IN LOVE REJECTED, BY GRACE REDEEMED

Good Morning!  God is so good!  I wanted to share something wonderful with you.  It's taken from Genesis 3:22-23:

22   And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23  So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.  (NIV)

Have you ever thought deeply about these verses?  I noticed that God did not tell Adam and Eve why He was banishing them from the Garden of Eden. Yes, He did tell Adam that he would have to work the ground by the sweat of his brow (Gensis 3:18-19) but in verse 22, God was speaking to Himself and amongst the Heavenly Host, not to Adam.  So when He drove Adam and Eve from the Garden, it must have looked like rejection to them, like God no longer wanted them around.  However, in God's eyes, it was out of love and compassion for them because He did not want them to eat from the Tree of Life which would have enabled them to live forever in their newly sinful state.  Could you imagine living forever in a decaying body with an evil heart and unregenerate mind?  Before Jesus came to redeem us, God told us in Jeremiah 17:9 that man's heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked!  The wonderful news is that Jesus gave us a new heart and a new spirit (Ezekiel 36: 26-27).

Rejection was born into man when they were banished from God's presence.  God really had never turned His back on them.  It was Adam and Eve that hid and separated themselves first from God when they sinned (Genesis 3:8).  God will never turn from us (Romans 8:31-39), but their perception was that He did because they did not know the truth of why they were forced to leave His presence.  They reasoned in their own minds that God rejected them.  This evil idea that God rejected them spawned anger and rebellion toward God resulting in more disobedience to where man not only blamed God for His seemingly rejection, but jealousy entered in and they blamed others believing it was their fault too why God rejected them.  We see that in Cain's response to God and how he killed his brother, Abel, out of jealousy.  Cain didn't offer a good sacrifice to God for the atonement of his sins (Genesis 4:3-5) and God wasn't rejecting Cain, but He couldn't accept the offering because without the shedding of blood their is no remission of sins (Hebrews 9:22).  God has standards set that are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9).  Out of His love for Cain, He even tried to reason with Cain and let him know that He was not rejecting him, but Cain would not listen (Genesis 4:6-8).  God gave him the freedom to choose and he chose to let his wrong feelings of rejection turn into jealousy.

Jealousy does not have anything to do with what another person has or doesn't have.  Simply put, jealousy is not believing that God can and will do the same for us that He did for someone else.  We feel rejected by Him and thus, we reject.  An example of this is that a person may think if someone gets a great promotion they wanted, then they can't have something as good. They may think it's because God loves that person more because that person pleases Him more.  Some even believe that God will have to rob the other person in order to give them the same thing because they believe God is lacking.  The root cause of this line of thought came from initially believing that God had rejected us.  This is also why so many people are angry with God.  Many people are claiming that God doesn't accept them for who they are - more rejection and they reject Him without finding the truth.  This belief came to the point where the Bible tells us that we WERE enemies of God (Romans 5:10).  The ultimate seed of believing we were and are rejected is to completely discount God and say there is no God.

But here is the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and His Grace!  Jesus came to put an end to that lie once and for all!  He took our rejection for us when He cried out as we once did in the Garden of Eden, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me!?" (Mark 15:34)  Child of God, you will NEVER be forsaken by God.  He has made it abundantly clear through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that He has not rejected you.  Like in the parable of the prodigal son, God our Father will always be waiting to run toward us with open arms when we draw near to Him (Luke 15:11-32).  He will run!

God bless you always,
Sandy