“The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will certainly die’” (Genesis 2:15-17).
“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).
“[F]or all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
Part 1 reflected on those that appear within the community of God as full-fledged members of the Faith. Jesus called the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs.” They looked righteous on the outside, but they hid lives full of sin. Sin is death. Therefore, the Pharisees were dead. Jesus singled them out, as opposed to others who did not even try to hide their sin (e.g., tax collectors and prostitutes), because the Pharisees took it upon themselves to teach others how to follow God’s way. Their hypocrisy ended in crushing their followers under an impossible burden of requirements, or they succeeded in infecting their followers with the cancer of hypocrisy. I introduced the concept of the “zombie” to describe the Pharisees. They were the living dead that consumed the living entirely. Those that were not completely consumed became zombies themselves. In the end, I warned that there are zombies among the church today, and faithful followers of Christ must be careful.
Part 1 left “zombie” at the level of metaphor. In this part, I want to push the concept beyond metaphor to reality. In Genesis 2, God told Adam and Eve that they would die, they would certainly die, if they ate to fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve eat the fruit and are expelled from the Garden of Eden. Eden was life. In fact, the Tree of Life stood in the middle of the Garden, and Adam and Eve, once expelled, could not consume its life-giving fruit. Blocked from the source of life, humans were dead. Still, humans worked furiously to fill their insatiable appetite for life-giving nourishment. Humans became roving corpses forced to sustain their havoc by consuming other living things.
How is this reality? We all have to eat. What do we eat? Things that used to be alive (or are alive in some cases). We eat animals. We either have to hunt them down and kill them, or we have to farm them and slaughter them. Then we cook’em and eat’em. Yum! You vegetarians and vegans out there are just as guilty. We eat vegetables. Any kind of flora is just as much alive as is any kind of fauna. You pick it and eat it. We all kill to eat. Death reigns in all of creation because humans are zombies.
We have all sinned; thus we are all dead. We are under the curse of sin simply in virtue of being human. We have all been stillborn. We move and live and have our sinful being at the expense of other life. We are not self-sustaining. We require life to be alive. Sin killed us, and God removed us from an everlasting source of life when He expelled us from the Garden. And, as you will see, there is no remedy for our being zombies. We are zombies.
How’s that for a teaser?
Jeremy Green
