"Where Are You?"

Why God's searching words for Adam are words of grace

Note: my book The Characters of Creation releases June 6th. Here is an exclusive excerpt.

Imagine Adam. Imagine the surreal whiplash he experienced in those moments after the Fall. He and Eve went from being naked and unafraid to totally exposed before the God of the universe, to a level of knowledge and experience that only ever brought pain. In a moment he saw it all come to an end. Imagine the weight of guilt in his heart at what he had wrought.

Imagine the regret he would feel as he watched his sons and daughters inflicted by the consequences of his own actions. How he would long, in the hundreds of years he would live beyond this day, those good old days. How he would replay in his mind the conversations with the serpent. How he would beat himself up for his sins.

But there was no escape, no hiding, no retreat from where he was now. None of us can imagine what it was like, what it must have been like, to be Adam. We can’t know what it would be like to wake up in Eden and be kicked out by God’s fiery angels.

And yet we do know what it’s like to carry around guilt. Like Adam, we look back longingly on what we’ve lost: the bad decisions, the failed relationships, the sins we’ve indulged. We see the widening chasm between what we should be and who we really are. We lay awake at night and replay our lives and lament the fallout of our sins on our kids, our neighbors, our friends. We ache and long for that home, for those good old days, for a relationship with our Creator.

You wonder how Adam bore this weight. He lived over 900 years, centuries of his sin compounding in misery, to generation upon generation. He’d suffer the tragedy of seeing one son rise up in hatred and murder another son. Imagine at that funeral, Adam in anguish, wishing he could go back to that fateful day in Eden when he’d passively acquiesced to rebellion. God had said that death would come, but could he have imagined he’d be staring at the lifeless body of his own son?

And yet Adam could cling to the faint glimmer of hope that one would come who could bear the weight of Adam’s guilt and your guilt. God would visit, in a Son born of a daughter of Eve. He who, unlike Adam, knew no sin, would become sin for Adam (2 Cor. 5:21), for me, and for all who call him Lord. The Lord would lay on this Second Adam the sin of us all (Isa. 53:6).

Adam, standing in the ashes of a world to which he had set fire, huddles, hidden in incomplete makeshift clothes. And yet he hears good news, the Father’s haunting, searching words, “Adam, where are you?” These words say, Derek Kidner, have “all the marks of grace[i].” Adam was caught red-handed by God. The God who sees all things saw Adam’s teeth sink into that fruit. “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account,” the writer of Hebrews reminds us, as if we didn’t already know, subconsciously, that we are not alone from God.

Naked and exposed was Adam. Imagine the most embarrassing, humiliating, shaming moment of your life, and here was Adam’s dilemma. Those hidden sins, those dark spots you buried in your heart that nobody knows. Well, God sees. God sees you. He knows the real Adam, the real you.

And yet, a comfort. “Where are you?” was not a bewildered God, looking for a lost child. “Where are you?” is a grieving Father pursuing a wayward son. “Where are you?” is the aging patriarch in Jesus’ story of the Prodigal, lifting up his garments and sprinting toward his beloved. “Where are you?” is the Good Shepherd, leaving the nine-nine sheep and going after the lost lamb.

“Where are you” is the entire Christian story, God seeking and saving those who have deliberately disobeyed him. It’s a radical, otherworldly, almost ridiculous love. This is why God sent his only begotten to bleed on a cruel Roman cross.

Today, God is still whispering, “Where are you?” I’ve heard the distant whisper of God as I made my way up the hot and dusty aisle at youth camp, while another verse of “Just As I Am” played.  Others have heard Jesus say, “Where are you?” at the end of a bottle of whiskey, their last measure of self-will erased by impossibility. Still, others have listened to the distant call of “Where are you?” while searching history in vain for ways to explain away the miraculous.

We’ve heard “Where are you” as we’ve sat in the reality of our own sin. We’ve heard “Where are you?” as we’ve gazed up at the nail-pierced hands of the one who never bit the apple, who never yielded to the temptations of the serpent, who instead poured out his life for me.

“We see ourselves in the Garden, hearing the Lord call ‘Where are you?’ We know what it is to hide through shame. We are skilled at shifting the blame onto others. We feel the cost of being expelled from Eden. We are part of the story. We are there in the Garden and the Word is addressed to us[ii],” writes David Atkinson.

Maybe you are while reading this, standing like Adam in the wake of your own mess. Maybe you are naked and exposed, crushed under the weight of your sins. I hope in these pages you can hear the distant call, the cry from Eden to Nazareth to Calvary, of the one who is calling you for you, beckoning you to look up, to come home. Genesis 3 doesn’t have to be the end of your story. God seeks you in your despair, having sent Jesus to take on the weight of sin while we were “yet sinners” (Rom. 5:8).

This is the real story of Genesis. The story begins with Adam’s first breath, breathed into his nostrils by the Creator, winds its way through the story of Israel, as the same Spirit that breathed on the waters in creation is promised by the prophets (Ezek. 37; Joel 2) to come and breath new life into a new people. On a cruel Roman cross, the Second Adam would breathe his last breath (Mark 15:37) so that we could be saved. and yet would shake off death, rising again to breathe new life into those who believe (John 20:22).

I want you to find joy in this reality. I want you to look around at a world so broken by sin and recognize that this world is not as it should be, but that Jesus Christ is renewing and restoring and will one day make all things new, including our own souls if we reject the way of our First Adam and pledge allegiance to the Second. I leave you with the words of Charles Wesley in a famous Christmas hymn:

Come, Desire of nations, come!
  Fix in us Thy humble home:
Rise, the woman’s conqu’ring seed,
  Bruise in us the serpent’s head;
Adam’s likeness now efface,
  Stamp Thine image in its place:
Second Adam from above,
  Reinstate us in Thy love.

The Characters of Creation can be pre-ordered here.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

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[i] Kidner, Genesis, 74.

[ii] Atkinson, The Message of Genesis 1–11, 33–34.