Okay, so my favorite place to read on the net has to be Stuff Christians Like. Jon is very candid and sarcastic. He makes no pretense to being holier than thou, or anything; but can definitely make me stop and think. He takes the nit-picky stuff we as Christians do, and makes fun of them; all the while saying "Why?"! Anyway, he also has two other sites that I like as well, only they are deeper and not a light read. Today I was catching up on the stuff he's posted since we'd gone on vacation. I came across this thought about God kicking Adam and Eve out of Eden:
"I used to imagine that was how God felt when he kicked Adam and Eve out. That He was enraged and disgusted and overwhelmed with the desire to hurt them. And in the midst of all those negative thoughts, I missed the unbelievable tenderness of the verses.
You probably did not miss it, but I did. I failed to see that by barring Adam and Eve from Eden he was loving them. By preventing them from entering, He was creating a way for them to find Him in the end. For if they ate the tree of life, they would live forever and be apart from God forever. In verse 22, God says, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." They would never die, never know His embrace again.
So the ejection from the Garden wasn't hatred. It was death, because in this case, death was a gift, the gift of one day being reunited with the Lord that loved them enough to allow them to die. "
All I can say is Wow!! I had never really stopped to think about it like that. Just something to think about today...
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2 comments:
Phil thinks about Bible concepts and sees parallels in Tolkien -- no one saw that coming, huh?
Seriously, in the Silmarillion, Tolkien describes the fact that all men die (whereas the elves lived forever unless killed) as a 'strange gift.' The Dark Lord, being dark and all, twists things such that men look upon death as a curse and something to fear.
What a WOW thought to start my day. God disciplined them out of love, just as parents sometime have to "shut the door" on an activity or place or action because we can see where it would lead to down the road. We block our child's immediate desire not out of anger or hate but out of love and the desire to protect. I have to admit the desire is still there even when our children are no longer small.
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