Missing the Mark

PART 1 — The God we were painted

Dear reader,

if you’re here, you probably carry a weight in your heart. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever.

Maybe you grew up — like many of us — listening to a story that went something like this: Adam and Eve committed an unforgivable crime. Because of them, the whole of humanity was condemned. God was offended in His sovereignty. And now, for thousands of years, He has been letting the world suffer in order to demonstrate — to Satan, to the angels and to all humanity — that His way of governing is superior. That He had been right from the very start.

We’ve been taught that this is a question of universal sovereignty. A cosmic dispute. And that human suffering — your suffering, that of your children, that of the brother who weeps alone in the evening — serves to settle this dispute. That God is permitting all this because He has to prove a point.

Stop for a moment.

Breathe.

And now try to look at this image with the heart of a child.

A human father — a father who loves his own children — would he make his little ones suffer for years and years to prove to the next-door neighbor that he was right? If a parent told social services: “Yes, I’m letting my children suffer, but it’s to prove an important point” — would we call that loving? Or would we call it something else?

And yet we have been asked to believe that the Creator of the universe — the One whom Scripture defines with the most powerful words ever written — does exactly this.

“God is love” — ὁ Θεòς αγáπη εστíν (ho Theòs agàpē estìn) — 1 John 4:8.

In Greek, the verb εἰμí (eimì, “to be”) here doesn’t indicate one quality among many. It doesn’t say “God is loving” or “God has love”. It says God is love. In His deepest essence. As absolute identity. Love is not something God does. It is something God is. Every one of His acts, every decision, every purpose flows from love as water flows from a spring.

And then the question rises by itself, spontaneously, and you can no longer avoid it:

If God IS love — in His deepest essence — how can the suffering of humanity be a tool to win an argument?

Doesn’t something not add up?

Maybe yes. Maybe something doesn’t add up. And maybe — just maybe — that “something” isn’t a problem with God. It’s a problem with the way the story was told to us.

PART 2 — A necessary premise

We ourselves take nothing as true without verifying. And we ask you not to take anything as true that you find here without doing the same.

That said — let’s walk together.

PART 3 — What “sin” really means: the word that turns everything around

What if we told you that the most important word in the whole Bible — the one on which the entire understanding of the relationship between God and man rests — has been translated in a way that has changed its meaning?

In Hebrew, the most common word for “sin” is חֵטְא (ḥēṭ’). And its original meaning is not “to commit a crime”. It is not “to violate a law”. It is not “to offend a sovereign”.

It literally means: to miss the mark.

To deviate from the trajectory. To lose the aim. To miss the point.

It is not a legal term. It is a term that comes from the world of archery, from everyday life, from the concreteness of the Hebrew language — which doesn’t think in abstractions but in images.

The proof? Judges 20:16 uses exactly the same verbal root to describe the slingers of the tribe of Benjamin: “Every one of these could sling a stone within a hairbreadth and not miss” (ליא יחטא, lo yaḥaṭì). The same exact verb. There is no moral sin here, no crime, no transgression — there is an archer who hits or doesn’t hit his target. Period.

This is the original meaning. This is what the Hebrew language intended.

And so — if sin is missing a mark— the question changes completely. It is no longer: “What crime did man commit?” It is no longer: “Which law did he break?”

The question becomes:

What was the mark?

If there is a “missing,” there must be a “hitting.” If there is a deviation, there must be a trajectory. If there is an error of aim, there must be a point being aimed at.

And that mark — we’ll tell you right away, because we don’t want to keep you in suspense — is something beautiful. Something perhaps no one has ever told you. Something that, when you see it, will forever change the way you look at the Creator, at humanity, and at the meaning of everything.

But to see it, we have to start at the beginning. At the true beginning.

PART 4 — The Creator’s method: each phase prepares the next

Genesis 1:1-2 tells us: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and desolate, and there was darkness upon the surface of the watery deep, and God’s active force was moving about over the surface of the waters.”

Formless. Desolate. Darkness.

The first thing the Bible shows us is not perfection — it is chaos. The starting point is not the flowering garden. It is a planet wrapped in darkness, covered in water, without form.

But the initial chaos was not a defect. It was not a design error. It was the starting point. The block of raw marble from which the sculptor would draw the masterpiece. The blank canvas on which the painter would paint his greatest picture.

How do we know? Because the prophet Isaiah tells us so explicitly:

“For this is what Jehovah says, the Creator of the heavens, the true God, the One who formed the earth, its Maker who firmly established it, who did not create it simply for nothing [in Hebrew: ליא־תהו, lo-ṯòhu — not for chaos], but formed it to be inhabited.”

Chaos was the starting point, not the destination. And between chaos and habitation there is a process. A long, patient, methodical process. Each phase prepares the next.

Think about it. Science tells us it took billions of years for this planet to become habitable. Incandescent gases that cooled. An atmosphere that slowly formed. Oceans that filled drop by drop. Simple forms of life that prepared the ground for more complex forms of life. Each phase — each single phase — was functional to the next.

Light before plants. Plants before animals. Animals before humans. Nothing is random. Nothing is improvised. Each step serves the next.

A Creator who works like that — with a patience that spans geological eras, with a method that crosses billions of years without hurry — is not a Creator who improvises. He is not a Creator who is taken by surprise. He is not a Creator who makes mistakes.

He is a Creator with a project. And everything converges toward one specific point: the final creative act.

PART 5 — Man: something qualitatively different

And we come to the final act.

“Then God said: ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.’”

The Hebrew expression is צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים (Tsèlem Elohìm) — image of God.

Stop on these words. Savor the weight of what they mean.

In all of creation — in billions of years of patient work — there is no other earthly creature that is given this title. Not the dinosaurs. Not the whales. Not the eagles. Only man. Man is the only creature on earth made to reflectthe Creator’s qualities: love, justice, wisdom, power.

But Tsèlem Elohìm is not a finishing point. It is a starting point. The image was in potential, like a seed that already contains the whole project of the tree but still has to grow, still has to open, still has to spread its roots and branches. Man was created with the potentialto fully reflect the Creator — but that potential had to be developed. Day after day. Experience after experience. Choice after choice.

And here another text comes into play, often overlooked. Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 15:14 says:

“He himself made man in the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel.”

“Left him in the hand of his own counsel.” He didn’t abandon him. He handed him over to himself — with trust. Like a father who hands the keys of the car to his son saying: “Now you drive.” That isn’t abandonment. That is the greatest gesture of trust a parent can make.

Because love without freedom is not love. It is control. A being who obeys because he has no choice is not loving — he is running a program. A robot doesn’t love. A puppet doesn’t choose. Only a free being can really love. And the Creator wanted to be truly loved.

That’s why He made man free. It wasn’t an unforeseen risk. It was the design.

PART 6 — The purpose: the construction site and the Father-mentor

And now we get to the heart. To the mark.

Genesis 1:28 contains the first words God speaks to man. The first words of a Father to a newborn son. Listen:

“Be fruitful and become many, fill the earth and subdue it, and have in subjection the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens and every living creature that is moving on the earth.”

Two Hebrew verbs define man’s mission:

כָבַשׁ (kavàsh) — to subdue, make productive, explore, take possession. It is not a verb of blind violence. It is the verb of the pioneer who crosses a new land and makes it habitable. It is the verb of the farmer who takes uncultivated ground and transforms it into a fertile field.

רָדָה (radàh) — to govern, manage with care, exercise creative dominion. It is not the dominion of the tyrant. It is the dominion of the gardener who tends his plants, of the shepherd who guides his flock, of the father who manages the home with love.

The garden of Eden — that perfect place God had planted with His own hands — was not the finished project. It was the model construction site. It was the practical demonstration of how all the earth was to look. It was the prototype. The sample. The example.

And man? Man was the construction foreman. Tasked with taking that model and replicating it — garden after garden, valley after valley, mountain after mountain — until it covered the entire planet. It was a grand project. An adventure without end. A work that would require generations, creativity, collaboration, growth.

But he didn’t have to do it alone.

Genesis 3:8 hides a detail that changes everything. We read: “And they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden about the breezy part of the day.”

The Hebrew verb used here is מִתְהַלֵּךְ (mitḥallèk) — a form of the verb that indicates a habitual, repeated, customary action. Not “God happened to pass by that day”. But “God was habitually walkingin the garden”. It was a routine. A regular appointment. A daily ritual.

Close your eyes for a moment and picture the scene.

The day’s work is over. The sun is setting. The evening breeze cools the garden air. And the Creator of the universe — the One who lit the stars and dug the oceans — comes to walk with man. Like a father who comes home from work and goes into the garden to be with his children. “How did it go today? What did you learn? What did you discover? Come, let me show you something...”

THIS was the original plan.

Not a distant God on a throne waiting to be obeyed. Not a sovereign who needs his authority to be proven. But a Father who walks with His children. Every evening. In the garden. In the breezy part of the day.

Communion. Closeness. Building together.

This was the mark.

PART 7 — The tree: the right moment, not a permanent prohibition

“But as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat from it, for in the day you eat from it you will certainly die.”

For generations we have been taught to read these words as an absolute and permanent prohibition. “That tree was forbidden, period. To touch it was a crime. To eat of it was the worst of transgressions.”

But this reading ignores something fundamental: the context of the divine purpose.

If man had been created to grow — if he was a developing Tsèlem Elohìm, a seed that was to become a tree — then the knowledge of good and evil was not something intrinsically forbidden. It was something for which man was not yet ready.

The wise Solomon wrote:

“For everything there is an appointed time, a time for every activity under the heavens.”

There is a time for everything. A child does not drive a car — not because driving is wrong, but because it’s not yet the time. An apprentice doesn’t run the company on day one — not because running it is wrong, but because he must first learn the trade under the master’s guidance.

And the apostle Paul confirms this principle in a remarkable way:

“But solid food belongs to mature people, to those who through use have their powers of discernment trained to distinguish both right and wrong.”

The Greek word for “powers of discernment” is αἴσθησις (àisthēsis) — perception, moral sensitivity, discernment developed through experience and exercise. The text explicitly says that the capacity to distinguish good from evil is something that develops through training. It is not a switch that turns on or off. It is a muscle that is trained. A faculty that matures.

And so the tree takes on a completely different meaning.

It wasn’t a “never.” It was a “not yet.”

The Father was saying: “My son, this knowledge will come. But first you must grow. First you must walk at my side. First you must develop maturity — the lehaskìl — the discernment, the wisdom that comes from guided experience. The right moment will come. But it must come the right way, with the right Master, at the right pace.”

Moral conscience was not forbidden forever. It was the next step. And the Creator’s purpose was not to deny that conscience to man — it was to build it together with him.

PART 8 — The serpent and “you will be like Elohim”: what it really means

Revelation 12:9 clearly identifies who was hiding behind the serpent: “So down the great dragon was hurled, the original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth.”

In Genesis 3:4-5, the serpent said to the woman:

“You certainly will not die. For God knows that in the very day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and bad.”

Let’s stop here. Let’s analyze the strategy carefully.

The serpent did not say: “Rebel against God.” He did not say: “Hate your Creator.” He did not say: “Do evil.” He said something much more subtle. He made two statements:

First statement:“You certainly will not die.” — This was false. A direct lie. Death entered the world exactly as God had warned.

Second statement:“You will be like Elohim, knowing good and bad.” — And that one? That is the part few examine carefully.

Go to Genesis 3:22. After man has eaten the fruit, it is God Himself who says:

“Here the man has become like one of us in knowing good and bad.”

You read it correctly. God confirmswhat the serpent had said. Man did indeed become “like Elohim” in the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent’s second statement was not a lie. It was true.

But there is more. The word אֱלֹהִים (Elohìm) in the Bible doesn’t refer exclusively to the Creator. It has a much broader semantic field than we’ve been taught.

In Exodus 22:8, the same word is used for human judges: “The owner of the house must be brought near to the true God [Elohìm]” — where Elohìm refers to men appointed to judge, men with moral conscience capable of discerning right from wrong.

In Psalm 82:6, God Himself says: “I have said, ‘You are gods [Elohìm], all of you are sons of the Most High.’”

Jesus quoted these very words in John 10:34, confirming their validity: “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said: “You are gods”’?”

The point is this — and take the time to let it enter your heart:

Man was meant to become like Elohìm. That was the project. To fully develop the divine image, to become a mature being with full moral conscience, capable of distinguishing good from evil — like a judge, like a son grown to the likeness of the Father.

That was the mark.

The serpent didn’t offer something wrong. He offered something right in the wrong way. He precisely described the next step of the creative process — moral conscience — but offered it as a shortcut. As a theft. As a premature autonomy.

The step was right. The way was wrong. The timing was wrong. And above all — the teacher was wrong. Not the Father who walked in the garden every evening. But the serpent who whispered in the shadows.

PART 9 — The two paths: same mark, very different costs

At this point, we can clearly see the whole scene. And we can imagine two paths — two different roads leading to the same destination, but with hugely different costs.

Path A — With the Father

Man grows up walking at God’s side. Day after day, evening after evening, walk after walk in the garden, the Father teaches him. He shows him how the world He created works. He explains the why of things. He guides him through experiences that grow ever more complex — like a master craftsman who teaches his apprentice, starting from the basics and slowly climbing toward mastery.

Man develops divine qualities — love, justice, wisdom, power — through guided experience. With time, his αἰσθητήρια (aisthētēria, powers of discernment — Hebrews 5:14) are trained. The muscle of discernment grows stronger. Moral conscience is formed — not as a sudden explosion, but as a dawn rising slowly, illuminating every thing at the right moment.

And when man is ready — in the time set by the Father, not a day before and not a day after — he receives the full knowledge of good and evil. Not as a transgression, but as a graduation. Not as a theft, but as a gift. Not as a crime, but as the natural crowning of a journey of growth made together.

Path B — The shortcut

The serpent says: “Why wait? Why depend on the Father? Take the knowledge now. Become autonomous. You don’t need Him to grow. Open your eyes alone.”

Man takes the fruit. He gets the knowledge — but without the maturity to handle it. Like a child who finds his father’s gun: he has the power, but not the discernment. He knows good and evil, but he doesn’t have the wisdom to consistently choose the good. His eyes are open, but he doesn’t yet know what he’s looking at.

Eve looked at the tree and saw something that deserves our attention. Genesis 3:6:

“The woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was something desirable to the eyes, yes, the tree was pleasing to look upon.”

The key Hebrew expression here is lehaskìl — to make wise, to gain discernment, to obtain wisdom. Eve’s desire was not vulgar. It wasn’t a whim. It was a nobledesire — the desire to grow, to understand, to become wise. The problem wasn’t the what. It was the how. It was the when. It was the with whom.

And here Jesus’ parable lights up everything like lightning in the night.

In Luke 15:12-13, the younger son said to his father: “Father, give me the share of the property that should come to me.” And the father “divided his means of living between them.” Then the son “traveled to a distant country and there squandered his property by living a debauched life.”

Think about it. The son didn’t ask for something wrong. That inheritance was legitimately his. It would have been his anyway, one day. But he wanted it before its time. Without the maturity to handle it. And he took it by going far from his father— to a distant country, where the father couldn’t guide him, protect him, teach him.

The parallel with Eden is precise:

Man took the knowledge that one day would have been his — because that was the mark, that was the project — but he took it the wrong way, at the wrong moment, with the wrong teacher. And he found himself far from the Father. In a “distant country”. With his eyes open but his heart broken. With the knowledge of good and evil, but without the wisdom to navigate it.

Both paths lead to the same point: a being with full moral conscience. But Path A builds whilewalking — and arrives at the destination whole, mature, in communion with the Father. Path B arrives at the destination stripped, wounded, with everything to rebuild. Like the prodigal son who ended up eating the carob pods of the pigs — not because the inheritance was bad, but because he wasn’t ready to bear its weight.

PART 10 — The Father is still waiting

And now — after all this journey we’ve made together — we get to the part that warms the heart. The part that changes everything. The part we wish we could whisper in your ear the way you whisper good news to someone who has cried too long.

The mark has not been eliminated.

The original project has not been canceled.

Think of the Creator we’ve come to know in these pages. A God who works for billions of years without hurry. Who takes a formless planet and turns it into a garden. Who creates a being worthy of freedom, capable of love, made in His image. Who plants a garden with His own hands and then comes to walk inside it every evening, in the breeze of the day, to be with His children.

Think of the God who stopped Abraham’s hand — “Do not lay your hand on the boy!” (Genesis 22:12) — because His instinct, faced with a son in danger, is to protect, not to punish.

This God — this Father — would He really have abandoned His project? Would He really have thrown away billions of years of patient work because of a wrong shortcut?

No. And the Scriptures confirm it with breathtaking clarity:

“The righteous will possess the earth, and they will live forever on it.”

Man on the earth. In a relationship with the Creator. Fully developing the divine image. Forever.

It is the same project. The same mark. The same destination.

The path has become longer, of course. More painful. More winding. Path B has its costs — and humanity has paid them and is still paying them. But the destination has not changed. The Father has not moved the mark. He has not changed His mind. He has not torn up the project and started over.

The mark is still there. Bright. Intact. Waiting.

And the Father? The Father is doing exactly what the father of the prodigal son did. He is waiting. With his eyes on the road. Every day. Scanning the horizon. And when he saw his son — “while he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him and was moved with pity, and he ran and embraced him and tenderly kissed him” (Luke 15:20).

He didn’t interrogate him. He didn’t humiliate him. He didn’t say “I told you so”. He ran. A father who runs toward his son. This is the God of the Bible. This is the Creator who planted the garden.

And Jesus — the Son the Father sent to bring us home — said:

“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Free from what? Free from Path B. Free from the shortcut that looked like freedom but was slavery. Free from the autonomy that looked like maturity but was loneliness. The truth — the knowledge of the Creator’s true purpose — brings us back to Path A. It brings us back to the Father’s side. It puts us back on the trajectory. It re-aims us at the mark.

The mark hasn’t been moved.

We are the ones who deviated.

And the first step to getting back on the trajectory is to understand what we were trying to hit.

Which is exactly what we’ve tried to do together, in these pages.

Questions to reflect on

A final word

We have come to the end of this reflection — but not to the end of the journey. This is just the first article of three, and there are still many things to explore together.

Before saying goodbye, we want to remind you once again — because we really care — that everything you have read here are reflections. Considerations. Thoughts born from study of the Scriptures in the original languages. They are not dogmas. They are not revealed truths. They are not “the” answer.

They are an invitation to examine. To verify. To take your Bible and check every single verse, every single Hebrew or Greek word we have cited. To compare with other translations. To do your own research. To draw your own conclusions.

If something has touched your heart — good. Verify it. If something doesn’t convince you — even better. Write to us. Let’s compare. Let’s grow together. As Paul said: “Make sure of all things”(1 Thessalonians 5:21). Not “make sure of some things”. All things. Including what you read here.

We are not better than anyone. We are simply brothers and sisters who took the time to seek. And we invite you, with all our heart, to do the same.

With a heartfelt embrace,
A Member of the Lovers of Truth
March 31, 2026