I see Him in my mind walking down the paths, calling to the couple, meeting their eyes for the first time, and Adam and Eve shaking in absolute terror, wondering what had happened, confused at the broken promise of a snake, feeling at once the trustworthiness of their first love and wondering if God would ever love them again, feeling the hot breath of His anger and emotion, hearing Him speak for the first time, not as a friend, but as One who had been betrayed. "Who told you you were naked?" (Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What)
Here I wept, and wept and wept, because I heard Him, too. I heard Him ask, "Who told you you aren't lovely? Who told you men would always betray you? Who told you you were on your own, that you would always have to take care of yourself?" And He went on and direct-bombed many more lies.
I didn't take the fruit and eat it, but I have definitely betrayed God before, wanted to be equal with Him. And now I saw God walking into my soul as One betrayed, and asking me about those lies in the kindest, most concerned manner--without condemnation or anger--that all I could do was weep because I knew; I knew who had lied to me.
Our position to God changed in that moment, and lies came in with the thirst for knowledge. For after all, it was the knowledge of good and evil. The fallout of this, the reason I have been in a surreal daze for two days? Again Miller articulates the birth of my thoughts:
...you and I need for God to be perfectly good, we need for Him to be the voice that did one day, and will in the future, speak pure glory into our lives. But for now, because of this act of war, relations have been strained. And we are feeling it in our souls.
I wept after this statement too--this time, more because I tasted God's heart for us, for the suffering we must endure until the end of time. We feel in our souls the rift, and it burdens us. We try to feed it, to medicate it, to escape it. But only God can aid us.
"Relations are strained." That's what grabbed my heart and shed more light on my heartache and longings: we are trying to get back to Him in all these little dumb ways (religion and formula), or we have given up altogether and joined the world's pursuit of pleasure until it ends, or we search for beauty in the mess and make a god out of it to avoid serving the real One, because we are hurt and mad at Him, like it's all His fault it turned out this way.
He made the sacrifice so that we could come back. He made a way. So few, so few find it. "Relations have been strained." Just like Jews today who live in an empty covenant, waiting for a Messiah who already came, so many humans don’t know that Jesus came to give us Eden back. We are living like He didn’t come, just like the Jews…we keep searching for Eden, mechanically, not knowing why we are urged to discover and create and long for beauty, just as the Jews await a Messiah on every horizon; both are disappointed—when it cannot be recreated (when it is just a fleeting moment), or when He does not come.
And about how God felt being betrayed...I felt His sorrow as I read the words:
All this makes me wonder what God must have felt, arriving on the scene just after the Fall, knowing all He had made was ruined, and understanding at once the sacrifice that would be required to win the hearts of His children from the grasp of their seducer.
How His heart must have raged in grief within Him over the debauchery of Sodom and Gomorrah, over the Amalekites, over the Egyptians--even over the Israelites. How they medicated and found other gods easier to worship, all to find their own way to cope until it was over. Raged over the Greeks, the Romans, the Native Americans, Africans, over the Goths and Mongols and Muslims. And Hindus and and Buddhists and Druids and Celts.
And now, over Americans and Europeans and Japanese, content with our things. How little we all think Him and of Him.
And here He is, big and ancient, weeping over us on the one hand, extending the other hand out in reconciliation through Jesus. Yeshua.
I got it that night, that piece of the puzzle that explains my plight--that when Adam and Eve succumbed to temptation, to deception, decided they wanted equality with God even though God did not make them capable of it, I lost something I was created to have and to be.
I was made to walk in a perfect land, full of the delights of my Maker's creation, in perfect, whole oneness with Him. It's not simply that I was made for a Creator to tell me who I am, which I certainly was. But it's more. I was made to walk with Him in Eden, and I got outside of Eden--I got earth.
We are all sick with the bite of the knowledge of good and evil.
The whole infinite universe changed course when humans wanted equality with their authority. Can't you see it? Can't you see it in the infinity of the stars surrounding Earth? It was all made for eternity in Eden. We were never meant for clothes and wooden houses and rectangle beds and processed food. We were never meant for small, green rectangles of paper, or metal boxes on wheels, or concrete or blacktops or machines. We were not meant for guns, germs, or steel. Not institutes or organizations or buildings or offices. It is the thirst for knowledge Adam got us that has brought us this far.
Oh, man can do great things for himself. But the hubris of thinking it's all so great and grand when--he was never made to do it at all! We are so tiny, so minuscule in the greatness of the universe. We want to know it all--I want to know, am driven to find out--but it's the knowledge bug Adam and Eve incepted for us.
They traded Heaven and a complete oneness for knowledge. That's why we usually "don't know what we got till it's gone." We are plagued by the first shadow.
I've been crying out for Eden since I was born. I never knew it until this moment.
That's all. That's the bottom line.
All of it--the search for identity, the overwhelming longing for a mate, the need for beauty and romance and acceptance and a place to fit--all originates there. It's my design. The thirst for adventure, for the woods, for the epic story--I've been running back to Eden in everything!
But...now that Eden is gone, and I know what I have lost, I understand that I was also always running to my Creator. He has worked with us, with our decision, and created a whole new story. It's still wonderful. It's big, and He's the center. We are still the crown of creation. Everything I've learned about Him is still true.
But the bottom line? We weren't made for this.
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