New Truth In The Last Days - True Parents Organization

The Fall of Humankind: Adam and Eve 11
humans, His children, with built-in contradictions or conflicts. Even we, as
finite human beings, would not create a simple utensil such as a pitcher to
hold water or juice and make it with a hole in the bottom. That would be creating
an opposing purpose, a contradiction—the vessel is supposed to hold
liquid, yet at the same time the liquid seeps out the bottom.
If God is our Creator who is all-knowing, all-loving, perfect, and absolutely
good, then why do we live in a world where there is so much cruelty,
suffering, oppression, sin, and evil? I asked this question so many times, yet I
also knew it was not uniquely mine. I had to conclude that something was
wrong—either there is no God or we don’t really know Him. In the Bible, in
Genesis 1:31, it is written, “And God saw everything that He had made, and
behold, it was very good.” However, I knew from history, and from my observations
today of the sinful and evil actions of human beings, that our world is
not good. The truth has to be that something happened, after God finished
the creation, which brought sin and evil into the world.
The Apostle Paul, the author of the Epistles in the New Testament, wrestled
with a similar question about the origin of sin. If human beings were created
to be good, in the image of God and with an original conscience that
desires goodness, then why do we all have contradictory fallen nature and evil
minds that lead us to the very things we do not want to do? Human beings not
only harm, inflict cruelty upon, fight with, and kill one another, but we also
experience within each of us a constant battle between good and evil. Saint
Paul anguished, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I
want, but I do the very thing I hate…wretched man that I am! Who will
deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:15, 24) I finally came to agree
with Rev. Moon’s Principle that we as humans went through some kind of
separation from God and that some kind of “Fall” of humankind was evident.
Before I studied the Divine Principle, I believed that Adam and Eve were
already man and wife. And if they were spouses, then why would sexual intimacy
between them be considered a sin? This assumption, shared by many
Bible scholars and other believers, makes it difficult to accept that the “fruit”
in the Genesis story is a symbol of sexual love. The belief that Adam and Eve
were married is based on a passage in Genesis called the “Three Blessings.”
And God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill
the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over
the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
(Genesis 1:28)