Just one more piece on the Fall. This is excerpted from my new Bible study: Learning God’s Story of Grace.
When my children were aged 6 to 1 month, getting them all dressed and ready for church required the Herculean efforts of both my husband and me. When he was on call and unavailable to help, I still managed to complete the feat, though I looked like I had run a marathon when I was done.
It was not uncommon that in the moment we were walking out the door, one of the following things would happen: the baby would poop in his diaper and the diaper would prove to be incompetent to its task; the baby would vomit all over my dress; the oldest two would start fighting; or the third child would have managed to lose one shoe on the way from her bedroom to the car.
I had a common response to these shalom-shattered events: I would throw up my hands in anger, look up to the heavens where I believed God must be reading the Sunday paper (I certainly didn’t think He was ‘counting the hairs on my head!’!), and I would scream, “I was made for more than this!”
Genesis 3 tells the story of “The Fall,” how Adam and Eve listened to Satan, the evil one, and chose to ignore God’s commands. They reached to take something they were convinced was even better than what God had already given them, fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They took life into their own hands, and the results were shame, hiding, alienation from one another and God, blame, and the expulsion from the garden, among other things. Cornelius Plantinga, in his book Not the Way It’s Supposed t to Be: A Breviary of Sin explains that shalom is the “way things ought to be.” Evil and sin are the “vandalism of shalom.” Adam and Eve’s sin affected the entire universe and everyone who lived thereafter, despoiling the beauty for which we were made. The Fall tells the tragedy of our stories, but the good news is that God’s grand narrative of grace does not end with this chapter.