Reading: Devotional

January 16

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God’s Gracious Initiative

Genesis 3:8

But God shows his love for us in that

while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8 (ESV)

After Adam and Eve consciously disobeyed God and broke communion with him by eating from the forbidden tree and simultaneously ceasing to eat from the Tree of Life, they desperately tried to protect themselves from the presence of God. They were sure that they would die. However, whether they saw it or not, they had an initial sign of God’s grace in that they did not immediately return to the dust from which God had formed them. As a further sign of grace, although they doubted at the time that it was grace, God came looking for the sinners.

Of course God knew where they were and why they were hiding, and could have asked them accusatory questions: “How dare you?” Or, “What were you thinking?” Instead, he asked a question designed to let Adam and Eve (and all of us) know what they needed to do now that they had sinned against their Creator. God’s “Where are you?” was an implicit call for Adam and Eve to come clean, return to believing and trusting in him, and make a new commitment to obedient living.

To be sure, there would be a price to pay for sin and rebellion. Yet, God was not willing to give up the partnership of caretaking and governance into which he’d installed Adam and Eve at the beginning. Nor was he willing to give up the relation­ship with himself and each other that he’d created them for.

Today too, God pursues men and women into whatever hiding places sin has led us. He wants us to own up to what we’re doing, and then to stop it and walk with him. He wants to restore us to the paradise-relationship from which our first parents fell.  In fact, our only hope for forgiveness and our only prospect for life and a future begins with coming out of hiding. Where are you?

January 18

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Signs of Hope

Genesis 3:14–4:2

I, Jesus…am the root and the descendant

of David, the bright morning star.

Revelation 22:16 (ESV)

Although Adam and Eve did not recognize it immediately, they had a sign of hope even at the height of their rebellion. Neither they nor the rest of God’s creation disintegrated into the nothingness from which they had been made. Eventually, however, they had other reasons for hope: God’s reconciling question for them regarding their whereabouts, the clothes God made for them for life outside of Paradise, and the children God eventually gave them.

Their greatest hope for their future, however, was given in God’s curse of the serpent in Genesis 3:15. There God promised that the one who had successfully tempted Adam and Eve to overstep the limits of their freedom would forever after find himself at odds with the offspring of the woman. Not only that, but one day her offspring and the serpent would be locked in mortal combat—a combat in which the woman’s offspring would be injured, but the serpent would be killed.

In the light of the rest of the biblical story, we understand this to be the first Scripture prophesying the coming of Jesus, whose death Satan would celebrate prematurely. Jesus’s death and resurrection delivered a mortal blow to Satan and ensured Christ’s final and ultimate victory. In Jesus, therefore, paradise lost has become, and is becoming, paradise regained.

In Jesus the homeless now have a home. And because of Jesus, we can have the power to reject and stay far away from the continuingly forbidden fruit of independence from our Creator and Redeemer. Instead, we may eat from the Tree of Life, thus ensuring our communion with Almighty God and our faithfulness to him.