The Garden and Agency

I heard a comment about how over time Satan has sought to distort the story of Adam and Eve so that most of Christianity views them as having ruined it for all of us.  Because they blew it, we all suffer terribly as the story goes; if only they had resisted temptation we wouldn’t have this evil and fallen world to deal with.  As Latter-day Saints we have a very different understanding of the Adam and Eve story and look to them with great reverence.  We see Satan’s actions in the garden as actually helping move God’s plan forward.  Opposition was needed and Satan provided it, and that allowed Adam and Eve to choose to come to earth and bring the rest of the human family here.  If Satan’s goal in the garden was to thwart the Father’s plan, he failed miserably; the Fall was no surprise to God but part of the original plan.  As the Pearl of Great Price puts it, “[Satan] sought also to beguile Eve, for he knew not the mind of God” (Moses 4:6).  So, since the devil failed on the first go around, perhaps Satan seeks to distort the story so at least it looks like he succeeded in disrupting God’s plan to those who hear the account of Adam and Eve.  But we know that “the works, and the designs, and the purposes of God cannot be frustrated, neither can they come to naught,” and the Fall was a step forward in accomplishing those designs (D&C 3:1).    

               If there is one word that summarizes the experience of Adam and Eve in the Garden, I think it is agency.  Our first parents had been told, “Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth” (Moses 2:28).  Lehi taught us that “if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but would have remained in the garden of Eden….  And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence” (2 Nephi 2:22-23).  This means that the only way for them to obey the instruction to have children was to partake of the fruit.  It’s not clear that Adam and Eve knew this at the time, but it does seem from the language of the account in Moses that the instruction to not partake of the fruit was more of a warning rather than a total prohibition.  The Lord gave the instruction this way: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, nevertheless, thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee; but, remember that I forbid it, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Moses 3:16-17).  The phrase “thou mayest choose for thyself” certainly suggests that the Lord was trying to give them an opportunity to use their agency, and He was warning them of what would happen if they partook: they would enter a fallen world and eventually die.  When Satan came to Eve, she explained the instruction this way, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; But of the fruit of the tree which thou beholdest in the midst of the garden, God hath said—Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (Moses 4:8-9).  Her language certainly sounds more like an explanation of what would happen—if you eat, you will die—than a restriction. It’s not clear what Adam and Even knew in their innocent state, but clearly they had to make a choice about what to do in the garden.  Perhaps their difficult choice was symbolic of the challenging choices we all have in mortality thanks to the gift of agency that God gave to Adam and Eve and to all of us.