Whether or not you believe that these were two literal human beings in a Garden in the Middle East thousands of years ago, the story of Genesis 2-3 rings true. Because we make the same decision all the time. The history of humanity, and the story of our own lives, is one of choosing ourselves instead of God.

Now don’t get me wrong. There’s something wonderful about our ability to choose, something that I believe was given to us by God. God gave Adam and Eve plenty of ways to make choices—choices about how to tend the garden and interact with each other, freedom to learn and make mistakes, but initially, they were doing those things with God. Once they decide to do it entirely on their own, we see that there is also something incredibly destructive about human freedom, something alienating, something selfish and dark.

Later on in the Bible, people begin to name this broken condition that Adam and Eve first entered into. They call this condition “sin.” And they say that sin is a state of being into which all humans are born, and which all humans choose. Just as Eve and Adam each chose to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we each choose to know good and evil on our own, independent of God. We each choose to reject God as the giver of life, the protector and provider, and instead desire and attempt to be God ourselves. God created us for life with Him. We choose life without Him.

Yes, we have glimpses of life with God. We have moments where we experience intimacy, beauty, purpose, goodness. So did Adam and Eve, even after they left the garden. And yet that choice resulted in a broken relationship with God, with themselves, with each other, and with the creation around them. And that one choice for life without God ended in the ultimate “without.” It ended in death. And without God, in death, we find ourselves in the ultimate without, without self, without each other, without anything. And we can’t do anything about it.

So the question becomes: Does God care about this separation? Is God content to let us stay in a life without God? It’s not an obvious answer. It would be totally within God’s rights to let go of us altogether, to let our lives break apart and end in death. We have aligned ourselves with the antithesis of who God is. In deciding to live without God, we joined the other team.

There’s a place in the Psalms, a book of poetry in the Bible, where the Psalmist says, “Heal me, for I have sinned against you.” Which is kind of like punching a doctor in the face and then saying, “Hey, doctor, can you help me out? My hand is hurting.” “Heal me, for I have sinned against you.” We have sinned against God. We have chosen life without God. And we are broken because of that choice. Our only hope is that God will intervene. Our only hope is that somehow God can, and will, overcome, our life without God.