Day 26: Cast Out

Read: Genesis 3:22-23

When relationships split, it is a heartbreaking situation. I’ve experienced this separation of relationships multiple times in my life, but I’ve faced it most explicitly with my grandparents. I truly loved them as a child, but they did several truly terrible things to my family, and after years of seeking to reconcile and bring about closure in my family’s relationship with them, we had to remove them from our lives. And until they are able to repent and reconcile, there will never be any form of relationship again.

One of the most heartbreaking parts of Genesis 3 is the inevitable severing of the close communion and relationship that God had with Adam and Eve. By disobeying God and eating the fruit, Adam and Eve severed their close relationship, and so the Lord had to push them out of the Garden of Eden. The Garden was made for the man’s enjoyment and to revel in the beauty of God’s creation. Now, they aren’t allowed there any longer.

Genesis 3:22 says that people know of good and evil, but it is not a good thing. The knowing of good and evil is also interwoven with the spiritual death and separation that occurred when sin came into the world. This is why they were not allowed to eat of the tree of life. It initially seemed like God didn’t want humanity to live forever and that He wanted them to die, but it’s a much more loving situation than that. 

To have humanity live forever in the state that we are now would be a punishment and a curse far worse than anything we could understand. The darkness and depravity that would live on forever would be truly awful. That’s why new life and eternal hope must come through the redeemer, which is Jesus. He, the perfect sacrifice, comes and make humans new through His life. This had to happen before there could be eternal life. Eternal life without being made new in Christ would be eternal damnation.

“Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.” (Genesis 3:23). When Adam and Eve left the garden, they left to live out the curse of working the ground and sweating out the punishment and sorrow of no longer walking with God like they did before.

Praise God that is not where we are left. In Christ, we are no longer wandering the earth looking for some sort of meaning. Through Jesus, we have been given a new life and hope for what is to come even in the midst of a broken world.