The serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Genesis 3:4&5
Dear members and friends,
About 40 years ago, I was running to be a member of the youth council at a Presbyterian church in Gwangju, Korea. This candidacy included public presentations, interviews with church leaders, and a voting by the whole middle school group (about 150 students) at the church. One of the questions that challenged me deeply was, “Did you read the whole Bible?” Thus, I decided to read the whole Bible from the beginning to the end. However, my decisive effort halted on chapter 3 of Genesis! I just could not pass on the scene where the talking serpent appears and manipulates the woman. With all due respect, I thought to myself, “This story does not make any sense at all.”
Chapter 2 ended with God blessing the man with the woman so that they could live together in the garden planted by God. Chapter 3 suddenly begins with the serpent as “more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.” The Lord God created the serpent! So why did it deceive the woman? I could not resolve this by myself, so I took the matter to the youth pastor. He explained to me that “the serpent was actually Satan, who took the form of a snake and sneaked into the garden to tempt Adam and Eve.” However, this answer caused even deeper confusion and many more questions in my mind.
It took me almost 14 years to make my peace with that chapter in Genesis. It was Swedenborg who liberated me from thinking so narrowly about the Bible. The first step to understanding the divinely-inspired Biblical stories is to elevate our minds beyond our worldly perspective. Next, we must recognize that God is spirit, and we need to be born of spirit to get close to God. Thus, Swedenborg firmly believed that the entire Bible is written symbolically to describe our spiritual journey and challenges in the process. The story about the serpent and the woman is about our struggle to rise above our physically-oriented perception of reality and our desire to make things our own. This is important because only when we free ourselves from the desire for possession will our minds be ready to rise above our innate attachment to physical reality.
My brothers and sisters in God, let us take a moment of silence this week. Let deeply reflect on what is truly real to our minds: the physical world or the spiritual reality within? Let us remember, we are spirits who have bodies to experience this world.
Blessings,
Rev. Junchol Lee