The Broken Mirror
From Being to Becoming - Power, Perception and the Fall
“I think, therefore I am.” — Descartes
With these words, Descartes sought a foundation — something so certain it could not be doubted. Even if he questioned everything — his senses, the world, his body — the fact that he was thinking proved something: that he was. Thought became proof of being. Cogito, ergo sum. But to simply be is not the whole story. Being alone is static. The real mystery — and challenge — is becoming. What we think shapes what we perceive. What we perceive forms what we believe. And what we believe determines who we become.
If Descartes pointed to the existence of the self, Scripture invites us to ask what kind of self we are becoming. Genesis does not just show us that humans exist — it shows us how a false idea corrupts what we become. God, in contrast to Descartes’ limited human certainty, declares His nature at the burning bush: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Or more richly translated: I will be what I will be. God’s identity is not frozen — it is living, present, relational, unfolding.
To bear His image is not merely to exist, but to become like Him — to mirror truth, love, and life in motion. In this light, the Fall is not just a moral slip. It is a distortion in perception. A warping of thought. A misalignment of imagination.
The serpent’s idea — that God is withholding, that autonomy is the path to divinity — becomes a seed of becoming. It doesn’t deny being. It redirects becoming. And so humanity becomes… less human.
To trace the Fall is to trace an idea — one that distorts who God is, and therefore who we are. To trace redemption is to recover the Imago Dei — the image marred, but not lost. For we were made to reflect, not reinvent. And only in seeing God truly — not as we imagine Him, but as He reveals Himself — do we become truly human.
This is the root idea — and the source of true power.
Misrepresentation and the Birth of Shame
Genesis 3 introduces a serpent — subtle, shrewd, and serpentine not just in form but in speech. He does not begin with a lie, but with a question. “Did God really say…?” With this, he implants doubt. Eve responds, but in her reply she already exaggerates the command: “You must not eat of it… or even touch it.”
The idea begins to warp. The serpent implies three things:
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God is restrictive.
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God is withholding.
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God is dishonest.
He promises they will be “like God,” not realizing they already are — made in His image. And so they reach. But what they take is not divinity — it is deception.
The result is immediate:
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Self-awareness without security.
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Nakedness perceived as shame.
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Fear, hiding, and blame.
They do not die — not bodily — but something dies: communion, innocence, trust. A spiritual stillbirth. They are alive, but no longer whole. God’s voice comes, but they do not draw near. “I was afraid because I was naked… so I hid.” They now see themselves and God through distorted lenses.
“Who told you that you were naked?” (Genesis 3:11)
This question is not about nudity, but about perception. Who has reframed your identity? Whose voice now defines you?
The Inversion of Order
In Genesis 1, humans are crowned with dominion, made last but placed highest — rulers over the creatures. In Genesis 3, the order collapses. The serpent, a creature, influences the woman. The woman gives to the man. The man blames both. This is not just a moral fall — it is a cosmological inversion. The head becomes the tail. Authority is abdicated. And with that inversion comes relational fracture. The nakedness once called “very good” becomes a source of fear. The relationship once defined by trust becomes suspicion. They hide from God. They hide from each other. Shame eclipses image. Adam blames Eve. And Eve blames the serpent. And by proxy they both blame God. No one looks inward. No one looks upward. The image-bearers have forgotten the image.
The mirror is broken.
Consequence, Not Condemnation
God’s questions in the garden are not accusations — they are invitations.
“Who told you that you were naked?”
“Have you eaten from the tree…?”
These are not demands for defense, but openings — doors through which confession might walk, and communion might be restored. Yet Adam and Eve, disoriented by shame and fear, do not step forward. They step back.
Their unwillingness to own the fracture leads to a shift in tone. What follows is often read as a list of divine punishments — curses handed down from an angry God. But perhaps it is better understood as revelation. God is not merely issuing judgment; He is disclosing what now must unfold. The serpent is the first to be cursed outright — a striking move in a story where the human pair are not immediately cursed, but rather exposed to the reality of what they have set in motion. And so, into the rupture, God speaks consequence.
But even here, there is prophetic mercy…
Then comes a curious and significant act.
God, in Genesis 2, gives Adam the task of naming the animals. This isn’t a trivial task. In ancient thought, to name something is to know it, to call out its essence, to clarify its role. It’s an act of discernment — almost liturgical in weight. Names shape perception. They speak destiny. In the biblical imagination, naming is not neutral. It is power.
Up to this point, neither the man nor the woman has a name. They are simply ha’adam (the human) and isha (the woman). That silence is telling. Their identities are not asserted, but relationally held — given and received in the presence of God.
But in Genesis 3:17–19, God speaks directly to the man — addressing him in consequence. In this moment, Adam is named — not just called adam, but confronted with the nature of his humanity: taken from the ground (adamah), to return to it in toil and death. The name now binds him to dust. His identity is not revoked, but it is reframed through the lens of his failure and silence.
Adam does not intercede. He does not defend the woman. He abdicates.
And now he is named in the consequence — grounded in a destiny of decay.
The Desire to Name
In the Genesis narrative, naming is not a neutral act — it is sacred. It carries weight, power, and vocation. To name is to reveal essence, to call forth identity, to position a thing within a moral and relational cosmos. When God brings the animals before the adam to see what he would call them, it is not a test of creativity or memory — it is an act of trust. A sacred entrusting of discernment.
At this point in the narrative, the human is not yet divided into male and female. The vocation to name is given to ha’adam—the undifferentiated human. It is a shared human calling, not a gendered privilege.
But by the time the woman is fashioned, drawn out of the adam, the narrative rhythm changes. She is not shown participating in naming — not yet. She is called ishah, because she was taken out of ish. The man names the woman, not in rejection, but in recognition. Still, the text is silent on whether she ever names — until later.
What, then, is the nature of the tree?
The fruit is described as good for food, pleasing to the eye, and — most tellingly — desirable for gaining wisdom. The Hebrew le’haskil suggests insight, perception, or enlightenment. This is not trivial curiosity. It is the desire to discern — to know not only what is good and evil, but the difference between them. In a word: the desire to interpret.
Could Eve’s temptation have been, at its root, a yearning to step into that very act of interpretation — the power of perception and naming originally entrusted to the human?
If so, then what she reaches for is not just fruit — it is vocation.
It is the desire to name.
To see with clarity. To understand the nature of things — and perhaps, of herself.
The classical virtue of Prudence — Prudentia — is the virtue of self-governance through discernment. In medieval iconography, Prudence is often depicted as a woman holding two objects: a mirror, and a serpent. The mirror symbolizes truth and reflection. The serpent, wisdom — or cunning, depending on the tilt.
It is a potent image: a feminine embodiment of interpretive power, holding both revelation and risk. Eve, too, reaches for something bound in these symbols. Her desire is not simple rebellion — it may be a misaligned reach for discernment, voice, and the power to name. Not evil, but untethered. Not disobedience, but dislocation.
And after the Fall, a pattern emerges.
Adam names the woman Chavah — Eve. In doing so, he reasserts the role of namer, but now in a context of alienation and fragmentation. The intimacy of shared calling has become a divided posture. Yet in the very next chapter, Eve does something new:
She names.
“I have acquired a man — et YHWH.” (Genesis 4:1)
This phrase is shrouded in ambiguity. Is Eve claiming partnership with God? Gratitude toward God? Or something more enigmatic — “I have acquired a man: the Lord”?
In the vacuum left by the Fall, both man and woman begin reaching again for what they once knew through communion — now acting from separation. The act of naming becomes not just sacred trust, but existential grasping. Eve’s voice enters the world of naming with mystery, paradox, and ache. And Adam, too, names from within the fracture:
“And the man called his wife’s name Chavah (Eve), because she was the mother of all living.” (Genesis 3:20)
On the surface, it sounds redemptive — a declaration of hope. But beneath it lies projection. Displacement. Perhaps even confusion. The one he could not guard now becomes, in his words, the source of life.
The name Chavah (or Havah, Hayyah) means “to live” or “to give life.” But it also echoes the Aramaic Hivya — serpent. Some rabbinic sources note the phonetic link between Eve’s name and the word for serpent. A tension coils beneath the surface:
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Life-giver and deceived.
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Hope-bearer and scapegoat.
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Vessel of promise and reminder of pain.
As Arvid S. Kapelrud suggests, Eve’s name — like Adam’s — holds both origin and destiny. It reflects what she has come from, and what she is becoming. But in Adam’s mouth, the naming may not be clear. It may be projection. An attempt to reassert order through interpretation — even as the mirror has cracked.
In a world where the image of God has been distorted, the names we give begin to echo that distortion.
Its not long before we see Eve naming her first son.
“I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.” — Genesis 4:1
But in Hebrew, the phrase is enigmatic: "qaniti ish et-YHWH." Literally:
“I have acquired a man — et YHWH.”
Does Eve mean:
• “I have acquired a man with the Lord”?
• “I have acquired a man from the Lord”?
• Or even: “I have acquired a man — the Lord”?
Some rabbinic and scholarly interpretations suggest Eve may have believed Cain to be the promised redeemer — the one who would undo the serpent’s deception. In that case, her words might carry a messianic longing: a hope that God has come through her.
Others see irony in her statement — that the son she “acquires” turns out to be the first murderer, not the Messiah. Her hope was misplaced. Her projection becomes pain.
In this naming, Eve gives voice to all human longing: the desire to make sense of suffering, to birth redemption, to name God in the midst of confusion. Her statement is poetry and prophecy, faith and folly — all at once.
Ideas Have Bodies: Words, Names, and Spells
The Fall begins not with an action, but with a sentence. A question. A suggestion. A reframing of reality.
“Did God really say…?”
In that moment, language is weaponized. Truth is twisted. A new idea is seeded — one that grows into alienation.Words have power.
“The tongue has the power of life and death…” (Proverbs 18:21)
This is not metaphor alone. In Scripture, names are more than labels — they reveal character, purpose, essence. Naming is a form of creation. Spelling, in its oldest connotation, is a kind of casting — to bind or to loose, to bless or to curse. In a fallen world, distorted words create distorted worlds. Language becomes a tool of control or confusion. But it can also be redeemed. Prophets speak to dry bones. Jesus names demons. The Word becomes flesh. The right word, rightly spoken, restores. To recover the image, we must first recover the Word.
A New Kind of Power
“Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit…” (Zechariah 4:6)
This verse redefines the metrics. The Messiah does not come wielding force. He does not mirror the empires of men. He rides a donkey, not a war horse. He washes feet. He weeps.
At Golgotha — the place of the skull — false ideas die. Jesus’ death is not just substitution. It is confrontation. It unmasks the lie: that power is control, that love is weakness, that God is distant.
As Ty Gibson says:
“He came to change the game, not just win it.”
Jesus redefines power as sacrificial love. He does not crush Rome — He absorbs its violence. He does not silence the accuser — He answers with silence. This is not defeat. It is revolution.
Reframing Judgment and Heaven
“I did not come to judge the world, but to save it.” (John 12:47)
The Greek word for judgment — krisis — shares roots with decision, division, revelation. Apokalypsis means unveiling. Judgment is not condemnation. It is clarity. It is light entering shadow.
In Jesus, judgment becomes invitation. He does not expose to shame. He exposes to heal. His presence reveals what already is. The Kingdom is not a future castle in the clouds.
“The Kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21)
To judge rightly is to see rightly. And to see rightly is to be transformed.
Recovering the True Image
What began in a garden ends at a tree — not in death, but in resurrection. The first Adam hides among trees. The second is hung upon one. One takes and falls. One gives and restores.
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation…” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
The image, once shattered, is made whole. Not just patched. Recreated.
To repent is not mere remorse. It is metanoia — a change of mind. A re-rooting. A re-seeing. A return to the truth.
We are not called to strive. We are called to reflect.
To mirror the One who is the true Image.
We speak life. We bear truth.
We mirror love.