Lessons from the Garden of Eden: Part 3. The Giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.

SUMMARY:
We tend to take for granted that God’s miracles are separate from science and they are. However God operates on a different level of science because He has limitless powers that we do not understand. God’s miracles were planned in advance by God so that they could easily be open to investigation whereby human scientific explanations would seem plausible. God in a sense created jobs for we scientists to discover His preplanned world. God is the unified theory of the universe that Einstein so desperately sought to find, even on his deathbed.

God’s First Public Appearance to Humans:
Why was it so important for God to make His first appearance to Adam and Eve when human evolution was ongoing for at least 50,000 years before the Garden of Eden? Yes, this was the first appearance of the Devil and the introduction of good and evil although humans had been killing each other thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. Yes, there was the need to punish Adam and Eve who were held accountable and were forced to exit paradise because they committed the Original Sin of eating the forbidden fruit. And of course, there was the demonstration of God’s awesome power of scientific miracles with the creation of Adam and Eve without going through the normal process of the birth process of a man’s sperm fertilizing a woman’s egg. God left all of these lessons for us to ponder. Yet there must be something else.

On the premise that God plans thousands even billion years in advance, might there be one more extremely important reason for God’s appearance? What was God thinking or planning? Looking down the road almost twenty-five hundred years after the Garden of Eden, God set in motion perhaps the greatest event in all of human history ― the giving of the Torah and the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai ― which in actuality is the blueprint for Civilization and the basis of monotheism for the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The Ten Commandments are God’s words that were uttered before Israel became a nation. Unlike the State of Israel, all other nations including the United States of America were formed and then their charters were adopted.

These seemingly simple Ten Commandments that virtually nobody can keep gave man a sense of decency because as God tells Noah after the Flood, man is evil in the imagery of his heart. If we didn’t have the Ten Commandments, the brutality of man’s inhumanity to man would be the norm. Even with the Ten Commandments, it’s a toss of a coin to see whether our planet will survive. With the weapon technology that we have today, man more than ever has the ability to destroy the world and himself.

As a biblical commentator stated, “Belief in God is not a prerequisite for morality, but without God and His Ten Commandments, humans tend to follow their own moral code which may be selectively different depending upon individual interpretations and rationalizations.”

Civilization Begins:
We need to look back at history to understand God’s appearance in the Garden of Eden and turn to a description offered by Isaac Asimov. By 8000 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia, which was in present geography 70 percent in Iran and 30 percent in Iraq, humans had learned to plant seeds and to gather the grain that grew from the seeds. This was the beginning of the Neolithic Age or Stone Age. Better and more polished weapons were produced, pottery was developed, and farming and the herding of animals became the livelihood of the day. The result was a population explosion, because food became secure and could be stored. The hunter-gatherers disappeared and gave way to communities of villages, and civilization began to develop. Agriculture from the Iranian highlands spread to two areas in particular, the Tigris and Euphrates locale just to the south and to the Valley of the Nile in Egypt. All of this was in full force around 4000 B.C.E., as Neolithic villages flourished.

As methods for farming continued to improve with increases in productivity, new areas were colonized and high population densities in towns and cities sprang up. The first civilizations in the world were very much present by 3500 to 3000 B.C.E. in modern Iraq, Iran, and in Egypt and were followed by new urban centers in India, China, and later America.

Simply stated, God announced himself with creation of Adam and Eve for the first time to the human race in 3760 B.C.E. Man became a creature of sensual pleasures after Adam and Eve’s partaking of the forbidden fruit. He could no longer keep his penis in his pockets, despite God’s later attempt with the Ten Commandments to repair the damage of the Garden of Eden. But why then and not before or after?

My guess would be this was an opportune time with the population increase taking place in developing and congested cities. No one can presume to second-guess the Almighty. However, it makes sense to me that this was the time for God to appear, since humanity would now be in close proximity to each other and we all know what history has shown us about humanity’s interactions with each other. Even when humans were living as marauding bands spread out on the savanna, it was their natural violent instinct that led them to clash with each other. Now with urban crowding brought on by the advent of civilization, a public announcement of a Higher Being was in order. God’s assessment of the evil nature of human behavior was borne out by the first ten generations of Creation Human. God caused a great Flood to consume everyone except for Noah and his family around 2100 B.C.E. in a localized part of the world. In my opinion, it couldn’t have been the entire world, since there were pockets of mankind developing via evolution in other parts of the world at that time. Evolution was ongoing because God had initiated it.

Not all of mankind came from Adam and Eve, but it is my view that at least the Jews were biblical descendants, as were the Christians and Muslims. Therefore, I believe God made His first public appearance at the time of Adam in order to show humanity a better way, but humanity didn’t get it back then.

The message advocated by God through Moses, His prophets, and Jesus was that humans live in harmony with each other and be as one with nature and the environment. God made quite a few public appearances during biblical times, but I believe that it was at the Revelation at Sinai with the giving of the Ten Commandments that God gave it His best shot to get His message across to mankind. Mankind at the time consisted of idol worshippers and Israelites. The Israelites got the message. They just didn’t follow through. The Israelites lapsed in and out of being idol worshippers and conducted themselves immorally against everything the Ten Commandments stood for. Look around the world and you will see that history repeats itself. We may not be dealing with idol worship but God can’t be pleased with the state of human affairs.

Final Thoughts:
Man has his God-given Free Will to choose to be immoral and not follow the Ten Commandments, but he cannot abrogate what God has commanded him to do. If we do choose evil, we do so at our own risk.” All of us are accountable at Judgment Day, Acharit Hamayim, in Hebrew.

The take home message of this article is to try and comprehend that with God, we are not just dealing with another human being. His powers and His intelligence are trillions of times greater than ours ― essentially limitless. As the Bible states, “My [God] ways are not your [humans] ways. My [God] thoughts are not your [humans] thoughts.” It’s this Omnipotence of God which has set our entire history in motion. It seems to us that it’s all new but as incredible as it sounds―to God―it’s been all planned in advance. God has a purpose. We with our human brains just can’t know it at this time.