“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”

(Genesis 3:24)

I can remember my early childish resentment to this story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden.  I can still see that old steel engraving in the Bible Story Book showing the shining angel with the blazing sword standing across the path and the man and the woman cowering back from his stern presence.  “How cruelly unjust of God,” I thought, “to punish so harshly that poor man and woman for eating just one forbidden apple.”

Of course, as I grew older I began to hear a lot of male chauvinist jokes about Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden, placing all the blame for our human misery upon the woman who tempted her husband to disobedience.  One story I remember seemed particularly funny to men only.  It was about Adam in later life taking a walk with his two sons, Cain and Able, and passing the ruins of what had been long ago his Garden of Eden, one of the boys asked Adam: “What is that over there, Father?”  And Adam replied: “That, my son, is where your Mother ate us out of house and home.”

But, for me, time has been a relentless teacher.  Gone, now, is my early childhood resentment at the seeming cruel injustice of man’s expulsion from Eden.  Gone, too, is most of my mirth over the never ending male and female rivalry over fixing blame for our loss of Eden.

The years have brought me a better understanding of this beguiling story from the infancy of mankind.  I have learned that here is the story not only of the great severity of God, but also of the great mercy of God. I have learned that here is not only the experience of the first man and the first woman, but of every man and every woman who has followed them in the unfolding saga of human existence.  I have come to see that the ultimate question that rises from these sacred pages to wrestle with our attention is not: “What is the origin of evil.” nor, “What is the nature of man?” nor, “Did all men and women really fall with Adam and Eve?” but rather the most intimately personal and vital question for every one of us is, “When the Eden of my innocency is shattered, what do I do?”

What do you do when your Eden is shattered – when you are driven out and you can’t go back?  When the flaming sword is set barring your return to the Eden where you were once so comfortable and so secure, and now you know your eviction is cruelly final, what do you do?

For you see, the Eden of our innocency is shattered, sooner or later, for every one of us.  How?  Oh, in so many ways.   Some deliberate sin – some stupid carelessness – some long series of unworthy acts in an unrighteous or unloving relationship — runs out to its inevitable end.  Then suddenly we see the shattering of the image of our innocency by the sin that has slowly gained ascendancy in our soul and alienated us from God, our fellow human beings, and our paradise of God’s eternal Kingdom.

Sometimes it is the realization by a parent of failure with a child that shatters the image of our innocency. Von Hugel, the saintly Roman Catholic thinker and teacher, failed with his daughter, and it was the dawning consciousness of this failure which stripped away the many mixed hangings of that relationship:  love and neglect, pride and selfishness, service and dominance, and suddenly Von Hugel saw himself in the shameful nakedness of a sinful failure before the one he loved most in the world.

Once I heard a parent in sad retrospect say about her parental relationship with a child: “We thought we were good for him but now we know we were poison for him.”  At last the realization of failure had shattered the image of innocency.

Or, it can be the sudden withdrawal of the loyal support of others we had grown accustomed to expect which shatters the image of our innocency.  During the Nazi occupation of Norway, the great giant of the resistance movement was Bishop Bergravv.  His personal courage, his indomitable spirit of opposition to the foreign tyranny, led his fellow countrymen in writing one of the most noble chapters of their national history.  But when the war was over and the emergency passed, this popular support was withdrawn from Bergavv, as is so often the case with great leaders when their time of service has passed, and Bishop Bergravv then experienced a cruel shattering of his innocency, and he saw himself a poor sinner and the history of his relationship with his people shot through with innumerable failures and mistakes.  So he was driven from the delightful Eden of his heart.

Sometimes, and for most of us it comes this way, the Eden of our innocency is shattered by the clever deal, the shrewd manipulation, the smart and selfish scheme.  It has seemed that the cards were stacked just right for us – there was an unbelievably perfect sequence of events for destroying our enemy, or framing our competitor, or just getting ahead of the pack.  Finally it came to the point where all we had to do was to say one word, or write one letter, or give one nod, and the whole deal would be sealed.  Then suddenly came the realization that we weren’t so clever after all.  The result was not a satisfied joy of tremendous accomplishment, but an empty feeling of guilt.  We had our rebellious way, but the eating of the forbidden fruit did not open our eyes to unlimited wisdom and power.  Like Adam and Eve, all we knew was that we were morally undressed and ashamed.  The image of our innocency was shattered.

But what do we do when the image of our innocency is shattered?  Do we hurry to those friends who assure us that we are just the same? Do we listen eagerly to those who tell us that nothing has really happened, and try to live on in illusion and confusion?  Whenever Margaret Mitchell was interviewed and asked about her purpose in writing her great novel, Gone With The Wind, always she said that it was used to show how crises and experiences of life revealed what was really inside people and that after this revelation, part public and part private, some had the gumption to regroup and reassemble the shattered pieces of their former selves and some didn’t. Ashley Wilkes was broken by the passing of the Old South. He never adjusted to the post war epic.  Rhett Butler, the opportunist, quickly adjusted, but was unable or unwilling to distinguish the moral from the immoral, the loyalty he owed to the imperishable values from the selfish desire to feather his own nest, so he became gross from his unprincipled practices.  In adjusting to the new times Rhett Butler became both corrupted and a corrupter.

Or, do we grow bitter when the image of our innocency is shattered?  Do we put the blame for our failures on others and never learn a thing, living on as if we were perpetually innocent?  Gamaliel Bradford wrote of Henry Adams that “he needed not to think but to live.  But he did not want to live.  It was easier to sit back and proclaim life unworthy of Henry Adams than it was to lean forward with the whole soul in a passionate, if inadequate effort to make Henry Adams worthy of life.”

Now what Adam did after Eden is not explicitly stated, but the Scriptures are full of illustrations of people whose Eden was shattered and who found a better way than growing bitter, or blaming others, or letting their brains be blasted by the shattering of the image of their innocency.

Phillips Brooks had a great sermon, The Giant with the Wounded Heel, where he would ring the changes on the Biblical doctrine of the essential dignity and greatness of man.  Though subject to the poisonous fangs of sin, human beings can crush evil, if they are so determined, and if they are empowered with strength from the only source of spiritual salvation.

Do we know how to go to that One who always holds for each of us the vision of our best-purposed self?  If our Eden is shattered we may be sure it is for our entering into a better place.  Joseph William Turner, the celebrated English landscape painter, was taken by a friend into a room and asked his expert counsel on where to hang a painting.  Every foot of available space was considered.  There seemed to be no suitable place for the painting.  At last Turner said to his friend:  “We’ll just have to rebuild the room.”

That is just what God has to do with you and me.  Many an Eden of our innocency has to be shattered in order to make room for the necessary rebuilding to contain the picture of that best-purposed self that exists in the mind of God.

Joseph, the petted and spoiled son of his indulgent father, Jacob, dreamed dreams of his personal success.  He was innocent of his own faults and responsibilities.  Did not his father, Jacob, take the lead in spoiling his favorite son?  Then crash – the Eden of Joseph’s innocency was shattered.  He was sold into slavery in Egypt.  But life did not end for Joseph.  After his Eden shattered what?

Of Joseph, Stephen the martyr says in his speech in the Book of Acts:  “The patriarchs out of jealousy sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt but God was with him and rescued him from all his troubles.   He also gave him a presence and powers of mind which so commended him to Pharaoh, King of Egypt, that he appointed him chief administrator for Egypt and the whole of the royal household.”

Joseph learned from the shattering of his Eden.  Formerly preoccupied with his own dreams of personal glory, when the day came that his desperate state permitted no dreams of his own, he interested himself in the dreams of his fellow men and in their fruition.  When Joseph made that step, God began to do something better than bless Joseph.  He used Joseph as a channel of His blessing for others, for the whole Egyptian nation, and even for his own brothers who had wronged him.

Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor, experienced the shattering of the Eden of his innocency on the road to Damascus.  In the blinding light he saw himself no longer as Saul the brave defender of the faith he had imagined himself, but as Saul the murderer of the saints and the enemy of God.  That Eden of Saul’s innocency had to be shattered in order that he might become by God’s grace, Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles.

The light that shows us our sin is the light that heals us.  Every Eden must be destroyed every Eden but the last one.  The Bible, which begins with the story of the eviction from Eden and the flaming sword set to shut people out from the garden and the tree of life, moves on to a cross and the coming of One who can do for every evicted Adam and Eve what they can’t do for themselves and brings them at last to that place described in the Book of Revelation where the gates are forever open wide, and in the midst of the garden there grows the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.