[...] therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.
God's Hidden Compassions
When we talk about the fall, the focus is usually on how we're screw-ups, we're full of sin, and how God had to kick us out and make sure we stayed out. Pretty depressing stuff that we think makes God look like nothing but a judge, a righteous one perhaps, but also cold.
Despite Genesis being written in a pretty brief only-what-you-need-to-know style, there's a surprising amount of compassion scattered throughout these chapters.
Verse 7 states that Adam & Eve had sewn themselves coverings after their fall, and yet in verse 21 God goes ahead and clothes them in additional garments of skin. And while on the surface, verse 7 might seem to take away from God's act of mercy, I find it actually enhances it: this was not a simple case of God providing bare necessities that Adam & Eve wouldn't have been able to obtain otherwise (unlike say, providing manna to the Israelites in the desert who would have otherwise starved). It would be like a homeowner who discovers a tenant of his has been stealing from him and must be evicted, in the dead of winter. In one case, the tenant doesn't own a jacket and so the owner provides him with a ratty old one that certainly isn't the warmest thing but will suffice to keep him alive. In the other case, the tenant already owns that ratty jacket, he'll be fine, and yet the owner, in his compassion, runs after the man and offers him his own warm winter jacket. Maybe I'm reading into verse 21 too much but that's how I see it.
And as for the implicit compassion contained within verses 23-24:
"He might justly have chased him out of the world (Job 18:18), but he only chased him out of the garden. He might justly have cast him down to hell, as he did the angels that sinned when he shut them out from the heavenly paradise, 2 Pt. 2:4 ("For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment..."). But man was only sent to till the ground out of which he was taken. He was sent to a place of toil, not to a place of torment. He was sent to the ground, not to the grave, to the workhouse, not to the dungeon, not to the prison-house,- to hold the plough, not to drag the chain. His tilling the ground would be recompensed by his eating of its fruits; and his converse with the earth whence he was taken was improvable to good purposes, to keep him humble, and to remind him of his latter end. Observe, then, that though our first parents were excluded from the privileges of their state of innocency, yet they were not abandoned to despair, God's thoughts of love designing them for a second state of probation upon new terms.
[...] The command of that covenant being broken, the curse of it is in full force; it leaves no room for repentance, but we are all undone if we be judged by that covenant. God revealed this to Adam, not to drive him to despair, but to oblige and quicken him to look for life and happiness in the promised seed."
The cursed world in which we were "abandoned" to is in many ways a blessing in itself (something Pastor Dan mentioned to me in conversation) as it makes us realize that something is not right, things are not the way they should be...
"The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. [...] God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." (C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity)
EDIT (2008/10/28)
While I still like this interpretation, I should point out my later entry on Genesis 4:3-6 (Why Did God Reject Cain's Offering?) which interprets these events with a much more negative slant. Not sure if these interpretations can co-exist or not...
(back to Genesis 3)
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