THE WATERFALL JOURNEY
Episode 3 The Waterfall - The Biblical Foundations - Genesis 2&3
The image of the Waterfall was a God-given picture
of life abiding in the presence of Father,
where we were designed to live. It is where Jesus stood as He walked the earth.
It is the place where heart to heart and Spirit to spirit communication flowed between the Father and His children
In the first three chapters of Genesis we see what God intended for His relationship with His children and what went wrong .
These chapters take us back to God’s intention, the best that He has for us, living in close company with Him involved in all His heart’s purpose.
The Waterfall Journey is a way for us to travel
in His service and presence,
every moment of our lives
and to achieve the particular and significant purpose He has set before us.
We were created to travel with the Father on His business as Jesus did. We are going to explore how to make that a reality.
GOD’S INTENTION FOR HIS CHILDREN
God is love and it is the nature of love that it has to be shared. God wanted a family:-
Ands so He made us in His image sharing His family likeness. This is not a detached Father who parents us from a distance;
our desire for involvement, closeness and emotional attachment are His too.
God is excited about us.
God wanted a special place where intimacy would be established. God readied the earth and within very precise boundaries,
there within the Garden of Eden He placed His children.
God did not hold back in creating the perfect setting:
full of colour and texture, sights and sounds and smells to delight, with flowers and trees, animals and birds.
Then the act of bringing us His children into being, was not a detached process.
On the sixth day the Garden ready, God created His family:
How He created us is powerfully described in Genesis 2: 7
The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
This is a picture of a very intimate connection between a loving Father and His children. He bends, He gathers, He breathes and with His life He gives us life.
This means we share God’s nature, character and DNA.
We are emotional, rational and spiritual just as He is;
we can make choices, we are family. The love the Father had for Adam and Eve is seen not only in the environment He provided but in the relationships that are portrayed there.
God set the safe boundaries but within those He gave responsibility to Adam. When He asked Adam to name the animals it was a co-operative venture and it must have been fun.
As each animal appeared Adam took authority and gave it a name.
Elephant... armadillo ... kangaroo ... he was joining God in creation because when you name a thing, you set something of its character.
When this work was done and there was no helper for Adam
God caused a deep sleep to fall upon him and
He met Adam’s deepest need, by fashioning woman from his ribs.
This union was to be the foundation for ongoing family life.
BUT GOD was still central to the picture.
Adam and Eve had a simple profound trust in the Father.
They all shared joy in each other as in the cool of the evening
the Father came to walk and talk with them .
THE WATERFALL is the place where we were born to live, abiding in the presence of the Father and the image of the Waterfall gives a dramatic picture of the reality of the flow of love from the Father to us.
This is no seasonal waterfall but a thundering, never diminishing Niagara torrent, the River of the Water of Life, the awesome love of the Father, flowing into and through His children.
In the overflow of that vertical outpouring, horizontal relationships flourish into everything they were meant to be:
It is also symbolic of the deep spiritual connection through which every need of life is sustained in us.
We are all created to be sustained by The living water flowing
from the Father’s throne in three crucial areas:-
1. To know we are unconditionally LOVED and so we have a place where we BELONG
2. To know we are VALUED as an individual and have WORTH in the eyes of others
3. To know that our life has MEANING and PURPOSE, that our being will make a difference.
In Eden in the Waterfall of God’s love, Adam and Eve were filled by Him to overflowing, allowing them to have full and satisfying relationships with each other.
The vertical relationship with the Father was the key to deep and perfect harmony between human beings. Relationships were maintained by sharing thoughts and feelings. When sharing time in the cool of the evening, walking together, there were things to talk about for God had not created Adam and Eve for idleness:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. Genesis 2:15
Thus, the Garden is a picture of trust, intimacy and richness, sublime relationships in a sublime landscape where God’s children were aligned to the Father’s will and purpose, playing their part in His story.
There was just one boundary that God set: In Genesis 2:16 it says
You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.
NOW THE TWO SUBPLOTS OF GOD’S STORY COLLIDE
Satan is immediately alert to an opportunity. In Genesis, Satan in the form of a serpent determines to spoil not only the relationship between the Father and His children but also the family likeness. To distort the image bearers, he attacks:
Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden?”
Genesis 3:1
The command had been given directly to Adam but Satan gets Eve to focus on a tree which had always been an unremarked part of the landscape. He deliberately overstates God’s command and she responds with a paraphrase of God’s words that too, goes beyond His original statement. “and you must not touch it.”
Satan then seizes his chance:
“You will not surely die” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good from evil.” Genesis 3:4
Until this moment the richness of their surroundings had made Adam and Eve unaware of any deprivation but now Eve thinks about Satan’s words and a seed of doubt is planted in her mind. Her attention is focused on the tree, she looks at the fruit and wonders, “Why not?”
She has no awareness of the devil’s plot and its consequences or an understanding of the spiritual death it will entail.
Now, doubting God’s absolute goodness and beginning to doubt the truth of God’s words she decides that
the fruit looks good;
she cannot see why they should not eat it
and indeed thinks it will bring wisdom.
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and
ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her and he ate it.
Genesis 3:6
A decision is made she eats and offers the fruit to Adam who is by her side throughout, a silent, compliant co-conspirator.
The devil always attacks us through our minds and desires. Adam and Eve in eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil have moved into the place of disconnection and distrust that will bring hurt, pain, and emptiness.
NOW THEY THINK THEY KNOW BEST
THEY THINK THEY KNOW GOOD FROM BAD
THEY THINK THEY KNOW RIGHT FROM WRONG
Now they can play God in their own lives and the lives of others. God is redundant; they are acting independently, making their own decisions. At a stroke everything is changed; trust is broken and sin floods into the world. The relationship with the Father is fractured.
Sinful man is cut off from a holy God, the Father is no longer freely accessible. Adam and Eve have made a choice that will lead to great suffering.
THERE ARE IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES TO THE FALL
Having broken God’s trust, for their own safety God evicts Adam and Eve from Eden so that they do not eat of the Tree of Life.
Outside the Waterfall, exiled, they are alone and cut off from the flow of the Spirit. This is the death that God spoke about. Where there was fullness of love and stability, now there is emptiness and uncertainty.
What had been the absolute knowledge and experience of LOVE and BELONGING becomes loss and leads to feelings of being ALONE and ISOLATED.
SECURITY was gone.
What had been the absolute knowledge and experience of being VALUED and RESPECTED was lost, replaced by feelings of being of LESS THAN others and WORTHLESSNESS.
SELF-WORTH was shattered.
What had been the absolute knowledge and experience of knowing MEANING and PURPOSE was gone. The opposite was now true, everything seemed to be MEANINGLESS and to NO PURPOSE.
SIGNIFICANCE was ended.
Living in the fallen world, running on empty instead of full tanks of love,
we experience life as balancing on a pin
instead of standing on the firm rock
where we were born to live drenched in the love of the Father.
PAIN had entered the world and since the Fall
there has been neediness and emptiness in mankind.
This is the death that God warned against. We were born to live in the Waterfall of God’s love - outside that we gasp like a stranded fish on a river bank.
To survive in desperation we are driven to where we think we can satisfy our raging thirst for the lack of God.
Jeremiah reveals the agony this is to God whose children have turned from Him to worthless idols.
Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols. Be appalled
at this O heavens,and shudder with great horror. Jeremiah 2:11
God makes it very clear what His children have done:
My people have committed two sins: they have turned away from me the spring of living water and dug their own cisterns, cisterns that cannot hold water. Jeremiah 2:13
Having rejected life in the abundance of the Waterfall of God’s love, in the fallen world all our behaviour drives us towards the bucket we put down into our cistern or well.
All of us long for:
LOVE and BELONGING, VALUE and WORTH, MEANING and PURPOSE.
These are not casual requirements for our wellbeing but life itself, they are crucial for us and the thirst for them will drive us to our cisterns.
However, what goes in the bucket is not living water and the cistern leaks; there are droughts and we have to survive on what we can get. Always the raging thirst remains and we have pain and emptiness, not abundance.
