Jesus Our Truth
The Bible says in Genesis Chapter 3:
Adam and Eve heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?”
So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.” And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?”
The translation here needs come clarification.
Let me give all the relevant Hebrew meanings, then we will re-translate the passage.
The word - ‘heard’ - comes from the Hebrew word - shema - which means ‘hearing heart.’
The word - ‘sound’ - comes from the Hebrew - cole - which means ‘voice.’
The words - ‘cool of the day’ is very misleading. The words in the Hebrew are - ruach hay-yom - which means ‘Spirit in continuance.’
So the more literal translation of this passage is:
Adam and Eve’s hearing heart heard the voice of the Lord in the continuance of the Spirit.
Essentially, the voice of the Spirit was continually yearning and beckoning to Adam and Eve, seeking to draw them into intimate fellowship, saying - “where are you?”
“Where are you?”
“Where did you go?”
“Why have you separated yourself from Me?”
“Why are you hiding?”
You can almost hear the Father’s heart breaking
The presence of the Lord, the searing hot, unrelenting, desire of God; His faithful, never ceasing love, was seeking fellowship with His beloved. But they had moved. Their hearts had shifted.
God had not changed His view of Adam. But Adam had changed his view of God. Adam had re-labelled God. And the Presence of God was exposing the lie, the perversion, the bankruptcy, the misery, the state of non-being that Adam and Eve had fallen into. And so…they hid. We have been hiding ever since. The way Adam and Eve saw themselves had been altered. The way they saw God had been shattered.
Adam had judged God. He re-defined who God was. God was now Judge and not Father.
And, Adam had judged himself. He created a new identity for himself that began with, “I am naked.”
But God’s response to Adam was far from judgement. The question needs to be asked - who judged who in the Garden? It was Adam that left HOME. His relational centre. Yet God has never stopped looking for us, moving towards us and seeking to bring us back HOME. To get home, God knew we would need a road map.
You see, Jesus didn’t just come to deal with our sin. Jesus came because we had forgotten who God was and what manner of existence we were designed to be. The incarnation is God’s journey into the far country of our delusion to find us, to redeem us, and convince us of His love for us, and who we really are as sons and daughters of His beloved Creation. Adam had projected his own pain onto God’s face and now God was no longer the Source of his life. God was the source of his rejection, judgement and pain.
God didn’t changed in His posture of love towards Adam. But Adam had changed in his. However, it was God’s problem to solve. Adam was imprisoned in a world of self-consciousness, self-centredness, self-authoring and independent truth making. His psycho-neural instincts had clicked in. Instead of intimacy with God filling him with peace and joy - his fight and flight response was activated and the thought of God had become adversarial. He believed the lie that He was separate from God and better off that way. As a result, Adam, and the generations that followed, moved away from God and now a great ugly ditch had emerged between who God actually was and who Adam believed God to be. The truth about God was now veiled, and God’s heart will constantly be misunderstood.
The new psycho-neural centre of Adam - his fallen source of inner truth making - is now projecting its own broken images of self and God onto the face of God. Anxiety is Adam’s new pivot point. Freeing humanity from this anxiety is now God’s new goal. But it can’t be imposed. It must be chosen. Something has to die in Adam so his originally designed, freewill, self-surrendering centre can be re-birthed. For without Adam’s freewill inner surrender to a loving, self-giving relationship with God, this freedom from anxiety is impossible to achieve.
And, if God wasn’t Adam’s adversary; He was, at best, his benefactor.
Humankind’s inner script becomes - “I want God in my life - in so far as He would bless my plans, my dreams, my thinking, my ideas of what the good life needs to be. But only on my terms. What I believe goodness is. How I define the good life and what those priorities should be will be my criteria. If God approves my definitions of things. Then fine. I will accept His presence and His blessing.”
But this couldn’t further from the actual TRUTH of the relationship that the Father had designed for His children. This new definition is transactional at best. There is an abundantly loving, abiding, circle of self-giving partnership that is shared by the Father, Son and Spirit that is our highest good and our original inheritance as sons and daughters of the Father. This is our true Source of LIFE. But we are lost in our lies, myths and delusions of truth.
And we need a way to find HOME again
Right from the very beginning of our departure from His design, the Father has said a resounding and resolute…NO!
NO! My Creation will not fall by the wayside and be lost to Me. I am coming to find them.
And so God Himself came into the far country of our lostness. The Truth about God’s love for us would clothe themselves in actual physical presence. The Word of God becomes Jesus, a human being, a Jew, a son of Adam. Jesus walks the earth in face to face unbroken fellowship with God the Father. The exact opposite of a hiding in the bushes! Adamic existence will be thoroughly converted to God. The fall of Adam and Eve will be completely undone. The enslaving lie of the serpent will be decisively defeated.
Divine Truth; not the illusions and mythologies of the devil and human psycho-neural invention, will be re-birthed into the Earth in an act of New Creation. Jesus will live out His divine Sonship from within our fallen Adamic existence, and forge a real and abiding relationship, a re-union, between God and humankind. Jesus came and ‘earthed’ the original design of our humanity, our eternal Trinitarian fellowship and relationship, bringing all of Creation back into the never-ending circle of divine fellowship.
Essentially, as Baxer Kruger says it, ‘the Trinity set up shop within human existence.’ The Son of God entered Adams estranged and alienated mind. He put on our flesh and lived out His perfect Sonship from within Adam’s fallen skin. His life ‘hammered out’ the obedience of a perfect Son. His death and resurrection meant He entered the furtherest reaches of our separation from the Father and, from the inside out, rebirthed our human flesh into new life.
What happens when LIFE itself gets on the inside of death, darkness and lies? It defeats it; as easily as light overcomes the dark, by swallowing up the existence of darkness once and for all. Life always overcomes death. No contest. And unlike Adam, divine life can never be intimidated or separated from its Source of Truth and Existence. The lie of death (separation) falls to the ground like an empty bedsheet. The Author of faith, and Perfecter of faith, stands in the midst of Adamic flesh and calls back into being our original design and fellowship within the Trinity.
