Have you noticed that in your pain you assume the worst of me?
—Jesus
The fact that Jesus Christ—and our adoption in him—is not a footnote to Adam’s fall but the plan from the beginning places Adam and Eve, and indeed the event of Creation itself, under the heading of “The Coming of Jesus Christ.” Stop for a moment and let this sink in. Eden was never the goal, but the beginning. For the staggering gift of our adoption requires an equally staggering humility on God’s part, a humility that stoops to cross all the worlds of difference between the Creator and the creature.1 Creation was not an accident, and not the product of random chance, but an act of divine freedom, the first fruit of the lavish and determined love of the Father, Son, and Spirit, setting the stage for the coming of Jesus. Creation and Eden establish the personal and living context for the fulfillment of the union between the blessed Trinity and humanity in Jesus himself.
All things were created not only in and through Jesus, but also for him. “I am the light of the cosmos,” both the source and the meaning, the rhyme and the reason of the existence of all things. It is in Jesus—and in what became of humanity and creation in him—that we see the gracious and joyful purpose of the triune God in calling forth the universe and human existence. Without seeing Jesus as the center of all things, we are doomed to live without hope in an essentially joyless and meaningless cosmos.2 But seeing Jesus, and ourselves and all creation gathered in him, and included in his relationship with his Father and his anointing in the Holy Spirit, is seeing “the light of life.”3
Human existence, including that of Adam and Eve, is understood in the light of Christ’s coming. Creation is the first act of the triune God preparing for the advent of the Father’s Son. It sets the stage for his story, and ours in him. There can be no Incarnation and no adoption in Jesus if there is no Creation, no people, no relationship, and no living context.
Creation establishes the place where the Trinity will become one with humanity. And this shared life will express itself in us in untold beauty and grace, and creation itself will find in us the friendship of Jesus. The cosmos and the earth within it form the theater for the great dance of the blessed Trinity with the human race. Yet creation is much more than a mere theater. The created world is a cosmic sacrament, a vast, burning bush4 baptized with the glory of the blessed Trinity. It is designed to be the “bread and wine,” so to speak, in and through and by which we experience the trinitarian life for ourselves. Each and every thing, from the lowest to the highest, from the apparently insignificant to the obviously critical, has its place and value in Jesus’ world. As Sarayu says in The Shack, “If anything matters then everything matters” (237).
“I’ll never get tired of looking at this,” Jesus says to Mackenzie. “The wonder of it all—the wastefulness of Creation, as one of our brothers has called it. So elegant, so full of longing and beauty even now” (115). One can only imagine what it is yet to become! As beautiful and extravagant and full of life as it is now, creation is presently more akin to a photograph than a real place,5 but it is destined in Jesus to become real. “The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead.”6
I love what Jesus says after he feeds the multitude with a few loaves of bread and two fish. “Gather up the leftover fragments so that nothing will be lost.”7 This is the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit for all creation, and a beautiful expression of the trinitarian determination to bless and to include.
At the heart of the preparation for the coming of Jesus, of our adoption in him and the blessing of all creation, is the forming of humanity in the image of God. There could be no incarnation of the trinitarian fellowship without its counterpart on earth. Adam and Eve were not created as religious androids, but as persons in relationship. They were not extensions of God, or robots, or computers with Jesus software. While completely dependent upon the Lord for their existence, they were nonetheless distinct persons with their own minds, hearts, and wills. As the Bible makes plain on every page, and as Young makes clear throughout The Shack, the triune God takes us very seriously. We matter. We are real to God. It is above all else in the Incarnation that we see how distinct and real we are to the blessed Trinity. As Papa says, “I’m not interested in prisoners” (94). As distinct persons Adam and Eve were called to walk in relationship with the Lord, with one another, and with the whole of creation.
The pattern or blueprint of their existence was Jesus himself, in his relationship with his Father, with the Holy Spirit, and the future human race and created world. The deck was stacked. “The whole character of the creation was determined by the fact that God was to become man and dwell in the midst of his own creation.”8 Everything was designed for the trinitarian life, so that the life and joy, the beauty and grace, the other-centered and altruistic love and fellowship, could set up shop on earth in Jesus when the time was right.
Adam and Eve were given the central role in the plan. They were called to live in relationship with the Lord himself and to be the agents of his blessing upon creation. They were made to hear and see and know him and his love.9 And in knowing him, in knowing his heart and love, they would experience a security and confidence not of this world—unearthly assurance. With this assurance would grow the freedom to love and be loved, to know and be known, to care and be cared for—to share life and engage in other-centered fellowship. This other-centeredness would then flow into their relationship with all creation, becoming the vehicle of blessing and shalom.
As creation has its existence, meaning, and blessing in Jesus, Adam and Eve were given a real place in his lordship. Creation was to “find itself,” so to speak, or “hit its stride” through their love and leadership. Adam and Eve, first in their relationship of trust, love, and fellowship with the Lord, then in their relationship with each other, and then in their role as mediators of his blessing, formed the living context or “the womb of the Incarnation.”10 This was the earthly counterpart of Jesus and his relationships in heaven. It was the first or infant form of adoption, which was destined to reach all its fullness and glory in Jesus himself.
It is here, of course, that the whole plan almost fell apart at the beginning, or so it would seem. The cunning serpent lied about the character of God. Adam and Eve believed the lie and fell to doubting the goodness of the Lord.11 Such doubt as to the heart of the Lord toward them was a singular disaster, for it obliterated their unearthly assurance. Into the vacuum rose guilt and shame, fear and anxiety, and terrifying insecurity, all of which became a lethal roux within their souls, soon to poison the whole dish of their existence and that of creation. As Sarayu says to Mackenzie, “You humans, so little in your own eyes. You are truly blind to your own place in the Creation. Having chosen the ravaged path of independence, you don’t even comprehend that you are dragging the entire Creation along with you” (134).
“The serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan,” and “who deceives the whole world,”12 is called by Jesus “a liar and the father of lies.”13 He is a creature and no equal to the triune God. He cannot create, cannot give existence or life, and has no meaning to offer; all life and meaning come from the Father, Son, and Spirit. If the evil one is to have his own world, which appears to be his dream, then he is limited to hijacking and exploiting, or “misusing,” as my friend Steve Horn puts it, the trinitarian life shared with us. And he can do none of this without our permission, or against our wills. So he lies. He deceives. He confuses us so that we willingly, though perhaps unwittingly, give ourselves to operate in his diabolical matrix of unbelief, confusion, and meaningless darkness. And so he finds a place for his dastardly and perverse ways in the good creation of the triune God.
His chief deception is to invite us to doubt the Lord’s goodness, creating insecurity and anxiety in us, which in turn drives us into independent action. All this is then shrewdly woven into the lie that we are separated from the triune God. Adam and Eve believed the whispering doubt about the goodness of the Lord.14 In the place of trust, love, and security rose doubt, and then fear, which inevitably turned them in upon themselves. They became self-referential and “chose independence over relationship” (125). They became self-centered, making themselves and their own judgment their point of reference and discernment rather than relationship with the Lord. The trust, love, and fellowship that had originally formed the heart of everything became mistrust, anxiety, and independence—estrangement. The divine-human fellowship, formed to be “the womb of the Incarnation,” became an impossible and hopeless mess. The very relationship designed to receive the trinitarian life in Jesus became alien to the blessed Trinity.
The great disaster of Adam and Eve was not simply that they sinned or were disobedient to a divine rule.15 The disaster was that in believing the lie of the evil one, they became blind. And by “blind” I do not mean that they could not see physically; I mean that their perception of reality became skewed, so skewed that they could no longer perceive the real truth about God or about themselves. They hid from the Lord.
Why? Clearly they were afraid, but afraid of what? Of course, their hiding comes on the heels of their outright disobedience, and most people would assume that they were afraid of God’s punishment. But then again, how could Adam and Eve stand in the garden, the recipients of such astonishing blessing and love, and be afraid of the Lord? Had God changed? Had the Lord who created Adam and Eve out of sheer grace and love, and poured such astounding blessing upon them, suddenly made an about-face? Had he ceased to love?
Surely Adam’s disobedience did not alter the being of God. Or perhaps it did. Perhaps God did change, abruptly and radically—not in reality, of course, but in Adam’s mind. As Papa says to Mackenzie, “When all you can see is your pain, perhaps then you lose sight of me” (98). The belief in the lie about God’s character swirled around with Adam’s pain—the pain of his own unfaithfulness—and altered his inner vision, his perception of himself, of his world, and others. But most important, the way he saw God was altered. Adam projected his own brokenness onto God’s face. He tarred the Father’s face with the brush of his own angst. He took a paintbrush, dipped it into the cesspool of his own double-mindedness and guilt and shame, and painted an entirely new picture of a god with it. And it was this god, created by his own darkened imagination—not the Lord—that he feared, and from whom he hid.
The triune God did not change. How could human action of any kind change the being of God? Is the divine character so fickle, so unstable, as to be dependent upon us, or upon what we do or don’t do? What changed in the relationship was not God, but Adam. He now projected his pain onto God, thereby creating an entirely mythological deity, a figment of his own baggage. But this figment was nevertheless frighteningly real to Adam.
Adam was scared to death. How could he not be? He believed himself to be standing guilty before a divine being who was as unstable as he. Sheer terror struck his soul. For in his fallen mind, he was staring down the gun barrel of utter rejection. In his mythology, he stood a hairsbreadth from abandonment and “the abyss of non-being.”16
This is the problem of evil and sin. The impossible has happened: the truth about the love of the Lord is eclipsed, so eclipsed it has now become inconceivable. A profound blindness has taken over Adam’s mind. He cannot see the Father’s face. There is now a terrible incongruence between the being and character of God as Father, Son, and Spirit and the divine being Adam perceives and believes God to be. And for Adam, and indeed for all of us, the God of our imaginations is the only way God can be. Any other God is inconceivable.
From this moment, our shame will disfigure the Father’s heart. The projections of our fear will rewrite the rules of his care. He will continue to bless us beyond our wildest dreams, but in our mythology we will never see it. The very presence of the Lord in love and grace will be translated through the fallen mind and perceived as the presence of “the demanding taskmaster” (198), the great critic, the Judge quick to condemn, whose judgmental, watching spirit haunts every room in the universe.
The human race is lost in the most terrible darkness, the darkness of its own fallen mind, the darkness of wrong belief and unfaithfulness, of anxiety and projection and misperception. As Papa says to Mack, “It is the matrix; a diabolical scheme in which you are hopelessly trapped even while completely unaware of its existence” (126). Tragically, the fallen mind is consistent; it never fails. Its dark and anxious imagination creates a false deity, the proof of which it sees everywhere it looks. And this god is very, very real to us, so real it has become quite “natural”17 to us, “normal” (126, 219), the most obvious thing in the world, the unquestionable truth about divinity, through which we misperceive the heart of the Father without even knowing it.