, Europe and Asia.  The war has revealed the thinness of man’s veneer of civilization.  How short is the road from garden to wilderness and jungle!

 

Evil defeats itself!  Self-indulgence takes the edge off pleasure.  The darkness of disappointment is the end of the egoist.  Abuse of power brings the loss of power.  Evil leads to shame and fear, attempt to escape, effort to evade responsibility, eviction from garden to wilderness.  The tragic story of Eden has not been outlived.

 

Our Bible begins with this story of a gate closing behind those who sinned their way out of a garden.  It ends with the vision of a gate to a holy city wherein dwelleth righteousness and wherein stands the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

 

On the way from that gate, unhappily closed behind, to the gate hopefully opened ahead, stand a cross.  For the cross marks the road of redemption.  “As in Adam all men die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”  That is the road the nations, our nation and all others, must travel if they are to reach a promised land of peace.

 

It is the road which you and I must take if we are to enter life which is life indeed.  In Him only do we live, and move, and have our being.

 

--------------

 

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, April 7, 1946.