To Adam [the Creator] said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.  It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:17-19).

I have a theory.  Think it through with me as I try to squeeze a lot of theology, philosophy, and sociology into a short space.  One of the most significant aspects of man’s fall into sin was our Creator’s curse.  Because we know that God works out all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, and because we know He loves the creature made in His image, we can believe this curse was for a beneficial purpose and was ultimately an act of love.

It is pretty obvious that the while the curse made a great impact on the natural order, nature itself did not sin.  Man is fallen, not nature.  Nature is cursed, but it is cursed to discipline sinful man—sending him out of the Garden where the living was easy and life perpetual into the wider world which would now resist his efforts to wrest it to his own glory, selfishly hoard it, and destroy its fruitfulness.  Sinful, self-centered man having perpetual life and easy access to all the fruit of the earth was a disaster in the making; so God did two other things to protect His creation from the evil of sinful man: He closed the Garden and prevented re-entry with His armed angelic host, and He took away our access to the tree of life: daily sustenance that would give mankind unending life (and which, praise God, we will once again have access to according to the last chapter of the Bible) .

Here’s my theory: God said we will make our living by hard labor being reminded of our sin by facing a natural world that would in many ways be hostile to us; and we said “No way.”  So immediately we put our creative powers to work to make “labor-saving” and “time saving” devices.  The rest is history, as they say.

We have saved so much labor by our cleverness that we’re now destroying the earth with it:  Creating chemicals that are a lethal influence in our environment.  Burning fossil fuels to run our powerful engines each doing the work of hundreds or thousands of people and fouling our air, fishing out our oceans, and wiping out our forests.  Creating huge machines that do the “gardening” for us and turning them over to irresponsible corporations motivated only by monetary profit, while we cocoon ourselves in our cities with purblind eyes that do not bother to see what is happening to our soil.  Making appliances that keep families out of the kitchen and keep us from working side by side with those we love to make our meals and wash our dishes.  And we leave all that and take our children to restaurant chains the purpose of which is to make money for stock holders and which waste millions of pounds of food and paper every day.

And what have we done with the labor and time saved?  Where to find clues: Facebook, sports, entertainment, TV, video gaming, perpetual travel, shopping temples, and . . . .

I’m going to leave that there for now—just to keep your mental gears in motion.  I’d love to have many readers of WOC take up this idea and start a good discussion on this post in the comments box.  Do you think that we have become a fat and loveless culture in part because we have spurned the love of our Creator, who was wise enough to know that our avaricious nature needed the discipline of the curse that we have worked so hard to overturn?  Dig into your Bibles for this one.

To be continued (with apologies to Shakespeare for snitching his title).