Made for Each Other

I was asked by a friend what I thought of the video on this page: Heavenly Fire – The John 10:10 Project.

On the whole, I like what it says, despite the American evangelical bent of what’s expressed there. The explanation of the sun’s and Earth’s magnetic fields and how they interact is accurate, as far as I know of such things, and I like the fact that Nelson can fully understand the gross mechanics of a phenomenon and still retain the pull towards the majestic and divine. For some people, it’s easy to bury one’s self in the science and not retain a part of themselves to just sense things as humans always have and link it to God.

I don’t necessarily disagree with his claim that the “Earth was made for us,” but I don’t think it’s the whole story. I’ll give the guy some grace because it’s an edited video with a definite purpose, and not a sermon. We can’t know his full thoughts on the matter just from the video. But his idea doesn’t really communicate the essence of the “situation of creation” and the post-Eden state of the human race. Whenever we’re talking about anything before the fall of man, or things beyond the physical, we can only understand it in symbols and parables, if you take seriously what the ancient Hebrews thought about it (I do).

Neither do I think the Earth should be better for us, and that God somehow goofed it up or is just toying with us. It’s just childish whining to want reality to be any different for our own comfort and ease. Demanding God do better is the essence of impotent rage and deserving of a solid zap from that storm cloud gathering over your head.

Whatever the situation was during Eden, our universe was a small, negligible part or “level” of it. Eden itself was a place and a state where we existed far removed from the limitations we currently experience. We can conceive of the best possible version of Earth and how we’d live in it, but Eden was much more profoundly attuned to our former state. Eden most certainly wasn’t co-located somewhere in the fertile crescent—that imagery is a symbol to help us understand what it was like, but I do think there was some physical, if you want to call it that, overlap between Eden and our universe*. Our universe was a place we could have visited and managed if we wanted to, as caretakers of a part of God’s estate, but our cosmos was hardly a necessity. That’s not a great comparison, because no comparisons will really capture how it really was, only give an impression of things.

After the fall, our existence was stuffed into mortal bodies, which were then stuffed onto one comparably very small part of the this one negligible level of Eden. Before the fall, I don’t think Earth was hospitable at all to our disgraced version, as the entire universe is hostile to Earth-born life to begin with. It takes an enormous amount of civilizational resources and technology to barely help us to survive temporarily outside of Earth’s magnetic protection, and I don’t see a reason to think Earth was any different before we needed it. So as a provision, God set up Earth for us as His basement, with a cot, a mini-fridge, and a Pittsburgh Potty, while we work out how we might get back upstairs into the main part of the house where the party is happening.

To sum it up: god made some temporary, ramshackle provisions on Earth to accommodate fallen humans’ situation while we are tied to the physical-only plane of existence. So it’s not so much that Earth was made for us, or that we were made for Earth, but we were concurrently made for each other.

* EDIT: Some clarification here. Yes, Genesis mentions the Tigris and Euphrates, and two other named rivers we don’t know about. At some point in the past, the area was probably a lot different than what we know it today, and the Tigris and Euphrates were inherited somehow from that forgotten era. So there was some historical or mythical attachment to that region to the people of that day, and the geographic area was attached to the “real” Eden in ways we can’t understand. Supposing, in our normal bodies we have today, we could go back in time and stroll through that four-river area, maybe we would see something crazy, maybe not. All we know is that the area was much different but how we would perceive it is unknown.