Jesus Christ: The Son of Man

1. The Fall

There are big repercussions for disobeying God, simply because of who he is. What were the repercussions for Adam and Eve?

"they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness."
We already have a hint that something's gone terribly wrong. These two beings were made for one another: Adam spoke the first love poem when he called Eve "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!" after she was created, and now they can't even be naked in front of one another.

But things are even worse than they seem.

God calls out "Where are you?" The Garden where God had placed the man and woman was a place where God and his people could hang out, live in intimate relation, and now they are hiding from their creator, the one who made them in his perfect image, and called them "very good".

God banishes them from the Garden of Eden and things seem to be increasingly worse thereafter. Over hundreds of years, humanity is multiplying but they're not spreading God's goodness over the face of the earth. They're spreading human wickedness.

Things get so bad that Genesis 6:5-6 records that "The Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them and put them on earth. It broke his heart."

But there is hope.

Before God cursed the man and woman and banished them from Eden, he addressed the source of their disobedience by speaking to the deceptive serpent: "And I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel."

It isn't immediately clear to us what God means by this, but the serpent knows what God has proclaimed: a war.

The next chapter will reveal how the serpent responded to God's declaration, and what exactly God's declaration meant.

• • •

Look at nature and you will see the obvious hand of God.

But there's a story in the Bible that you can't read in nature. There is something in it that God is showing us. All human beings are lost because of the downfall of the man and woman you read of above. What they did rewrote our very nature.

But God has made a way to correct their wrong, and to restore us to himself. That is what the story of the Gospel is; God's rescue mission for his wayward children.

In Exodus 3, when God reveals himself to Moses, he actually says his name is I AM. He modifies it into HE IS for Moses so that when the man is speaking to the other Israelites, there aren't any linguistic problems; wouldn't it be a little confusing if someone showed up and started shouting "I am has sent me!"

God addresses this problem by making clear that it is not Moses who has sent himself, but God who has sent Moses to speak to the nation of Israel.

What does it mean that God's personal name is I AM?

Infinitely more than I could know, hope or understand, but I am going to grab onto one characteristic of our Creator, and hope and pray that he will reveal more of himself to me in the future.

God was God before he made us. God was God before he made anything.

I AM doesn't rely on anything; He is self-existent. He is truly Elohim of Elohim (Ruler over rulers). There are spiritual beings that aren't God, but none of those beings can exist apart from God. He is the one source of all life.

And now to his creation, he is HE IS; Yahweh.

Speaking God's name is a proclamation of praise in itself. Nothing can speak the name of God without praising him! All of creation cries out 'Eternal One!', even if it opposes him.

You can bow to God's love with all joy, all bliss. Or you can bow to God as the demons do, opposing, hating, and being envious of his power and authority. The choice is yours, and the consequences are yours too.

Either way, God will be glorified.

References

Please read the comment titled AUTHOR'S NOTE to directly access the links listed below.

https://youtu.be/U5iyUik97Lg - The Bible Project, 'Elohim'.

https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/elohim-supreme-one-mighty-one.html

Genesis 1-3.
Genesis 6.
Exodus 3.

Eager learners, be sure to check out the references above! They could help you better understand some areas where I might have fallen short in explaining.

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