The Horror of Seeing Weeds Come Up in the Garden of Eden After the Fall
We live in a post-Fall existence. We therefore cannot truly imagine what the Garden of Eden must have looked like before the Fall. However, it must have been a beautiful, comfortable, and low-maintenance place to live. There were no weeds or thistles, no poisonous plants. Tending to the plants and obtaining nutrition from these plants was a straightforward business.
Adam and Eve had never seen a weed or an unwanted, undesirable plant in their lives. All the plants there were beautiful and/or useful:
The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground - trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Genesis 2: 9
Unlike Adam and Eve at that point, we on the other hand, are all too familiar with weeds. They spring up much faster than the plants we are trying to cultivate, and will choke their growth and spread their seed quickly. If we are not careful, the land containing the crops we plant will become overgrown with weeds. This situation actually seems 'normal' or 'common sense' to us. We post-Fall humans don't know anything different.
But Adam and Eve, up until the Fall, had lived in a perfect world.
Imagine then the horror of seeing weeds spring up in the Garden of Eden caused by their transgression.
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
Genesis 3: 17-18
Adam and Eve experienced a very different world compared to that which they started in. Thorns and thistles came up from the land, and it required "painful toil" to produce and eat crops. Those of us from the world of today can only imagine how easy it must have been to maintain the plants and to pick and eat food before the Fall.
In the Garden of Eden, the appearance of weeds must have been truly horrifying to Adam and Eve - something that we, in our post-Fall existence, take as 'normal' because we don't know anything different.
If you found this post interesting, you might also like these related posts on this blog:
Adam and Eve had never seen a weed or an unwanted, undesirable plant in their lives. All the plants there were beautiful and/or useful:
The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground - trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Genesis 2: 9
Unlike Adam and Eve at that point, we on the other hand, are all too familiar with weeds. They spring up much faster than the plants we are trying to cultivate, and will choke their growth and spread their seed quickly. If we are not careful, the land containing the crops we plant will become overgrown with weeds. This situation actually seems 'normal' or 'common sense' to us. We post-Fall humans don't know anything different.
But Adam and Eve, up until the Fall, had lived in a perfect world.
Imagine then the horror of seeing weeds spring up in the Garden of Eden caused by their transgression.
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
Genesis 3: 17-18
Adam and Eve experienced a very different world compared to that which they started in. Thorns and thistles came up from the land, and it required "painful toil" to produce and eat crops. Those of us from the world of today can only imagine how easy it must have been to maintain the plants and to pick and eat food before the Fall.
In the Garden of Eden, the appearance of weeds must have been truly horrifying to Adam and Eve - something that we, in our post-Fall existence, take as 'normal' because we don't know anything different.
If you found this post interesting, you might also like these related posts on this blog:
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