The Companion

 

  My Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

I have written before about the moment when God said, “It is not good for the Adam to be alone.” Generally, I have understood that before He said that, it actually was good for the Adam to be alone. After all, when He had created the Adam, and all the rest of the world, the scripture finished up by saying, “And behold, it was very good.” So I take it as a new movement in the performance art that is the universe, and from then on it was not good for the Adam to be alone.

But why? Remember that the Adam is a self-portrait, made in the image of God. And God is alone – well, there is this Trinity thing, by which we understand that there are three persons but that they are all perfectly unified, so God is One. But maybe They/He doesn’t want to be alone.

So He tried some things. I don’t exactly think He was engaging in trial-and-error; I think it was trial-and-demonstration of possible ways He could have provided Himself a companion, someone who was in some significant way not Him. Ephesians 3 speaks of the gentiles being “fellow heirs and of the same body…” And “the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hidden in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ… according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” See, it was not trial-and-error. He meant for it to come out like this from the beginning, and created the universe by Christ Jesus.

First, He created the heavens and the world. Jesus describes Heaven as God’s throne, and the Earth, or as I have been saying, the World (ie the entire temporal universe) as His footstool. This magnificent two-part creation even to this day tells of the glory of God. Just the World, as we have come to understand it, is awesome, wonderfully complex and huge. And Heaven, who knows? This brilliant creation might have been the first attempt at a companion – but on the whole, it was too impersonal, for God is a person – okay, He is a multiple-person being. More on that later.

Now, the Heaven is a spiritual realm, a place where among other things, time does not pass. We have very little solid information about Heaven and the spirit beings God created there, but one of them was Lucifer. He was at least a person in some sense, as were other heavenly beings. He may have been intended to be more than a servant – but clearly that didn’t work out. It seems that he tried to take over, or at least got a swelled head and tried to grasp for himself equality with God. Lucifer was cast out of Heaven and into the temporal universe, where it seems he goes to and fro like a roaring lion, seeking whom he might devour. He did not make a suitable companion, most likely because he is not loving, a major property of God. So now he has become Satan, ie the Adversary.

Next, God created the Adam, specifically as a self-portrait, and that seemed to work for a while. God gave the Adam physical analogues of many aspects of His nature. He planted a garden out east, in Eden, and gave the Adam the job of looking after it. Evenings, God would come down and hang out. Not bad, until God changed things with His pronouncement. Then the Adam became more like God in that he too, needed to have a companion; the metaphor seems to operate in both directions. So then, God does another trial-and-demonstration. I call it an artistic feint. He brought the Adam a copy of every living animal that He had caused the earth to bring forth, and the Adam spontaneously came up with names for them (revealing another aspect of God’s nature, naming things); but none of them made a suitable companion. Sorry, Dogs, even you just didn’t cut it, though some people may disagree on this. Finally, God gives us another hint and uses a piece of the Adam to fashion his companion. I want to take a moment here to point out that there is a kind of progression here. God creates the heavens and the world, then He forms the Adam out of the dust (Hebrew ‘adamah’) and breathes into him the breath, or spirit, of Life. And the Adam became a living soul. Then He takes a piece of the living Adam and forms the Woman. Thus the Adam has elements of the dust, and of the spirit of life; Eve has the elements of the Adam, and somehow differs by not starting out as unliving dust. She seems to have a lesser connection to the dust of the earth (more on that later too). When God brings her to the Adam, he names her and renames himself in his first recorded utterance, recognizing that he has also changed, as he says, “This now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, (‘ishsha’ ) because she was taken out of man (‘ish’).” The Spirit (ie the narrator of Genesis) adds, “Therefore shall an ish leave father and mother and cleave unto his ishsha, and they two shall be one flesh.” C. S. Lewis once pointed out that a more modern translation of ‘flesh’ here is ‘organism’. This bond that a man and a woman are capable of creating in loving intimacy constitutes the Adam, version 1.1, a single organism, made of two persons and the spirit of life, as God is a single spirit in loving intimacy with its various persons.

Now the man and the woman are together in the Garden, and again, God seems to enjoy coming down at the cool of the day to hang out with them. This version of the Companion worked for a while. But then, enter the Adversary. I have written elsewhere about Original Sin, ie, the sin of our origin, so I will be brief here. The Serpent fooled Eve into taking some of the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with the suggestion that she could be “like God”. Typical of the Adversary, this suggestion had some truth, but filled with deception. She actually already was a lot like God, but who wouldn’t want to be more like Him? Here is the deception: adding the Knowledge of Good and Evil to the Adamic nature actually damaged the Adamic metaphor. The woman did not realize this. Adam wasn’t fooled, but he ate it anyway when she gave it to him, because that’s just what guys do, right? Then he tries to blame the woman for his own breaking of the one negative command God had given him.

Let me stop right here and say that I understand that the talking serpent is somehow Satan, but honestly, I don’t get the metaphor. Something is revealed here about Satan in this story, but it is not at all clear to me what it is. Snakes have been getting their heads bruised ever since, but the one who deserved it also got his head busted by the seed of Adam (when the Father resurrected Jesus from the dead), and there must be some sense in which he has to eat dust and go on his belly since that time.

Okay, so when the man and the woman were vandalized by receiving the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God had to alter the design a little.

First, the serpent. God declares that the serpent is cursed above all cattle and every beast of the field, and that he has to go on his belly from now on and eat dust (a reminder of Adam, the Dusty One?). There will be instinctive hatred between the serpent’s seed and the Adam’s. This mythological poetry about why snakes don’t have legs and why humans irrationally hate them is really about God and Satan, I think. I just don’t have any reliable details right now. Perhaps something has been revealed to others on this subject.

Next, the woman. God does not describe this as a curse, but he multiplied the woman’s fertility cycle and her sorrow in childbirth. I am not a woman, but I have been present at the births of my children, as well as the births of other mammals. I know that a woman feels pain in childbirth, but I would like to suggest that it is different from the pain of an injury; it seems more like the pain of great physical exertion. Still, I’m not about to tell a woman to just “shake it off”. As for menstruation, that seems a logical adjustment to the accelerated pace of human ovulation compared to most large mammals. I’m sorry for the mess, but at least there’s a reason for it. If women only ovulated once or twice a year, they would remain fertile for something like three-hundred and fifty years. Considering the effects of aging a consequence of sin), this seems like a bad idea. Why didn’t God just reduce the number of eggs, or do something else? You’ll have to ask Him.

For the man, not just eating that fruit, but for listening to his wife rather than the command of God, the very ground was cursed “for your sake.” I take that to mean that Adam’s eating of that fruit and its consequent damage to him is what caused the earth to be spoiled, or as God put it, cursed. In his letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that the whole creation groans and travails in pain (like giving birth) waiting for the resurrection. I think it’s because ol’ Dusty has a direct connection to the dust of the earth, from which he was formed. So now the earth brings forth thorns and briers, and it’s going to take a lot more work than it used to in the Garden, which they have to leave. Adam will have to work the now unruly ground in sorrow all the days of his life. In the sweat of his face, man eats his bread. And so must his children work for their living, for we have all inherited the Knowledge of Good and Evil from him. I assert that work is not the curse: it is the answer to the curse. Work is the Adamic path to redemption.

So now we have Adam and Eve out in the wide world (so they won’t eat the fruit of the Tree of Life – living forever but aging would be a terrible fate, like Tithonus, the mythical Greek guy who shriveled with age until he became a cicada) and start working and having babies. This sets the stage for the next try at a companion. Damaged as they are by acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they judge things by their appearance. This approach to life – is it good, or is it bad? – makes them unsuitable, even grievous companions for God.

In fact He considers calling the whole thing off, as the children of Adam continue to degenerate, and He decides to kill them all. But He just can’t bring Himself to do it when he sees that there is one man left that still loves Him. So he gets the guy to build a boat that can carry him and his family, along with a pair of all the animals, and drowns the rest. Noah is kind of Adam v1.1.1, ie not a significant change to the previous version. His children go on to show that as long as there are humans, there is going to be sin, ie the bad decisions brought about by the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in the world. So God is going to have to figure out a way to fix this. Satan is feeling pretty smug at this point.

With Abraham, we find God is looking ahead to a larger, corporate companion rather than a single man or couple. Originally named Abram (‘exalted father’), he hadn’t had any children, but God came to him when he was seventy-five and told him to leave Haran and that God would make of him a great nation, and in fact, “in thee all the families of the earth will be blessed.” (emphasis mine – this is another hint). When Abram gets to Canaan, God tells him “Unto your seed will I give this land.” Later, God repeats this promise, after Abram and Lot split up. God tells him “I will make your seed as the dust (remember dust?) of the earth.” Still no begotten children, and the scripture doesn’t even bother to say that Abram believed God. That will come later. Renamed Abraham (‘father of multitudes’), he became the father of many nations, and in particular through Issac and Jacob, the nation of Israel. The children of Jacob, renamed Israel (‘God prevails’ because God won the wrestling match), became God’s chosen people, which He referred to collectively as His daughter. There are many many lessons to be learned from the stories told in the Old Testament, and with my focus here I need to skip over most of them. But I would like to point out the changing relationship God had with His people.

With Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and indeed, Joseph, God was around in visions and visitations, not much different from Noah or Adam (after the “fall”), speaking directly with people in a still, small voice, so that it didn’t frighten them to death.

The big change came with Moses. By Moses’ time, Israel was much more than just a big family. They were an ethnic group living in Goshen of Egypt. With a strong arm, God led them out of what had become slavery, and when they followed Moses through the Red Sea, they were “baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (I Corinthians 10) and so started on their journey as the Chosen People. After the people got to the other side, with the Egyptians coming after them in the midst of the sea, the Lord told Moses to stretch out his hand over the sea, that it would come back to where it had been. Moses did, and all the Egyptians were killed. It was then that the people, seeing this, even more than when they crossed through the sea on dry land, that they feared the Lord, believed in Him, and listened to Moses. At least for a while. In the Song of Moses. They recognize that they are “redeemed”. “The Lord is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is my God, and I will prepare Him a habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt Him…. Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou has redeemed.”

In this period, God speaks to Moses, who tells Aaron, who tells the people what to do. God appears in glory before the whole congregation from time to time, speaking with Moses, in an effort to convince them to do as he says. When the people murmur against Moses or don’t do what he tells them, God comes to Moses and says, “Why are the people murmuring against me?” or “Why are they not keeping my commands?” God is identifying with Moses, and all the House of Israel through Moses, and the House of Israel is trying to deal with God through Moses. Moses is both priest and prophet. This relationship seems to be about as personal as God can get with six hundred thousand men, and their wives and children. It seems to illustrate just how difficult a large group can be as a companion, trying to get them to put their faith in Him and teaching them how He wanted them to live. This is Adam v1.1.2, another group of children of Adam and Eve.

Moses’ father-in-law, in the hopes that Moses will not completely burn out, suggests that he appoint a structure of administrators and teach them the ordinances and laws, and let them deal with the small stuff. This is the first step away from God dealing with all Israel directly through Moses.

After three months, they came to Mt. Sinai and camped at its foot in the wilderness. And God said, through Moses, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles wings, and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then you shall be a peculiar [meaning special] treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine. And you shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

And the people answer, again through Moses, “All that [the LORD] has spoken we will do.” They officially made the covenant. Then God wants to do one more thing. He wants to speak to Moses out loud, in front of the people, “...that the people may hear when I speak to you [Moses] and believe you for ever.” They all gather at the foot of the mountain and hear Him directly as He gives them the Ten Commandments; but with all the thunder and lightning, smoke, trumpets, and the whole mountain shaking like jello, the people moved away, and told Moses, ‘you speak to us – don’t let God speak to us any more lest we die.’ That does seem to be the emotional reaction of people who find themselves in the presence of God: they usually fall on their faces as if they were dead. This relationship is scarey, viewed in the cold light of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is not enough to witness miracles, not enough to have a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night leading you through the wilderness; not enough to receive bread and quails and water miraculously in the wilderness; these things alone are not enough to overcome the Knowledge of Good and Evil, ie our sinful nature, and make people love God. And loving Him is what He needs for them to be a proper companion. Jesus said that the greatest commandment is that you shall love the Lord your god, with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. He didn’t mention that it is also the most ignored one. This nation, chosen by the loving creator God, became “stiff-necked”, a bunch of lawyers, loving the idea of being chosen by God but not understanding the reality. This is not true of all of Israel, or course. There was always a remnant of people who did react to Him with love and compassion for their neighbors, however imperfectly. For their sake God endures sorrow and grief.

After being led for a long time by prophets and judges, the people ask Samuel to provide them a king. God views that as undesirable and tries to talk them out of it, but in the end, they get what they ask for. A still more distant relationship. It seemed as if this corporate companion idea was not working out; but the nation of Israel is preserved and God illustrates some things about kings and kingdom.

And so we come to Jesus of Nazareth, Adam v2.0. Remember Paul refers to him as the second Adam? Also the last Adam. Jesus was born of a woman, but not by a man. This is important. The Spirit of God somehow impregnated the virgin Mary and so God is his father. I believe that being born of a woman made him human and in particular, an ish; not being a son of the original ish enabled him to avoid the inherited Knowledge of Good and Evil. So God Himself entered his creation and “tabernacled” ie, camped out, among us. His love for the Father, and not the Knowledge of Good and Evil, guided his life as a man.

Alone, this ish did not fulfill the original Adamic metaphor, the image of God, without an intimate loving relationship with an ishisha, with whom he could become “one flesh”. I suppose he could have found a nice Jewish girl and married her (conspiracy theorists like to think he secretly married Mary Magdalene) and maybe God could have worked out a new corporate companion with Jesus and his children after the flesh (relegating the rest of us to obsolescence); but God had bigger plans. He planned to redeem the entire world from sin and enable all of us to overcome the vandalism and all of the subsequent misery that the world has suffered from sin. And corporately, we are being built into a bride for the Son. But before we get to be the Bride of Christ, we are being made members of his body, in an echo of Adam 1.0.

In his letter to the Romans 2:17, Paul links Adam and Jesus. “For if by one man’s offense death reigned by one, much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.” Then Paul talks about being “baptized into Christ” and into his death, and how we are “buried with Him in baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, we also should walk in newness of life.” So then it is important to believe in both his sacrificial death and his justifying, glorifying resurrection. This is what reorients us toward God in “righteousness”, or the right relationship. And the right relationship is one of love, as Christ loved us.

In order to break the power of sin, God himself became a man who knew no sin and yet was subjected to the ugly death of a criminal, despising the shame. God personally paid the price of our sins, which sins create a debt to Him that we could never repay. When we accept that gift of grace, we are immersed (or “baptized”) into Christ. As more and more of us give ourselves to Him and become members of His body, the Adam v2.0 becomes more and more complete. For us, having become one spirit with him, we live the rest of our lives being transformed in the renewing of our minds. Of course in this life, we never completely free ourselves of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but if we identify with Christ in his death (as what we deserved and not he), he will identify with us in his glorified life. Only the Father knows when this process of adding members to Christ’s body will be complete. This completeness is what is often meant by the word ‘perfect’: not some humanistic ideal of lack of error, but perfect specifically for our purpose as members of his body.

So there has been a shift in our understanding of the makeup of the people of God. Being born of Jewish parents is not enough: being born of Jesus Christ in the spirit is the qualifying birth. To achieve this circumcision of the heart, one must believe as Abraham did, that what God has promised he is able to perform. We may still be living with the consequences of Adam v1.1, but now we also live with the consequences of Adam v2.0, those who have been born again, and have the hope of eternal life as His bride.

Paul ties this together in Ephesians 5. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it….So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, even as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” For the third time here, the Holy Spirit has invoked those words. He said them directly in Genesis; Jesus quoted them when he was talking about marriage; and Paul quotes them, both instructing men and talking about the church.

When Adam v2.0 is complete, then the end will come, and the wedding feast of the Lamb. We will be separated from Adam 2.0 and formed into his ishsha, his Eve, and the Father will present us to His son, and with Him we will become Adam 2.1. God will have His companion at last.

And I suspect that as a couple, we will be fruitful.