Thoughts on Hebrews: God's Rest, Part 4

In trying to reach an understanding of God’s rest, we have spent a fair amount of time examining the contours of sin and sins. I would like to be done with that subject, but it’s important to treat one other aspect of sin to lay the groundwork for understanding why God became angry enough to swear that they—the freed Jewish people of that first generation—would never enter into His rest.

To do that we have to return to the beginning where God’s goodness is seen and felt. God has created this lovely place with springs, and rivers, and creeks, and streams, with lakes, and tidal pools, and bays, and seas, and oceans, with plains, and hills, and valleys, and high mountain peaks, and low mountain ranges, with blue skies, and gray skies, and red, and orange, and purple skies, with grasses, and plants, and hedges, and trees—and all of this filled with living things, winged things, flying things, crawling things, and creeping things, and with things that leap, and run, and walk together, and sometimes apart—and all of this life reflecting different beauty in different seasons, days, and years. The woods has one beauty, the desert another. The mountains have one beauty, the shore still another. There are wonders in the heavens at night, and wonders in the earth by day. Indeed we can find no end to God’s creative expression in the things that are seen with the naked eye and with all the instruments science has provided.

And in this grand and glorious world, He planted a garden and there He put man whom he had formed. The garden was a special effort of God’s. And the man was a special creation. In him was the breath of life, God’s breath in man-shaped earth—bearing the image of God. What a thing to consider!

What made the garden special was God came and spent time with the man. God hallowed the garden. It was set apart not simply by the act of planting it; but He intended the garden to be a seed bed for an ever growing relationship with God. And God gave the man a special beauty; the man was to live life together with another, and not alone, in similar fashion to the Us and Our in “let us make man in our own image.” Man was to learn love and union with God on the one hand and with the woman on the other.

If you cannot see that whole of creation was made out of His love, and humanity was formed out His love, and we were meant to experience and reflect His love, then I cannot help you. You won’t understand His rest.

The man was faced with a choice. Would he accept all the things he could see as God’s love towards raising the man up in His image, as a son, or would he conclude instead that God wanted servants, slaves even? Was God looking for familial devotion or servile fear? Would God be someone to run to, to cling to even? Or someone to run away from and hide? Would a simple command invite trust or mistrust? Would the man love God freely out of his heart? Or would he think God a harsh taskmaster? Could he see his life growing in God into something more than his young heart could ever imagine? Or would he see God crowding out his life—and independence would be the only answer?

This incomplete list of questions confronts us still. Many still stumble over these just as Adam and Eve did with similar results.

Ultimately, the man had to answer what would be sacred. God had made a special place, a beautiful place, made that much more lovely by His footsteps in the cool of the evening, by His budding relationship over the naming of the animals, by His sensitivity to the man’s need for a companion like himself, by His fashioning a wonderful someone for him. These are loving gestures, acts of love, overtures of love.

The critical test was whether the man will see the prohibition against eating from the one tree as an act of love.

Unfortunately, the man could not see the command as love too. And so the man threw over the entire thing—he desecrated God’s overtures of love, profaned the garden, and rejected God himself as someone with whom to grown in relationship.

The man chose a life grounded in his own judgment of right and wrong (remember he had to decide to eat the fruit before he ate it); he elevated his own desires over God’s desire for him. And that after God had given to the man in extraordinary ways out of His goodness.

I’ll leave you with this. God came to the man after he made his own choices about what was best for him. Look at what God first said. Adam, where are you?

Adam, where are you? That’s incredible. God first tries to bring the man to himself, so that he can come back to God and build a relationship again. Man begged off and was not ready to confess and repent. He would have to leave the garden and intimacy with God. The cherubim and the flaming sword made certain the man understood he would not find the way back to God. He had no such power or authority in himself.

The only hope the man had were the garments of skins God himself had made for the man and the woman—a loving gesture while man must work the ground from which he was taken—something to remember God by. That gesture would have to suffice for now. A small but significant glimmer of hope.

Image courtesy of Unsplash and Doruk Yemenuci