God Said “NO” To Our Blindness
“Surely Adam’s disobedience did not alter the being of God. Or perhaps it did. Perhaps God did change, abruptly and radically so—not in reality of course, but in Adam’s mind…Perhaps Adam took a paintbrush, dipped it into the cesspool of his own double-mindedness and guilt, and painted an entirely new picture of god with it. And perhaps it was this god, created by his own darkened imagination—not the Lord—that he feared, and from who he hid.” —C. Baxter Kruger (Across All Worlds: Jesus Inside our Darkness)
As Scripture and history testify, humanity became lost in the darkness and illusion of separation, losing sight of the One who formed us and has always delighted in us. Imprisoned within the confines of our own minds, we began interpreting God through the lens of our fear, shame, and alienation. As C. Baxter explains, “What changed in the relationship was not God, but Adam, and he now projected his pain onto God, thereby creating an entirely mythological deity, a fragment of his own baggage. But this fragment was nevertheless frighteningly real to Adam.”
Yet God never stopped moving toward humanity with redemption and healing. The tragedy was not that his goodness had disappeared, but that we had become unable to recognize and trust it. As revealed in the Genesis story of Adam—a pattern that would echo throughout the human story—we ran from the very One in whom we were created to abide. Still, there were those who caught glimpses of his goodness and dared to trust him. Hebrews 11 remembers many of them as heroes of faith, men and women whose lives testified to a profound truth: faith is ultimately rooted in trusting the goodness and faithfulness of God.
Nevertheless, the Father refused to leave the human race wandering within the illusion of separation and abandonment. He would not surrender humanity to the darkness we had come to believe about ourselves or about him. In his eternal oneness with the Father, Christ came as one of us, entering fully into the human condition to heal our distorted vision and reveal the Father from within our own humanity.
Jesus did not merely come to give us better information about God. He came to make the invisible God visible—to confront our fear-shaped images of the divine and reveal what the Father had always been like. In everything he said and did, Christ fascinated humanity with the glory and goodness of the One he intimately called “Abba.” In Jesus, we encounter not a God who had finally decided to draw near, but the God who had been pursuing us all along.
If you want to know more about the Father’s love for you, check out my book, “Fascinated: Living in Awe of the Father.”
