4.3 The Absence of Divine Mercy
God’s hiddenness in Eden gets even more mystifying when we consider His punishment for humanity in the wake of the disobedience of Adam and Eve. It was nothing short of a global catastrophe. Therefore, it is reasonable to ask: Did God really have to inflict such horrendous suffering on Adam and Eve, and their posterity?
At first glance, it may seem obvious that sin must entail a severe punitive response from God because sin is an affront against Him who is holy. Bad behavior calls for disciplinary action to reform the bad actors. And good parents understand the importance of not condoning bad behavior when their children disobey.
However, it is also true that good parents do not discipline their children for every single one of their offenses. Various factors often come into play, and parents must carefully evaluate them before punishing their children. As a matter of fact, parents sometimes let their children off the hook as they see fit to do so, just as clemency and pardon are sometimes granted, under exceptional circumstances, to convicts by human judges and leaders of nations. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to ask if God should have relented from imposing such a severe punishment on the humans on that day. This is because Adam and Eve, unlike Christians of today, had no forewarning about the existence of Satan and his evil intent. They were caught off-guard and flat-footed, so to speak. And furthermore, it was their first offense. Isn’t this an exceptional circumstance that should have warranted divine leniency? Moreover, as noted earlier, Scripture declares in Hebrews 5:14 that it is through life experience and training that a Christian is equipped to discern truth from falsehood. But Adam and Eve were created as naïve “infants”, evidently without the experience of mature Christians who have been trained to discern the duplicity of the devil. Isn’t this another exceptional factor that God should have taken into consideration before meting out such a severe punishment?
I should emphasize that the enigma presented here is not based on subjective human expectations of how God should have responded to the disobedience of Adam and Eve. Rather, it is predicated objectively on the apparent disparity between the way God responded to the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and the way He is known throughout Scripture to respond to the disobedience of humans in later generations.
Take for example the abundance of Scriptural evidence portraying God as One who would often give warning to sinners first before punishing them. He is manifestly committed to communicating His desire for sinners to repent and to benefit from His mercy, and thereby forestall the punishment that was meant for them. Thus, whenever His people sinned in the Old Testament, He would not punish them immediately. Instead, He would task His prophets with the mission to warn them first. “Indeed, the Sovereign Lord never does anything until he reveals His plans to His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7). And through the mouth of His prophets, God would reveal at length the severity of the punishment He planned to inflict upon His adulterous people; He would outline the details of their devastation if they refused to repent: their nation would be invaded by enemies; they would be exiled into captivity; they would suffer alarming cruelty at the hands of the invading forces.[1] To say that God’s intended punishment for His rebellious people can be brutal is an understatement. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that God, who is patient and merciful, had an overarching commitment to warn them first and to give them a chance to repent in the hope that they would not have to suffer the agony of being disciplined by Him.
Incredibly enough, even the notoriously wicked King Ahab was a recipient of divine forewarning. And in a rare moment of spiritual sanity, he repented and succeeded in averting God’s punishment that was intended for him (1 Kings 21:17–29). Likewise, the pagans in the ancient city of Nineveh were also beneficiaries of God’s forewarning to motivate them to repent and to forestall the divine punishment that was meant for them (Jonah 3:10). Yet ironically, when it came to Adam and Eve, such divine forewarning was strangely missing when they sinned. They were whacked immediately, if you will!
Indeed, it is worth noting that God’s offer of forgiveness to sinners who are contrite and penitent was already available long before the advent of Christ and the atoning sacrifice on the cross of Calvary (for example, Leviticus 16:30, Numbers 14:19–21, Psalm 103:8–12, Proverbs 28:13, 2 Chronicles 7:14, Isaiah 43:25, Jeremiah 31:34 and 33:8). But once again, it is curious that God did not offer such blessed news to Adam and Eve to elicit their repentance. What could have been on His mind that caused Him to treat with such disparity between the first pair of humans and the people of later generations? Did He not have the desire for Adam and Eve to repent so that the disciplinary actions that caused untold suffering globally could be averted?
God, whom we extol for His long-suffering and mercy, offered Adam and Eve no forewarning and no second chance. His stern response on that day flies in the face of the merciful God depicted everywhere else throughout the Scriptures. And as it turned out, He wasted no time in meting out the severest of punishments for Adam and Eve, and their posterity.
Incidentally, I should mention that the animal skin He supplied as covering for the naked and despondent couple (Genesis 3:21), often hailed by well-meant preachers as an act of divine grace, was in reality an irrelevant gesture at best, given the punishment of biblical proportions (pun intended) that was so swiftly implemented.
The perfect world God has created would never be the same again. It would be plagued with all kinds of suffering and evil imaginable. And because the meaning of life is most desperately sought after in times of suffering, the reason for God’s hiddenness in Eden contributing so significantly to human suffering should not be swept under the rug.
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At this point, we may be inclined to say that God’s wisdom and actions can sometimes transcend our ability to understand, and therefore we, as finite humans, should reverently submit to His sovereignty for not revealing to us His ways. Thus, Isaiah 55:8–9 says, “‘My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,’ says the Lord. ‘And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts’” (NLT). In a similar vein, Romans 11:33–34 declares, “Oh, how great are God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand His decisions and His ways! For who can know the Lord’s thoughts? Who knows enough to give Him advice?” (NLT). And so, we shrug off the things we do not understand about God with the standard cliché, “God moves in mysterious ways.”
No doubt, we can agree that God’s ways can sometimes be beyond our ability to comprehend, and reverent submission to His sovereignty is certainly appropriate. Fair enough. However, we mustn’t capitulate prematurely. Rather, we should take our cue from Proverbs 25:2, “It is God’s privilege to conceal things and the king’s privilege to discover them” (NLT). Therefore, if it seems God has exercised His divine prerogative to conceal certain matters from us, such as His rationale for His hiddenness in Eden, then perhaps He could be deliberately presenting us with an invitation to discover what He has hidden and concealed. And when we do that, we are not necessarily being irreverent or unfilial toward Him, but rather, we are exercising the divinely given privilege of kingship.
With this in mind, may I suggest that more must be said to resolve this enigmatic beginning of human history, especially if we want to proclaim the biblical narrative coherently as the ultimate and compelling answer to the meaning of life in this broken world?
I shall propose for the reader’s consideration that God’s hiddenness related to the fall of Adam and Eve was nothing short of intentional; His non-intervention during their temptation by Satan was deliberate; His delayed appearance on the scene only after Adam and Eve had yielded to Satan’s temptation may seem tardy and negligent on the surface, but was divinely calculated well in advance. But why? This is the question we must ask.
Let’s turn now to another biblical narrative for some clues to this divine enigma—a narrative in which God was similarly hidden—the Book of Job in the Old Testament.
[1] For example, in Isaiah 30:15, God warned His people to repent or they would be defeated by enemy forces: “Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved” (NLT). Likewise, in Jeremiah 7:3, “This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: “‘Even now, if you quit your evil ways, I will let you stay in your own land” (NLT). And also in Jeremiah 18:7–8, “If I announce that a certain nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down, and destroyed, but then that nation renounces its evil ways, I will not destroy it as I had planned” (NLT).