Main news for 4 February 2025

Without this biblical verse it is impossible to understand what God's design for the human being consists in, why God created us. One can build a huge number of more or less pious hypotheses, but all of them will be our own judgments, and guesswork at that. Trust in the Word of God allows us not to engage in this fruitless pastime. In truth, who can know why God created us? Only God. Is this knowledge important for us? Of course; without it we cannot participate in the fulfillment of God's will for us. Then this knowledge must be handed on to us by the Word of God.

What, then, is said here, if these words are translated from symbolic language into ordinary language? Of course, with such a translation the beauty, concision, aphoristic quality, and many-layered meaning will be lost, but what can be done? So: God planted the garden of Eden, and in this garden there is everything needed for human life: land, an abundance of water (four rivers watering the whole earth), plants suitable for food, and even the tree of life. That is, God created a world in which the human being does not need to fight for survival.

What, then, is the human being to do in such a garden, where everything already exists? "To cultivate it and keep it." This is the paradoxical assignment given to the human being. Why paradoxical? Because to cultivate means to change, while to keep means not to change.

God offers the human being a share in His creation of the world (the following scene with the animals illustrates this thought), but not in its destruction. By preserving and sustaining in his activity the same motive that exists in God, love for the world, the human being is to apply all the creative abilities given to him by God in order to raise all Creation to the Creator, including himself. Is that not a worthy occupation?

What is the human being? And what is the Garden of Eden? At first glance it may appear that the issue is a completely real, earthly geography. Yet every people has such a sacred geography. Every people has its own sacred land, its own mythological ancestral homeland, usually where that people's historical memory awoke, where its own history began for it. The Jews remember themselves from the time of Abraham, and that means Harran, Northern Mesopotamia, where the Garden of Eden is located. There was something else as well: the memory of the times the Greeks called the "golden age," when the human being lived in full harmony with the world, with other people, with the gods, and with himself as well. The Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis combines features of the mythological ancestral homeland of the Jewish people with a description of the world in the times of the "golden age"; in this way the sacred writer wants to tell us that those times are not merely myth, that at one time the human being really did live in full harmony with God, with the world, with himself, and with other people.

What, then, was the perfect human being like? In the Poem of Creation it is said of him that he, alone of all the living beings created by God in our world, was created in the image and likeness of God. All the animals are created, each according to its "kind," or, as we would say today, according to its prototype. Only the human being has no prototype: every human being is created according to the image of God, and God Himself becomes the human being's "prototype." How is such a thing possible? From the point of view of his nature, the human being does not differ from other living beings; he is created by God from the "dust of the earth," and the whole universe, as people thought in the times when the account of the creation of the human being was written, consists of the tiniest specks of dust. There is nothing unique in human nature as such. The human being's uniqueness lies elsewhere: in that "breath of life" through which he becomes a "living soul." In the Bible, "soul" is not a static structure, but a process, the stream of life in which both the spiritual and the natural component are present: here are lofty spiritual movements, and simple physiology too, such as breathing or blood circulation.

A modern philosopher would probably call this stream existence. Such is the human soul in the biblical sense of the word. And the stream of human life exists in the quality in which it exists thanks to that very "breath of life," God's breath, God's presence at the very center of our own personhood, which makes that personhood's very existence possible. If there were no divine "breath of life," there would be no human being as the image of God; there would simply be another species of primates. That is why there is no human being without continuous communion with God: after all, breathing is not a one-time act, but a process that must continue without interruption. The human being was conceived and created by God for continuous communion with God, outside of which, spiritually speaking, he simply cannot remain himself. And yet God leaves the human being freedom: he can live as God proposes to him, or choose his own version of existence, under his full responsibility for all the consequences of his choice.

Today we read that the Lord gave the human being the right to give names to every living creature. And about the first prohibition, concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. About how the Lord warned that if one ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, one would die. And how He watched as the human being gave names to the animals and birds.

When the human being was in his Father's house, and He showed him the world, spoke with him, and rejoiced in his achievements. And although today we do not read about the breaking of the first law, not to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we know that this was how the fall took place. And having become proud, the human being began his rule on earth by the sweat of his brow.

And in the words of the prophet Isaiah we know that on the day of the Second Coming God will restore in us the memory of who created everything we manage. He will restore it through our fear. He will take away our strength and abilities, and once again we will become speechless. And our works will condemn us.

In the Proverbs of Solomon we read a remembrance and an indication that fulfilling the Lord's commandments is the fulfillment of the Father's will by His children. When the Lord entrusts something to us, we, as His children, carry out these requests and assignments. We need wisdom and understanding, humility, and the will to be with Him. Now we have to accomplish much labor in order to meet Him again. Almost impossible labor, were it not for His desire to meet us. Not only by His will, but by our love for Him.