Chapter Three--A Total Disaster
Chapter Three
A Total Disaster
au·ton·o·my: the quality or state of being independent, free, and self-directed
The bottom line: since sin has damaged everything, God calls us to be concerned about everything.
It was always a moment of panic for us. We would hear her feet on the steps, and we knew what her mission was. She was coming up to inspect the neatness and cleanliness of our bedroom. We would immediately go into rapid-bedroom-restoration mode, but it was always to no avail. There was no way we could ever get it right before her feet touched the last step. The mess was too great and the time too little. She would always hit that last step just as my brother Mark and I were stuffing huge piles of personal belongings under our bed, vainly hoping that this time Mom would be fooled. But she never was. In her anger at the sorry condition of our room and her irritation at our stuff-it-under-the-bed game, she would say the words we hated to hear, “This room is a total disaster!” And we knew that this meant we wouldn’t be leaving it until it had been fully restored to its rightful condition.
When Adam and Eve forsook God-centered transcendence for the false-hope, me-centered transcendence that the Serpent offered, the result really was a total disaster. You and I still experience the effects of that disaster every day of our lives. What happened in the garden is truly the central catastrophe of human history. It is almost impossible to overstate the hugeness of its significance. Here is how big this disaster was (and is). When Adam and Eve fell, the entire cosmos fell with them! There is no place to run. There is no refuge in which to hide. There is no situation untouched by its power, no location unharmed by its destruction. In a flash of disobedience and stolen glory, sin wrecked the cosmos. It was a total disaster.
A Thing of Stunning Beauty
God’s creative artistry, shown in the world he made and everything he placed in it, was a thing of gorgeous and stunning beauty. The hills were awash in multihued flowers, with no weevil to consume their leaves and no mites to infect their blossoms. The soil was packed with life-giving nutrients, and there were no thorns, thistles, or weeds to be found. Trees were laden with the lushest, sweetest, most succulent fruit. There were no plagues or pollutants. Nature grew, bloomed, and produced without struggle or toil. There was untainted natural beauty as far as the eye could see. It literally covered the earth.
Animals frolicked, fed, mated, and produced without fear of predators or a fight with disease. The animal kingdom was a place of an amazing variegated beauty, all existing in an atmosphere of peace.
People lived in joyful, unafraid, and unashamed community with one another. There was no stealing, lying, cheating, harsh words, abusive actions, strategies of vengeance, sexual immorality, broken families, or corrupt government. No one struggled with depression, anxiety, issues of identity, paralyzing regret, anger, envy, compulsion, addiction, fear, guilt, aloneness, hopelessness, or doubt. People didn’t suffer from injury, disease, or old age. There were no hospital vigils and no viewings of the deceased. No one needed to ask for forgiveness and no one struggled to forgive. There was no marital disappointment and no employment gone bad.
People lived in heartfelt, loving, obedient worship of God. They worshipped the Creator and managed creation; they didn’t give in to worshipping creation and trying to manage the Creator. There was no doubt of his goodness, no fear of his anger. There was no overt rebellion or subtle disobedience. They obeyed his words and listened to his wisdom. There were no corrupting idols or competing systems of faith. No one was ever angry at God, and God had no cause for anger with the people he had made. People loved God’s glory and in no way lived for their own.
In every way you could think or imagine, the world, as God created it, was a place of unparalleled peace and beauty. It was a sight and surround-sound glory display, reflecting the transcendent glory of the One who had made it out of nothing. His creative majesty was on untainted and uninterrupted display: the piercing red of the rose, the fluorescent scales of the fish, the sweet song of the bird, the gray grandeur of the rock, the earth-shaking roar of the lion, the endless gurgling of the stream, and the lacey delicacy of the leaf. Each part pointed to him. Each thing existed as a hymn to his glory.
How Do You Measure a Catastrophe?
How do you wrap words around the worse thing that ever happened? Maybe the apostle Paul did it best with this powerful statement in Romans 8:21: “The whole creation groans.” Lilies now fought with weeds that would choke out their lives. Pollutants floated as shadows in the sky and unseen toxins in the stream. Fruit and flower were blighted with disease. Pain, suffering, toil, disease, and death became the regular experience of everything in the creation. What was once very easy was easy no longer. What was simple became terribly complicated. Everything that was once free now was only obtained at great cost. What seemed once unthinkably wrong and out of character for the world that God had made now became a daily experience. Words like falsehood, enemy, danger, sin, destruction, war, murder, sickness, fear, and hatred became regular parts of the fallen-world vocabulary.
For the first time, the harmony between people was broken. Shame, fear, guilt, blame, greed, envy, conflict, and hurt made relationships a minefield they were never intended to be. People looked at other people as obstacles to getting what they wanted or as dangers to be avoided. Even families were unable to coexist in any kind of lasting and peaceful union. Violence became a common response to problems that had never before existed. Conflict existed in the human community as an experience more regular than peace. Marriage became a battle for control, and children’s rebellion became a more natural response than willing submission. Things became more valuable than people, and they willingly competed with others in order to acquire more. The human community was more divided by love for self than united by love of neighbor. The words of people, meant to express truth and love, became weapons of anger and instruments of deceit. In an instant, the sweet music of human harmony had become the mournful dirge of human war.
The Saddest Thing on Earth
Yet, with all of the havoc that sin wreaked on the physical world and on the human community, there was another horrible result. It was something so unthinkable, so horrific, so hard to grasp, that it easily stands as the saddest thing that has ever happened on earth. This tragedy is portrayed in a seemingly mundane conversation captured in Genesis 3:8—10:
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
What a sad, sad moment! Here is a man, created to have the boundaries of his life reach to the furthest boundaries of the glory of God. Here is one who was created to get his identity, meaning, and purpose from an intimate relationship with God. Here is a person whose every word, thought, desire, and deed were meant to be shaped by a heartfelt submission to and worship of his Creator. What do we find him doing? He hides in fear when the One who is meant to be his life comes near!
The sadness of this scene penetrates far deeper than formal religion and spirituality. It is about a crushing loss of transcendence, meaning, and purpose! To hide from his Creator is to hide from his true identity. He has done the one thing that he never, ever was supposed to do. In a moment of conscious rebellion, he has treated his life as being no bigger than his life. As a result, his response to God’s presence is not delight and love, but guilt and fear. He knows what he has done. He has forsaken the transcendent glory for which he was created and chosen a replacement glory: to take for himself the glory that only God was to have. He has compressed the borders of his life to his own wants, needs, and desires. It is the small world of autonomy, too small for real life to ever exist there. This self-centered world lacks the oxygen of relationship with God. It is not a place of life. It is a place of death.
How sad! Created for more, Adam and Eve chose less instead. Forgetting who they were, they attempted to find life outside of God, but what they found instead was death.
Autonomy and Transcendence
What did the Serpent hold out to Adam and Eve that was attractive enough for them to consider stepping away from the one central thing for which they were made? He offered them an independent glory. If they would just step out on their own, they could be transcendent beings like God. The word for this is autonomy. Here was the lie (and one that is still being whispered in the ears of people every day): “The key to true transcendence is autonomy.” But it was a wicked and cruel lie. The quest for autonomy will always crush transcendence. Rather than the huge glories of living for the glory of God, I end up with little shadow glories filling the dim cubicle of my own glory. As 2 Corinthians 5:15 makes clear, human beings were never meant to “live for themselves.” So, when Jesus touches me with his rescuing grace, he is freeing me from my bondage to me!
Since that horrible moment in the garden, every human being has tended to confuse autonomy with transcendence. The inertia of sin is always away from the Creator and toward ourselves. And let it be known that this is not only the struggle of the unbeliever; it is the struggle of the believer as well. As long as sin still dwells in our hearts, autonomy will war with transcendence. We are quite able to shrink the transcendent promises, glories, and hopes of the gospel to the size of our own lives, forgetting that, by God’s grace, we have been rescued from our self-constructed cubicle and welcomed to the vast expansiveness of the kingdom of God. One day the war between independence and transcendence will end, and we will live in glory, with glory, forever.
Until Then
I once had a friend who hired a contractor to build a new house for his family. Their budget was very limited, so they could only afford to have the contractor get them under a roof and do all the rough carpentry work. They had to complete all the interior finish work after they had already moved into their “new” home. I can remember him saying to me, “We are very thankful for our new house, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that the job isn’t done yet, and we have to stay focused and working until it is.” In the same way, each of us should be deeply grateful for our inclusion in God’s family of grace. We should be very excited about the way that grace has radically changed our lives. But we must also be aware that God has not yet completed his work in us. Yes, every day in some way you and I demonstrate that there is more work to be done. Maybe it is a word of irritation. Perhaps it is shown in a moment of selfishness or greed. Maybe it is a refusal to admit wrong or a willingness to shift blame. It may be revealed in a thought of lust or a compromise of biblical conviction. Maybe it is in the all too frequent conflicts in my marriage or with my children. Maybe it is in my unwillingness to accept my job or my financial state. The point is that the evidence is there that the work of God’s grace in each of our lives is not done yet.
Because of this there are two things that I must always keep in view.
The ongoing tendency to treat my life as if it were no bigger than my life. We all need to be examining the places where we still tend to “live for ourselves.” Maybe this comes out as being more personally excited by the acquisition of a material thing than by growing in my relationship with the Lord. Maybe it comes out as being in conflict with another person because they are in the way of something I am convinced that I need. Maybe it is eating or spending more than I should. Maybe it is exhibited by a stronger desire to “win” a conversation than a desire for loving unity. Maybe it is that my involvement in my local church has been whittled down to a Sunday slot in an already too busy schedule. There is a great temptation in all of us to reduce all that God has taught us and done in us down to the size of the personal concerns of our lives. Yes, it is right to be excited. The work of Christ will help you enjoy a better marriage, be a better friend, enjoy better relationships with your children, and do better at work. It is true that if you deal with your heart issues you will make progress in all of these areas. But God has called you to a greater circle of concern than your own life. You see, when God enters our lives by his grace, he isn’t working to make our kingdom work so much as he is calling us to an excitement with, and dedication to, a much greater kingdom.
Most of us have learned how to celebrate our inclusion in God’s great and glorious work, while functionally caring for little that does not directly address us. In doing this we have Christianized our autonomy. Essentially, we are asking God to give his endorsement to our attempt to shrink the transcendent glories of his kingdom to the size of our circle of personal concern. And even though we are trying to live inside of God’s boundaries, we have still manufactured a life where self is at the center. It is quite possible for our Christianity to be quite narrow and selfish and to not be aware of the shrinkage.
We must keep in mind that the fall was a total disaster. Again, it is hard to find words that do justice to the unimaginable devastation that sin wreaked on everything that God created. Its effect was total and complete. You may be wondering why it is so important to keep the comprehensive nature of the fall of the world in your mind. This is necessary because it is only when you remember how big the effects of sin are that you will live the way God calls you to live. Here is the logic of living in light of the purposes of God: If sin’s devastation is as wide as creation, then the scope of redemption must be just as big. Therefore, we are called to live with the total restoration of creation in view.
What is the kingdom of God all about? What is the new life to which God has called me? What new meaning and purpose is to become the focus of my life as a child of God? What in the world are we Christians supposed to be doing anyway?
God has called us away from our autonomous, self-focused living to live transcendently once again. This means to live with restoration in view in every situation, location, and relationship in which God places me. And what is God’s redemptive purpose? It is captured in the second to last chapter in the Bible, when God, seated on the throne says, “I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21:5). It is summarized in Romans 8:18—24, which pictures the whole of creation groaning, waiting for redemption. If the glory of God is reflected in all of creation, if the effects of sin reach to all of creation, and if the goal of redemption is to restore all of creation, then what should you and I care about? EVERYTHING!
Your sadness with sin should be bigger than the fact that it complicates your life. Your sadness should extend as far as sin reaches. Your celebration of God’s restoring grace should be bigger than the fact that it brings blessing to your private world. No, your celebration should reach as far as restoration is needed. God’s grace really does welcome you to think big and live large. God invites you to be an active and daily part of the “more” of redemption. His restoring grace gives you reason to extend the boundaries of your concern way beyond the borders of your own life. He calls you out of your little kingdom to give your talents, gifts, resources, and time to the glorious concerns of his big sky kingdom.
As his child, when you get up in the morning you awake to a huge kingdom. It courses back through history and extends to before the foundations of the world were set in place. It extends forward in time to endless eternity. It encompasses every location known and unknown, every situation of every kind, every person and every created thing. The goal of this kingdom is the complete restoration of every last thing that was damaged by the fall. You must no longer live for yourself. Grace has led you through the door to something more and better. Grace calls you to shape your living to the contours of this amazing work of restoration. As the great old Christmas carol proclaims, “He comes to make his blessings known, far as the curse is found.” (“Joy to the World”)
But this is precisely where our problem takes place. We get so excited about the personal benefits of redemption that we lose sight of redemption’s greater goal. Yes, the personal benefits of redemption are amazing, worthy of eternal celebration. But redemption’s agenda is not to make our kingdoms successful, but to welcome us to a much bigger, much better kingdom.
Jim Collins makes this stunning observation in his best-selling book on corporate management, Good to Great.
Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.” 1
Collins’s observation is so important! Many of you have done just what he is talking about with your walk with the Lord. You have settled into a self-focused enjoyment of the good life. You are enjoying what grace has done to your marriage, your parenting, your friendships, and your work life. It has been all too easy for you to miss the point that you were rescued from what was very bad—not just to be part of something good, but amazingly, to be part of something very great.
You have been chosen to transcend—to transcend the boundaries of your own hopes and dreams, to transcend the boundaries of your own plans and purposes, and to transcend the borders of your own family and friends. You have been chosen to transcend the furthest reach of your own definition of glory to be part of a greater glory, the glory of God and his work of making all things new.
Have you settled for living too small? In the midst of the total disaster of sin, have you settled for something good when you have been chosen for something great?
The final question: have you treated the size of god’s grace as if it were no bigger than the size of your personal concerns?