In my last blog I introduced this subject, you should read the one first if you haven't already. In this blog we begin to see God's perspective on this world. We could not know God's perspective, but He has revealed it in the Bible so that we can know and understand. The Bible reveals the following ...
1) God created a good world. In Genesis 1, we are told five times that God created this world GOOD. That means, He is responsible for creating a GOOD world and NOT a war-torn, famished, polluted, broken, disease-ridden, messed up, chaotic world of pain and misery. There was none of that in the world He created, nothing in it to spoil it. No sickness, suffering, disease, disaster or death, no human wickedness, no injustice, no pain - just good - that is the world God created. If we are going to complain about the Christian God - then we cannot attribute the creation of a messed up world to Him - that is not the God of the Bible. He created a good world.
2) God created the first ever human couple, Adam and Eve. Their life (like ours) came from God and was sustained by Him. He provided for them a beautiful, harmonious and pristine world to live in and it was only good in every way. He literally provided everything for them!
3) Now this next bit people often don’t like, but it has to be said because it is just true. That is, because He created everything Himself, including Adam and Eve, He rightfully owns everything. He owned Adam and Eve. In fact, since we were all "In Adam", God rightfully owns you and me too. We are not our own, we did not make ourselves. Back to Adam and Eve ... And because He owned them, He had every right to give them His law - and He did. The law was,
“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 2:16,17)
4) This law was not hard to keep. The fruit from just one tree in the whole world was forbidden. They had everything else. God made everything, He is perfectly right to reserve anything He makes for Himself, since it is His in the first place, He is not obliged to give us absolutely everything and it is unreasonable and ungrateful to expect everything. But anyway, God never gave that rule for nothing.
5) In giving this rule or law, God did a number of important things.
a) God exercised His authority. God is God! We should obey Him simply because He is the Authority. Our godless, modern thinking hates authority. The idea that we should obey someone just because of who they are strikes at the our prideful hearts. “Give me one good reason why I should obey you!” we say. God’s answer is simple, “Because I Am GOD!”. The Bible tells us that by His word He created the heavens and the earth. Imagine the power of His word. That we would dare defy, reject and rebel against Him would be laughable if it was not so dangerous. We should obey, simply because God has spoken.
b) This rule was necessary for Adam and Eve’s humanity. The fact that God gave them a command, meant that they had a choice about obeying God or not. We have that choice today. There are two reasons parents want their own children to obey them.
(1) Because parents love their children. The rules parents give are to keep their beloved children safe and for their ultimate flourishing.
(2) Parents want children to obey them, because the obedience of a child to a parent is an expression of trust in the parent. That is to say, the child obeys because the child loves the parent. Imagine your child only obeyed you because they had no other option. The very fact that they can go against you but choose not to, speaks of their love and appreciation of you. They freely choose you.
That is what God’s law enabled Adam and Eve to do.
5) He gave them the choice of living in that pristine world under His rule and authority, or they could reject His authority. But to reject God’s authority is to reject God Himself, because He is ultimate authority.
To reject His authority is to take control of our own lives with ourselves as the highest authority. We become God’s of our own lives - the Bible calls this idolatry. We cannot do that without taking control of God’s world too - because, we carry out our defiance and rebellion by doing what we want in His world and with His world - as if it is ours to do as we please.
The problem here is, though we (human kind) want to act like we are gods, we are not. The truth is, we cannot govern and control this world with justice and in harmony. We cannot sustain it or hold it together. Our limited power, wisdom and understanding means we are ignorant of how to govern this world and our universe. That is why we have so completely trashed it. That is why there is so much human misery. The world is falling apart and so are we.
It is a strange thing but, this world is in desperate need of God to intervene, yet still mankind denies and rejects Him. No wonder the Martyrs in the book of Revelation cry out … “How long O Lord, How long?”
Part 3 to follow soon.
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