Sequences of Sin

In the first pages of Genesis, when God creates the world, he unfolds the cosmos in a sequence, a chain that begins with the most basic of elements—light and darkness, water and land—and grows in complexity, culminating in the first human being. Each link in this chain is good, God declares, each more deeply embedded than the last, and the whole follows on the councils of the Lord, in accordance with his will. So it goes through the early pages until the eating of the fruit, the descent to the east of Eden, and the entry of violence and death into the world. Cain is a murderer, but his descendants will forge weapons of war, and if Cain was avenged sevenfold, Lamech shall be avenged seventy-seven-fold. The sequence of God’s creative will, unfolding in accordance with his intention, has shattered, and that breakage has become infectious, multiplying and spreading through the damaged wills of God’s wayward creatures.