Last night I couldn't sleep (dang coffee at 5:00 in the afternoon!), so I got up and began scribbling in my journal. The wifey says that words just flow out of me. I need an outlet or they get pent up, then lookout, he's gonna blow!
Anyway, I got up and started scribbling. Here's a slightly refined version of what I scribbled:
I think that when God cast Adam and Eve out of paradise, the serpent thought he had them exactly where he wanted them. The "pinnacle of creation" was now the nadir. Now facing the grim prospect of life in decay, scratching a meager living from the earth, Eve giving birth in great pain, surely bitterness would overcome them and these so beloved of God would turn on him roundly, cursing their maker for what He'd done.
I think that's what the serpent was hoping for. Sure, he knew that God had a "plan of redemption" for this pitiful couple and their descendants -- but in the meantime the evidence of their unworthiness would accrue.
But then in Genesis 4:1 we read of that first child born -- no doubt in great and very startling pain to Eve -- and Eve says, "I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord!" You see, though she had been cast out of paradise, she knew somehow that she and her husband were not completely beyond his safekeeping.
Oh, that must have galled the serpent. Later that first child would turn on his brother and become the first murderer, and just think of the new level of bitterness and near despair that must have caused for Adam and Eve. We don't know much more about them after that, except that they had more children, and their children grew and bore children, and all of this in the midst of great pain and disorder. And then,in the seventh generation, there came Enoch, who walked with God (Gen. 4:21).
That's a little mysterious to me. What does it mean that Enoch, quite uniquely it seems, walked with God. Adam and Eve had walked with God in the garden, but they had been cast out. There was no going back. But somehow, in a way that at least resembled the kind of communion that his first father and mother had had with the Lord, Enoch too could be said to have walked with God.
I think this was a great step in God's plan of redemption, a great precedent. Even in that ancient dispensation, a relationship of intimacy with God was possible. Enoch proved it. The serpent, that old enemy, must have raged!
Why is all this significant? Because the plan of redemption that God set in motion even as he cast Adam and Eve away from his presence was in motion right from the start. God's redemptive plan, which would manifest itself supremely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, was manifesting itself even then, in Eve's time, and in Enoch's. God had a plan, and it's trumped Satan's gambit. Through many thousands of years that plan has been unfolding, and it is, as they say, the greatest story ever told.
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