Human life was established and meant to be whole. Since the first day of our existence, the intention was completeness. When God created Adam, God desired a oneness — a wholeness — between Him and man, a marital relationship in simplicity and purity (Gen. 2:18). This oneness is an effortless living of man before God, in which we take in and live by nothing but the tree of life.
We all know the story of the serpent tempting man to eat of the other tree, but the evil in this situation was not even about the temptation to disobey God — it was a craftiness to divide, to fragment, to complicate. Satan’s nature is subtlety, sophistry, and guile. It is not openly displayed evil, but beautiful lies. He creates and manipulates the truth with a view to a system of error (Eph. 4:14), convincing us that something else is true and worthy beyond the life of God. He says, “Did God really say…?” (Gen. 3:1). This “something else” may look similar, but it is not one and the same. In the New Testament, the Bible uses the word “craftiness,” which, in Greek, is panourgia. This word comes from the roots pás, or “every,” and érgon, or “deed.” This “every deed” sounds beautiful — that every alternative, many possibilities, and countless reasonings are valid. In this fallacious system, there is no whole anymore — just fragments. And justifying such a system of error, living such a fragmentary life, is a tiresome, never-ending effort.
Yet human beings were never meant to live a fragmented life. As believers, when we come back to our “status quo” of simplicity and purity, we find we can experience being whole. There is a hymn that says:
Arise! the holy bargain strike—
The fragment for the whole—
All men and all events alike
Must serve the ransomed soul.
All things are yours when you are His,
And He and you are one;
A boundless life in Him there is,
And kingdom yet to come.
God’s mathematics are nothing but “one” — there is not man and God, two separate entities, but simply two-become-one in this original divine marriage. The first verse of this same hymn begins, “No mortal tongue can e’er describe / The freedom of the soul…” This is truly our experience of salvation — that when we return to oneness with our Husband, our master, our Lord, there we find privilege and freedom to be whole once more.
(Above are notes of fellowship taken from a gathering on 10/20/2024, not reviewed by the speaker.)