Church of the lamb of god cult11/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Sin is like the loss of a childlike wonder at the extravagance of God’s gift, which is followed by an attempt to manage everything for ourselves. In this passage, sin is associated immediately with shame, with an incapacity to marvel at the gift of our innate dignity. It is the shame of sin, though, that in a way “surprises” God-encountering the fumbling attempt of Adam to explain himself and his new fig-leaf number, God effectively responds, “You what?” The Lord God appears not to have foreseen that the vastness of his generosity would be refused or missed by his creation. Sin emerges as the unaccounted-for thing, the unanticipated. But what makes this passage so challenging to much garden-variety theology of this sort is that it is not the good that surprises God but the sin. God then scrambles to come up with Plan B, which he brings to fruition by sending his son to save his creation from our own inveterate capacity to make a complete, chaotic mess of it. ![]() According to this picture, God makes a beautiful world, and the first couple almost immediately screws it up. This scene is frequently described as the origin of an irreversible human tendency toward disobedience, as initiating a tragic chain of events that will eventuate in the sending of the Redeemer. What could possibly surprise God? “But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked and I hid myself.’ He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked?’” (Gen. It is surely meant to strike us that God, casually moseying through the garden, almost acts surprised when he sees the man and woman covered in leaves. Of course, as we all know, the first humans fall for it. In effect, the serpent tells the man and the woman that God doesn’t want them to know the “real” truth-in his selfish will-to-power Big Truth is really a Big Lie he only wants to keep divinity to himself. ![]() This subtly selective “truth” is the first instance of that perennial allure of the conspiracy theory. In this interlude, the crafty serpent famously introduces the first heresy: “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 2:23–25) and this scene (3:8ff), there is a pernicious and well-known interlude, upon which the rest of Scripture arguably depends. Between God’s creation of Eve from Adam’s side (Gen. In fact, there is almost a sense in the text that God is so taken up by this delight that he appears to be distracted, lost in wonder for a moment. In one of the most astonishing passages in the book of Genesis, in the book’s second creation narrative, the Lord God is depicted as a gardener, out for a leisurely evening stroll in the garden he has just made, clearly pleased with his creation. ![]()
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