The biblical record of the making and creating of man in Genesis 1 and 2 is thoroughly engrossing. God made Adam physically and created Adam spiritually. His body was the material, and His spirit was the immaterial. Together, they constituted the human soul. This combination, and it alone, is peculiar to human beings, separating humans from all other biological life produced by God. Because man had this God-given human spirit, he was able to connect with God in a way that no other created being could, spirit to spirit. But, when we arrive at Genesis 3, everything will change. Something is being added to the constitution of Adam and Eve that God did not put there. That something was an infectious terminal disease called “sin”, and this sin, produced by their disobedience to God caused them to be out-of-sync with their Creator. Previously, they enjoyed harmonious fellowship, but now, that was past. Their disobedience awakened their conscience. The conscience is activated when we violate a known standard. The result is guilt combined with fear; guilt because we know we did wrong, and fear because we are afraid of the consequences.
All behavior has consequences, whether good or bad. Adam and Eve’s consequence was immediate, just as God said it would be, remember? “The tree that is in the midst of the garden, you shall not eat of it, for in the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” But, what does that mean in light of Adam living to be 930 years old? It means Adam and Eve did die the day they ate. But, it was the spirit component of their being that died, not the physical body. And of what does their spiritual death consist? The same as what death always consists of…separation. Not cessation, but separation. Death, whether spiritual or physical, does not mean the one who died ceases to exist. It means the one who died is separated, ruptured in his personhood, disintegrated. Physical death is the separation of the human spirit from the human body. Spiritual death is the separation of the human spirit from God. That’s what happened to Adam and Eve on the day they ate. Their physical death came much later, but their spiritual death was already evident. They were separated in their spirit from God, and their spirit was in their body. So, the only thing they could do to distance themselves from God was to hide physically. They were simply following through with their physical body what they had already experienced in their inner spirit…separation. Spiritually, they were now dead toward God, so they hid in guilt and fear.
When they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, Adam and Eve hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden. Right here, Genesis 3, is where the great drama of human redemption begins, and it was just as soon as there was a need, the need for the now separated to be reunited, reconciled to their Creator. All the remainder of the Bible recounts the details of their ultimate undertaking towards redemption for the entirety of creation.
CC 09-03
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