3.
One
Rule to Ring Their Necks
Have
you ever sounded like this as a parent? “For heaven’s sake! I give
you one rule – ONE RULE to follow,
and look what happens! WHY was that SO hard to follow?!?
Is there a
parent who’s ever lived who didn’t have that feeling?
So,
God the Father has His first two human children, a.k.a., Adam and his bride (soon to be named Eve). He puts them in
the playpen, a.k.a., the Garden of Eden. They're free to roam around, with very
minimal supervision; they’re not only allowed to interact with any of the
animals or plants but they’ve been given dominion
over all of them; they have a literal Paradise at their fingertips, completely
un-blemished by themselves or any other human, and they’ve only one rule of
significance that Papa has told them to obey: do NOT eat from that there
Tree of Knowledge; got it?
(This sounds like the set-up for a bad
sit-com episode, doesn’t it?)
So,
God goes about His business, and leaves the winsome twosome alone to play. Understand: The Lord is omniscient.
He knows what will happen. But (and
this is me, deigning to project my experiences as a parent upon my Lord) He
is hopeful. Maybe – just maybe!
– they’ll be able to show some resistance. Alas, with the ability to see all of
time as one piece, He already knows otherwise…
And,
sure enough: the serpent deceives the woman, the woman persuades the
man, and when the Father comes back to check on His children, He finds them
hiding behind trees because they’re naked – no,
scratch that: hiding behind trees because they now realize they’re naked, and thanks to the fruit from the only
tree they were forbidden to eat from, they believe this to be an embarrassment.
Think
back to your reaction when you hit
that “I gave you ONE RULE!” moment in your child’s life.
Remember?
Yes, you were upset.
Yes, you were furious.
Yes, you were full of punishments.
But more
than anything, you were disappointed, weren’t
you? Your child should have been smarter than that, right? You trusted
that child! After all, that child came from you – and you would
have been smart and trustworthy enough to have done the right thing… right?
Wouldn’t you?
So
much of our disappointment in our children gets directed back at ourselves. We
see our children as an extension of ourselves – they’re our DNA, we’re the ones raising them, so they should turn out
like us.
Check
that: as better versions of us.
That’s
always our hope, isn’t it? Somehow, we’ll help them avoid the mistakes
that we made as we were growing up, and they’ll turn out so much better
than we did.
So
when they disappoint us, it feels like we’re the one letting them
down. Something in the DNA we gave them was defective; something we forgot to
teach them along the way, something…
Put
yourself in God’s place for a moment: He made Adam in His own image. He made his bride directly from Adam. The two of them were undoubtedly the pinnacle of what He had
created – the most intricate living things, perhaps; but more importantly the only
creatures with the spark of divinity
within them. The animals were amazing manifestations of what His infinite
imagination, their interlocking ‘circle of life’ a masterpiece of intricacy –
not only in their initial setting but as they were allowed to adapt to the
changing circumstances on His earth as time progresses.
But
these humans… They were different.
Oh, anatomically, they’re not
significantly different from the animals. The two humans, however, were infinitely
different from any other creation on earth because they were created in God’s own image – they were given
that spark, that inextinguishable flame that gave them souls, that made their
essence immortal, that gave them the
chance to advance beyond this
temporary form into something more akin to God than anything else on this ball
of mud they occupied. They were, quite possibly, going to grow up to take their
places alongside Him in the eternal sphere we now call Heaven. Unlike
everything else on his planetary creation, Adam and his mate were indeed His heirs.
He had the same high hopes for these two that we have for our own progeny.
And they disobeyed the only rule of
significance He gave them.
Zero for one, right off the bat.
Did He overreact? Most people
on a first reading of Genesis 3 think so: how bad can eating one piece of fruit be that it gets us thrown out of the
Garden of Eden? But we are those same children as Adam and Eve, and we see
the situation through our childlike eyes. Our children don’t understand our
rules, either – “why can’t I play in the
road?”… “When can I use the oven / sharp knives / blender / etc.?”… “Dad, you
never trust me!” And that’s exactly what happened here.
To Eve, it appeared to be just another
tree – apples, pears, figs, fruit of
knowledge – and provoked by the serpent’s clever argument on the topic, she
thought there really didn’t seem
to be anything particularly remarkable about that specific tree. Why shouldn’t we eat from this tree?
Sure, God probably did say not to, but it can’t be THAT bad.
Whereas God the Father had thought, If
they eat from the Tree of Knowledge, they will know what evil is.
If
they know evil, they now have the possibility, and thus the high probability,
of committing evil.
If
they commit evil, they are no longer holy, and I can no longer be near them.
I
will be forever separated from My children.
Big
deal? Indeed. What’s more, consider
the “punishment”:
If
they commit evil and are no longer holy, I cannot allow them to eat of the Tree
of Life anymore. Because…
If
they eat of the Tree of Life, having sinned, they will be forever
separated from Me, not just for the length of mortal lifetimes. Better that
they have to survive outside Paradise and die a natural death.
So,
best to evict them from the Garden entirely, and set up the plan to give them
the chance to come back to Me after their sin-filled lives are concluded:
“Jesus, pack Your bags. You/We’re headed for
Bethlehem…”
God
didn’t send us away from the Garden of Eden to punish us. He did it to save us from an eternal life of sin
away from Him, away from our Father. And then He started the process of
preparing for God the Son’s arrival in Israel.
What’s that, you say? He wasn’t
thinking that far in advance? I beg to differ: Read Genesis 3:15 à “I will put hostility between you and the
woman,” God says to Satan, the serpent, “and between your seed and her seed.” (This is from the
HCSB version.) Understand, women
aren’t usually said to have a “seed”
– that’s the man’s role in the fertilization process. The only time that
He might have to refer to a woman’s “seed” is if the man isn’t
involved at all – say, perhaps in a virgin birth?
That’s right – “her seed” means Jesus. The moment humans disobeyed and
allows Satan to introduce evil to humanity, God’s ready with His preparations
to do an end-around it.
†
So,
as a Parent, what have we learned from God the Father?
If He has a rule,
it’s not a trivial one: He only sets rules that are important for us to follow.
If we break that
rule, His punishment is not meant to be punitive, but in our best
interest. Even our punishment in this case was actually meant to save us from ourselves, from
accidentally adding injury to insult.
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