Brokenness

‘You won’t tear me down oh you won’t no……cause I won’t let youuu🎶’

‘We live in a broken world, and we are all broken.’

How are we all broken? The devil severed our connection to the Father. I think we focus so much on the sin that was committed in the garden that day that we pay less attention to what actually went on in that garden.

Growing up, I blamed them. I wondered how they could disobey God. How they could go against Him and eat that fruit. Then one day as I complained, the Holy Spirit opened my eyes. He asked, in such a calm, fatherly, non-condemning way,

“Don’t you think I would have put you in the garden if you would have done better? Don’t you think that if anybody would have not done what they did, I would have put them instead? Maybe you won’t have even lasted as long as they did. Maybe you won’t have needed the devil and would have just tried the fruit for trying sake😂”

I promise you He laughed. Not in a mocking way, but in a cute fatherly way. Kind of like General Iroh. And I sobered up so fast. My words caught in my throat. I had nothing to say. And that has followed me since then. We think we are better than Adam and Eve because of what we know now. Because of our access to the results of having the knowledge of good and evil. 

The truth? Adam and Eve were a blank slate and they had nothing to refer to, nothing to tell them otherwise. And no, God was not withholding from them. He wasn’t hiding anything from them. He wasn’t keeping them from knowing. No! He wanted children who worshipped Him and knew Him and loved Him and related with Him in that family way. And He wanted us to do it on our own. He wanted us to have that free will to choose and still choose Him.

He isn’t insecure, no, He is sooo loving that He would give us a chance to choose to love Him and not be forced to love Him, not love Him because of the consequences of not loving Him. So He allowed them. Gave them as much information as they needed because He needed them to choose. That’s not to say they chose the devil. Oh no, not at all. That’s what the devil may think or try to get us to think. But the devil went after something else, he went after our connection to our Creator. He went after our trust in Him. He went after that sacred relationship that would have us trust God even in the unknown, knowing that He will never harm us, He will never lead us the wrong way, He will never leave us.

I always wondered what was so special about Abraham. Do you realise we have no idea what his background story is? That we don’t know Abraham from birth up until God called him at age 75. What did God see in him as a person, not just his future, because I assure you, God knew before He called Abraham that he would be the father of faith, that he will trust God the way He desired Adam and Eve to. 

So who was Abraham? What convinced God? There’s a picture I saw recently and maybe I’ll use it as the picture for this post. It’s a picture where people from the Bible are at different tables and we are to pick a table to sit at. Someone said they’d sit with Abraham to ask how he believed God the way he did, how he became the father of faith. I don’t know if Abraham has a specific answer though, I may be wrong sha.

I would sit at his table to know who he is. To try to understand not by asking him now, but by paying attention to him, who Abraham is because it’s in his brokenness that God saw the future. Just like Adam and Eve eventually became broken and all of us who followed, Abraham was also broken. God is not looking for perfect individuals, and I don’t mean perfect in the way society has defined it, but perfect in what we do or do not do, ‘how Christian we are’. No, I believe He is looking for who is willing to be broken enough to allow Him to come in freely and fix. Who is willing to in their brokenness wholly rely on Him, pick Him, and trust Him to carry us.

I would like to believe that God was heartbroken even if He knew what Adam and Eve would do, before they did it.

Yes! You heard me right.

It would have been one of the saddest and heart wrenching scene the entire earth had to witness that day. Don’t forget all that was in the garden. Everything that witnessed that family break-up. The devil had the guts to break up God’s family. It’s funny really, he rebelled, wasn’t destroyed but just cast away. In fact, God cast him and his angels to earth as punishment. Then decided to move on and create us. His children, and we were a beautiful normal family, family identity can be traced to the garden. God made Himself a beautiful family.

That pissed the devil off! And what did he do? He dared to come against God and his family. He dared to break up God’s family. To cause us, God’s children to have a life altering disconnect from our maker and be separated from Him. I’ve watched too many shows to have a visual of how terrible this incident was. Children getting lost and getting separated from their parents. Kidnapped, hurt, abused…… that’s why the family is still the devil’s target till date. The family is the root of society, and the devil thought he could mess what God created to replace him, his rebellion.

I mean it’s not enough that he rebelled, and got so many of God’s creations to ally with him, he still had the guts to go after God’s children! 

Nahhhh, God was pissed. 

He saw it coming yeah, but it doesn’t negate the pain He must have felt in that moment. I imagine Adam and Eve walking out of the garden, away from their dad, heartbroken! The devils sought to hurt God and he used what God loved the most, us, to do that

What did God do?

He placed a curse on the earth, on Adam and Eve, and finally the devil. Because now, he has to be dealt with. Now, he went too far. But because of His loving nature, He didn’t do it in blind anger. Nope! Still mighty and sovereign and all powerful! He placed the curse with the assurance of a cure, with the assurance of a redemption plan in the works. 

God isn’t insecure, the devil rebelling didn’t even put a dent on His feelings, no, not at all. 

But you come after those He made in His very own image and likeness? 

You come after His very own? 

His children?? 

Then you will pay for it!

You will pay dearly for it! 

The devil isn’t waging war against us, he doesn’t have the capacity to. No, he has no cards left to play again, so what does he do?

He still keeps coming after our relationship with the Father, our connection to Him, trying to get us to keep hurting God because he has hacked that we are the only ones capable of hurting God and all he cares about is hurting God. So he will keep us in that brokenness, in darkness, in hate, envy, lies, sin, in ignorance.

If we don’t know the truth of what he actually did to us and our Father, if we don’t know what’s really going on, if we keep chasing after the wrong things, then we don’t put him in his place, then we follow him to the final place God has prepared for him and his cohorts alone, eternal punishment. 

He wants us to go with him but that’s not what God wants. 

Why are we still in this broken world? Going through brokenness? 

Because God doesn’t want us to go there. He is trying everything in His power and He has been doing that from the moment Adam and Eve fell.

They planned for Jesus already. 

God didn’t kill Cain! Because He knows who is truly behind every hurt and pain and terrible thing we do and go through on this earth. We think we have power outside God, but because we know not who we really war against, we don’t.

We caused our brokenness and yet He fixed it for us. He sourced out the remedy for us. And He is still doing it, constantly chasing after us, over every shadow, mountain, wall, lie. 

The more of us who come into the light, the more we need to talk about what we now know! Who we now see! Who is truly the enemy! And go after him with everything we’ve got. How? By helping our broken brothers and sisters see the real enemy for who he is, know what’s truly going on and step out of that darkness (ignorance) into light (truth found in Jesus Christ).