Unemployed

Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” Genesis 3:9  NASB

Where – Man was created to be useful.  In fact, he was assigned an indispensable role on the earth—to steward it on God’s behalf.  “Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.”[1]  Specifically, the verb is ʿābad, a Hebrew word used for work, worship, and service.  Adam’s task was to care for the Garden as God would have, to worship the One who created his environment, and to service it and the Creator.  In every way, Adam was needed.

But something happened.  Adam lost his job, and in the process lost his sense of purpose.  The fact that he was hiding was not simply a result of shame.  It was a complete change of consciousness, as we discovered when we investigated the unusual verb conjugation in 3:10.  Adam was not simply afraid.  His entire understanding of the relationship with God changed.  He saw himself as afraid in the past, the present, and the future.  He was separated from the One who gave meaning to his existence.

Two traumatic, devastating things happened.  First, Adam felt isolated.  In modern terms, we can summarize Adam’s trauma like this:

“We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation.  This is not the same as being alone.  It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation.  In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation.  People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.”[2]

Adam’s trauma changed him forever.

The second terrifying result was Adam’s loss of purpose.  He no longer qualified, in his mind, as the gardener, as the one responsible to steward God’s creation.  This shift also had enormous consequences.

“The feeling of futility that comes with the sense of being useless, of not being needed in the world, is the most common cause of psychoneurosis.  The only way to avoid despair is to be a need rather than an end.  Happiness, in fact, may be defined as the certainty of being needed.”[3]

But now Adam was unemployed; even worse, fired!  At least that’s what he thought.  Now who was he?  Cut off from life, left without the single purpose of his existence, he no longer had personal identity.  He was a nothing, a nobody.  He could not be rescued by simply being forgiven.  Adam has to be reinstated to regain his identity.  Otherwise the future held years of emptiness, of despair, and psychosis.  God does reinstate Adam, as the story ends, but apparently it wasn’t enough.  In fact, it seems that his psychosis grew.  After the Garden, Adam appears briefly, mentioned only with regard to impregnating his wife.  He disappears from the record, a lost soul.  He leaves nothing behind but a name and a broken line.

Is that all we learn, that our progenitor ended up a derelict?  I don’t think so.  I think we learn that individual well-being requires interpersonal relationship and a sense of being needed.  Not one or the other but both.  Community is not simply connectedness.  It is purposeful intra-connectedness.  You and I need each other if we are going to be happy, if we are going to be mentally stable.  “No man is an island” is much deeper than we might have thought.  Adam’s story tells us why.   When God asks, “Where are you?,” He isn’t asking for location and He isn’t asking, with surprise, why Adam isn’t where he is expected to be.  He is asking who Adam is now that Adam has abandoned his place in creation.  Is He asking the same of us?

“More grave than Adam’s eating the forbidden fruit was his hiding from God after he had eaten it.  ‘Where art thou?’  Where is man? Is the first question that occurs in the Bible.  It is man’s alibi that is our problem.  It is man who hides, who flees, who has an alibi.  God is less rare than we think; when we long for Him, His distance crumbles away.”[4]

Topical Index:  where, isolation, alone, purpose, ʿābad, happiness, need, Genesis 3:9-10

[1] Genesis 2:15.  NASB

[2] Brené Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 140.

[3] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, pp. 194-195.

[4] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 153.