Were Adam and Eve unsatisfied in the Garden of Eden? Even a little? If not, how were they tempted?

Temptation is the enticement to seize unsatisfied desires by disobedience rather than through faith. Now, there are good desires, and there are bad ones. Those good desires are good in that they are ordered according to God’s nature and ours as his images. Those bad desires are bad in that they are discordant with God’s nature and thus our own. As a result of the fall, we struggle with bad desires, otherwise called concupiscence.

But that does not mean that Adam or Eve did not have desires before the fall; they were just not concupiscent ones. And yet, to be tempted, even by good desires, means that there were good desires left unfulfilled for Adam and Eve. In some real way, Eden was incomplete and, though mostly satisfying, even in some small way unsatisfying. Otherwise, Satan would not have been able to deceive Eve with the promises of the forbidden fruit. After all, the best possible life is one in which you know you are living the best possible life, or else you would not be wholly satisfied.

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There is a major hint of Eden’s incompleteness written into the creation story. God had just breathed life into Adam and set him about tending the garden. He tells Adam to avoid the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And then, God says something that should cause the reader a moment of reflection, “It is not good…” Up until now, everything had only been declared good. Nor had sin yet invaded the cosmos. How then could there be something “not good” in the perfect world God had created?

Simply put, Eden was imperfect.

That there was a “not good” before the fall of man indicates a lack of perfection even before sin had entered the world. To be clear, “not good” does not always mean evil. Evil is one sort of not-goodness, but there is also another sort. An artisan weaving a tapestry on her loom would not call a half-finished piece “bad.” Yet she would not call it complete either. However, if she found a hole or rot in some completed portion of the piece, she wouldn’t merely call it incomplete, but also “bad.”

Eden was good, but incompletely so. There was no rot or stain, and yet, neither Eden nor man was as good as God planned for them to ultimately be. In this sense, Eden was “not good.” There was still more work to be done to complete creation, especially the creation of man, the cardinal member of the garden.

And what exactly was “not good”? It was not good that man should be alone. But did God not walk among man in the garden? And yet, God still declares that man was alone. Why was man created in such a way to be left unsatisfied with the Edenic presence of God? How could the first man stand before God and yet remain lonely?

Man’s first deficiency is not sin, but loneliness. And it is a purposeful deficiency ordained by God toward an ordered end. Our ultimate hope is that God will not leave this deficiency, or our loneliness, deficient.

God would provide Adam with an other to aid in the fulfillment of this deficiency. Indeed, marriage was more satisfying for Adam than the alternative because Eve was “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” Though previously, Adam was in the presence of God, God is not a man. God is not bone of my bones, nor flesh of my flesh. God now gives his grace to Adam in a manner fitting his bodily constitution, as God created man to receive it.

We may assume that the creation of the woman and the couple’s subsequent union completed Eden and resolved man’s loneliness, but that would be assuming too much too quickly. After all, Adam fell after the creation of Eve, not before. Marriage, with its abundant blessings, was better than the prior arrangement, yet still insufficient to fully satisfy the inner longing of man for the other.

When God gave Eve to Adam, and when, through loving her, Adam’s satisfaction was magnified, his pleasure was only real because Eve reflected those aspects of God of which Adam, in his person, both lacked and desired. And Eve also consisted of that which God created Adam to so desire but which God himself lacked, namely, a fleshly body after his own kind. The same can be said of Eve’s natural longing for the bodily Adam.

Only God is ultimately satisfying because God is satisfaction itself, yet man cannot understand this satisfaction unless it be through bodily means. Eve, an image of God, is quite satisfying to Adam but not ultimately so because she is not God, yet she is fleshly unlike God and can thus communicate the satisfaction found ultimately in God more fully to Adam.

Adam or Eve would never be ultimately satisfying to the other, for neither were God fully, but images, created to reflect, worship, and enjoy God. The enjoyment they had in each other was real, but not maximal. A light may be reflected in a mirror, and yet the mirror will always be lacking the full splendor of the original light.

Thus, man sinned. They were not forced to sin, and indeed, they could have chosen against it. But the possibility of their sin is only explained in their lack of total satisfaction in the gift of each other, given to them by God. Further, while God intended that gift to be temporally satisfying, he never intended the gift of the other to be fully satisfying in and of itself.

“For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.”

— Matthew 22:30

Heaven differs from Eden in this fundamental way: we will be completely satisfied with God. And only when we are completely satisfied with God can it be said that God has completed his creative work in us. We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

We will see God, and seeing God will be enough. This is the beatific vision.

The nagging discontent is always present. The truth—I know I am missing something. I am incomplete. Every moment of happiness is tinged with sorrow. Every smile hides a tear. I am not enough.

I hunger, and I thirst, and am never full. I leave my marriage bed only to battle lust yet again. I stare into the innocent eyes of my children as I rock them in my arms and blink—they have grown. I work and work to build a future I will never fully enjoy, and for my reward, I barely have enough to live. I read and learn and am rewarded with sorrow. It is never enough.

In response, Christ tells me to partake of himself, and I will be satisfied. So I drank of the living water and only grew more discontent. I have had a part of heaven and will not be satisfied until I have had the whole. I’ve learned that a taste of the living water does not immediately quench my thirst. It only makes me more discontent about that which truly matters most. If anything, it leaves me more parched, longing even more for the celestial rain.

My thirst becomes an all-encompassing motivation—that I may gain Christ!

He promises untold rewards and riches. That is not enough.

He promises victory and status in his kingdom. That is not enough.

He promises vindication after the dark night of this life. That is not enough.

If I gain heaven, it would not be enough. For what is heaven without the light?

All these gifts of God are vanity if God does not give himself to me. Christ is not the means of salvation. He is very salvation of very salvation. He is not another means to an end. He is the end of all things. He is enough. Take the world, take the heavens themselves, but give me Jesus.

We will see his face, and his name will be on our foreheads. And we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. As he truly is. This is the beatific vision. The end of our dissatisfaction. The end of our sin. The end of our loneliness. Fully man as God intended us to be, forever gazing into the face of God, the beginning and end of all things.

How is heaven better than Eden?

Man was not finally satisfied with the Edenic presence of God because, while man was made like God, God had not yet become like man. We are embodied beings. God is not. Sin, the penultimate problem, is solved by Christ’s death and resurrection. But man’s first deficiency, solitude, is solved by his incarnation. God with us. Our marriages are mere shadows of Christ’s love for His bride. Marriage was never meant to solve solitude permanently. It ultimately cannot.

Christ is God become bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh.

Christ’s incarnation solves original solitude. And while sin is not good by any sense of the imagination, Christ can redeem even evil for his good purposes. It is the climate of sin into which Christ is incarnated and demonstrates the greatest of possible loves for us. And he endears his bride to himself by facing our brutality to free us both from our original solitude and sin.

God made man embodied, with bodily appetites that can be ultimately fulfilled only through bodily means. This is not a flaw of creation. This is God’s intention. God is a spirit, yet He enfleshes himself for us. The incarnation was always part of that plan. His creative work in us can not be completed until God becomes man. Eden was not yet complete because God had not yet clothed himself with the veil of our flesh. But now that God has become man, we are closer than ever to God’s creative fulfillment.

What is the creative fulfillment? It is heaven. To completely know and be known by another. To know God. To know thyself. And we only fully know ourselves through knowing another and seeing ourselves through their eyes. To know and be known by God is also to know thyself perfectly. To see God’s face and be seen within the eyes of God.

God is the object of our desire. Even when we desire lesser things, that is only an indication of our ultimate desire for God. And God’s beloved will truly experience the Triune God. We will partake of the divine nature mediated through the incarnated Christ. And we will be satisfied, not merely in spirit, as in Eden, but also in our flesh, both body and soul.

And on that day, we will fully realize that seeing God is enough.

Some pictures from Credo Conference 2026

Q&A with Louis Markos, Matthew Barrett, and Gavin Ortlund

A Representative from New Aberdeen College

Matthew Barrett leading an Anselm House session on Thomas Aquinas

New friends

Michael Allen, The Lamb is All the Glory in Immanuel’s Land

Taking notes

A friend of mine with Gavin Ortlund

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