NOTES for Gen 2:15

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?