Characters of CreationSample

Imagine Adam. Imagine the surreal whiplash he experienced in those moments after the fall. He and Eve went from being naked and unafraid to totally exposed before the God of the universe, to a level of knowledge and experience that only ever brought pain. In a moment he saw it all come to an end. Imagine the weight of guilt in his heart at what he had wrought. Imagine the regret he would feel as he watched his sons and daughters inflicted by the consequences of his own actions. How he would long, in the hundreds of years he would live beyond this day, for those good old days. How he would replay in his mind the conversations with the serpent. How he would beat himself for his sins.

But there was no escape, no hiding, no retreat from where he was now. None of us can imagine what it was like, what it must have been like, to be Adam. We can’t know what it would be like to wake up in Eden and to be kicked out by God’s fiery angels.

And yet we do know what it’s like to carry around guilt. Like Adam, we look back longingly what we’ve lost: the bad decisions, the failed relationships, the sins we’ve indulged. We see the widening chasm between what we should be and who we really are. We lie awake at night and replay our lives and lament the fallout of our sins on our kids, our neighbors, our friends. We ache and long for that home, for those good old days, for a relationship with our Creator.

Maybe you are standing like Adam in the wake of your own mess. Maybe you are naked and exposed, crushed under the weight of your sins. I hope in these pages you can hear the distant call, the cry from Eden to Nazareth to Calvary, of the One who is calling you, beckoning you to look up, to come home. Genesis 3 doesn’t have to be the end of your story. God seeks you in your despair, having sent Jesus to take on the weight of sin while we were “still sinners”.

This is the real story of Genesis. The story begins with Adam’s first breath, breathed into his nostrils by the Creator, winds its way through the story of Israel, as the same Spirit that breathed on the waters in creation is promised by the prophets to come and breathe new life into a new people. On a cruel Roman cross, the second Adam would breathe His last breath so that we could be saved, and yet would shake off death, rising again to breathe new life into those who believe.