THE FIRST FEAR

The Bible story gives us limited insights into the initial relationship God had with Adam and Eve. The details of the processes by which they were each created portray God as intimately involved with them as creatures and then in conversation with them about their roles in this new world and the provisions He had made for their well-being.

From the story in Genesis 3, it also seems that it was not unusual for God to come looking for them, to spend time walking and talking together with them “in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8). But on that particular day, they hid from God.

Something had changed. The story explains that they had listened to the God-questioning alternative offered by the serpent. It was not so much that they had questioned God but that they had questioned God apart from God. So, when they heard God looking for them, they felt afraid. God had not changed from the good creator they had previously known, but they had been changed by their distrust of God that the serpent’s lies had prompted. As the story describes it, their shame and their fear in response to God’s approach was “their first bitter taste of accepting the serpent’s view of God.”* This is a wound that has been perpetuated and repeated in humanity ever since. “Biblically, anthropologically, and existentially fear is the most succinct description of the human condition.”† Because of the broken relationship between us and our Creator, the God who is the source of all the goodness of our world and life itself is also an inevitable cause of fear in us. But the Bible insists that God is still good and has been working to overcome and undo our fear.

* Sigve K. Tonstad, The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 2009), 244, 245. † Tonstad, 244.