Beginnings of Banishment

God desires to dwell among men. That is good news worth dwelling on.

In yesterday’s post, I pointed out the tension that comes along with God’s desire and plan to dwell among men.

If it’s to happen at all, it will all happen on God’s terms.

Like most good stories, the story of the God who dwells with His people starts at the start.

When Adam was first formed out of the dirt, God placed him in a garden, gave him a job, a blessing, a command and a wife. But we’re also told that God himself was with them, walking among them in the garden "in the cool of the day."

That nearness to God was soon broken, however, when Adam spurned the kind and loving authority of his Maker and disobeyed the only command he was given. In addition to curses falling upon the serpent, the earth and all of mankind as a result of Adam's willful disobedience, something even more dreadful and painful overtook us as a result:

God banished us from his presence.

From that moment on, the tension and plot-line of God's story revolves around one question: How will God and Man dwell together as at the beginning?

Also, from that moment on, the world is seriously out of whack. Brother turns on brother and murders over jealousy. Problems escalate from Cain's shameful murder of his brother to Lamech's shameless boasting of murder to his two--count 'em, two--wives, and finally to God reducing the world's population to right around eight.

The best solution man can come up with to remedy the core issue of banishment from God's presence comes in Genesis 11, where the world's first and finest self-help religion arises at a place that came to be known as Babel.

As the workmen stand back and marvel at their enormous tower, bottle of suds in hand, they pat each other on the back and raise a toast. "We did it! We've worked hard, and finally reached heaven! Soak it up, boys, this is a day they'll remember!"

Just then, "the Lord came down..." That's a painful phrase to would-be God-reachers. No matter how great you are, successful we are or hard-working we are, we can’t ever hope to reconcile ourselves to God. We must give up all hope of reaching Him ourselves.

In other words, if you are to meet with God, He must come down to you. Not the other way around.

And yet, even amid constant failure on a personal level and scandal in the public sphere, the world around us—including myself—instinctively strives to reach back up to God, to restore Eden and even to assert ourselves as good, worthy and right.

If we are to be re-united with God as we were in the beginning, it will have to be His doing, on His terms. The Babel experiment failed, and with it, so do our repeated efforts at self-justification.

God must take action to bring us back to Himself, to again dwell with man. And that's where Abram comes in.