Ruin - or - Renewal?



Our first parents, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, did the one thing they were not allowed to do.  They flunked the test of their loving obedience and took the forbidden fruit.  The rest of us human beings have had to live with the consequences of their selfish rebellion ever since.  And – by the way – let’s not do what our first parents did and pass the buck: “The woman put me up to it”; “it was the serpent that was the culprit!”  No!  The Lord God made quite clear our human responsibility – it rested with them and with them alone.

The question I want to ask though is, “Why didn’t Almighty God just wipe them out and begin again?

I’ve enjoyed doing some woodwork projects at Men’s Sheds in my retirement.  But there have been times when a project somehow got botched up along the way.  I’m afraid I didn’t have the patience or the inclination to painstakingly fix up my mess – instead it ended up in the rubbish bin.  Discarded..!  So why didn’t God just discard Adam and Eve?  They couldn’t even keep this one simple command: “It’s all yours, just don’t eat of that one tree...!”  So, why didn’t God just abort Project Humanity?  He could easily have blown planet earth to smithereens and then chosen another planet somewhere in the universe and produced Man-Mark2.  But He didn’t.  Why not?  Let me suggest two reasons that may not be too hard to work out from what we know from the Bible.

The first reason is what we should call GRACE – undeserved favour.  Unlike me with my aborted woodwork projects God did have the patience and the inclination to deal with this faulty and broken Humanity-Mark1.  Immediately after our first parents got the guilts and hid from God in the shrubbery, the Lord came to them and asked them: “Where are you?”  Not because he didn’t know, mind you, but to solicit their repentant response – which never came.  So God gave them, right there and then, the first promise of the gospel.  God would send the Seed of the woman to crush the head of the serpent.  In due course God solved our problem of our brokenness through the coming of Jesus.

One can readily see that God’s solution brought greater glory and honour to the Lord our God than blasting planet earth to smithereens and starting again elsewhere.  As a result endless songs of praise are now sung to the Lamb that was slain.  We fallen and redeemed humans are now not only part of God’s created reality we are also those who  now know what it is to live by grace.

But I suspect that there’s an equally good second reason why God didn’t just obliterate us and start again.  Let me come back to my discarded woodworking project.  That heap of junk in the rubbish bin brings joy and satisfaction to no one.  There is even a sense in which I discarded it with a certain amount of pain and regret.  So much work had gone into it.  So much beauty and splendour was expected from it.  But now...?  All doomed – ready for the garbage dump.

Is that not so much more true of the almighty creator of heaven and earth.  He took great pride in his handiwork.  Again and again we read in Genesis 1: It was good... it was good... it was very good!  The Bible makes clear over and over again that creation is God’s... it all belongs to Him.  Psalm 24: The earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof.  Psalm 50: Every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills.  And then just think of the numerous treasures that our creator God hid within the earth: the gas and oil, the rubies and opals.  In Haggai 2:4 the Lord tells Israel: The silver and gold is mine!  Moses in Deuteronomy 33:19 spoke about the treasures hidden in the sand.

We marvel at numerous such treasures our Creator God hid within the earth just awaiting our discovery of them in due course.  It’s yet another thing for which we praise and worship the almighty Maker of all things.  The Psalms are full of praise to the Lord God for what is found in nature.  And then to just blow all that to smithereens only to start again elsewhere in the universe...?  No!  God had too much invested in planet earth to abandon the work of His hands.

John Westendorp
Radio 2MaxFM - Feb. 2nd 2025

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