There Is A Way Back to the Garden by John Frattarola

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…God saw everything He had made, and indeed it was very good…(Genesis 1:1, 31).

God made man in His own image on the sixth day of Creation. With tender precision and biological perfection, He sculpted man from dirt, breathed physical, emotional, and spiritual life into him, and gave him the intelligence and ability to communicate. God also gifted him with something apart from every other created being—a free will—the capacity to choose right from wrong, good from evil. What a magnificent specimen of a living soul in an untainted personal relationship with his Creator.

But what wrong or evil was there in the idyllic garden setting in which God placed him? All creation in some way had been fashioned for man’s benefit and pleasure. God even created a helper for man who possessed the same attributes, abilities, and capacities, yet who was satisfyingly different in complementary ways. Man was given free reign in the garden with only one prohibition: Don’t eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day that you eat of it you will surely die.”

Since God had proclaimed all His creation to be good, this tree and its fruit were not evil. The tree was simply the test of man’s free will. It was man’s own self-determination that would be evil and which would bring death. So, given a perfect state in a perfect environment, man willfully committed an act so simple, yet so eternally profound, that it instantly and irreversibly infected the entire universe, separating man from his Creator for all future generations. The warning had become prophecy with the choice to disobey, which was, in essence, the first realization or knowledge of evil. It resulted in the severed personal God-man relationship that no fig leaves, towers of Babel, or animal sacrifices could ever restore. That it was impossible for sinful man to approach a sinless God became humanity’s ultimate dilemma.

God would require a blood sacrifice for the punishment of that sin, but man could never meet the requirement, because the blood of all earthly sacrifices was tainted by the very same sin. With God, though, all things are possible. His personal intervention on man’s behalf in the original garden by providing animal skins for man’s shame was a clue to His divine solution: He Himself, untainted by sin, would graciously step out of eternity and onto the cross to become the acceptable sacrifice for the sins of the world. This incomparable demonstration of God’s unfathomable love (John 3:16) is the only satisfaction to the deep yearning in man’s soul to get back to the garden. No other way will work.

“For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:17).  That, indeed, is good news.  And every generation has had the same choice–still simple and still eternally profound.