The New Creation

I know that nothing good lives in me ~ Romans 7:18

Mistakenly, we often seem to think that God put Adam in the Garden to test him, to see whether he would obey or not. Not so. It was because by no other means could Adam discover his own innate helplessness.

It was not, as we often erroneously think, that Adam could have done the good deed of rejecting the advances of Satan. If that were so, man could be good by his own unaided effort. No, he was placed between those two trees to learn that of himself he can do nothing good, and that he is not expected to!

He was put into the Garden to learn the basic fact of his creation, that his own human spirit is an empty, helpless vessel so far as living the good life is concerned. “In me, that is in my flesh (my humanity) dwells no good thing.”

Man was not created to be good. He was created to be indwelt by the Good One. The negative command not to eat of the tree, followed by the direct temptation to do so, was not to stir into action some potential capacity in Adam for obedience and goodness, nor to demonstrate that he could be good if he would. It was to reveal to Adam the one essential point he had to learn about himself–that he was created helpless so far as being and doing good is concerned.

Adam was to learn that his little human spirit had one marvelous potentiality: his spirit could be the container of the Divine Spirit via the Tree of Life, and yet he would not lose his own individuality. The glorious face is that the two–human and Divine–can dwell together, each in the other, in an eternal fruitful bond of union.

(Taken from The Liberating Secret by Norman Grubb copyright 1955)