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Recently, as result of our Colossians Remixed book discussion, a student applying for a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant questioned the salvific rhetoric used in the application. I responded that it is right to question to whom our research is offered and toward what end. We are to delight in the opportunity to explore the beautiful creation by offering our use of and insights to the creation in a manner which enables us to be a redemptive influence among the people, ideas, and structures of the university. We are to handle the fruit of knowledge, research, and money with care.

In the [Genesis 3 Temptation] narrative, the forbidden knowledge, which is not a created entity, is represented by a fruit, an element of the created order. What is the full implication of this 'detail'? It is immense. It recalls this point: it is always in his use of the created order that mankind exercises the autonomy that he pretends to have seized. When mankind decides to be like God, 'knowing good and evil,' he fails lamentably to create anything at all. He cannot withdraw from God's world, neither can he bring about any innovation except by misusing the wealth that God has given him. Thus, it is always with regard to one of the fruits of God's garden, a fruit that is genuinely beautiful, pleasant an useful, that mankind is tempted. Evil is not in the good that God has created, but in the rejection of the order that God has instituted for the enjoyment of the world. Temptation plays with facets of things that are good and highlights the attractions of the beauties in creation. Sin then perverts the excitement which these objects quite rightly cause within us. Thus, to revert to John's words, 'the lust of the flesh' perverts and corrupts the excitement which drives us toward what is good and beneficial. The 'lust of the eyes' likewise corrupts the drive towards what is beautiful and true. The 'pride of life' perverts the rightful effort to be, and to be valued. Thus, in the temptation of Jesus, the devil offered to him things which by right belonged to the Son of God; but he invited Jesus to invert the order established by the Father. Thus, in Genesis 3, the fruit of the tree planted by God was intended to be beautiful and good -- the opportunity for sin was an innocent creature -- but the human race perverted the order of the Creator.

It was by doubting God and by desiring in a wrong way something good in creation that the first couple sinned . . . What, in the last analysis, is the reason for the role that doubt and covetousness appear to play in the narrative? It shows that the first sin was a human act. A human act is never completely simple, and sin, being a corrupt act, is less simple than any other. As soon as it enters, sin is just as we know it -- complex, involved, mulitvalent, like an octopus with its spreading tentacles or like a cancer with its manifold mestastes

Taken from pp.140-2 of In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis by Henri Blocher.