The Incarnation: From Beauty to Turmoil and Back Again – Part 1

By Hasmik Babayan

Hasmik serves on the SVM2 International Facilitation Team and currently lives among the unreached.

The Calculated Risk

We read in John 1:1-5,

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (ESV)

The beauty of God’s imagination, the creativity of His mind, the passion of His soul, and the power of His word called into existence the human life, the masterpiece of creation.

In the image of God humans were created. They were created for a purpose – to belong to Him, to enjoy life with Him and to thrive in Him. They were created for God, and the meaning of their life and existence was in God.
The beauty of life consisted in knowing God and enjoying life in His presence.

The meaning of life was to become the fullness of what God intended when He created Adam. God beautifully and mysteriously made human beings so that the latter is able to KNOW his Maker and acknowledge the meaning of his existence. To live was to know God and to discover the mystery and potential of the human soul and body.

Adam, and in essence all of humanity, rebelled later. As Adam did this, he lost the beauty and mystery between God and himself. He exchanged light with darkness, love with hatred, life with death and harmony with a chaos. He alienated his soul from the source of his existence.

He pulled himself out from the light and chose to go into the darkness. Consequently Adam started using his power and potential to create hate and destruction, greed and war, pride and slavery, fear and religion, abhorrence and injustice, and the demolition of his own self.

As he estranged himself from God, he started twisting the original meaning of all beautiful things such as love, worship, friendship, sex, joy, happiness, and etc. In Isaiah 5:20 God says,

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (ESV)

So, the human mind used its creativity to twist things, to destroy the original meaning of purposefully created things. Human beings had become so creative in destroying, abusing, hurting, hating, and killing, that they didn’t have time to realize that they had used this creativity for their own annihilation and complete devastation.

The human mind had become so busy that its very desire to save life, will lead to losing it! Jesus said in Matthew 10:39, “If you try to save your life, you will lose it. But if you give it up for me, you will surely find it.”

In Genesis 1:26 we read,

“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (ESV)

Thus, God had entrusted the creation to humans. Humans were given complete authority to rule over the created things. Basically God took a calculated risk in putting so much trust in humans. But this trust was necessary; otherwise the creation wouldn’t have had meaning.

Humans took over and started ruling over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over the livestock, even over the very human beings, over the nature and over all the earth. While ruling they messed up a lot and caused a real chaos in nature, in their own soul, and in their societies.

Humans were trusted, but they abused the trust. They failed God, as well as nature (the abuse, misuse, and overuse of nature-trees, plants, animals and etc.). In other words humans made up their own world, the one that we live in now, the world of chaos and hate.

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