The Sinless Nature of Humanity

Sep 25 in Feed

My father recently shared with me notes from a class he’s teaching about the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you’re not familiar with the story, the short version is that a man who wasn’t Hebrew saw a badly beaten man who was Hebrew and helped him even though other prominent Hebrews walked right past him. One of the morals of the story is that the true neighbor is both the one in need, and the one giving help, not necessarily the ones who are most alike.

Because my father is still an Evangelical Christian, he often ties his conclusions back to his belief in salvation as the Christians see it. He adheres to the doctrine which states that “…it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast.”

At the end of his class notes, he came to a similar conclusion which really got me thinking.

His conclusion is this:

“By convincing ourselves that we can achieve eternal life by obedience to some standard of our own making, we disqualify ourselves from receiving the gift of salvation.”

I’ve been studying these ideas a lot lately and I’m coming to some unconventional conclusions. The statement, “disqualify ourselves from receiving the gift of salvation” is deeply profound.

This reminds me of a passage from A Course In Miracles. It says, “The Holy Spirit cannot punish sin. Mistakes He recognizes, and would correct them all as God entrusted Him to do. But sin He knows not, nor can He recognize mistakes that cannot be corrected. For a mistake that cannot be corrected is meaningless to Him. Mistakes are for correction, and they call for nothing else...Every mistake must be a call for love.”

I’m also coming to understand that if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, then it takes a tremendous delusion of the ego to suppose that any one of us could ever be separate from Him. And if God has and is these traits, and God is the highest perfection of perfection, then how could sin exist? How could God have created something that wills to destroy him and has the power to do so? Instead, what we call sin is an aspect of that same delusion of the ego.

This leads me back to the original lie in the Garden. If you’re not familiar, the short version is that God created Adam and Eve and placed them in a garden called Eden. In the middle of the garden He placed a tree called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He told Adam and Eve they could eat from any tree of the garden except that one, and if they did, they would die. But a Serpent came to Eve to tempt her and said to her, “You will not certainly die. For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

In most churches today, it’s taught that the original lie was that a human could be like God. In their eyes, and probably in the eyes of most adherents to Abrahamic faiths, the concept that a human could be like God is heretical and blasphemous. But…I disagree. In my view, the ones who teach that the Serpent’s lie was that humans can be like God don’t understand how good lies work.

It’s not a very good lie.

The best lies, like the ones we see every day in advertising in this consumerist society, tell us that we aren’t already everything we need to be. If we buy this car, we’ll find joy, instead of realizing we can simply be joyful. If we wear this perfume we can feel beautiful, instead of realizing we are naturally beautiful. So, the Serpent’s great lie wasn’t that they “would be like God” but that they weren’t already like God.

And so, when we “convinc[e] ourselves that we can achieve eternal life by obedience to some standard of our own making, we disqualify ourselves from receiving the gift of salvation,” we are, in effect, making up our own rules to a game that we don’t need to be playing because we made it up ourselves as a delusion of our ego.

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