Chapter 2
Adam’s Choice and Adam’s Road
The human race has wrestled across the centuries with why we die. Some would argue it’s natural—the cycle of life that brings birth, death, and rebirth. It’s something to celebrate as part of the human experience. Still others see death as a grand foe. They wage a war against it with syringes or ointments or foods stripped of fun and flavor. But no matter what approach we take—whether we explain death away or try to outrun it—that yawning cave still waits for us at the end of our life’s journey.
Humanity—with all of its approaches to death—understands, at least subconsciously, that death is unnatural. Something is wrong with a human body deprived of God’s breath. When my grandmother died, I was very curious how my four kids would react to seeing her in her coffin. My sons, still full of the boisterous idiocy that plagues all grade school males, thought it comical that someone who’d died would be dressed in their finest clothes and be set on display. My eldest daughter adopted the emotional burden of everyone in the room and could hardly bear just to look at her great–grandma.
My youngest daughter at the time, barely two years old, had the most interesting reaction. She didn’t know—couldn’t know really—what death looked like. For all intents and purposes, my grandmother had simply chosen to take a nap in a comfy–looking—if narrow—bed. But anytime I walked closer to the coffin while carrying my daughter, she’d start to whimper and then to yell. She knew something wasn’t right about the body in the box. Something wasn’t there that was supposed to be. Long before she would ever be able to articulate what death was, my two–year–old recognized it when she saw it. And it unnerved her.
Death is not natural. The road we humans walk—the one that always terminates in death—was not the road God made for us in the beginning. When the trees of Eden still dripped with the morning’s first dew, humanity was immortal. The Creator had fashioned our race himself, kneeling in the mud and shaping beings from the dust—dirtlings, if you will—to look like him. When that human’s chest rose for the first time, it did so with a breath expelled from God’s own lungs.
So humanity’s road was established—the road God wanted us to walk was never supposed to end—and certainly not in death. It would wind around the globe, bringing life and order and peace to every place it crossed, but it would not end. Death was not our destiny. Only life heaped upon more life.
And more than that, God wanted to walk that road with his new dirtlings. The first time we see him act after he rests from his days of making, he’s come to walk with humans. To be with them. To enjoy their company in the cool of the day. The immortal God hand–in–hand with our immortal race.
Our experience of death and all the terror and trauma the life before it brings with it was never meant for humanity. Our genes, worn thin through the years, still know implicitly that death is an enemy, not a friend. When the chest stills and eyes close and mouth parts to release one final puff of air, the very nature of humanness crumbles apart. We call it natural to ease our minds. To justify the death of the oldest among us. To salve hearts that bleed with the pain of a suddenly vacant crib.
But, if we’re being honest, it’s all a lie. Because we were born before death. The seizer–of–souls is younger than we are. God never intended his divine race of representatives to grow weak and frail and return to the clay from which he crafted us. God gifted us immortality. But our first father and mother chose death.
The story of the fall at the beginning of the Bible is really the story of death’s birth. God had promised to Adam and Eve—the first dirtlings—that on the day they stepped out on him they would die. God had given them the divine gift of his authority and power. He’d commissioned them to take his rule to the ends of the world and establish the borders of Eden across the planet. He asked only that they trust him—that they enjoy his presence and look to him for their good. They had only to believe that he had their best interests at heart. Trust, and the Spirit that filled their lungs would remain. On the day they chose to rebel, he promised death would come for them. Not as a vindictive punishment, but as a simple reality.
The first humans had every good thing. But they wanted more. They might not have known it at first, but with the twisted words of an upstart snake, they discovered they could want something beyond what their Creator had given them.
They wanted to choose their own destiny. To be masters of their own fate.
And so, before the dew had dried on Eden’s flowers, death was born. It came into the world not with a crack of sky–shattering thunder or with the groan of breaking icebergs, but with a question.
The serpent in Eden was one of Adam and Eve’s subjects. He was supposed to submit to them as they ruled for God. And they, in turn, were to submit to their Creator. And yet that serpent enticed his masters to rebel against their masters with a question. Doubt. Mistrust. Perhaps this God, this giver of all good and green things, was holding out. So the first humans put rebellion to lips that had so recently known the breath of God. They left the fruit of life hanging on the branch, and chose to decide for themselves what was good and what was evil.
In that moment, death came into the world. The tap tap tap of juice dripping on green grass applauded as Adam ripped apart the blind trust the two humans had for each other. Horrified that their naked flesh lay exposed to the world, they hid first from each other and then from God.
A God who just wanted to walk with his humans.
Death had already unraveled the relationship between Adam and Eve, and now with their insistence that rebellion was someone else’s fault, he struck down the relationship between the dirtlings and their maker. When the Creator heard the blame–filled bickering of his first humans, he laid out the consequences of their choice. Death had come. Death would tear apart the rule humanity was supposed to have—creation would fail to listen. The earth would fail to bring fruit for food. The multiplication of the human race would bring with it pain. And life as the humans knew it would be a long road of toil that ends in the embrace of death.
In that day, our mother and father chose this road we walk. This road that takes the bright hope of childhood and flings it to the night sky, promising a place among the stars but really just snuffing it out in the biting cold of a winter wind. This road that grinds our feet, knees, belly, heart, and head to dust. So that, by the time we reach death’s yawning maw, we crumble like the dirtlings we are.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Creator could have wrenched our feet from the path and set us back to immortality, but the corruption had already sunk its fangs into the human soul. So humanity became twisted creatures, forever scraping the cosmos for bits to build a kingdom for themselves.
This road is our inheritance. Willed to us by parents who thought they were choosing the better path. And we choose like them when we challenge God for mastery of this life. We try to build like our Creator, but fail like our father. We cannot kiss life into dust, but that does not stop us from trying. Humanity through the eons has raged against our road. But we cannot get off. The doors of Eden closed behind us, and we have only death to look forward to at the end.
Except, that the Creator–God refused to abandon us. He followed us out of Eden.
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