WHAT’S VENGEANCE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

“Rejoice with Him, O heavens; bow down to Him, all gods, for He avenges the blood of His children and takes vengeance on His adversaries. He repays those who hate Him and cleanses His people’s land.” (Deuteronomy 32:43)

Before time—the way we understand it, anyway—God desired mankind be with Him forever, so He designed and created an entire universe precisely for that reason. He twirled galaxies, He hung the stars and our sun. Then He birthed the moon before making an extraordinarily beautiful planet, perfect in every way. He carved mountains and valleys, oceans and rivers, deep gorges and high plateaus, lush pastures and dry sandy deserts. He carefully planted vegetation and then, in a display of magnificent imagination populated the place with gorgeous animals of every shape and size. And they all got along!

There was no disease, weapons, plagues, pandemics, injury, war, or death. Every single thing existed to please and glorify God—including temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure, precipitation and cloud cover. Deep within this perfection, God planted a special garden of extraordinary beauty and from its ground He made His final and most beloved creature—man. God declared the entirety to be good, and He rested on the seventh day, calling it the Sabbath (Saturday).

And as dawn broke on the Sabbath, multitudes of angels sang in praise and worship over His work. Wow, what a sight that must have been!

Seeing that Adam required a helpmate, God laid Adam down and took out a rib. From that bone He formed woman and told the original couple to rule and reign over earth together. They were to manage all of its resources, including every living thing. He had the couple live in the most beautiful of locations, created specifically for them—the Garden of Eden—and God ensured they had everything they needed to live the most pleasant life. This is known as absolute perfection.

Understanding that humans required something to keep them busy, God asked the couple to tend His Garden—quite a different term from work. Tending is more like moseying about to pick fruits and berries, and lettuce and carrots and radishes and herbs to eat. Leisurely walks along perfect paths beside sparkling streams and lush foliage. Meandering along with lions, and giraffes and badgers and wolves—who roll over on their backs for a belly rub—well, maybe not the giraffes.

So, yeah…perfection.

Every day the Lord walked among the Garden with them, talking, and sharing, and loving the couple—deepening His relationship with them—enjoying their company. And they returned His love and adored Him, praising and worshiping with the angels every morning.

Things were idyllic.

God desired this mode of operation continue forever. He commanded His beloved couple to multiply and fill the earth with offspring who would be in a perfect relationship with Him, too. People, and animals, and plants all cycling together in flawlessness forever and ever—God promised He would see to it.

Oh, and one more thing—eat baby, eat—from that amazing Tree of Life right there in the middle of the Garden, but don’t eat of the Tree in the center that would change all of perfection into absolute misery, thus resulting in death. That was the ONE AND ONLY rule. Everything else was a free-for-all.

(I looked that word up—MISERY—it’s not pretty…unhappiness, distress, wretchedness, hardship, suffering, affliction, anguish, anxiety, angst, torment, torture, hell, agony, pain, affliction, tribulation, woe, calamity, misfortune, difficulty, problems, discomfort, deprivation, depravity, poverty, grief, heartache, heartbreak, despair, despondency, dejection, depression…shall I go on? Misery has PARAGRAPHS of descriptions for our current world.)

We don’t know the exact timeframe, but we do know what happened.

Adam and Eve believed Satan and disobeyed the only rule God assigned to them. They blatantly sinned against God—out in the open—willingly choosing Satan over their Father.

What should a loving Father do, then?

He did the only thing He could. He banned them from the Garden before they had the chance to partake of the Tree of Life, which would have caused them to live in misery FOREVER.

What does scripture say about how Father God felt regarding the original couple’s decision?

Genesis 3:14 tells us. The Almighty addresses His fury toward Satan first. He turns the once remarkably beautiful and highest created angel into the lowliest and most repugnant reptile, who will slither and crawl among the feet of men in absolute hostility and torment until the Day of God’s Wrath.

Then God turns to Eve and condemns her to painful labor and birth, and He permanently lowers her status. She will no longer co-rule earth with Adam. Instead, Adam will rule over her, no matter how frequently she attempts to escape his dominion, or how often she tries to control him.

Next, it’s Adam’s turn to feel God’s displeasure, and He is quite clear about who Adam should have listened to…“Because you obeyed your wife and ate from the tree which I commanded you must not eat, thanks to you, I curse the ground.”

Cursing the ground means a total curse over all the earth and everything in it. God tells Adam that he and all of his descendants will painfully toil to produce food. They’ll have to WORK for it—no more tending. Now it is thorns and thistles, heat and sweat, drought, disease, injury, harm, destruction, and finally a pain-filled death back into the ground where he came from. And immediately thereafter, the loving Father killed some of His beloved animals to clothe the couple—thus indicating all of creation will groan and suffer and decay under their new ruler’s reign.

Perfection is gone. The original couple turned their livelihood and rulership—along with the deed rights and ownership of earth—over to Satan.

Nothing about this situation makes a loving Father happy.

God cannot have the couple live in sin forever, so He throws them out of the Garden to fend for themselves. He is still with them, but not as He originally planned. And the Father watches as the world begins it’s horrific domination under the one vile creature who hates humanity the most.

As earth began it’s slow spiral toward death, God commenced His sacrificial plan of love to overthrow Adam and Eve’s horrible sin.

Meanwhile, under Satan’s rule, humanity burst with pride and rebelled against the God who loves them. People lied, killed, sacrificed their babies, raped, stole, warred, and committed incest. They built idols and worshiped them instead of worshiping God—stupidly expecting wooden suns and golden cows (and now celebrities) to provide them with the same miracles they’d once witnessed from their Father. And Satan advanced his destructive control over earth and humanity to such an extent that God mourned the day He created everything.

Except for Noah and the other seven, God wiped the whole bunch off the planet with a flood. Every creature that wasn’t on that ark drowned.

And one would think having been spared, the eight remaining humans would forever surrender themselves into the hands of the God who saved them. One would imagine they’d praise and worship Him forever. But they didn’t, and it wasn’t long before one of them committed a horrible act against Noah—tumbling humanity yet again down that slippery slope into iniquity.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah didn’t turn humanity around.

Neither did the warnings God gave through Kings, Judges, and prophets. Plagues and pandemics and biting vipers didn’t stop humanity’s rebellion. Regardless of how God tried to bring mankind back to Him, the vast majority of humans chose Satan over God, and God abandoned them over to the great deceiver.

And yet, He longed to save the lost, so He sent His Son to earth, He showed Who He was through Jesus’ humanity. The Father invited mankind to Him by His Son. But they refused. Choosing worldly desires instead.

By refusing Him, humanity fell away from God’s protection, so God continues to turn them over to their deepest desires and straight into Satan’s hand.

And so, Satan’s human armies have been persecuting God’s beloved since the original couple were cast from the Garden of Eden.

Well…what is a loving Father supposed to do? Just sit back forever and allow Satan and his armies to persecute and martyr the people who choose to love Him?