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By: Pastor Joel You may listen to this devotion in audio form via podcast here.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
I recently heard Paul Tripp say something important about the Christmas season. He said, “…the Christmas story is meant to present to us the ultimate solution to the loneliness that began in the Garden of Eden.” Humans weren’t created to be lonely. In fact, after God created man, He saw that it is ‘not good for man to be alone.’ Too often we then jump to the part where God provides Adam with Eve. But this misses something deeper happening in the Creation Story. That is that humans are created to have intimate relationships. We are created to have intimate relationships with one another, but even more so - with our God. Adam and Eve spent their days walking in the Garden and often God (Jesus) would come and walk with them. This is broken in the Garden. Adam and Eve are broken from one another. And they are broken from their God, hiding from Him when he comes to walk with them. Already in the Garden we are beginning to see profound loneliness break into the human experience. It is a deeply heartbreaking story.
Yet our God is not content to let that loneliness dwell in us. How do we know this? Because He sent himself once again to walk amongst us. The purpose of Jesus coming on that first Christmas is to first of all, unite our hearts to Him. As Paul Tripp explained, our deepest loneliness comes from being broken from our Creator. We have this deep sense of loss and need to be known by and to know our God. When we are restored to our God, through Jesus among us, we now can begin to be restored to one another.
Here is the Good News for anyone who is lonely this Christmas. Jesus came because He cares about your loneliness. There will one day be a time when we will be lonely no more. There will be a day when we will walk with Jesus in heaven. We will know our God and He will know us. Indeed, perhaps the greatest gift we have in our loneliness today is the ability to pray. Even though we do not yet walk the halls of heaven, the echo of our voices reverberate to the very throne of our God. So that even when we feel the depth of our loneliness, we never are alone.