One Day, Adam

I’m considering taking my book, “When God Got His Hands Dirty” off my Amazon shelf, dusting it off and making some changes. I wrote that book with my middle school students in mind and now I’d like to adjust it for a wider audience and maybe see if I can sell it through a more traditional channel.

I was thinking about the chapters this morning and I remembered Adam. I have a soft spot in my heart for him. I believe his heartbreak at being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, his separation from God, and the loss of all the beauty of the Garden echoes through our very cells to this day.

It was just last week that I was ranting to someone about death. They responded with something like, “We have to come to terms with it because it’s just the natural course of life.” To which I responded, “It not the way it was meant to be!” My hatred of sickness, disease and death comes from my forefather, Adam who remembered a time when he lived with God in the beauty of the Garden without it. I will never think sickness and death is normal or natural.

Years ago when I was reading and writing my chapter about The Garden and Adam, I read this in Josephus’ “Antiquities of the Jews” concerning Adam’s son, Seth, and his children:

“Now this Seth, when he was brought up, and came to those years in which he could discern what was good, became a virtuous man; and as he was himself of an excellent character, so did he leave children behind him who imitated his virtues. All these proved to be of good dispositions. They also inhabited the same country without dissensions, and in a happy condition, without any misfortunes falling upon them till they died. They were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order.”

I remember being stopped in my tracks wondering why were Adam’s son and granchildren drawn to study the stars? I thought of Adam when he left the Garden. The silence. The aloneness. I don’t know where God came from, but from a few verses in the Bible we’re given the impression that God comes “down.” From where? From the heavens?

I had a picture in my mind of Adam missing God especially in the cool of the evening and going outside looking for God in the sky hoping to see Him again. Wishing God would come down again and things could be like they used to be. Maybe Seth came out to be with his Dad and they sat and looked for God together. Then maybe Seth’s children did the same.

As they sat and looked for God, they probably saw patterns in the stars and named them. Then maybe they saw changes, saw comets and meteors and maybe assigned meaning to them. Maybe God revealed things to Adam, because Josephus goes on to say that Adam had predictions. He predicted that “the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water.” (The flood happened around 1000 years later.)

Maybe Adam found solace by looking for God among the stars.

I feel sorry for Adam. I feel sorry for all of us. There’s much in life that we try so hard to normalize, to come to terms with, but deep in our soul we know it was never meant to be. In addition to sickness and death, I don’t think we were meant to sit in traffic, or have our kids sit in crowded windowless classrooms, or live a life counting calories or dealing with food allergies. We should never be lonely. Like Seth’s children, I think families should “inhabit the same country without dissensions and in a happy condition” and not scattered across the globe trying to make a living.

But one day we are promised, because of Jesus, we will all be together in our Father’s house of many rooms and God will be there. “He will wipe every tear from our eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

One day, Adam, one day we’ll be back in the Garden.