The second group discussion at church was about the Creation and how God intended things to be. As the previous week, that has got me thinking. The verses that we looked at reminded us of how carefully he made everything and how amazingly good it was. Creation was indeed God's masterpiece. Of course the pinnacle was the making of Adam, crafted from the dust, and Eve fashioned from Adam's rib. Ever since then humans have been fearfully and wonderfully made, each one of us.
Adam and Eve were given the luscious Garden of Eden to tend, which produced food for them without any effort and they lived in harmony with nature, as well as in communion with God himself. They knew good, and the good that they knew was very good. God came and talked to them personally. What more could they want?
Well, maybe a few days after they had been created, or possibly approaching more like 100 years (probably somewhere in between), the devil possessed a snake and came to talk to Adam and Eve. He asked them the same question as above: "Don't you want to eat from that tree in the middle of the Garden which God has forbidden you to have as food? If you do, you will know evil as well as good." The devil was offering them more than God had, and they wouldn't have known what evil was or its consequences. The devil painted a tempting picture of their eyes being opened to the more.
Jesus sets us free to live fully in God's image.
O dear, why did God allow us to choose? Why did he put the tree there as a temptation? Why didn't he just make us as people who had to love him? Because being made fully in God's image means that we have to be able to make choices, like him, and because love is not love if it's compulsory. Love has to be a choice to be love. He did, though, give us everything that we could possibly need and want so as to make the choice easy for us.
But Adam and Eve made the wrong choice and we became fallen creation, still intrinsically in God's image, but distorting that image dreadfully at times. We still possessed divinely inspired creativity and an enormous capacity to good when we so chose, but none of us choosing that all the time because we no longer could. Our very nature had become corrupt and sinful.
It doesn't have to remain like that, though. For those of us who have given our lives back to God and trust in Jesus for our salvation, we are now redeemed creation, free from the need to sin. We still make mistakes and need forgiveness, but we are free, free indeed, to start reflecting again that unfallen image of God.