Recap: Chapter One

Quote of the day:  "It says that God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep and he pulled out his brains and made the woman.  That's the way my wife's version reads."

Recap of Chapter One:
God created the world with the grand vision of dwelling together with us in the world.  It is God's supreme passion to be with YOU. 

God gave us freedom of choice.  Adam and Eve chose out of the freedom of their will to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, thus ruining God's vision of dwelling together with us.

Sin was deposited permanently into the nature of Adam and Eve, a virus seperating them from God. 

God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and set angels to guard it, in order to keep them from the Tree of Life, which would sustain life forever.  Without access to this tree, they would eventually die.  We think God is being cruel by letting us die.  But it's actually an act of God's grace to keep us from being able to sustain our life forever in a state of sin and hatred (thus seperated from God).

Man's choice resulted in seperation from God, and it broke God's heart.  The "rest of the story," the entire Bible, tells us of the relentless pursuit of God and the extent to which God will go in order to get us back.

The flood is God's first attempt to go to great measures to get us back.  But it doesn't work because it doesn't deal with our sin.  Sin goes into the ark with Noah, and it disembarks with him (Genesis 9, not in The Story).

Application:
YOU are the point of The Story.  When God replaced Adam and Eve's fig leaves with garments of skin, God gave us a clue as to how far God would go to fulfill God's supreme desire to restore a relationship with us.  Even when we are ashamed and feeling vulnerable, God covers us in order to restore our relationship with God, but covering us requires the shedding of blood.  We are invited to soak in the fact that the God of the universe wants to be with us more than anything on earth, literally.