Little Edens

I'm kind of ashamed to say this, but I don't read the Bible as much as I should. If I love God, shouldn't I want to read His word to me? Probably. So one of my goals for this year is to read through the entire Bible. I got myself a snazzy ESV one-year Bible, and I am proud to report that as of this morning, I have read my section for each day. I know it's only been three days, but I'm still pretty pleased with myself (mainly because this morning I actually woke up early and read it before I went to school)!

Growing up in church, I heard the story of creation and the story of the fall a lot. God makes Adam and Eve. God tells them not to eat out of this one tree. They do. They get kicked out of Eden because they sin. So, I was honestly planning to breeze through the early stuff in my one-year Bible. As usual, my plan was stupid and wrong and didn't make a whole ton of sense. As I was reading, I came across Genesis 3:22-23:

"Then the Lord God said, 'Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever--' therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken."

So yeah, Adam and Eve kind of have to leave because they ate from the wrong tree, but that's not really what that verse says. God sends them out of the garden so they won't eat from the tree of life. Yeah, we think that getting cast out was the worst thing that could have happened to Adam and Eve, but it wasn't. The worst thing would have been living forever in their sin, and that's what God saved them from. It wasn't so much that casting them out was punishment. It was an act of love.

This got me to thinking. I'm sure that there were times when Adam and Eve really missed Eden. They probably thought about it longingly and thought that if they could just somehow get back, their problems would be over. Little did they know that waiting inside what they thought was perfection was something incredibly dangerous to them. I think that we all have Edens in our lives. Something we think will make us happy, something we think will solve our problems, something we think will be just what we need. For me, it's things like a relationship, getting time to myself, not having to think about money ever again, or having a house one day with a library in it. Sometimes I think about these things, and I really want them. They start to seem like the perfect thing to me. I start to want them so much that I get angry with God for not giving them to me. But just like God kept Adam and Eve out of Eden for their own protection, I think He keeps my little Edens from me because He knows me better than I know myself. He knows it's better for me if I don't have the things I often think I need so badly because He knows that they would be dangerous for me. So instead of being upset that I don't get what I want, I can be thankful that God loves me enough to not give me whatever I ask for because He's looking out for me.

Let's be honest, anyone who knows me knows that if I had a big library in my house I might never see the sun--or another human being--again. That's probably why God hasn't let me have one yet....