Different Bodies: Part One

  A Twilight Musing

I have long been intrigued by the question of how things would have developed had Adam and Eve not eaten of the forbidden fruit and been banished from Eden.  One can exercise some inferential imagination by envisioning a world without the known consequences of sin. Attached to those inferences are some questions: Would Adam and Eve and their descendants have lived forever, absent the penalty of death?  Would the innocence of universal nakedness have continued?  If so, it’s hard for us fallen people to imagine there being no sexual desire except for one’s mate.  God arranged the union between Adam and Eve; how would the monogamous coupling of their descendants have been arranged?  Would reproduction be unlimited?  With no need to produce food by the sweat of their brows, would human beings have been engaged in other activities, such as creative, artistic, and scientific pursuits?

These questions may seem to be idle speculation, but I think they lead into matters of some significance.  All of the questions I have posed above are based on the assumption that there existed in the pristine world of Eden an expectation of purposeful and orderly development over a period of time.  God Himself looks in this direction when He tells the newly-created man and woman, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28).  Things in the original creation were expected to change in ways designed by God to fulfill His nascent purposes for this new world of His.   Since any kind of change requires the observed passage of time, it seems legitimate to infer that there was a kind of positive temporality in the prelapsarian world that in the postlapsarian world became a degenerative penalty.

Perhaps the best way of getting some sense of God’s original plan for Edenic fulfillment is to consider the implications of the two trees placed in the Garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life (Gen. 2:9).  We find out after Adam and Eve have eaten from the forbidden tree that God took precautions against their also eating from the Tree of Life.

Then the Lord God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—" 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.  (Gen 3:22-24)

To me, this passage implies that, had Adam and Eve not disobeyed God, there might have been a time for them to partake of both trees under God’s direction.  It seems not unreasonable to conjecture that the Lord wanted unfallen mankind, under His timing and direction, to become aware of the presence of evil in the universe so that He could equip them to partner with Him in the final defeat of that evil, and thereby be ready in the full maturity of their existence to eat of the Tree of Life.

At any rate, I think that God created the physical world as a kind of theater in which to do battle with the Devil.  We have some biblical hints of a battle in Heaven between God and his angels and Satan and his cohorts, in which God by His superior power cast a rebellious Satan down from his exalted position in Heaven (see Ezek. 28:11-19; Rev. 13:7-12).  The most familiar literary rendition of this battle is of course in Books V and VI of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Although his narrative of the epic battle in Heaven exercises the privilege of poetic imagination, it nevertheless presents a drama that may very well have taken place in some form before the creation of Eden.  This was a victory of God’s power, but it remained to provide a setting in which Satan could be confronted with the moral superiority of God, which could take place only in an arena where God’s love could be triumphant over Satan’s hate.  Exactly how that would have worked out if the Creation had not been corrupted by human sin, we don’t know, of course; but it’s hard to imagine how it could have had more dramatic or emotional impact than God’s “backup plan,” in which He participated in the suffering of the sinful world, even becoming a mortal human being and dying in order to redeem the fallen world.

This little essay (Part One) represents a refinement of ideas I have held in rough form for some time.  My central point here is that God’s created world, both before and after the Fall, is in marked contrast to His eternal being, which has no beginning and no end and is perpetually and always the same, yesterday, today, and all possible tomorrows.  As God’s inherent nature is immutable, so is the place where we will dwell with Him in resurrected form for eternity (see the description of the New Jerusalem in Rev. 21-22).  “Heaven” is where all divine purposes have been realized, and there is no longer the need for change toward an objective.  The catalyst for this refinement of my ideas on original and fallen creation was a rereading of Paul’s discourse on the Resurrection in I Cor. 15, in which he details the radical contrast between the temporal bodies of the first humans and the eternal bodies that we will share with the resurrected Christ.  Part Two is an analysis of this passage, with application of the principles Paul enunciates to the larger matter of the radical difference between the temporal earth and our eternal dwelling place with God.

Image: By William Blake - William Blake Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7735228

Ambiguous Nakedness

A few months ago, I alluded to the following poem:

“And they realized they were naked . . . .”

(Gen. 3:7)

What mystery was shrouded

By the fig leaves of our forebears?

Primordial tailors,

Their hands’ first fallen craft

Was born of shame,

The name of sin but freshly formed.

Why that immediate, desperate need

To cover their suddenly secret parts?

Their hearts alone have known

Both nakedness with innocence

And clothing worn in guilt.

For us, their heirs,

Only cloaked desire

Mingled with pain.

                                                     Elton D. Higgs

                                                     Oct. 1, 2009

In speculating about what life in the Garden of Eden was like before the Fall, we can only project the other side of the coin from the present state of evil that we know all too well.  Of course, we have the picture of the eternal state in Rev. 21 and 22, in which there will be no death, no disease, no sorrow or weeping, no environmental disorders to disrupt and destroy life.  But what is the flip side of the evils attendant on our sexual desires?  We must assume that Adam and Eve’s becoming “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) meant that their relationship before the Fall involved sexual intercourse.  The perfection of their sexual intimacy seems to have been symbolized by their uninhibited, shameless nakedness (Gen. 2:25).  It is also significant that the first consciousness of their changed state after they had eaten of the forbidden fruit was that “they knew they were naked” and felt compelled to cover up their genitals.  The first victim of lost innocence was the unalloyed enjoyment of sex.

It’s also interesting that Adam and Eve’s recognition of their nakedness had immediate spiritual consequences, causing Adam to hide from God (Gen. 3:10).  Surely it was not merely his physical nakedness that Adam didn’t want God to see, but at a deeper level, he was not able to endure God’s looking at the nakedness of his now-corrupted soul.  God Himself makes the connection between the two levels of being unclothed: “Who told you that you were naked?  Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?” (Gen. 3:11).  Adam would not have known he was physically naked had he not first exposed himself spiritually by his disobedience to God.  The easy pleasure of walking with God in the Garden gave way to the agony of feeling Yahweh’s searching eyes.  The protection of innocence had been permanently torn away.

Among the judgments God pronounced on Adam and Eve and their progeny were two things relating to the couple’s  new-found knowledge of their nakedness (which was, by extension, a painful awareness of sexual vulnerability).  First, He made pain a part of child-bearing and declared that wives would be dependent upon their husbands and be ruled over by them.  Secondly, God provided clothing of animal skins for Adam and Eve to replace the crude fig-leaves they had sewn together for themselves.  Herein we see God on the one hand administering severe discipline to the fallen couple, and on the other showing His mercy and provision, giving symbolic assurance that though they had foolishly and perversely thrown aside the beautiful and unproblematic existence God had given them in Eden, He was still with them, if in humility they accepted God’s judgment and submitted to His commands.  Even in the face of the painful consequences of their sin, they could recover some of the beauty of the innocent nakedness they had experienced with God before they fell.

What might be some instruction we can take from these observations?  First, the sexual communion that came naturally to Adam and Eve in the Garden now has to be worked at by men and women in the fallen world.  The nakedness that they took for granted has to be re-embraced by married couples as a wholesome part of their experience and cherished as a mark of the intimacy that God intends for those who are committed to each other in covenant relationship with Him.

Second, the emotional bond that must have been natural between Adam and Eve is challenged in our fallen state.  God’s decree that a wife is to expect and accept dependence on her husband and be subject to him is very problematic, especially in our egalitarian society.  This dynamic is reinforced in the New Testament (Eph. 5:22-33), of course, so how is a spiritually committed but enlightened couple to work this out?  In the Ephesians passage, the wife’s submission is balanced by the husband’s sacrificial care, and Paul refers back to what Genesis says about the initial relationship between Adam and Eve, that they were to “become one flesh” (v. 31).  For this to occur in the fallen state, the woman has to resist using sex to gain power, and the man has to resist using his power selfishly.  Each must work at respecting and enhancing the other.

As reflected in the last lines of the poem above, sexual desire in fallen humankind is experienced ambiguously as “cloaked desire / Mingled with pain.”

Married couples need to realize that although physical and spiritual nakedness with each other is risky, it can be joyful, too, if undertaken with the assurance that the God who disciplines is also the God who redeems.  God is able and willing to use our ambiguous nakedness as an avenue to tasting even in this vale of tears a bit of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

Image: By Thomas Cole - Unknown, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=182975

Greater Than the Mess

Several days ago, during my morning devotional time with my wife, we were talking about some disturbing things in our domestic life and in the nation, and I ended up saying, “Boy, what a mess!” I then opened up a book of daily readings that I use, and the headline for the meditation of the day was “Greater than the Mess!” We both responded with a laugh and a rush of amazement at how God often gives comfort and instruction in unexpected ways. We talked later about personal and biblical experiences of God’s showing Himself to be “greater than the mess.” The most notable of these in our life was the time in the mid ‘90s when we were under great stress from caring for our emotionally troubled daughter and her young child, whom we had adopted at birth. Our home was in disarray because of the complexities and pressures of our situation, and we were desperate for relief. As my wife commented, “One of us is going to wind up in an institution. We just don’t know yet which one.” Then, when it seemed we couldn’t cope anymore, the Lord supplied a politician who had a word with a mental health director, who cut through the red tape and supplied us with an adult foster care home for our afflicted daughter within a week. Our daughter’s psychological counselor told us she had never seen such a fast placement. God was greater than the mess!

Scripture is full of examples of this truth. The Israelites were caught between the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s terrible chariots—what a mess! But God opened the sea for them to pass over and closed in on Pharaoh’s army. God was greater than the mess!

Elijah destroyed the prophets of Baal while Jezebel was away, but when Jezebel came back she sent her soldiers in hot pursuit of him, so that he had to run and hide in a cave—what a mess! But God showed Elijah that 400 other prophets were also on God’s side, and He sent Elijah out in renewed hope to anoint his successor, Elisha. God was greater than the mess!

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego dared to refuse Nebuchanezzar’s order to bow down to his golden idol, and the king in his wrath cast them into a furnace so hot it killed those who put them in. Quite a mess! But a fourth figure was seen in the furnace with the three faithful Hebrews, and they came out of the furnace without even a singed hair. The God they had trusted to deliver them was greater than the mess!

Paul and Silas cast out a prophetic demon from a poor, exploited young woman, and they were seized and arrested and beaten for their merciful deed. What a mess! But while they were singing in jail at midnight, God sent an earthquake and broke them out, so that they could preach to the jailor and convert his household. Once again, God was greater than the mess!

All of us who have served the Lord any length of time have personally seen many instances of His being greater than the mess, and the Scriptures are full of illustrations as well. Why, then, do we find it so hard to feel that truth when we are still in the midst of some mess? I will suggest three reasons. First, although we rejoice in the times when God has shown Himself to be greater than a particular mess, we forget that God is in His essence greater than any and all manifestations of evil and suffering. In a sense, He does not have to prove Himself in each instance to be Master of the Mess, for He is the one than whom no greater can be imagined. His power simply has no rival, and there is no threat He cannot overcome.

Second, we find it easy to focus on the particular mess that we are involved in, and we lose sight of the many other personal, social, and environmental messes in the world at large. Therefore, we aren’t aware that our suffering is interlocked with the larger suffering in the world around us. As my high school principal used to say, “If you’ve got a boil on your neck, it’s hard to be concerned about starving people in Africa.” But God, of course, sees the whole picture, and His timing in solving our particular mess may be connected with what’s needed to remedy some other mess or messes. That larger concern is illustrated in II Peter 3:9, in answer to the question of why God delays his righteous judgment on an evil world: “The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (ESV).

Third, our difficulty in seeing past our immediate pain may blind us to the possibility that God is in the process of transforming us in ways that we don’t even see the need of. As the writer of Hebrews says, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:11).

At the center of the “peaceful fruit” spoken of in this verse is the sure hope we have as children of God that Father will complete the supreme and overarching example of His being “greater than the mess.” His ultimate solution has already been launched in the coming of Jesus Christ, His own Son, who was sent to die the sacrificial death which would take care of the systemic mess of sin and death for which Adam and Eve were the catalysts. Therefore, we endure in confident faith that, although we still live in the weakness of our own mortal flesh and exist in a sin-stained and disordered world, these bodies we live in, the scarred planet we inhabit, and the corrupt society in which we carry on our daily lives will be gloriously replaced by immortal bodies in a perfect world, living in the harmony of full communion with the eternal Master of the Mess—Jehovah Jireh, the God Who Provides.

Image: By Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24564985

The Constraints of God’s Holiness

A Twilight Musing

Alternative Scenario for Immediate Post-Lapsarian response by the Creator

(see authorized version in Gen. 3):

God looked down in sorrow and disappointment at Adam and Eve chewing on the Forbidden Fruit and noted their being chagrined at the first thing their newly-opened eyes saw—their nakedness.  They didn’t realize yet why it was a problem, but of course God knew, and He was ready to help them fix it.  Poor babies, they had truly bitten off more than they could chew.  So God came down and stood beside them (though He had to hold His nose to do it—the stench of corruption had already set in), and He set about making them garments to replace the pathetic stitched leaves they had cobbled together to cover their newly embarrassing private parts.*  He then sat down and held their hands and chided them for being so foolish, but He also encouraged them to buck up and learn from their error.  They wept on His shoulder and vowed they would never repeat their mistake, and both they and God saw it as a growth experience.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

As fallen human beings in the lineage of Adam and Eve, I think many of us might be inclined to say, “Yeah, why couldn’t God have cut Adam and Eve (and us) some slack?  After all, He sort of set them up for failure by planting that Forbidden Tree and then letting the Tempter in the Garden.  Why make such a big deal of their failure and then pass it on to all human beings afterward?  We all make mistakes. It wasn’t fair; the penalty far outweighed the offense.”

Such sentiments, though understandable, fail to consider the implications of God’s immutable, innate, essential qualities, such as Goodness, Love, Justice, and—most relevant to this discussion—Holiness.  Strange as it may seem to contemplate, the biblical picture of God indicates that His immutability constrains His choices in ways that are not true of fallible mortals doomed to the ultimate form of mutability, death.  It is expected that humans will achieve only relative degrees of goodness, love, justice, and holiness, since even though we cannot know perfectly, we have nevertheless to act on the limited knowledge we have, i.e., we make choices.  But God, of course, has perfect knowledge and wisdom, and there is no excuse, as it were, for Him to act in any way contrary to His immutable, innate qualities.  He “cannot,” to put it in human terms, do anything that is not in accord with who He Is.  His very name, He tells Moses, can be expressed in human terms only as “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex. 3:14).  James 1:17 describes God as “the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to turning.”

So it is that God could not have merely overlooked the sin of Adam and Eve and reset the program to give them another chance.  When their disobedience broke the bond of identity and oneness between them and God, it became impossible for God in His Holiness to walk with them in their sin—not because He “chose” it so in the way that we use that word, but rather they had removed themselves from the realm of His Holiness.  He could, in perfect justice, have separated Himself from them entirely and left them to the unmitigated consequences of their sin; but, in fact, He not only spoke to them of the negative consequences of their rebellion, but He clothed them and hinted at a mortal blow that would be dealt to their Adversary in the future by Someone born of woman.  God already had a plan by which He could overcome the barrier between sinful mankind and His holiness.  It was a radical and unbelievably costly solution that only He could implement.   That brings us to the Incarnation, in which He let a part of Himself, with the essential qualities of divine Holiness and Justice intact, be injected into the morass of the death-bound fallen world and emerge from it having fulfilled Divine Justice and paid the penalty of death so that forgiveness could be extended without violating God’s Holiness.

Chapters 8-10 of the book of Hebrews present the Incarnation as the culmination of God’s plan to bridge the gulf between His holiness and sinful humans.  After establishing the special priesthood of Jesus according to the order of Melchizedek  (Heb. 7:11-17), the writer makes clear that Jesus as priest has entered into the eternal Holy Place at the right hand of God, not merely into the earthly space into which the Aaronic priests enter once a year to offer the sacrifice of atonement (8:1-2). These Old Covenant priests served only “a copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (8:5) prescribed by the Law of Moses.  In the same way, Jesus’ entry into the eternal Holy of Holies and the sacrifice He made there was not merely “gifts and sacrifices   . . . that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but deal only with regulations for the body” (9:9-10).  Rather, “he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (9:12) and establishing a New Covenant through His self-sacrifice.

This New Covenant, in contrast to the Old Covenant, went beyond physical purification that provided temporary access to God’s Holiness and Presence:

But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.  (Heb 10:12-14 ESV)

Through the patient development of His plan over the millennia between the first Adam and the Second Adam, God overcame the necessary separation of His Holiness brought about through the Fall with the loving sacrifice of a part of Himself.  As the first Adam fell, so the Second Adam descended into the wounded world and ascended to the Father to make it whole.

*See “And They Realized They Were Naked” in the poetry archives of Moral Apologetics.

Image:By Carl Heinrich Bloch - www.the-athenaeum.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25990900

Time: from Regulator to Terminator

Marking the passage of time is such an ingrained part of modern Western society that we usually give little thought to why we are conditioned to do so.  Business and industry strive for the most efficient use of time to maximize the profitable productivity of their investment of material resources and human energy.  Contracts and agreements are drawn up and ratified with reference to the boundaries and limits of the time during which the agreement is to be carried out.  In social life, much is made of anniversaries and the celebration of what has been done or accomplished in the span of years leading up to the chronological milestone being observed.  All of these things are treated in a positive way:  “Happy Birthday,” “Happy Anniversary,” or “Happy New Year” we say.  But at the gut level, we all recognize that the passage of time leads eventually to the demise of the organization, or the nation, or the person whose milestone is being affirmed.  In other words, time, in our experience of it as fallen creatures, inexorably weaves the web that ensnares us in death.  Shakespeare’s Macbeth, at the end of his campaign to manipulate the world of time for his own benefit, expresses the despair that comes with realizing he has always been the victim of time, rather than the master of it.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

(Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5)

Time became our enemy when Adam and Eve rejected God’s order of things and thought to set up an alternative order, a substitute kingdom with themselves as rulers.  The way we experience time in our fallen state is at the core of our alienation from God, so how does our experience differ from the way God intended for time to function?   In His essence, God is completely unaffected by time, since time is perceived and measured only through some sort of change taking place, and God is immutable, without beginning or end, changeless.  However, His present creation does have a beginning and an end, and even in the Garden before the Fall, time was a defining element of order in both the act of creation and its ongoing operation. The Genesis account of creation calls its phases “days” even before the sun was created to define them, and the concept of the seven-day week, culminated by a God-honoring Seventh Day of rest, showed time as a natural thread integrated into a perfect creation;  but time in Eden carried with it no sense of limitation or decay. It was merely a regulator in the daily activities of Adam and Eve in caring for the garden.  But of course, sin changed all of that.  God’s regulator became humankind’s terminator.  

In the poem below, I have imagined Adam at the end of his first year of living with the consequences of his and Eve’s sin.  He shares something of Macbeth’s dark vision of the relentless advance of time, but unlike Macbeth, he also knows that God’s light and presence, though diminished, are still with him.

Adam's First New Year

Adam paced the field

Made rough by tilling,

Unwilling ground since God

Withdrew His Presence from it.

The sun itself, now cyclic,

Gave only partial beams

To warm the stubborn soil.

"No need in Eden's bounds

To think of ebb and flow,

Of patterned change

Which gives us markers

For the progress of decay;

But now each day reveals

That something more of what we were

Is lost,

And nights accumulate

Until the sun comes back

To mark the point where death began.

"That day, I made a world

Where beginnings add up to ends,

And cycles are incremental.

Can God be heard in such a place?

Can timeless Love be found

Where time feeds hateful death?

I only know that breath,

Though shortened now,

Is still from Him;

And though I sweat for bread,

He feeds me yet."

--Elton D. Higgs

 (Jan. 1, 1983)

Image: "Closing Time" by Kevin Dooley. CC License. 

“God saw that it was good."

A Twilight Musing

In the Genesis 1 account of creation, we are told five times that God judged what He had created “good,” including his looking at the completed creation and saying that “it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).  In chapter 2, it is made clear that the setting of the Garden of Eden was the perfect environment for mankind to partake of and participate in all of this goodness.  It had “every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for food” (2:9).   Only in the prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is there any mention of evil.  In chapter 3, however, we have the disastrous substitution of human judgment of what was “good for food” (3:4), and the natural good of God’s creation was overturned.  What was formerly “very good” is turned into inhospitable ground and difficult farming, sorrow, pain, and death.  The light with which God’s good creation began has now been turned into darkness which, like the sin-cursed ground, has to be tilled at great sacrifice to bring God’s good out of it again.

The fact that light was the first element spoken into existence in God’s creation, which He repeatedly endorses as “good,” indicates that there is an elemental connection between Light and Goodness as characteristics of God.  Together they show the intertwining of God’s existential indefinability (as physical light is paradoxically both wave and particle) and His non-referential Moral Perfection.  All light and all goodness are derived from Him.  God’s Light was foundational to the rest of creation so that in that Light could be seen God’s Goodness in the rest of His creation.  God judged it to be good only by the Light that He Himself had created; and as long as the morally enabled and responsible humans He had created judged their lot by that same Light, all was well.

When Eve consented to the suggestion of Satan that she change the way she perceived the forbidden fruit (she “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” [3:6]), the result was, ironically, that “the eyes of both [Adam and Eve] were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (3:7).  It was just as the Serpent promised, that “when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:3).  What he does not tell them is that seeing what God sees without His essential Light and Goodness as protection turns all goodness on its head and brings disorder and destruction, rather than the blessing of seeing only what God has granted us to see at the time.

Although the short poem below is in immediate reference to the gathering of daily manna, it has a broader application, and the last two lines are especially relevant to the Fall of Adam and Eve.

SUFFICIENT

(Exodus 16: 19-21)

Sufficient to the day

Is the good thereof:

Honey-sweet wafers,

Dawn's measure of graceful bread.

But dread of want tomorrow

Crowds out the bounty of today;

Blessings seized out of season

Turn to worms and decay.

                                                -- Elton D. Higgs (1977)

Image: "Beams" by Furbychan. CC License.