Does God Seem Far Away?預覽

THE SEPARATION 

Well, we all know what happened. Mankind did not keep his part of the bargain. We don’t know how long Adam and Eve lived in perfect fellowship with God in the wonderful garden He’d created for them, but at some point Eve was deceived by the serpent.

As a result, she and Adam disobeyed and did the one thing God asked them not to do—they ate of the fruit. The moment they did, sin entered the earth. And sin did what it always does—it separated man from God.

Think of how tragic this was. Adam and Eve had had perfect, open, loving fellowship with God. When they heard God come walking in the garden every evening, it was their regular practice to run to Him, excited to see Him.

But this time they hid from Him. Suddenly these beings He created for fellowship and communion weren’t there. They had been living in perfect communion and light with God, but now they were transformed into beings of the darkness through disobedience. Instantly, because of sin they were in bondage to the enemy.

I’m not sure that you or I can fully understand the heartbreaking sadness that God experienced as this precious fellowship with His man was broken. This son and daughter He loved so much were now separated from Him. 

God’s glorious creation, those He had crowned with glory and honor, who had endless opportunities to know God and commune with Him, were now stolen away by sin, destroying the dream of God. The wages of sin (you could say “the paycheck for sin”) is death (Romans 6:23), and we have been paying ever since. But it was man himself who allowed death into the earth by disobeying God, and from then on sin has reigned.

Adam and Eve probably didn’t even know, at that moment, the ramifications of what they had thrown away. They didn’t know that they had doomed all of humankind to be in bondage to sin. But God knew. He knew that sin had stolen away His precious prize, His family. With grief, God drove them out of the garden, effectively separating them from Himself.