What was God to do in the face of this dehumanizing of mankind, this universal hiding of the knowledge of Himself by the wiles of evil spirits?
—Athanasius
The Lord’s response to Adam’s fall is as remarkable as it is beautiful.1 There is no pretending that all is well, no looking the other way as if Adam’s infidelity were a mere glitch in an otherwise properly functioning relationship. The Lord saw the disaster for what it was, but, to cite Athanasius again, “What then was God, being Good, to do?”2 Pretend all is well? Lash out in anger? Being who he is, he accepted the Fall, without approving of it, and accepted Adam as a fallen creature. In the words of Papa, “Instead of scrapping the whole Creation we rolled up our sleeves and entered into the middle of the mess” (101). There is no divine indifference or neutrality, as if the Lord couldn’t care less what happens in his creation. And there is no divine outburst of retaliatory anger. There is certainly judgment, judgment which discerns that a great wrong has happened, and judgment that insists on putting things right, on establishing peace and trust and love in the relationship. For the eternal purpose of our adoption in Jesus stands.
So as an act of sheer grace, of keen awareness of Adam’s fear and identification with him in his pain, and as an act of determination to meet and relate to him in his fallen state, the Lord accepted Adam in his shame and related to him as he was. He clothed him.3 Such an act was not about God or a divine need to be appeased. This was an act of love, of acceptance and real relationship, flowing out of his determination to bring the purpose of adoption to fruition.
It was the great Anselm who said to his friend Boso, “You have not yet considered the exceeding gravity of sin.”4 For Anselm, the problem of sin lay in the fact that it was committed against the great King, the eternal God himself, and therefore even the smallest sin necessarily carried the weight of an eternal offense.5 But in the Garden of Eden it is difficult to find such an offended God, or to see sin being weighed over against God’s eternal worth. We see the Lord, who, by our way of thinking, should have been highly offended, and who had every right to curse Adam and destroy him utterly—but he didn’t. We see the Lord putting aside all his rights to abstract justice and punishment, and we see him more concerned about his lost and terrified creatures than he is about his honor.
There are no dazzling lights, no hosts of angels, no triumphal entry of a King demanding proper recompense or vengeance for Adam’s offense. The Lord comes in the cool of the day for fellowship with his beloved creature. He finds his friend hiding, ashamed and terrified. He recognizes what has happened, and without flinching moves toward Adam in tenderness and accommodating love.
The problem of the Fall, of evil and sin, is not simply that there has been disobedience to a divine command. The problem is that Adam is now so lost in his own fallen mind that he is utterly incapable of relationship with the Lord. How could he possibly trust the God of his broken imagination? Trapped in the tragic nightmare of his self-referential confusion, he has become the judge, and in his judgment, he believes that the Lord is the enemy to be feared and avoided. He is ashamed of himself and terrified of God. He hides.
The hiding of Adam—from the presence of the concerned and caring Lord—tells us that the Fall, at the very least, is about a terrible twisting of human perception, about an alien, ungodly confusion that so warped Adam’s fundamental way of thinking that he actually hid from the greatest friend in the universe—and believed he was right.
The most penetrating commentary on the disaster of Adam’s fall are the words of Jesus: “No one truly knows the Father except the Son.”6 Jesus does not say that we are doing well but need some fresh insights about his Father, or that our basic vision gets good marks but needs to be tweaked. He says that no one truly knows the Father. What statement could be more solemn? Here is the “exceeding gravity of sin.” No one—not the Jews, not the Romans, not the Greeks, no one—truly knows the Father. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” as the apostle Paul contends.7 For Jesus, the problem of human blindness is absolute. All are so caught in the toils of Adam’s confusion that there is not one who knows the Father, not one who sees him as he is, not one who is even close—except the Son.8 “I have come as Light into the world, so that everyone who believes in Me will not remain in darkness.”9
A confused mind sees only through its own confusion.10 We cannot push the weeds of our fallen minds to the side and know the Father’s heart. With Adam we are so confused, and trust is so obliterated, that adoption now seems the dream of a fool, for the rug of any possible divine-human fellowship has been jerked out from under our feet. And without fellowship, the “womb of the Incarnation” is simply and profoundly wrong for the trinitarian life. We are so trapped in our alien vision that we will not and indeed cannot let go of the way we see things, and therefore can do nothing other than impose our confusion upon the Father’s face, creating a god in the image of our brokenness.11 Jesus is dead serious: no one knows the Father.
The biblical story is not about changing God, as if somehow our failure altered the Father’s heart or his eternal dreams for us. The story is about how the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit finds a way to do the impossible—reach us in our fallen minds. As Papa says to Mack, “I understand how difficult it is for you, so lost in your perceptions of reality and yet so sure of your own judgments, to even begin to perceive, let alone imagine, who real love and goodness are” (192). The problem for God is: How can I restore to fellowship with me those so utterly lost in their own fallen minds that they hate me and run for cover from my sight?
How do you relate to one who does not want to relate to you? How do you get inside blindness? How do you reach one whose projecting shame so disfigures your own face that he disowns your love and hides in fear at your sight? In our pain we, like Adam, have condemned ourselves, created a god in the image of our shame and handcrafted religions to go with it, all of which we project onto the Father and defend with a vengeance.
How will the Lord get through our darkness and make himself knowable to us? Revelation seems the obvious answer, but is it? What good is revelation when our minds are so twisted that we would only misinterpret what is revealed? How can authentic communication, not to mention trust, be possible at all when our fallen imaginations paint the Lord’s heart by the numbers of our own guilt and shame?