You didn’t create yourself. You don’t remember being born. You don’t even remember your first birthday, except for that picture of you with the cake! How did you come alive? When were you created? Did someone take care of you until you knew you were breathing? You look around, and almost everyone takes life for granted. In fact, most people also take “free will” for granted!
Yet every night, you sleep for several hours. You take it for granted that you’ll keep breathing. Your sleep experience is considered “restful” if you go “timeless” and sleep the whole night through. Ironically, those with breathing problems have the greatest worries. Matters of life and death hang in the balance! Hebrew culture considers a person one-sixtieth dead when asleep [Talmud, Ber. 57b: 13]. Life didn’t start with you, or with your parents. It started when God gave us breath!
“Then ADONAI Elohim formed the man out of the dust from the ground and He breathed into his nostrils a breath of life—so the man became a living being. Then ADONAI Elohim planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there He put the man whom He had formed” (Genesis 2:7–8 TLV).
God’s breath infuses life. And in the beginning, God breathed life into that first human and placed him in the Garden – perfect Paradise! So … what changed?
© Jeffrey Enoch Feinberg. JEF thinks God highly prizes free will and gives humanity a chance to shape creation.
