He needs you!

 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.  Genesis 3:15

Enemies go to war.  Enmity between the woman and the serpent was not merely a prediction, it was a covenant made between man and God.  The Lord God proclaimed this covenant of enmity with full knowledge that He would fulfill it Himself.  The contract made between God and man was sealed by the shedding of blood (3:21).  The Lord made it possible that His precious people could be wrapped in love.

Meanwhile, human destiny is worked out in the presence of the serpent.  Heel bruising and head crushing war is part of God’s promise to us as those who choose to side with Him.  Jesus sees the trajectory of the falling star of Lucifer/satan when His disciples report victory over evil (Luke 10:17-18  And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils [demons] are subject unto us through thy name. And he said unto them, I beheld satan as lightning fall from heaven).  Humans experience the good will of Jesus because the good thing He wants for us is victory over evil that is subject to His blood and His command. 

The startling thing to consider is that the overwhelming assault on the enemy’s primary position in this realm of time was not a display of power, but a display of weakness.  How much more vulnerable could God be than to become the seed that made a willing virgin woman great with child?  How else could God fulfill the promise to truly be one of us so that, in death, He could be one with us?  Naked, He came, vulnerable and dependent upon the stout heart and strong hands of that unsung hero of the Nativity, Joseph, Son of David.  Chosen by God because His father, David, before Him would risk his life for a lamb or a cringing army, Joseph is the warrior prince who will raise the King of kings.  Jesus became a man and won the greatest of all victories in war. The war of human nature.  The war to rebuke the devil.  The war to gain freedom for slaves.

Come to Jesus.

Come to the Cross.

Who is He looking for?

And the LORD God
   called unto Adam,
   and said unto him,
      Where art thou?   Genesis 3:9 KJV

Many things can be killed with analysis and classification.  To regard the words in Chapter 3 of Genesis as "The Fall" or the outcome as "Original Sin" may make it impossible to read the story for what it really says.  When something becomes the property of the experts, then ordinary people are excluded from having the right to see it in a different light; they may have flashlights but are not provided with batteries.  Instead of looking only at the story of "The Fall," why not ask about the story of the Lord God, Himself?

Apparently, the Lord God had grown accustomed to taking walks in the garden that He had planted and into which He had placed the man.  Perhaps He went there after countless hours of painful spiritual warfare and the ugliness it presented.  Whatever had been happening in God's life before He arrived, He was about to encounter the new sinners and would have to adjust to the emptiness of the garden in the near future.  The interesting thing to notice is that He did not enter the garden in the pomposity of omniscience.  Instead, the Lord began His walk and, eventually, had to search for His customary companions.  Adam and Eve were hiding and God was seeking.  They had invented a game that God would be compelled to participate in for many years to come.

Many years later, Jesus (Jesus is God) is worn out from a long ordeal of spiritual warfare and sits down at a well near the town of Sychar (John 4:5).  A woman comes to get water at the well and Jesus asks her for water to drink.  The amazing conversation that follows invigorates the Lord God because He has won through at the game of spiritual "hide and seek."  Having told Jesus deep painful truths and revealed that, in spite of being a sinner, she still wanted to worship God, Jesus acquaints her with the garden variety style of the Living God:
But the hour cometh, and now is,
when the true worshippers
shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth:
for the Father seeketh such to worship him. (John 4:23 KJV)

Amazing! After all these years, God is still looking for and calling out to people who will trust Him. Obviously, it is a foolish human invention that views God as relying upon His omniscience to get the job done in advance.  Instead, the Bible clearly points out that the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are at work in time to bring an end to spiritual warfare in the finality of new creation (Revelation 20:10-21:1).  The blessing of the good news that has been spreading for hundreds of years is that the place for enlisting on the winning side is always open for those who long for a walk with God that will never end.  The cross of Calvary is the victory of God.  The blood of Jesus cannot be cut off from humans who are sinners.

Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.

Tree huggers...

And they heard the voice of the LORD God

   walking in the garden in the cool of the day:

And Adam and his wife hid themselves

from the presence of the LORD God

      amongst the trees of the garden.   Genesis 3:8 KJV

Adam and Eve sought shelter from the singing voice of the Lord God among the trees to which they were now trying to conform themselves.  Wearing fig leaves and trying to appear nonchalant about their new alliance with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the loving presence of the Lord was painful to their newly awakened consciences.  But, like it or not, there He was; walking, talking, singing and enjoying life as only God can live it. 

The devil’s plan for Eve and Adam was to reconstitute the life that the Lord God had given them into something they could live on their own terms.  He wanted them to share his distorted condition that rejected the boundaries that God had creatively set for them…Satan’s as a bloodless angelic creature and the humans’ as blood-filled biological spirits.  The Lord had prescribed certain by-products from other plant “biologics” as sustaining life while others were unhealthy, dangerous or deadly.  The fig was designed to provide a spiritual death: all the ramifications of which are still being explored to this day.

It is high time that humans revisit this moment in our history with our hearts.  Admittedly, we men need to be led humbly back to this place where our mother was deceived (1 Timothy 2:14) and our father’s love for her compelled him to throw himself into the fray of spiritual warfare by wrapping himself in the death that she had died.  Too long has humanity had to endure the foolishness of cerebral men who work out logical systems and inflict them upon philosophy and theology.  “Original sin” did not make humans that followed by procreation into spiritual filth any more than it did so for the original sinners.  All of humanity is still qualified to participate in spiritual warfare just as all of humanity is subject to spiritual attack.  The devil takes seriously that humans are worth something to God, even if many human philosophies scream loudly that it is not so.

The place that the Lord God prescribed as His rallying point for humans in the war against evil is the Cross of Calvary (1 Peter 1:19-20).  Christianity demands that believers be tree huggers of a different sort than Adam and Eve attempted.  We must meet Jesus in the place where His shed blood became available to all humans.  We must not depart from the cross since it is prescribed for us to take it with us (Luke 9:23).  It is the only tree that has value and the only one from which the onslaught of the enemy tries to separate us.

Come to Jesus.

Come to the Cross.