What Happened to Us in Eden? - Psychology of the FallNäide

MOVING FORWARD TAKES COURAGE

The resentment between us because of what happened in Eden is still alive today. We inherit it generation after generation—“you” versus “us,” “us” versus “you”—and we’ll dig into it in more detail later. In the meantime, we remind ourselves...

• that anyone who says they love God but does not love their brother or sister (often the closest neighbor of all) is lying,
• that the children of God are revealed by doing what is right—that’s what distinguishes them from the children of the devil: “Anyone who does not do what is right and does not love their brother or sister is not God’s child.”
• and that when we see injustice, as those who have been born again, we are expected to respond: to align ourselves with what God aligns Himself with, and to call evil what He calls evil.

This reflection is not a call to arms, but it is a plea to recover the original design for our relationships, shaped by the ways of the new Kingdom we belong to. Wherever we see injustice, in honor of the truth, we are not truly loving unless we seek to reverse it. And that begins here—among us—not only “in glory.”

Being a Christian—and therefore, as Ephesians calls us, “imitators of God, as dearly loved children”—means giving ourselves fully to truth, justice, and goodness, with all that this entails. And the matter of women is one especially urgent ground for this, because in many ways—and being very conservative in my estimate—we are at least two thousand years behind.

Maybe it will take more centuries, even millennia, for every person who has received light on this matter to be willing to pay some of the price of defending truth in love, so that women may experience greater justice—even within the church.

I am especially grateful for men who, seeing this plainly in Scripture, use their voices to speak up for those who don’t have one—or whose voices, even when present, are more easily ignored simply because they are female.

And the Lord—regardless of how human beings handle it—has not forgotten us. He, as our Helper (the very same Hebrew word ezer used to describe woman as a “suitable helper”), still surrounds us, embraces us, protects us, walks with us in the desert, and whispers: “I am here, with you.”