I hate puzzles. I’ll do them still, every once in a bad idea, to appease the family but generally I avoid them like a fat kid and broccoli. I can work on one for about fifteen minutes before I get the urge to flip the table and drop kick everyone in the room (I promise I’m not actually a violent person). It’s the searching part that irks me. Spending fifteen minutes looking for the singular right piece just for it not to fit is simply torturous. At this point, I start forcing the pieces in, regardless of where they actually go, resulting in something along the lines of a Picasso on acid.
Every piece of a puzzle is dependent on the one next to it. There’s nothing worse than spending three hours on an eighty-piece puzzle just to find out you’re missing the last piece (especially when your five-year-old finishes one in twenty minutes). You search for it but it’s nowhere to be found. You go and open another puzzle to find a piece that could perhaps fit but even if it does, it throws the whole picture off and all eyes are drawn to the anomaly. Because that one piece of the puzzle is missing, the puzzle will never be complete.
We were made in the image of God, formed by His own hand, with His very breath birthing life inside of us. He placed Adam and Eve in Eden along with two specific trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He gave them one simple rule, do not eat from the tree of knowledge-or else they would die. But Adam and Eve did what humans do best, screwed up perfection, by eating from the tree they were told not to.
A quick note on God:
- He is Holy- and because He is holy, anyone in His presence must be holy (set apart)
1 Peter 1:15-18
- He is good- and because He is good, everything He does is right and true
Nahum 1:7
- He is just- and because He is just, He judges all things
Psalm 89:14
Because God is holy, good and just any and all disobedience to His command (trespass) must be judged. Perfection is the only thing allowed in His presence. So, God in His mercy kicked them out of Eden and blocked off all access to it, including the tree of life. Resulting in something far worse than Adam and Eve could have expected.
This event became known as the original sin. It was the downfall of humanity. When God created Adam and Eve, they were perfectly aligned with Him. His life flowed through them, making them One with Him. They had access to the tree of life which would have enabled them to live forever as long as they ate from it. Their rejection of the law of God was the rejection of God Himself. And because they rejected God, they rejected the very life inside of them.
When something is void of life, that thing becomes known as dead; for death is the absence of life. Dead things remain dead unless an outside force resuscitates them. The place that life once filled within them was now empty. A hole was created, a piece had gone missing.
“He (God) has also set eternity into the heart of man”. Ecclesiastes 3:11
God is eternal. When He breathed His life into Adam, He breathed an eternal life into him. When Adam was expelled from the garden he was left with an eternal sized hole in his heart. But it didn’t end with Adam and Eve, it was passed down to their children and their children’s children, all the way down to us.
We are all born with an eternal sized hole in our heart.
This hole is the pain of our existence. It echoes its emptiness throughout our entire being. It’s a bottomless pit, a hungry vortex that’s never satisfied. The more you feed it, the more it craves. It calls up from within us, “more. I need more. This isn’t enough. More. More!”
We try to shut it up, to fill in this missing piece with whatever we can find money, sex, drugs, power, influence, you name it. These things quiet the noise for a moment, but it always pains for more. Enough is never enough and the more we try and cram into it, the more it pains in retaliation.
We can never satisfy an eternal hole with finite things.
All the money, sex and drugs, even the world if it were possible can never fill this void. The only thing that can fill this eternal hole is the eternal God that created it. This void is proof to the world (because everyone who has ever lived has experienced this void) that we need God. It is a constant reminder of our dependence to Him.
We were created to be dependent upon God but since the beginning we choose independence. As independent as we try and become, we still always find ourselves dependent upon something else, no matter how much we deny it. No matter how independent we become, our identity is shaped by those things we depend on. We become power hungry, money thirsty, pleasure seeking, “independent”, career advancing people.
This would be completely ok and applause-worthy if that is all there is to life, but it isn’t. And deep down, this independent person knows it. Recall the lives of Monroe, Cobain, van Gogh, Williams, and Hemmingway.
Death begets death and attracts scavengers. These things we try and fill our void with have no life within them. Death can never satisfy life. The only thing that can fill this void, the only piece that makes our life complete is the life, eternal life that is only found in God through Jesus.
“I have come to give life, and life abundantly”. John 10:10
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