The story of Adam and Eve is familiar to many of us. Or is it? There are different versions of understanding of this story. This article asks questions and is looking at this story from our Father's point of view. Please open your bible and read with me as we go through it.
Please read Genesis 3:1 - 9
Q. Look at the beginnings of failed relationship in Genesis 3:1-9 and ask “what is happening here? “. Who closed off, man or God?
Separation or not?
Q. What were you taught about this story?
Most of us seem to have been taught something of the Roman Catholic doctrine of original sin. This doctrine majors on God having to break fellowship with man because He cannot tolerate or be associated with sin. He is a Holy God who cannot be defiled and man is a worm who can never achieve His standard etc.
We can see that in fact it is not God who breaks fellowship, but man. God, on the other hand comes looking for them in a non confrontational way. He could have appeared in front of them and confronted them with what they had done, but He discretely appears at a distance and lets them hear Him coming, calling to them as He comes. They are the ones who hide from Him and He gently gives them space to be all they are now being in the disempowering shame of self condemnation.
Q. How much of all that happens do you believe God knows and sees?
He knows all that they have done and knew in advance that it would happen.
The caring Father
Q. What is the nearest behaviour pattern to this that we experience in the natural frame?
I think you will agree that it is the good caring father that this portrays. The father that does not abandon His children when they do not take his good advice, but does His best to help while giving them the room they need to make their own decisions and to be who they are without dominating them. This reveals such a gentle, understanding and caring heart. He even kills animals and prepares skins for them Himself in Genesis 3:21 to meet their perceived need. The thing you must be asking as I have is “why?”
The answers lie in previous verses. If we look at Genesis 2:19 we see God bringing the animals to Adam “to see what he will call them”. This portrays a self determination decision making ability of man. God has not created Adam to be a puppet, or a robot, or even predictable. There is a quality about this Adam and it is the creative quality. God Himself is the great creator who cannot help but create and He has passed this family characteristic on to the man creatures that are created in His image and after His likeness.
Look at Genesis 1:26, 27 and see the way that man is created. God takes some dust and forms it into flesh and blood and then breathes into it and a man is made. What do we know about the word ‘breath’ in Hebrew? That it is the same word as is used for spirit, so we can translate this that God took some dust, formed into flesh and blood and then spirited into it after His own likeness and in His image.
Q. What does Jesus say that God is like? What is the substance of God?
The answer is in John 4:24 “God is a Spirit and those who worship Him must do so in spirit and in truth”. So the likeness of God and the image of God must be primarily of the spirit part of us, not in terms of flesh, or body that we seem to have fixations about in our thinking and our attempts to understand this.
What was Adam really like?
Q. What is the commission of Adam in Genesis 2:16.?
What he is to do is dress and keep the Garden of Eden. If we put this with Genesis 3:17-19 we see that it was done by Adam without sweat or toil. The nearest I have been able to place the garden is a plain near the Caucasus Mountains that is ringed with mountains and is very large. To have kept this place without sweat or toil, Adam will have been very powerful so that he could do this by thinking about it and speaking it into place just as God does. I believe that just as with Jesus on the mountain, they would have been clothed in light, and the mistake they made caused them to lose that.
Current Christian thinking also places a distance between God and us. The truth is found in a revelation to Isaiah in chapter 66:1. The earth is God’s footstool. He cares so much for His family that He has made the earth a footstool in His throne. All thrones have footstools built into them to have a step to step up into them and a place to rest the feet on when sitting in it. We couldn’t be very much closer to Him and in fact have all of our existence around His feet, where He can watch over us constantly because He wants a family like Him and cares so very much for each of us.
Q. What do you think our heavenly Father is really like?