What if the lie in the Creation story is not “The Fall,” but something much more subtle and far-reaching?
What if the deepest lie carried through our world religions, philosophies, marketing strategies, and cultural messages is the belief that we and the world are innately flawed?
This worldview is so insidious that most of us rarely notice it. It whispers, “If you do one more thing, then you’ll be whole.” It looks and sounds good. It grows on a beautiful plant that mimics the truth. It looks nourishing, wise, even holy. But once we ingest it, our entire worldview shifts.
Instead of seeing with an ayin tov, a good eye, we begin to see everything as flawed, including ourselves. We blame one another, nature, our bodies, time, and circumstances. We treat our lives like projects instead of experiences. We treat mistakes as character defects rather than lessons in the human journey. We even begin to treat the human experience itself as something to escape.
But in the beginning, the Creator called it all good, very good.
What does it mean, then, to be made in the image or likeness of God? Does it mean we all look like God physically? We don’t look exactly the same, and Numbers 23:19 reminds us that God is not a man. Does it mean we share characteristics of God, like when someone says you remind them of your parent? Do we share God’s spirit? Genesis 2:7 says that the Eternal God formed man from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the spirit of life, and man became a living soul. Perhaps it is that our spirit is a part of the Eternal God’s spirit, and that is what makes us made in the Divine image.
The Eternal created humans in their image, both whole and good. The Eternal is a spirit with no beginning or ending who created all life in our world. Humans were made differently from all other life because the Eternal lovingly placed a portion of that eternal, infinite spirit within our finite bodies. We are eternal spirits with finite bodies, not bodies with a spirit. The combination of the two, spirit and body, makes us human and makes us a whole soul. Every person is born whole, lacking nothing. That is why the Eternal lovingly formed each of us in our mother’s wombs, making us beautiful, complete, and whole. The Eternal looks on every person and says we are “very good.”
In Hebrew, wholeness is shalom; it is the state of something fully formed, completed, or finished. A related word, shalem, means complete or whole. That is how the Eternal created each of us: whole, with all the potential we need already within us.
Yeshua pointed to this wholeness when he named the greatest commandment:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:29–30) Wholeness is lived when these four elements–heart, soul, mind, and strength–work together in unity. Yeshua lived from this place of wholeness to show us how to reconnect with the Eternal and awaken from the delusion that we are broken or separate.
Many of Yeshua’s teachings on wholeness are misunderstood today because the Hebrew word shalom is often translated as “peace.” Peace is only one aspect of wholeness. When the angels sang at Yeshua’s birth, they were proclaiming wholeness on earth (Luke 2:14). When Yeshua healed people, he sent them away in wholeness. When he prepared to leave his disciples, he said: “Wholeness I leave with you; my wholeness I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.” (John 14:27)
Yeshua came to open our eyes, ears, and hearts to the truth that we are already whole, and to give us an example of how to live from that wholeness in connection with the Eternal. When we awaken to this truth, we can also accept that we were created good and can return to the good life at any time. The Hebrew word for good is tov, which means functional, or operating as designed. Its opposite, ra, means dysfunctional. Humans were created good, with the freedom to choose actions that are functional or dysfunctional. People are not completely good or completely bad; they simply choose to operate in functional or dysfunctional ways. The Eternal, though, is wholly good, and our goodness flows from being created in the Divine image.
Yeshua recognized that he could not live functionally in a world full of dysfunction, illusions, and lies without maintaining unity and oneness with the Eternal. He taught that while no person always chooses good on their own, with God all things are possible. His life demonstrated how we can operate out of wholeness and goodness when we are aligned with our original design.
The Bible, then, is a story of relationships and restoration. In the beginning, humans lived whole and good, walking with the Eternal. We lost that connection when we believed the lie that we were lacking something; that we could become like God by grasping for more rather than living from the wholeness already within. This is our human story, but it doesn’t end here.
Whenever someone or something reminds us that we are already created whole and good in the image of God, our relationship with the Eternal is restored. Yeshua taught this human experience in the parable of the prodigal son. He showed us how to live as children of the Eternal, whole, good, and deeply loved.
Perhaps this is what his life, death, and resurrection reveal most clearly: that Nothing, NO THING, not suffering, not failure, not injustice, not sickness, not loneliness, not even death, can separate us from the Creator. The lie says we are broken and need something more to be fixed. The truth says we were created whole and remain held within the Eternal, always.
We experience liberating peace when we unravel the lie, spit it out, and refuse to plant its seeds in our lives or in the world; then we begin to recognize shalem olam, the wholeness and goodness of ourselves and all creation. The human experience is not evidence that something is wrong with us. It is simply the embodied experience of being human with all of its highs and lows. In this lifetime, it is the only experience we have, so let’s choose wisely.
Our prayer is that we live as those who trust that we were created whole from the beginning and that we walk with the Eternal in that truth, here and now.