God’s salvation, a holy week reflection

Instead of contemplating God’s divinity, this short period of time steers me to ponder upon the human condition.

Adam and Eve once lived an ideal life. A life of primitivity inside a garden called Eden. God’s supervision was there. Their task was plain and simple: just govern on God’s behalf. Their life was structured. God put them in an assignment. They were appointed. Appointing is God’s way of governing a man’s life. (It is not good for the man to be bored.) Two things disrupted this easy-going life: curiosity and temptation. A certain fruit was forbidden. But in a supposedly safe place, why did God allow evil to creep in?

The two sinned. They were kicked out of the garden, and the garden has been guarded since. Simply put, that divine structure, which we cannot fully know, was forfeited through sin. They wandered outside for quite a long time for their heads to evolve, figured their living out as they began comprehending and adapting to their environment, until they perhaps understood the plausibility of sustainable living through human settlement. Nevertheless, as the story goes in the scriptures, God remained gracious.

God delights in seeing His creation being the way He intended them to be. Of course, God cannot afford to lose sight of His creation, let alone the man, and let them just be wandering outside. It is like a love story of God and humans where humans are being chased by her Lover.

To cut the long story short: Man sins, God forgives.

But here is the catch. We may think God forgives unlimitedly. Let us suppose that is so. Yet it is troublesome for us. Surely, man sins and he is forgiven. In the case of Adam and Eve, God might have shown kindness still yet the two were not taken back into the garden of Eden. Point being, when we sin, we can no longer go back to where we started. We start at our own quagmire. You live a good life from level one to three, but sin in level 4, then miss level 5 to 6, and you repent to live in level 7, and God sheds His light on you. But you missed levels 5 and 6 anyway. It will always be your loss, because God sheds His light on you only at the point you call Him, and respond to you. God appears, shows His way for you to sort your problems out, but the past remains the past.

But what if: our problems are layered in problems that are layered in problems and so on, to the point where we tell God to not help us anymore, because we know that His help will not work, and thus far, only God’s actual salvation shall work?

Therefore, we cannot blame God for the ills of society. God, though all-powerful as we know, cannot be held responsible for the freedom that we yearned for. Freedom has its price. We clamor for it, but right where freedom is, there shall our horrors be.