#genesis

We all know that there’s bad things in our world. That’s pretty much an uncontested truth no matter who you are. Bad things happen. The part we disagree on across religious lines is why? Why do bad things happen? Why and how did sin become a part of lives? These questions are the second step in the gospel story, Creation —> Fall, Perfection —> Brokenness, Holy —> Sinful.

Our story of a sinful world with broken people begins in Genesis 2 with a tree and a choice. “The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  God placed two trees right in the middle of the garden of Eden to remind his creation that he was at the center. With their hearts and minds set on the Lord as the center of their lives, Adam and Eve would be secure in holiness.

Yet they had a choice. God gave them free will to choose to follow his commands. “But wait! Couldn’t God have forced them not to eat of the tree? Couldn’t he have not given them that option?” Well, yes. But God wanted more than robots. He wanted us - created beings in his image with the ability to have a real and meaningful relationship with him. How meaningful is a relationship with a robot? We have free will so that we can fully image God and know him to a fuller extent. Here’s the thing to remember about this fact- God did not create sin. Giving us a choice does not mean he failed on the job, created evil, or was defeated by evil. God is holy. God does not tolerate sin.

With that in mind, let’s continue the story. The first thing that happens in Genesis 3 is that the woman (not yet named Eve) and the serpent twist God’s Words through questioning, diminishing, and exaggerating. First, the serpent exaggerates God’s command: “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?”  Next, the woman also exaggerates God’s command although she corrects the serpent at first: “you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.” Eve exaggerates God’s commands (God only said not to EAT of the tree, not to avoid touching it), thereby allowing the temptation to continue. Then the serpent diminishes God’s word instead, knowing that Eve is beginning to question the accuracy of her God’s words: “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The tricky serpent knows about the best lies- the ones that are almost true. Would the woman and man become like God, knowing good and evil? In a way, yes they did - they came to know evil. Did they die? Not immediately. At this point Adam saw his wife eat, and instead of protecting her or standing up for Truth, he saw that she had more knowledge and did not immediately die (although she did surely die), which convinced him to also take and eat. Thus we had the first sin.

Here’s the thing about the first sin- it wasn’t about eating fruit. There may be 10 commandments to keep, but there is really only one sin in the world. It was the sin that the woman and the man in the garden committed, and it the one we still commit today: Ourselves > God. All other specifics fit into this one sin- we put ourselves (the creation) over God (the creator).

So why do bad things happen? Because we no longer have God at the center of our garden,we put ourselves there instead.

But brothers and sisters here is our hope - our sin story may have begun in Genesis 3, but so does our salvation story. Genesis 3:15 says “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.”  This is the first prophecy of the Bible. Sin entered the world, but it did not overcome. God was not surprised by the choice made. God is provider. God is deliver. God is faithful even when we are not. God always keeps his promises. God had a plan all along to redeem his people and restore them to himself. 

And Adam believed. He named his wife Eve, “the mother of all the living,” because believed the promise of the Lord that through Eve, a child would come to bring life.

-31Women (Beth) 

MonKey iSLanD SeGA MegA CD

Bare Knuckle III (Streets of Rage 3) (Sega - Mega Drive - 1994)  

Bare Knuckle III (Streets of Rage 3) (Sega - Mega Drive - 1994)  

Among other things I am displeased about when it comes to Spn angel lore: Lucifer’s cage as a fucking physical C A G E I mean come on guys have a little more imagination. 

This is how I imagine Lucifer’s Cage. 

Lucifer’s Cage is made of silence and void and nothingness. Its purpose is punishment, and isolation, and the latter translates into the former. It mimics conditions prior to Creation, when the Darkness still roamed and the edges of space were speckled with the bombshell carcasses of broken realities. 

The Cage is cold, although simply cold is a drastic understatement. In empty, interstellar space the average temperature is 3 kelvins, -270 Celsius. Absolute zero, where atoms sigh and halt in their motion, is three degrees lower. The Cage is colder than that. The Cage mimics conditions at the Beginning, where matter did not yet exist and Time was nothing but a facsimile and the dimensions that make up current reality was swallowed continuously by the Darkness even as they were spun into being. It is a void and it is a black hole singularity: existence is possible in its confines, cessation is not. 

And above all, it is ruinously, achingly lonely. Standstill time and flat dimensional existence and negative absolute zero temperature are all things Lucifer has withstood before and not as a punishment, for Lucifer too predates time and space, and the void was the cradle he was born in. But even in the empty ether of the Beginning there was always the constant of his Father’s Presence. Father, and Michael (who is the fire to Lucifer’s Ice, the supernova to Lucifer’s cool bright starlight, Michael, the first face Lucifer ever saw just as God’s was the first voice he ever heard) and afterwards, Gabriel and Raphael. When the Darkness was locked away all the choirs of creation sprung into being: galactic star song and the sigh of nebulae coalescing: the humm of matter, the murmurs of the newly created Host, past and present and the coalition of a thousand senses in synthesia born on the input of wings. 

Angels are not solitary creatures. They were created for service, and in hivemind, and even during the earliest emptiest days of the Beginning Lucifer had God, had Michael (hadMichaelhadMichael). But in the nothingness of the Cage he is cut off from the voice of the Host, from the brightness of souls, from starlight and starsong, a thousand eyes and a thousand senses giving negative feedback. In humans extreme sensory deprivation can lead to hallucinations short term, identity loss long term. Lucifer is far more resilient by nature, but the Cage is still the most isolated place Creation, and he is so lonely and so bitter and so furious heburns. 

The Cage is isolation and punishment and his holding cell until the end of times, punishment for not bowing and scraping to lesser creatures, and Lucifer despises it. When the last seal is broken it will be a triumph: because that is when humanity will face their rightful retribution upon his wrath, when all of Heaven and Hell and Creation will see them as the wretched creatures they are. 

(And when the last seal is broken it will be a tragedy, because it will cost him Michael. Because to get to humanity the cost will be Michael, So It Is Written, and in the void nothingness of his Cage, during the moments when his frigid freezing rage temporarily recedes, all Lucifer can feel at the thought of the lock finally breaking is overwhelming trepidation. Because the cost will be either himself or Michael, and so in those moments when the future stands in crystal clarity, he hopes, very quietly, in a small and subconscious part of himself, that the day the Cage opens never comes.)