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Gen 3:14-21

Eating of the tree of knowledge is assigned, in the Genesis story, as the reason for the expulsion from Eden; and when we see that Eden was the state of heavenly love, which had been gradually formed in the hearts of the Adamic people, and the garden in Eden the heavenly intelligence of their minds, and the tree of knowledge the appearance that life was their own, and that eating of that tree meant that they confirmed and appropriated the appearance as a truth, and thus came to regard knowledge of spiritual things as self derived, we can see that nothing less than the loss of their heavenly love and intelligence could result.

The question has been asked: "If the serpent represented man's sensual nature, which finally led him astray, why did the Lord put such a snare in man's way?" In answering this question, we must lay aside the current ideas clustering around the term "sensual;" for as used in the writings of the New Church, it does not stand for the lusts and appetites of the fallen mind, but for that plane of the mind which sees and concludes through the senses of the body. It means the sensuous degree of man's mind. This sensuous degree of the mind is the sense plane of life - the sense-consciousness - that which makes us conscious of the external world and its life. It is plainly to be seen that the Lord could not have created man without this plane of life. He would not be man if it were left out of his constitution.

With the primeval Adamic man, this plane was in perfect order. It was upright. It looked to the higher element of spiritual reason for guidance. It was an obedient servant.

The posterity of the Adamic people who lost their heavenly Eden, inclined to this sensuous principle. They paid an undue regard to that, which on its own plane, was designed to minister to higher things. They came to prefer the things of mere bodily life to the things of the soul. This led them to eat of the tree of knowledge.

They then came to believe in their own goodness and wisdom; they became wise in their own conceit; they attempted to enter into Divine and heavenly things through a cultivation of their sense-life. Thus that which was a necessary endowment became, because of an abuse, the source of the greatest evils.

This could not have been prevented without violation to that freedom of will in which the Lord holds His children. Where the will is not free there can be no moral responsibility.

The dreadful crime committed by this posterity of the Most Ancient Church - the exaltation of their own good above God - the turning of their minds downward to the senses and the consequent loss of all the heavenly excellencies that had crowned and beautified the lives of their forefathers, is visited with fearful curses. How are we to understand this? The idea generally prevails that God became angry at man when he transgressed His law, and that He visited these evils upon man because of His anger. This cannot be true. Anger has no place in the Divine mind. It is as utterly foreign to God's nature as sin itself. There may be here the appearance of anger, but it is only an appearance. It cannot be a reality. Anger when attributed to the Lord, expresses the aspect under which He appears to the perverted mind of man.

The wicked man thinks God must be angry when His laws are broken, because he forms his ideas of God from his own state. He believes God does what he knows he would do if he were in God's place. Here is a principle by which to explain all that is said in the letter of the Bible about the anger of God. But the serpent was cursed: the woman's sorrow was to be multiplied, and the ground, cursed of God, was to bring forth thorns and thistles. What do these things mean?

The serpent of this story is, as we have seen, the sensuous side of the mind. This mental serpent, which in the beginning, was upright, led the self-hood of the Adamic people astray and involved them in dreadful evils. It thus turned away from its subordinate position; and then sank to the lowest depths. It, the sensuous plane of the mind, reached a deeper degradation than any other fallen principle in the Adamic people. The curse, which is said to have consigned it to drag its slimy length upon the ground, was simply the utterance of the Divine truth as to the state of the sensuous mind after it averted itself from the Divine order in which it was formed.

This side of man's mind, which in the beginning looked up to higher principles, now crawled close to the earth and was fed by merely earthly and corporeal things. The higher degrees of man's life were closed and men began to live a sensuous life believing only the things that reported to their minds through the outer doorways of their bodily senses. They became sensuous men - a generation of serpents - mere naturalists, to whom God and spiritual things were mere sounds. Ah yes, this curse upon the serpent is seen even in our own day in men and women who are seeking the satisfactions of life in the gratification of bodily appetite, in mere pleasure and natural diversion.

The enmity between the serpent and the woman and her seed - what is it? It was the separation that was then effected between the sensuous life and the heavenly selfhood. These two planes became antagonistic. There originated then an antagonism which has persisted in all the succeeding generations of men. We all know what it is. St. Paul graphically describes it: "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary one to the other." It has been the conflict of the ages, and will continue, until the mystery of sin is ended in the final triumph of redemption.

And the curse upon the woman, what was it? Certainly it was no Divine infliction. The woman of the Edenic story was the symbol of the selfhood, which the Lord mercifully granted to the Adamic people when they could no longer live alone with Him, and into which He inspired what was lovely and pure. But this selfhood, yielding to the senses, fell. Its entire character was changed. Thereafter it would be hard to bring into the conduct the states of heavenly life. It would be difficult to even conceive of spiritual things, and great spiritual sorrow and temptation would be experienced in bringing the high truths of heaven into the daily life. Is it not so? How difficult it is to lead men to see that there is a spiritual world! How hard it is for them to believe in the supersensuous life! This is all the result of man's fall.

And the curse upon the ground: "Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth." The ground referred to is the external natural life. Out of this ground, the Lord, in the beginning, formed man; now he returns to the ground from whence he was taken; but it brings forth evils which are spiritual thorns and false principles of life, which are spiritual thistles. These things became man's hereditary nature; they grew up spontaneously. And the curse upon the man! He was to eat bread in the sweat of his face. No longer would good come directly from the Lord by a gentle inflowing into the will. The order of influx was changed. Only through spiritual toil could heavenly life - the good of heaven - be procured. It has been so ever since. Man came under a different law, the law expressed by St. Paul where he says: "Work out your soul's salvation with fear and trembling." Only in this way can we expect to procure and eat of the bread of life.