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Tag: eden

Be My Valentine – What Love Is Not
Not Alone

The Lord reminds me in solitude and in silence: we are not alone; for he is always with us and never will leave us. So much passing talk of love, yet what is love? Who loves me? Truly, who do I love?

I may have known love, you may think. Or love has never found me, you may lament.

Rare time of silence pours in all the questions of life, thoughts of love: lost love, unrequited love, lovers, would-be lovers so you had hoped. Love of your mom or a father not even yours as you see a man pouring out joy into the life of his child at a nearby dinner table may invade your thoughts.

I have remembered a friend, oh so close, who once filled our days together with shared love of life. What ever happened to my best friend I see no more?

Love defined

Love’s imagery in seasons such as this often paints pictures so distant from the touch of our real love life. We question what meaning love truly holds. For love is more than a mere valentine card, candy, flowers, a romantic date. Even a honeymoon to Eden would not fully satisfy love’s desires of unconditional oneness. A brief moment of life now and before may have embraced something more like love, but we can no more define love than the blurry-eyed poem of a love struck teen.

Of course our first definition of love is eros, but eros quickly comes far short of love’s fullest meaning. [ctt title=”Truly the storyline of eros proves to be myth in our romantic lives from first love to last.” tweet=”The arrows of true love pierce a heart irreparably.” coverup=”mM232″]

אָהַב ‘ahab – to love

Human love for one for another includes much more than just sexual love, a true binding of souls between two living complex beings of flesh and bones… even a oneness between ‘broken hearts.’ It includes family, father and mother and dear friends. Love of another, plain and not-so-simple.

Real life beyond the myths of love greatly challenges our sensibilities of meaningful relationships with others. Who do I trust? Who has not wounded the tenderness of my very being?

I will love my child over all others, a parent may say. Or I will love no friend like the one who hurt me. Love, true love of another may be a many splendored thing, but to love another risks all by trusting vulnerability of my soul.

A Higher Love

Do you know this one?

Deuteronomy 6:5 וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶֽךָ׃

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

In Hebrew, the same word to love is applied first to the LORD! ‘ahab Yĕhovah ‘elohiym – You shall love the Lord your God.

Jesus calls this the greatest Commandment” in Matthew 22:36-40.

[ctt title=”Love God. Love cannot exclude love of the LORD our God!” tweet=”“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart…” coverup=”1l94c”]

The challenge of love

Who can I love beyond my self? Who can I trust with my tender wounded heart?

Love of God is a challenge for many. Fortunately the Lord exceeds every man and every woman in love by reaching down to our delicate depths with overflowing love, mercy, forgiveness and grace.

Love of a parent or child or dear friend, a mentor, a confidant, a leader or teacher: all become part of the loves of our life. All fall short except the love of God.

Yet how shall we love those we love as unsparingly as the Lord our God?

A true love of others cannot seek to love for our own benefit only, but in humble unconditional service to one also beloved of the Lord. I cannot love as well as God, but in all humility I can try to love another in a way that is better than the selfishness of man.

What love is not

You may have heard love preached at an altar of bride and groom. Or you may have read on a card the great wisdom of God’s love from a letter to the church in Corinth, a city of excess worship of gods of myth and tradition.

Yet Paul did not write the love chapter of 1 Corinthians 13 for a ceremony or only for advice to a husband and wife. This love, as we mentioned before, is so much more.

In Greek, ἀγάπη, agapē love points upward to God’s love as we embrace other souls in this temporary place. The love chapter’s forgotten definition of love is ‘charity’”

Aside from the definitions and niceties, however, let us briefly examine our own hearts for the leaven of what love is not:
- love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.
- It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing…
A valentine greeting

Think of the valentine message you send to loved ones every day and consider from above what love does not do?
- Does your heart’s greeting to God even approach His love for us?
- Does your gospel for parent or progeny ever appear arrogant or rude? I’m convicted.
- Do you boast to your friend or envy another?
- Worse, at the failings of another do you also ‘rejoice in iniquity?’
Beloved,

Love one another as Christ Jesus loves us.
February 14, 2017
Reflections: man vs. GOD

Eden, as we read previously, was a place – a walled garden – created by God for His pleasure and the pleasure of Adam and Eve: a man, and a woman made for man, joined as one; even as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are One.

God walked with man in the garden of pleasure.

And it was good.

When man is in relationship to God, in conversation with God, in prayer with God – when we are one with the Father, we mirror his holiness.

When man (woman) misses the mark of perfection, the ideal of holiness – when we do not mirror the essence of the Father’s goodness, it is sin.

Trespass, crossing the forbidden line, climbing over the hedge of protection – when a man or woman turns from the direction of perfection, it is sin.

So what was so wrong with Eve and Adam wanting to sample from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

Should we not recognize evil, that we might follow good?

Should we not attain knowledge, that in ignorance we might fall from the will of God?

Genesis 3 English Standard Version (ESV)

He [the serpent] said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”

2 And the woman said…

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Wait! Let’s pause here a moment and ask, What’s wrong with this image [picture]?

First: Satan lies. The enemy of good is subtle in his lie.

Second: The woman is receiving knowledge [information] from the devil! Can that possibly be good?

Third: The woman is not seeking the answer of her husband, from whom she was made and for whom she was made. So how can her response be as a women one with the spirit and flesh of her husband? (I know this is touchy, controversial topic in a church where the wife is not expected to honor her husband as her personal lord only after the worship of the Lord they worship as one.)

Fourth, yet not least of importance: Eve, and for that matter, Adam, does not take the issue and application to God before they sin – before they act – before they exercise their Self-will over the will of God.

It is disobedience!

They have used their freedom to choose, within the hedges of the garden of good, to do what is evil in the eyes of the LORD.

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4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

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NO, Adam didn’t consult with God either. He listened to his wife, who had listened to Satan.

But was it really such a bad sin?

Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment. After all, don’t we hold our universities and learning in high esteem? Isn’t knowledge a good thing for us? Have we not made life on earth so much better by the great learning of man from generation to generation?

Now from the other side of the bar I ask you to judge: how good is mankind now that we have all this knowledge? How good is man?

Have you ever played the telephone game?

Suppose God tells Adam… then Adam tells Eve… Eve and the serpent whisper something back and forth… then Eve entices Adam with what the serpent has said… yet eventually, the conversation gets back to the LORD.

What has happened to truth?

It is like the telephone game, when we have listened to Satan and not God?

Eventually, news of our sin will prompt the question of conviction from the Father of righteousness. Eventually, man, made in the image of God, is accountable to the Creator who does judge that which the Lord created, even in His Image.

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9 But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”

10 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

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After the LORD hears Adam confess his fear, the LORD asks the obvious question:

MAN, who have you been listening to that is NOT the LORD!?

Is the evidence of the sin of the telephone game not convicting?

‘Did GOD really say?’ Was this not the first deception of Satan?

So in the beginning, the good and the innocence of holiness and sinlessness is broken by one simple disobedient ‘choice’ by man (and woman) free to choose good or evil, yet destined to also receive the judgment of consequence.

And the Lord saw it was good… or must the Lord see the nakedness of your sin?

Adam rightfully fears punishment of a Holy and loving Father God, our All-Powerful Creator. FEAR now enters into the relationship of man to God – fear because of the just judgement of sin.

To be continued.

March 20, 2015
Reflections: Eden

Genesis 2 English Standard Version (ESV)

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying,

“You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

18 Then the Lord God said,

“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

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Examine the Biblical text from ‘in the beginning;’ for before the beginning, GOD IS.

The LORD יְהֹוָהYĕhovah GOD אֱלֹהִים‘elohiym

made adam אָדָם ‘adam

in his Image צֶלֶם tselem.

First: LORD GOD, Yehovah elohiym; not Allah, not any other NAME. The LAW, or first five books of the Bible are a narrative written by Moses for the Hebrew people – God’s Chosen people. It is not an eyewitness account – Moses was not a reporter in the garden of Eden – yet Moses spoke directly with Yehovah elohiym. GOD told Moses!

Second: The LORD God put Adam in Eden to work it and keep it.

Third: The LORD God had not only created Man, God created everything in the heavens and the earth and made man in His Image in this place to glorify Him.

God met with, spoke to and had a personal relationship with man in this special unspoiled garden. It was a place where the LORD God walked and talked with His beloved man of His creation, Adam.

Think about it: the ALL-POWERFUL CREATOR of ALL, walking in a place with a creature of His creation – GOD carrying on a conversation with adam, enjoying the good of His creation with His personal friend, Adam.

Would one made in the Image of a good God, a loving friend, not want to do all the Lord commands?

Adam is an innocent sinless child of God! The first man and the first woman have no father and mother. They were both created by the LORD God!

Does it matter if the LORD created them in His Image?

Yes.

Does it matter if the materials were dust or rib?

Does it matter where an archaeologist might dig up this garden paradise?

Could it possibly matter to a generation gorged on the tree of speculative knowledge when all of this took place?

What, then, is important from the Biblical account of Genesis?

The LORD raised Adam and raised Eve in the garden as a Father raises his innocent children.

God provided. God gave them their purpose. God gave them love.

And as a good father will do, God gave them a rule for their own continued good (as ones made in the Image of the God of Perfect Good).

The LORD God did this for the perfect pleasure of the man, of the woman and of the LORD!

(Note: If you haven’t followed the links to root definitions, you ought to – especially this last one.)

To be continued…

March 18, 2015