Falling

Day Six

Falling…

How do I look this child in the face and tell her everything is going to be okay, when the reality all around her says it’s not? When her nine year old frame spins on a planet full of poverty and pain and she knows more than most what this means. When she lives in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the world and bullets don’t stop and ask if you’re too young. When she lives in a community where girls lose childhood innocence far too soon, and she’s knows in her numb heart just how this feels.

I don’t need to tell her about all this spinning sadness, because the scars on her heart have driven it into her soul. She knows. With all the hardness of heart of a veteran of war, she knows. She knows the darkness of violation that no nine year olds should know. She knows that humans flex their ‘free will’ at the expense of hers. She knows. She knows, she feels, she lives, all of this. She knows the dark, and it isn’t light. It weighs heavy on her soul. Just as it does for all of us, spinning on this planet.

Where is the light in all this spinning pitch? Because there are seasons here on this patch of earth when we all worn-out wait, languishing in darkness, searching, straining, scanning the horizon for a thin gold rim of hope.

This is not the world that any of us were dreamt for. This is not the world our fragile human hearts were formed for. It is now our lived reality, but it was not our breath’s beginning. The beginning that was planned for us in a garden long ago.

There was another reality then. Unmixed with fear and pain and thickening dark. A time when light and hope danced all together, when this whole spinning planet spun on chords of love alone. When we were wholly alive in the breath of God in our lungs, living in trusting love, purposeful existence and volitional freedom.

^‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.’ 

Genesis 2:31

It was all very good. All of it. Good and safe and free from all this spinning pain.

   

^“Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” …

…”And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die”.” Genesis 2:8-9, 16-17

There were two trees, and no restrictions were placed on the one that gave life. It was good, it was given.  Adam and Eve had only experienced good. No fear, no sadness, no world of spinning pain. Goodness was their lived reality.

Until this day. This day that will alter every other day from then on. This day that arrives with a hiss on the wind.

“Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” Genesis 3:1

Slithering darkness dresses up in light, twisting truths and winding lies, coiling them around humankind’s ego, stroking deception into their veins, massaging the poison in, “Did God really say…” he hisses planting doubt where had dwelt trust.

Sometimes it is in the absences we truly see what is present, omissions revealing subtle motivations. From the beginning of the second account of creation in Genesis chapter two, the name YHWH is used twelve times describing God’s active personal involvement in His creation. ‘YHWH’ is a proper noun translated in English as ‘the LORD God’, and is the personal name of God. No other name from chapter two onwards is used for God… until this hissing serpent’s speech at the beginning of chapter three.

This serpent slips himself between God and His children and in his words attempts to de-throne God as Lord, using the more impersonal and generic ‘Elohim’, a distancing arms-length name for God, rather than His personal name YHWH, revealing his contempt and rebellion against the Kingship of YHWH.

And Eve, with his whispering ‘did God really say…’ is lured by his words, drawn into deception, drawn to discard ‘LORD’ from her references to God also.

“The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,

but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die”.” Genesis 3:2-3

And right away the disease begins to take hold. Not only does Eve start to refer to God with the same distance and disrespect as the serpent, but she then also begins to twist truth herself, presenting partial truths in her retelling of God’s commands for them.

Where God in His generous abundant grace had said ‘you may freely eat’ (Genesis 2:16) now she reports it simply as ‘you may eat’. Where God had only said they ‘must not eat’, now she adds ‘and you must not touch it’. And when God has said ‘you will certainly die’ she simply says ‘you will die’.

Her exaggerations and omissions make God appear mean. And now the serpent comes to her rescue with an alternative version of the truth, a twisted truth she would much rather hear…

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman.  “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:4-5

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent hisses (and in this statement reveals that He knows exactly what God has said). Where Eve misquotes God (dropping the ‘certainly’) the serpent does not. He simply twists God’s words and makes God look like ‘the bad guy’, claiming He is withholding ‘truth’ and ‘wholeness’ from them.

“You will be like God” he hisses. And were they not already like God? Made in His image? The Devil uses the very thing they are to twist them into something less, wielding partial truth to wreak a full deception.

For Eve to yearn to be like God was not wrong, identifying with God, well, that was the best of her, her spiritual yearning to resemble her Heavenly Father. But she reached for what was right in the wrong way. And herein lies the root of all our problems, the achilles heel of all humankind. Our authentic spiritual yearnings get twisted up in half truths, and half truths fully deceive us. We reach in the wrong directions in an attempt to satiate our authentic yearnings, yearnings for wholeness that can only ever find their true fulfilment in God. Yearnings for love, twist into unhealthy relationships, yearnings for significance twist into selfish ambition, yearnings for purpose twist into drivenness for success. These twisted truths have a strangle-hold on humankind as we are blinded by the slithering whispers of darkness dressed as light.

The whole truth is we are like God because we are made in His image, we are loved because we are God’s children and He loves us, we are significant because we bear His image, we have purpose because He has given us a vocational calling.

The whole truth is that all our yearnings are at the root, yearnings for only what God can provide. And this is perhaps then the greatest irony in human history: the one relationship that would satiate all our inner yearnings is the one we now push away.

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” Genesis 3:6-7

Human eyes are opened to the darkness and they begin to cover up and hide. Shame for the first time enters human vocabulary; authenticity and true freedom are replaced by alienation and fear.

‘Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” ‘ Genesis 3:8-9

Where are you?

This first question in the Bible is the first question God always asks, asks them and asks us… ‘Where are you?’. 

God knew exactly where they were. He was giving them a chance to name it for themselves, just as He asked them to name the animals now He asked them to name their fear, their sin, their disobedience. The way we name things reveals where our heart is. Our failure to name in truth reveals the truth of where we are at. Adam answers in partial truth, a trick he learned from the hiss on the wind.

‘He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Genesis 3: 10-11

God knows once more the answer to His question, but He always gives this chance, this chance for naming, for remorse, for repentance. And Adam,  shifting the blame, throws Eve under the bus.

‘The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”’ Genesis 3:12

In one breath he blames both God and Eve, not using the intimate name of either, distancing himself from both. And then Eve follows suit by shifting blame to the serpent.

‘Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”’ Genesis 3:13

It wasn’t just Adam and Eve’s choice to take the fruit that set the chain reaction of brokenness into action, it was that in choosing to replace the love and worship of God with anything other than Him at the centre they took out the foundation stone of all creation, and the beating heart core of all humanity, and then tried to live without it. 

Nothing we try to prop up our humanity with can replace the foundation stone of God Himself, and we forever fall without Him.

All peace is broken and all wholeness in pieces, at the foot of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And all this pain floods into this spinning world. 

And the battle rages all around us now, all around us and within us, good verses evil, light verses dark, always boiling down to this one repeating choice: The love of God as the foundation of our humanity or something else, trust in God’s way of seeing things, or another way, our own way; eyes wide open to the dark. Because everything truly good is of God and everything evil, the absence of Him.

Human life has become a tug of war, and our arms wrench and teeth clench and pain is the only outcome from this tear, the tear between who we are formed to be and who we have become, the tear between our Imago Dei and our grasping after dark.

And like the leaves Adam and Eve plucked to use to cover their shame, they have plucked themselves and all future generations from the tree of life. They still breathe, but their slow death has begun in the long listless fall to the forest floor.

“All of us have become like one who is unclean,

    and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;

we all shrivel up like a leaf,

    and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”

Isaiah 64:6

There were two trees. There are always two trees, and now almost unknowing, we bend towards the dark. But though we bend towards brokenness we know what good looks like. By the grace of God there is still good, the gold threads remain, the wheat with the tares, the sheep with the goats, the light in the darkness. 

Now all that remains is to wait for the light…

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light;

on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.”

Isaiah 9:2

There were two trees.

But there would also one day be a third.

Within humanity’s curse that day in the first garden long ago, there had been a hidden message, folded into the words of loss, were hid the words of hope…

“So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock

    and all wild animals!

You will crawl on your belly

    and you will eat dust

    all the days of your life.

And I will put enmity

    between you and the woman,

    and between your offspring and hers;

he will crush your head,

    and you will strike his heel.”

Genesis 3: 14-15

The word ‘offspring’ also means seed. Buried within these words of loss lay the seed of hope. A seed of hope planted deep in darkness, a holy seed that will one day become the shoot of a sawn off stump (Isaiah 6:13), a tender shoot growing in dry ground (Isaiah 53:1-3) that will be struck on the heal by death, only to turn death on it’s head. A seed that will fall to the ground and die (John 12:24), and in doing so become a tree of life. The third tree.

How do I look this child in the face and tell her everything is going to be okay when the reality all around her says it’s not?

Because this reality of darkness will not have the final word.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” 

John 1:1-5

  

Journey Further 

Pluck a leaf from a tree today and rest it somewhere, on your window sill, your table or mantle piece, to remind you: This is where we were at. Living, but separated from the life of God…

“All of us have become like one who is unclean,

    and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;

we all shrivel up like a leaf,

    and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”

Isaiah 64:6

Consider for yourself today. In what ways have your right yearnings for love, significance, freedom and purpose been usurped by brokenness. How have you reached for the right things in the wrong ways? What has been the impact?

There is no way around the brokenness of humankind. No matter how we try, we cannot fix this.

God doesn’t expect us to. Without Him.

“ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

John 1:1-5

What response rises in your heart to the message in this verse?