Man's on-boarding
Updated: Feb 23, 2020
“Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that [h]moves on the earth.’ ” Genesis 1 vs. 28
Many professional organizations run a ‘buddy’ approach to on-boarding new employees. The Idea is to help new employees fit into their new environment by attaching them to an existing employee whose job is to introduce them to the workplace (people, places etc.), their roles & functions as smoothly as possible. Aside from helping get through the initial nervousness associated with moving into a new environment, a great on-boarding experience can increase new employee satisfaction and help them attain a high level of productivity much faster.
Man could not have had a better on-boarding, God their maker spoke the first words to them, and He blessed them and empowered them for dominance. Further into Genesis 1, God also furnished man with all the resources needed. In Genesis 2, God continued man’s on-boarding, He gave him a job, rules and when He saw that man was lonely, provided him with the ultimate company.
It’s difficult to describe how awesome this would have been, but imagine that you joined one of the world’s biggest companies, Amazon for example, and the CEO - Jeff Bezos himself was your buddy, introducing you around, showing you the meeting rooms and offices and telling you what your job role would be. Multiply the sensation you would get from this process by about a million and maybe that starts to describe how Adam should have felt.
God did not go through this process for no reason, He did this because Man was important to him, a creation in His own image, His own child. You would have to be important for Jeff Bezos to give you a personal tour. To God, Man was special. Man felt so special that even in his nakedness, he experienced no shame.
However, through another encounter (with the serpent) man fell into sin and lost his closeness to God (Genesis 3). Man thought it was necessary to hide from his ‘buddy’, he lost that special feeling and felt shame.
‘So, he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.” ‘- Genesis 3:10
The serpent tempted man by creating a selfish thought, “You know, all that God is, you can be, if you disobey him and eat the fruit”. At this point, man learns a bitter lesson, everything he enjoyed until that moment was not about who he was, it was about whose he was. He had the right buddy, and everything seemed easy. Man was in the same physical state as he had been from creation, the only difference in Genesis 3:10 was that sin had been introduced into the equation. And so, the on-boarding ended.
What we know so far: That God’s first words to man were enabling words – Man was never designed to be a slave. We also know that great starts, like the one God provided, matter. Finally, we know that man lost his place with God – leading to a sequence of catastrophes that we experience today: individually and as a race.
It remains important to God that man fulfills purpose and so He sends Jesus to mend the divide between God and man, to restore man to the original state – blessed.
‘But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.’
Christ came to restore us to a blessed state but more importantly to restore us as God’s. “He gave the right to become the children of God”. To restore a state where we can call God father, where we feel no shame because God is there for us and with us. Christ came to make you and I special…again
