The story of the fall of humanity in Genesis 3 is one of the most popular and memorable stories in the Bible. There are a number of features of the story that make it memorable. Simply the idea of a pure and innocent place grabs our attention. We really don’t know what this is like as humans. We live in a corrupt, broken, and decaying world. A quick glimpse at the news attests to this. So the idea of a pure and innocent existence is, well, captivating. Even to the point where we really have to stretch our imagination to try and understand what this may be like.
Did you know that faith requires much imagination?
There are also some quite strange elements of the story of the fall in Genesis 3. The most obvious one is that we find a talking animal, the serpent in particular. Many of my students here in Haiti have asked me, “Professor, this must mean that animals were able to speak prior to the fall, right!?” I answer is, “I don’t know.” We know that the Bible has accounts of all sorts of strange things like this happening (like Balaam’s donkey speaking, or all the animals fitting under the roof of a single boat. I constantly tell my students, “I don’t know how it’s true, but I know that it’s true.
This is important. Faith will stretch our normal confines of thinking. Faith asks us to stretch beyond ourselves to consider believing in something that is otherwise incomprehensible. I have even come to a point in my faith where I tell myself, “If I’m able to understand everything about God, then he’s not much of a god at all is he?” If God can fit in my head, then he sure is small.
I want to worship a BIG God. A God that makes me stretch beyond the confines of reason. A God that invites me to embrace the unimaginable. This is the kind of God that I want to worship and serve.
While this idea that the God of the Bible is mind-stretching, it also carries some challenging implications. Namely, that there are simply somethings in life that we just can’t understand. These can be good things and bad things both. For example, I just can’t understand how a holy God could love me enough to die for me when I shamed him as his enemy. This is a good, unimaginable things. On the other hand, I just can’t understand how a good God would allow innocent babies to suffer and even die. I don’t understand.
This is the heart of the story of Job, by the way. Job cries out to God in is agony asking him, “Why!?” God’s response, “I’m sorry, but this is beyond you; you just cannot understand…but will you trust me anyway?” This is faith.
Are you willing to trust God even when you don’t understand? Even when it hurts and you feel abandoned? Job did. John the Baptist did as he died in prison. Jesus did as he hung on the cross.
Will you trust him? People who do not only have faith, but are faithful. There is a difference.
