Garden of Eden

Notes from Sunday's sermon, March 12, 2011

I tried to look at Genesis 3 this week with a little different perspective.  Genesis 3 is the story of the temptation and sin of Adam and Eve.  After they eat the forbidden fruit, I think we often read God's responses as if they were driven solely by wrath or anger or judgment (kind of the knee-jerk reaction most of us would have, I suppose).  But is there another possibility?  Is there a note / a thread / a whole stream of sadness or disappointment in the way God responds to Adam and Eve?  Consider these possibilities:

God, the loving Father, made and created a world that was "very good", Adam and Eve as the crown of creation, and a special place in that world for them to live and enjoy His company.  When His beloved children unleashed the tsunami of sin into this perfect world, would He have responded only with anger - "Adam, WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU!!!!?" - or with concern, like a mother looking for a lost child - "Adam, please come out; I'm so worried about you.  Adam, please!"

As Adam and Eve shuffled their feet and made their excuses, could it be that God's sadness was growing more quickly than His anger?

God unleashes His anger on the snake, so that forever afterward the very characteristics with which He blessed the snake in creating it would now be the signs of its curse.

But He doesn't curse Adam or Eve.  In His disappointment and sorrow that His loving fellowship with His beloved children is irretrievably changed, He speaks to them (with a catch in His voice and tears in His eyes?).  To Eve and her daughters He says, "from now on you'll be focused on your relationships with men" and to Adam and his sons He says "from now on you'll be focused on your work."

But He doesn't leave them there.  He promises salvation in the first promise of Jesus.  He takes away their pitiful, temporary efforts to camouflage their nakedness and covers them with coverings He provides.  He sends them out of the garden to protect them from (accidentally? deliberately?) someday eating the Tree of Life and living forever with the pain and sorrow of their sin.  Now they, and we, get to die someday and leave this vale of tears.

Was there sadness in God's heart on the day Adam and Eve sinned?  or just anger?

But surely He is the God who is love, who sent Jesus to the cross because He loved us, and who gives us the gift of salvation and eternal life because He loves us. 

And I think it is precisely because of His love that His actions that fateful day were not only driven by wrath or anger, but also driven by His great love for His children, His great sadness at their sin, and His great plan and hope for their restoration.

The preview of that restoration is in Revelation 22.  Thanks be to God!