When you read the Bible’s first two pages, you see people living blessed lives of purpose and meaning, at peace with their Creator, each other, and the world around them. Work is a joyful calling, not a painful necessity. Relationship – and specifically, marriage – is shared between two people who, though created very differently as male and female, cherish, hold fast to, and are completely, delightfully vulnerable with each other. This is the world as God intended it to be, and it is very good.
So, what happened?
Our world is not like Genesis 1 and 2. We work in bad environments for unsupportive supervisors just to survive. We long for relationship but struggle to find people we can trust for a lifetime. We question life’s purpose. Living isolated from God and each other, we die – because humanity sinned.
Starting on the Bible’s third page and continuing ever since, people have rejected God’s authority and tried to decide what is good and evil ourselves. We “did not honor him as God or give thanks to him”, preferring to worship and serve the creature instead of the Creator (Rom. 1:21, 25 ESV). This abandonment of truth and failure to acknowledge God in turn leads to all kinds of behavior that goes against His design, resulting in ruin and shame, slavery and death (cf. Rom. 1:26-32, 6:20-23). Dead in our sins and alienated from each other, we are left “having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).
But it doesn’t have to stay that way. The Bible reveals something else: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13). While the consequence of our sin is death, “the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). Jesus, the Son of God, perfectly embodied living in God’s image. Then He lovingly gave that life as a sacrifice for our sins and rose from the dead. Now, God has given Him dominion over everything, bringing “to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known…according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph. 3:9-11).
We went against God’s design – but He still had a plan, a purpose to rescue us from our own sins. Through Jesus, He gives us a way to go back to the drawing board – back to abundant life with Him. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). When in our work, our relationships, and all of our lives we let Jesus lead us into living according to God’s design, we see how very good it can be.
Discover God’s design for your life in our sermon series Real Men and our Bible study Ladies Night.