Here, finally, in the last book of the Bible, is the desire of God fully realized. In the beginning of the Bible, it was man’s own disobedience that caused him to be banished from the Garden and separated from God’s Presence. From that very moment, God went to work on a rescue plan. He initiated the dangerous and daring means by which he could bring us back into his Presence and pull us near to his heart again. Though it would cost him his greatest possession, God’s desire to be close, to be intimate with his creation, drove him to make this great sacrifice.

“God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.” This is what God wants. This is what he has always wanted. He has always wanted you free of sorrow, of tears. He has always wanted you free from pain. He has always wanted you free of  your broken-ness, your suffering. He has always wanted you free from the power of death, free from heart-rending loss. He has always wanted you to be free. He has always wanted… you.

I love these honest words from the prophet Jeremiah, “Alas, my mother, that you gave me birth, a man with whom the whole land strives and contends! I have neither lent nor borrowed, yet everyone curses me.” If we would be as honest, we might admit to having these same feelings from time to time. I hear them echoed in the movie I just watched last night, the same movie I watch every year at Christmas time – It’s A Wonderful Life.

In our Bible passage, Jeremiah is whining to God about how wretched his life turned out to be. In the movie, George Bailey is whining to the angel, Clarence Odboddy A-S-2, about the same thing. Like Jeremiah, George complains that in spite of all the good things he has done for others, everyone is against him and his life is not worth living. When Clarence assures him that taking his own life is not the answer, George supposes that, “it would have been better if I had never even been born at all.”

Clarence: “What’d you say?”
George: “I said I wish I’d never been born.”

I think all of us wonder about this at some point, “What would it have been like if I had never been born?” “How would the world be any different?” Depending on how you tend to answer yourself when you ask questions like this, you might just dive into an emotional tailspin. The Bible assures us, however, that we can be confident of God’s good purpose in bringing us into this world. He has a plan for each of us.

Honestly, conception itself is such a miracle that there can be no such thing as an accidental baby. So we can encourage ourselves with this thought from Psalm 139; “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” We can be sure, God planned out every one of our days. What’s more, our lives truly do touch others for his good purpose.

Bell. Attaboy, Clarence!

“Why did God let this happen?” This is a question I hear fairly often, particularly when bad things happen to “good” people. But it’s a fully loaded comment. What people really mean is, “God, you did this. I thought you were supposed to be good and loving. I thought you had my back. I don’t think I trust you. It’s your fault.”

Joshua was having just such a pity party when God stopped him in his tracks with a big dose of reality. In the midst of his prayer (read, whining) to God about the dire situation he and the people of Israel faced, God spoke very sternly, “Stand up! What are you doing down on your face? Israel has sinned; they have violated my covenant, which I commanded them to keep.”

I can just hear Joshua now… “Oh, so THAT’S the problem. It wasn’t you after all. It was… um… us. We sinned.”

Yep, sometimes… a lot of times … the bad things that happen to us are entirely our own fault. We failed to listen. We decided not to obey. Now we are simply paying the price for our disobedience and we don’t like it.  So, the whining and blaming comes when we should be repenting. Sometimes the cause of our problem is as simple as that.

First, Adam and Eve went from being naked and free from shame in front of each other, to sewing fig leaves together to cover themselves up. With the tragic onset of guilt and shame they suddenly felt compelled to hide their bodies from one another. This “cover up” affected their relationship. Now we have two people who have literal barriers constructed between them. Intimacy was easy, natural before. They were free and open to love, touch, relate. Now there is the awkwardness of the leaves and then the clothing God made for them.

Next, shame over their disobedience drove them into hiding from God as well. They fear their loving Creator and their strained relationship with God impacts the couple’s relationship. The animal skin clothing would always be a reminder of their failure and their need of a sacrifice. Death happened and it was their fault. They play the blame game, however, pointing the finger at others … “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree.” Adam blames the woman, and even more amazing, God himself. Eve doesn’t really do any better by saying, “The devil made me do it.”

This is now the new normal in their relationship. They have a desire to keep things hidden, to keep secrets. They hide their thoughts and feelings. There is distance created in their relationship with God and one another. Shame and fear are the driving force and the real “covering” they now put on. They deflect accountability for their own actions creating even more distance and conflict in their relationship. Intimacy is no longer easy or natural.

Adam and Eve no longer look at one another with pure intentions. Selfishness, the desire to preserve and feed self has crept in and now they “see” things very differently. Eve, “saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining…” something for herself so she just took it. This is their manner of relating now. There is a turn toward the more visual and physical and a turning away from the spiritual and supernatural. They no longer view the other in terms of what they can share with them but for what they can get from them. Baser sin-driven instincts take hold. Trust is gone.

In this kind of relationship, how can they possibly survive? We know that it eventually affected their children as well… all of them. It is awesome to know, however, that God would use this very foundation, the family, to remove sin’s curse and provide the means to bring us back into intimate fellowship with him and each other. This is the heart of God and the fulfillment of all his hopes and dreams for us.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

5He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” (Revelation 21:1-5)

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’

He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’

And he said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?’

The man said, ‘The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’” (Genesis 3:6-12)

These passages are rich with insight detailing why relationships can be so tough for us. Before the Fall, before sin had entered into and tainted humanity, Adam and Eve and God all enjoyed an intimate and satisfying relationship together. God created man, gave him a companion and then the Father God spent time with his children, caring for, loving and blessing them. They were so at peace with one another that Adam and Eve had no awareness at all that they were naked before God or one another. In fact, being uncovered, fully open before God and each other, was completely natural and normal. They related to one another without any barriers, without pretense, without fear.

Many things changed in the world following that fateful day when Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. The most tragic, of course, was that it resulted in a broken relationship with God and separation from him. God did bring them through a process of restoration of relationship with him through sacrifice but things were never the same between them, between any of us.

There is a great deal that we could talk about here in terms of the effect of sin and the offer of redemption that Jesus provided by his death and resurrection. What I would like to focus on for the purposes of this reading, however, is the effect that sin has and continues to have on human relationships, particular those between men and women.

As you think through the events chronicled in our passage it becomes clear that things between Adam and Eve were forever changed. Before the Fall they were naked and felt no shame or fear of exposure in any way.  The Bible says, however, “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.” Immediately, the happy couple came to a terrible realization, sin left them feeling exposed. They were overwhelmed with a feeling they had never experienced before, a feeling God never intended for them to know… a sense of shame.

The way the man and the woman would function in their relationship was fundamentally changed from this point on. Innocence was lost and along with it, one of God’s greatest gifts… intimacy.

More later…

If you need the reading plan, you can find it here.

Could it be that his weeping was merely and emotional response coming from that side of Jesus  which was his humanity; maybe he simply missed this companion that he loved so much? Or, was Jesus just caught up in the sorrow and grief of the moment as he saw Lazarus’ sister, Mary, weeping uncontrollably? Is it possible that Jesus was unsure of his power to raise Lazarus from the dead or unsure of God’s will in the situation? Not hardly.

I believe it was God who wept that day. There was no worked up human emotionalism involved in this cry. It was genuine sorrow rising up from the heart of the Divine Creator. In that moment as God stood before the tomb of Lazarus, His mind spanned the countless ages of history in which the sting of death had worked its evil upon the creation He so dearly loved. It was not Lazarus’ death that brought sorrow to the heart of God but Death itself. He stood there, overwhelmed by the pain and heartache that he knew had been and would continue to be a part of human lives.

But in the hopelessness of that moment, this same God brushed the tears from His eyes and spoke with life-giving force, “Lazarus, come forth!” What a time of rejoicing that must have been for Mary and Lazarus! Can you even imagine? And when Lazarus stumbled out of that tomb, a smile must have crossed God’s face as he said to Himself, “Just you wait until resurrection day, just you wait.”

This thought occurred to me again as I was simply reading a Washington Post Magazine article about the life of William Shakespeare (there is a lot of brew ha ha about him just now since a painting recently surfaced that might be the earliest extant portrait of history’s greatest writer.). So, there I was minding my own business, thinking of all the wonderful lines Shakespeare has given us and of his enduring impact on our culture when, there it was, yet another story of a great man apparently propelled to greatness through suffering.

Just think through these facts about his life. In the summer of 1596, Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. I can’t even imagine. That tragic loss alone is enough pain for anyone. Then in February of 1601 he lost his close friend and patron (imprisoned for being part of a plot to overthrow the queen) and in September of 1601, his father died. Shakespeare had lost his son, his father and his patron (loss of friend and, potentially, his career) all in the space of five years.

Referencing this period in Shakespeare’s life, Washington Post staff writer, Sally Jenkins, observed, “There was a marked slowdown in his work, and when he did write again, it was with a new bleak intensity.”  It’s true, consider these lines from “Henry V” penned just two years after the loss of his son:

Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of this universe
– “Henry V” (1598-99)

Shakespeare had changed. This “poring dark,” I believe, was the suffering and the accompanying uncertainty that searing losses can bring. I think it penetrated him. The darkness then poured into his writing. Shakespearean scholar Alexander Leggatt notes, “Sweet Master Shakespeare suddenly began “giving his audience nightmares.”

Yet the Master of Dramatic Irony would find that with his great losses, new things were added to his life… depth, maturity, a richer level of creativity. And so, from 1600-04 Shakespeare would write, arguably, his most famous and artistically mature plays, “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear” and “Macbeth.” Go figure.

Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. Romans 8:17