How Not to Imitate God

The Gift of Life: Death & Dying, Life & Living DVD set offers a vision of hope and a view of reality that counter the cultural norms that view death as a tragedy, or the end of living, or an entry into harsh judgment and retribution. These videos are out-takes from the video series and presented here for your enrichment. A new video will be presented every Monday.

English Transcript

Instead of freedom being an enormous gift for serving God and loving God, it sends out an appeal to be a competitive program – to become God’s equal – and this is the exact temptation, of course, that Satan proposed to Adam and Eve. They told him we are not supposed to eat this fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. He said, “Oh, don’t pay any attention that that!  God know that if you eat it you will be equal to him.”

They ate the fruit of the tree and immediately became aware of good and evil which they hadn’t been before, apparently. And what brought this about was their self-consciousness. So now they were self-conscious that they had disobeyed God. So this is the basic human – or any creature with freedom – temptation and it consists of wanting to be equal to God on our own terms; that is to say, we want to manage this process instead of receiving it as the sheer gift of God’s generosity.


 

de Marzo: Cómo no imitar a Dios

En vez de que la libertad sea un extraordinario don para servir a Dios y para amar a Dios, el tenerla nos urge a embarcarnos en una competencia para volvernos iguales a Dios – y esto es  exactamente lo que usó Satán para tentar a Adán y Eva. Le dijeron que no debían comer el fruto del conocimiento del bien y del mal. Él dijo, “¡Ah, no le  presten la menor atención a eso! Dios sabe que si lo comen serán iguales a él.”

Comieron el fruto del árbol e inmediatamente se volvieron conscientes del bien y del mal, lo que, aparentemente, antes no percibían. Y lo que esto trajo como consecuencia fue que se cohibieran. Así que ahora tenían vergüenza de haber desobedecido a Dios. Por lo tanto esta es, esencialmente, la tentación que sufre cualquier ser humano o cualquier criatura que tenga libertad: querer ser igual a Dios en sus propios términos; es decir, queremos dirigir el proceso en lugar de recibirlo como un simple regalo de la generosidad de Dios.