Monday, October 5, 2020

day no. 15,323: more whole than if never broken

"One of the first things we see is that God loves to unite by dividing. He creates our beautiful world by dividing the land from the sea. He creates our earth by dividing the waters below from the waters above. He made the earth fruitful by dividing the inanimate world from the animate world, bringing forth the latter out of the former. He placed the sun and moon in the sky, thus dividing the day from the night. God is not fragmenting the world, shattering it to pieces; rather, He is tying everything together in a Trinitarian complex, binding everything together by means of thoughtful division. This is not the kind of division that sin brought to our race—the division of malice and hostility, of relationships fragmenting. No. This is the division of fruitfulness. The Lord created Adam out of the dust of the ground, and as Adam looked around, he should have seen that he was the only thing that was undivided. Everything else that God had broken in two He had pronounced good. But Adam stood, solitary, alone, and unbroken, and God said that it was not good that man should be alone. And so God determined to complete him, and He did this by placing Adam into a profound deathsleep, and He then divided Him, taking a rib from his side. From that rib, God fashioned the first woman, our mother Eve, or, as she was known to Adam, Ishah. God made the one into two in order, by His glorious wisdom, to restore them in a deeper and more fulfilling unity by making the two into one. If He had not made the one into two, He would not have been able to make the two into one.

This is God’s way. He takes something in His hands, He blesses it, breaks it, and the result is life for the world. This pattern was disrupted by sin, but sin has not overcome it or erased it. Even when the Lord Jesus was on the eve of His betrayal, He still followed this same pattern. He took the bread that was His body, blessed it, and broke it. And in that breaking, we who were scattered all over the world in countless little pieces were gathered back into Christ. By bring this kind of fruitful division, the division of sacrifice, to one, the many are made one. He was broken so that we who were broken might be made whole." -- Douglas Wilson, Bone of My Bones

God's design for the world is to bring it back together after breaking it. In other words, the whole world will be more whole by being broken than if it had never been divided. The unity produced by bringing the pieces back together is more whole than the pieces were prior to being separated.

The story God is writing is better than the one we'd assume. We would write Eden and leave well enough alone, but God wrote a story where the new Eden, brought back together after the brokenness of sin, will be better for having been broken apart. His story is better and the unity produced by His division is better than the unity of our singular focus.

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