Genuine consequences and a new matrix

The crushing tragedy for human history is that the effects of the choice Adam and Eve made were not only a personal matter between them and God. It had cosmic repercussions and affected the entire matrix of how things were.

God outlines what will now happen to Adam and Eve, not because, having been wronged, he is meting out punishment, but because he is explaining what life will look like within the new matrix. For woman, giving birth and raising children will be difficult and painful. Her relationship with her husband will be hard work, strained even, as she seeks to be the support and helper for him God created her to be, but as he now will tend to take the upper hand. For man, work will become toil and burdensome. Work would no longer be a joy. There would be stress and strain, disappointment and frustration as man ekes out a living and tries to find some sort of meaning in it as his life ebbs away and he realises that really he is dust and will return to being dust.

I grew up believing that because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in going against God’s instructions, He became angry with humans for their insolent disobedience. I grew up believing that God cut himself off from them, not because he doesn’t love them anymore, but because in his holiness and his perfection he is no longer able to live in relationship with man who has now become less than perfect. I always imagined God’s holiness to be a sort of pure existence, sterile almost, that can’t bear contamination or imperfection of any kind which is why he had no other choice but to cut himself off from man until ... well, until when? Until man could prove he was really sorry? Until the conditions were met that allows man to be, or at least be considered as, untainted again, until somehow a solution could be found by which man could get ‘cleaned up’ so he can once again enter God’s clean and  sterile presence?  

The way I look at it now, I see that I was looking at it the wrong way round! Of course God was deeply hurt by Adam and Eve’s choice. There is even a sense in which God was angry, the same way we would be angry if our own children turned their back on us and walked away from us. But God was not inventing a punishment for his beloved children because he was angry. He was not being spiteful, wanting them to see what they had done to him (and better be sorry!). It was not about retribution.

All of Scripture portrays a God who, although humanity turns their back on him, continues to pursue her with his Love. In Scripture we find a God who gets himself dirty and who remains involved with humanity, despite their indifference, despite their rejection of him. We find a God who continues to offer the choice to respond to his Love and return into relationship with him until the opportunity for doing so is no more and man makes his ‘final answer’.