Divine Plagiarism

Situation for today. You are Adam. You’re in Eden. Your wife, Eve, comes up to you holding the forbidden fruit, which is conspicuously minus a mouthful-worth. (We are, of course, assuming that he wasn’t right there when she was eating the fruit. I don’t have the telemetry feed. Sorry.) You have the aircraft, or the fate of humanity, as the case may be. Unfortunately, as we all know, our great-great-great-and a bunch of other greats-grandfather did not choose wisely. No ‘take a seat’ for him. The ‘sit down’ was disastrous, and certainly involved the booming voice of God. So, really, this is more a safety board than a stand-up. For all non-zipper-suited-sun-demi-deities out there, sorry about the inside joke.

What sorts of thoughts are running through Adam’s head? How can he wrap him head around the situation? His wife, the woman who shares his very essence, has just introduced sin into their union. He is united to her in relationship, yet she has cut herself off from relationship with God. She is undeniably wrong, but yet he is responsible.

She was wrong. Love knows when to say no, and when to confront. To ignore that she was wrong, Adam does a disservice to himself, her and God. He is like the cowardly man, who gets browbeat whenever he has an argument with his wife, and says, ‘I’m so sorry honey, you were totally right.’ This man is not loving his wife if she was in fact wrong. If she was wrong, then he forgets his loyalties: first to God, then to her. (Of course, if she was right, he should take ownership and apologize.) If he does not love God more, then he will love her less. Adam chose Eve over God, and did her a tremendous disservice in doing so. He needs to own the situation, not be owned by it.

In owning the situation, he realizes that he was responsible. Just as the lover feels the pain of their beloved, the lover feels the guilt of the beloved through the link of their love. He is not the offender, but he must become the intercessor. He must bear the guilt of both of them before God. Remember something about ’as Christ loves the church?’ He must not deny the sin of his beloved, but neither will he abandon her to her fate. It is his responsibility to take ownership of the situation, his responsibility to confront the wrong, and his responsibility to reconcile their relationship to each other and to God. Love speaks kindly and compassionately, confronts the wrong, and then keeps no record of it. Love remembers that anything that happens in a relationship involves both people. And can only be solved with both people. So love accepts what portion of the blame was theirs, realizing that if Adam was doing his job, Eve probably wouldn’t have taken the fruit.

Imagine if Adam had recognized the wrong of his wife and chosen to take responsibility for her? God wrote a plan of salvation for the fallen couple. Does it not stand to reason that He would have made a plan to save Eve if she alone had fallen… Can you imagine an Eden where Adam refused to eat the fruit? Where he came before God with his wife, where he interceded for her in repentance for both of them? Where he acknowledged his role in her choice to take the fruit and prostrated himself before the throne of Grace? Instead of ‘its her fault for bringing it to me, its Your fault for giving her to me,’ imagine ‘I take the blame of my wife upon myself…please have mercy upon a sinner.’ I think history may have played out quite differently. Adam failed. He failed in his wrong choice to eat of the tree, and he failed just as deeply in his choice to shirk responsibility. He trusted in fig leaves to cover the shame of his family instead of trusting in the depth of God’s love. Praise God that the Second Adam succeeded where the first one failed.

Adam was in a covenant relationship. I was not. Yet the same dynamics apply, if to a lesser degree. I was so busy trying to blame everything on her that I never took responsibility for the story. I acted far more like the first Adam than the Second. In my story, I first tried to excuse her wrong by participating in it. When that failed, I blamed her wrong choices for my own wrong choices. It took me far too long to realize that her being wrong did not make me right. It just made us both wrong. I failed to take responsibility until the very end. My failure to confront the dynamics, worse, my participation in them made me just as guilty as her. I wanted to hold on to the relationship by excusing the wrong things that were happening. I thought that if I were to take responsibility and confront them, then we would never talk again. Just like Adam thought. So instead I followed her into sin, just as he did. In doing so, I failed God, her, and myself. Finally, when I did confront her, I was wrong even as I was right. My words were not kind. They were not intentionally cruel, but they were not kind. They may have been words that needed to be said, but they could have been said better. They may have been factually correct, but they were not loving. So I am the first Adam. Praise God that the Second Adam is so much better than me.