One of the reasons my
belief that the Bible could hold answers for me, began with question I had
rolling around in my head since I was a kid.
Much like the previous
blog entry, I asked myself… how can the world be so beautiful and terrible at
the same time?
As a little girl I often
rode my bike around where I lived observing the beauty in nature and would
spend a lot of time at the beach soaking up the salt air while studying the
amazing changes the ocean wrought depending on seasons, wind changes and light.
I loved cartoons, yummy food and playing with my sisters. But occasionally this
lovely world would have shadows.
My parents would fight. I’d
get sick or one of my sisters might hit me. Nothing out of the ordinary but I’d
wonder why can’t things be nice all the time?
...these things happened
A flood happened in my
street when I was 11 and I watched my world alter in a matter of hours. The
teenage boy who lived across the street died in a motorbike accident one day - and
I couldn’t understand how that could happen. I read the diary of Ann Frank and
suddenly I perceived “badness” on a scale I’d never dreamed of. That a girl my
age, could be carted off in a train and sent to a concentration camp to die. It
seemed inconceivable that humans could do this.
So began my grapple with
the paradox. How could this amazing beautiful earth, filled with so much
goodness, love, fun and wonder also be a place of pain, hurt and conflict? I
thought all this as I too battled with losing my own temper at times and
hurting others, or lying and stealing occasionally as a teenager to get the
things I wanted. Wasn’t I a negative part of it all too?
Having no religious or Christian
background I wondered about the story of Adam and Eve. Like most people it
seemed like a fairy tale and not really anything I’d taken seriously. I figured
there may have been an original man and woman at the start of the world but not
sure what happened, if they evolved or just were put there by God.
But what made some kind
of sense to me was the idea of the Garden of Eden. I remember my sister had a
record of Joni Mitchell and she played this idealistic hippy song in which the
chorus sang “…and we got to get ourselves back to the
garden”…. (Metaphorically speaking of course)…
Even as a young teen I got what she was saying, we need to live a pure
and good life.
If only!
The older I got the more
confused I felt about the world.
Love was hard, it was messy and I struggled
coming to terms with how awful people could be. I couldn’t understand bigger
problems like poverty, cancer, unemployment and war. They perplexed me.
The idea of this “Garden”
in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible… captured my
attention. God
initially creating a perfect world where there was no conflict, illness or decay sparked
my imagination of the way the world could have been. That beautiful planet
with oceans, trees, peace and goodness - A world I sometimes glimpsed in my everyday
life… but was now also polluted with crappy
stuff.
Eden - A “perfect
world” with its self perpetuating garden and landscape so rich it grew everything
without toil, animals and people lived in the same space, no death or
sickness and a place where God walked with people. But wait...!! It all crashed and burned somehow, and war began, someone started killing, cells died and weeds grew.
That pretty much describes life today.
The first people whom God apparently created - were requested not to cross
his boundary (and eat of the tree of good and evil) but they decided to cross it. God
warned, “If you do this, if you choose to go against me in this you’ll end up
dying”. And they did… and now we do and so forth.
They opened this world to a force called sin.
What strikes me I guess as having some sort of relevance in my world, is that I can
imagine this place of Eden when this planet earth in a perfect state, and when I
cannot understand what went wrong its design - even if it was an evolutionized
world - when I can't explain how civilization and it's inhabitants became so malfunctioning - that the very potential for world peace,
wellness, happiness and health now seems impossible to attain.
They say when Adam and
Eve broke God’s command and sin came into the world, much like a storm
breaking into a perfect day, the ruinous aspect of sin permeating every
spectre of life and our history. War, sickness, addictions, injustice, slavery,
pollution and the list goes on. These are all because of this sin-infiltrating
force in life, of evil that co-exists with this creation of beauty - and to me that makes some kind of sense.
This amazing world should
have been beautiful, we shouldn’t kill each other, we should not wreck the environment
and disease shouldn’t occur - people shouldn't be starving or morbidly obese - But it all does occur and I wanted to know when I was 14
years old why why why? What is the reason civilization and our planet fails so much - can't get it right?
Is it that people are so
evil, or that God doesn’t exist or care? Is it that evolution is misfiring and
we are not evolving at all?
- The
Genesis story seems to fit this "once perfect now polluted profile". A created environment with sin seeping in and around it over
centuries and this to me seems a tangible explanation of what went wrong. It was perfect but became imperfect somewhere.. still beautiful, still full of love, goodness and wonder.. but broken.
I see evidence of this I
suppose in my own character. The Bible says we are inherent with sin because of
what human kind began in their DNA in the beginning. We can be wonderful and
cruel ourselves. We can be kind in one breath and slander in another. If we are honest with ourselves we know that we too are beautiuful and broken.
I wish it was always
beautiful … I wish the world didn’t suffer in ways I feel powerless to
overcome, even in smaller places like where I work. A hospital ward, where
patients have cancer, a work environment where co-workers get annoyed with each
other, a week of work where my body tires and ages. My own small world is full
of bad things and so much beauty as well.
Does it make any sense to
you? That sin may be the reason life sucks sometimes? That there is evil and
imperfection that happened in the human race and environment which changed what
could have been an amazingly perfect world?
If we start to apply the
idea of sin to real life we can find a step toward God and what he offers as an
anecdote to sin in our own lives personally. For me it was a hunger to know…
how I deal with the problem of sin, of evil, of crappy stuff that I couldn’t make
sense of and that makes me feel despair.
When I pushed my mind
back to an idea of Eden, when I could clearly see glimpses of beauty and
perfection of Gods original plan and how that original plan was ruined, but
still functioning, I didn’t feel so powerless or helpless. If this God story,
this Genesis story was actually true and God put it there for us to read and
understand then surely he would help us in the here and now to deal with it.
And once we consider this, the whole
reason of why this Jesus came actually makes sense.
If we don’t believe that
sin entered an originally perfect world with plans only for life, life and more
life, if we just put it down to nature, human or otherwise, then we have no
anecdote. We haven’t a lot of hope but to do our best in this life and fingers
crossed if or if not there is more to be had. We can’t make sense if our mum’s
get cancer or we lose our job, or we get wrinkles. We just go with it. But in
God’s Genesis explanation we are offered a reason… and a promise for something
more...
We dont just accept the brokenness and the fact we are part of that dying process.
Jesus says he came to give us eternal life, and be sin in our stead. To remove it's power over us forever.
keeps me leaning to Him to find out why...
That's my thoughts anyway.
all photo's by me - enjoy
