Reg Christensen lives in the Midwest with his wife, Carol. They have seven children and seventeen grandchildren. Reg has fulfilled a variety of callings in the Church and he and Carol have been blessed with many service opportunities as Pathway missionaries and service volunteers at the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, to mention a few. While living in Jerusalem, they served in the Bethlehem branch, Carol as the Relief Society president and Reg as the branch president. His happy times come from being with family and friends, reading, writing, woodworking, leathercrafting, exploring nature, and blessing lives with his handyman skills. He has published several books, including Unlocking Isaiah: Lessons and Insights that Draw Us to the Savior.
Enter Reg…
Often, I have the experience of considering a concept and struggling to be able to rightly verbalize it and then hearing a speaker or writer so eloquently express the very concept I was trying to articulate. Such is the case with this thesis statement from Sister Beverly Campbell in her book about the fall of Adam and Eve. The story of Eden, the garden, and Adam and Eve, is of unusual and equal importance to both women and men, for it significantly affects how we perceive one another and how we behave towards one another. It shapes and colors our expectations along with our actions.
If such actions and expectations are based on faulty premises, limitations are imposed, strengths are denied, and relationships are misarticulated daily. We all know that even the smallest error in the foundation of a building can eventually bring it down. Errors in understanding the Eden story are not small, and until they are corrected, ignorance of their presence will continue to be manifest in grossly enlarged consequences to our social fabric.
Understanding the Fall
Frequently, I have considered how much our understanding of the fall affects our individual and societal attitudes toward life and the sacred roles of men and women in God’s plan. For example, I believe that the pervasive denigration of women in our society has its roots in misunderstanding the truth about the role of Eve in the fall.
Those who correctly understand her righteous role will reject the notion that she sinned and will honor and revere her as the sacred matriarch of humanity. Those who misunderstand perpetuate their confusion throughout generations.
God has declared through living prophets that:
“The family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.”
The War with Satan
Satan, in his rebellion, anger, and loss of personal potential for eternal life, has waged war on our Heavenly Parents’ sacred work of preserving and exalting families. This dark being, who will never have a physical body, a wife, or a family, has focused his efforts upon the destruction of families. He began this diabolical assault on the truths associated with our first parents, Father Adam and Mother Eve.
Our current culture of degrading and perverting the sacred roles of both men and women has root in Satan’s efforts to distort and corrupt the true gospel doctrines associated with the lives and mission of Adam and Eve. Satan has promulgated the false and damning notions that Adam and Eve were unintelligent beings who descended from lower life forms and that they were rebellious against our Heavenly Parents and Their plan.
Eve has been portrayed as some sort of vile seductress in leading Adam to commit sin with her, thus conveying a sinful status unto all their descendants—“original sin,” if you will.
A falsehood has endured that God, in His fury at their “sin” in Eden, cursed Adam and Eve and angrily cast them out from His presence.
Satan has misguided various groups and movements through the years to demean Eve and women generally to a subordinate status and elevate Adam and men as ones who hold absolute power and authority over women, who are left to be mere helpmates to the men and their causes.
Satan also plays the reverse, raising Eve and women as ones superior while demeaning and belittling men
The Greatest Creation
What is true about our first parents, Adam and Eve? They were our Heavenly Parents’ greatest creation. They were created separate and apart from all other creatures. From the Bible, we learn that after the earth and all plants and animals were created, God then declared,
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:26-27)
Eve was created in the very form and image of her Heavenly Mother, and Adam was created in the form and image of his Heavenly Father. Adam and Eve were eternally married by the hand and power of God. In the biblical account of their creation, they were referred to as “the man and his wife.” (Genesis 2:25)
Honored Responsibility
To Adam and Eve were given the charge and honored responsibility of presiding over all their descendants for all generations of the earth’s existence.
Adam, in recognition of the glorious and righteous status of his eternal companion, called her “the mother of all living.” (Genesis 3:20)
President J. Reuben Clark said of Eve,
“So came Eve…the last created being in the creation of the world, without whom the whole creation of the world and all that was in the world would have been in vain and the purposes of God have come to naught.”
A Help Meet
Adam received the “keys” or the official responsibility to preside over all dispensations (or time periods) of the duration of the earth.
As husband and wife, Adam and Eve served together in righteousness in all things. She was “an help meet” (Genesis 2:18) with Adam, not a “helpmate” as is often wrongly spoken.
“Help meet” correctly portrays them as equal in intelligence, talent, compassion, wisdom, and strength. They were help meets one unto another. They were equal partners with different roles and responsibilities. They were humble and prayerful. They communicated with each other and with their children in “a language which was pure and undefiled.” (Moses 6:6)
They kept the commandments of God, including the law of sacrifice. They sought and obtained the saving ordinances of the gospel—including baptism and the receiving of the Holy Ghost. “And thus he was baptized, and the Spirit of God descended upon him, and thus he was born of the Spirit.” (Moses 6:65) Their lives were living models of correct choices and righteous adherence to the will of Heavenly Parents.
Elder John A. Widstoe helps us understand the choice made by Adam and Eve in Eden: In life all must choose at times. Sometimes two possibilities are good; neither is evil. Usually, however, one is of greater import than the other. When in doubt, each must choose that which concerns the good of others— the greater law—rather than that which chiefly benefits ourselves—the lesser law.
The greater must be chosen whether it be law or thing. That was the choice made in Eden.
A Righteous Choice
I want to emphatically state that Father Adam and Mother Eve did not sin in their choices in Eden. The concept of original sin held by so much of the world is a false concept. Their choice to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was a righteous choice in perfect harmony with the plan and desire of their Heavenly Mother and Father.
Although we sometimes use the words “sin” and “transgression” as synonyms, in the case of the fall of Adam and Eve, their “transgression” has an entirely different meaning than “sin.”
I prefer a definition pieced together from my trusted old college dictionary: “trans” = “on the other side of…above and beyond,” “transgress” = “to step over, pass over.”
Adam and Eve, through their choices and actions in Eden, went above and beyond their limited status and condition. They stepped over the limitations and barriers of Eden to bring about the great plan of happiness. Their courageous choice made eternal life possible for us all.
A respected teacher of mine liked to paraphrase the moon-landing statement of Astronaut Neil Armstrong to describe the fall of Adam and Eve. He often said of the fall, “That was one small step for Adam and Eve, but one giant leap for mankind.” The exodus of Adam and Eve from Eden and the presence of Heavenly Parents took them into the condition of a harsh and trying mortal world where we all live and struggle. In sending them from Eden, God was not casting them out as we sometimes say—He was sending them forward to a new stage of essential growth and development.
Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. (Genesis 3:23)
This transcendence into a mortal, fallen world was not a cursing but a blessing. It was the ground that was cursed—not Adam and Eve.
“Cursed is the ground for thy sake. … Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth. … In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” (Genesis 3:17-19)
Righteous and Noble Lives
Father Adam and Mother Eve were and are the opposite of all the lies Satan declared about them. They lived righteous and noble lives worthy of our emulation. They lived in love of each other and of our Heavenly Parents. They were given challenging choices to make and were valiant and courageous in their decisions, bringing opportunity for true and eternal joy to their posterity. They chose the very thing Heavenly Parents desired them to choose to move forward—Their great plan of happiness for all Their children. They were industrious, faithful, prayerful, and obedient to the commands of God. Of their decision to partake of the fruit, bring about the fall, and further the plan of Heavenly Parents, Eve declared,
Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient. (Moses 5:11)
Praise and Honor
Praise and honor be to Father Adam and Mother Eve. My prayer is that we can strive to be like them in all our words and deeds. I am grateful for their example in all things and for their courage and foresight to provide us the opportunity for mortality and prepare us for the Atonement and rescue from sin and death.
