HOW TO ACHIEVE A HAPPY BALANCED LIFE

It’s a number of years ago now that a man from Belfast, with the unusual name of Troy, called me to say that he could ‘explode the myth’ that God created the earth and the stars in six days around six thousand years ago. His argument, he said, is supported by moon dust and dinosaurs. I think he was claiming that regolith, the powder-like soil found on the surface of the moon and was carried to earth on the boots of astronauts, can be carbon dated to around four and a half billion years ago. He also believed that he could prove that dinosaurs roamed the earth sixty-four million years before the creation story.

When he asked could he come to my home to see me I of course agreed, but added that he might be wasting his time and mine because I really didn’t care how long it took God to create everything he created or when. He was shocked. I explained; ‘All the Bible has to say about it is, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...” If the Creator had considered it important for the likes of you and me to know more, it’s safe to assume he would have told us.’

Troy wasn’t happy, I think he wanted to be the other half of a debate that generates more heat than light, and frankly I wasn’t even slightly interested.

There’s another story in the Book of Genesis that some folk get all het up about. It tells how God made humans: ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’

As a child I used to imagine God on his knees in the Garden of Eden making a sort of sculpture from the wet clay, then poking two little holes in the world’s first nose and blowing into it. I imagined the ‘man’ coughing and spluttering and sitting up, looking around him at the trees and flowers and animals and birds and finally at God, in a big white shirt stained with mud and saying, ‘Hello! Did you just make me?’

Now there might be those who even now, if they haven’t already thrown the County Down Spectator in the fire, are displeased with me for trivialising the divine, but that is exactly my point. There is a tendency to get stuck on an irrelevant aspect of the creation story and miss the broad sweep of what it’s all about. And in this example we’d miss the Bible’s first and perhaps most powerful lesson on how to achieve a balanced and happy life. Here it is:

‘When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the garden. So they hid among the trees. Then God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He replied, “I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.”

“Who told you that you were naked?” the Lord God asked. “Have you eaten from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat?”

The man replied, “It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it.”

Then the Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?”

“The serpent deceived me,” she replied. “That’s why I ate it.”

To summarise, the man said, ‘It wasn’t my fault, it was the woman you gave me!’ – in a sense he was blaming God for his predicament. And the woman said much the same, ‘It wasn’t my fault, it was the serpent.’

 

I have a suspicion that God has forgiven all of humanity for all their wrongdoings whether they ask for forgiveness or not, but the point here is that it is very difficult for anyone to experience the peace and freedom that accompanies total forgiveness if we don’t first acknowledge that we’ve said or done something wrong and are in need of forgiveness. Trouble is, to do that we need to accept responsibility for our own actions and we’re not good at that.

 

You can contact me online: adam@adamharbinson.com