Friday, August 9, 2013

Things you can learn from Genesis: Part seven


The second after sin.
Genesis 3:7
It is amazing that immediately after Adam and Eve choose sin their eyes are opened. They do not die and at this moment they are filled with the knowledge of good and evil. It is imperative that we understand that in God’s economy there are only two kinds of knowledge. You understand them both at once. But to be sure there is no neutral knowledge. This is the way God lays it out. This is His hard word but we must get on board because He makes clear that everything we can know boils down to good or evil. If there were a third option God would have laid that out for us.

This is troubling for most of us because there is so much that feels neutral to us. It is this place where most of us reside. Most of us are not going about our day doing things that are inherently or intuitively evil. But be sure that if it is not something of, by or for God my guess is that it falls under the category of evil. And for me it is a struggle as I write this but I want to fully understand Him, to know His ways and not just be ok with His ways but desire them fully.

Adam and Eve have eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As a result they are changed in an instant and know things that God never intended for them to know. So there is this element of God that He protects us from things we should not know. I get that. I do that all the time with my daughters, especially my oldest who is on the verge of knowing all that the tree of knowledge reveals. So there is something to this knowledge that is not good for us. We were not designed to navigate the reality of the knowledge of good and evil apart from God. That is one really important truth to hold on to. This is why God sends His Son because He understands that the gap is unbridgeable by man and if the gap is not bridged then we hopelessly wander toward darkness and away from light.

From the moment of sin until we see murder is just two births. We don’t know how old Adam and Eve are when Cain and Abel are born. (Both those birth lines become unimportant. Which is really interesting when you think about it.) We do know that Eve gives birth to Seth when Adam is 130 years old. We know they have Seth to replace Abel. It is through the line of Seth that we move toward Noah. Noah is born 1056 years after Adam is created by God or roughly 126 years after Adam dies. From the moment of murder until “the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”(Genesis 6:5) is roughly 1500 years. And since a lifetime at that point was nearly 1000 years that is not too far removed from creation. In truth, we are talking about six hundred years give or take after Adam dies. So the point here is that the knowledge of good and evil without a savior and without the Holy Spirit pretty much leads only to evil. At least according to God.

It is interesting what the first moment after sin reveals.  Genesis 3:7 tells us, “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked.” Isn’t that interesting? The horror that they experienced, the knowledge that was revealed, was that they were naked. There is something more to this than the symbolic revelation of their gender difference.

Here is my take. At the heart of our disconnect from God is an immediate revelation that the flesh has a desire for intimacy.(Lack of a better term) Once there is a disconnect from the creator (loss of intimacy with the Father) this desire is played out in the perversion of what was once pure in the eyes of God. So while all sin in God’s eyes is equally dark the ramifications of sexual impurity has a deeper impact on our hearts. This disconnect is at the heart of our lust. Because we have become separated from God we cannot quench our desire. (Our desire is for intimacy) We are told that in Him is the fullness of Joy. Apart from Him is only darkness so we cannot find the joy we would experience in God, So for whatever reason this unquenchable desire has shown itself throughout history as sexual dysfunction. To be sure we see our sin played out in many areas but we cannot forget that Adam and Eve notice nakedness not idolatry or murder, jealousy or any of the other many possibilities. 

We have seen that our selfishness is usually played out through a sexual dysfunction. It may be something as simple as obsession with personal beauty or something more devastating like fornication, adultery or same sex attraction. These things lead to countless other sin issues. The point here is that this aspect of our sin nature is revealed in the second after the fall.The truth is that the immediate effect of their sin is a devastating loss of the fullness of joy. And that is played out in the revelation of nakedness and shame. At least that's my take.

So Adam and Eve see that they are naked and they desire to be clothed. They want to run and hide, they long to be apart from God not with Him. This is also a critical component of our choosing sin. We have a deep shame that leads us farther from the creator. We literally head in the other direction leading to dark. This is the catch 22 that Jesus came to fix. He came to take our sin and give us His righteousness. Apart from Him there is only dark. And in the dark there is not a path to light. Contrary to what most believe there is only one way out of the dark and His name is Jesus. Without Him you are trapped in the dark forever. In the dark we create an entire system to make dark feel like light. In the beginning we put on some fig leaves and hope God won’t notice. After long enough in the dark we forget that God can even see us. Pretty soon we don’t care that we are naked. In the dark we can’t tell the difference anymore.