In Genesis 1 God spends five and a half days making EVERYTHING. Light. Land. Water. Sky. Stars. Moon. Sun. Animals. Fish. Birds. Plants. EVERYTHING. Everything except man and woman.
And when God makes man and woman, He makes them in His image, in His likeness, in His ways. And when they wake up, so to speak, everything they could ever need, i.e. the EVERYTHING God had just made, was already provided for them. What a sign of grace! What did man and woman possibly do to deserve this paradise? They did nothing. They were simply brought to life. They were given life. And when they woke, they first saw the face of God (there's an alarm clock for ya), and then they were shown the rest of all that was created.
In verse 28 of chapter 1, it says, "God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.'” I will cover this in detail in another post down the road. But for now it is important to see that even though they had it all (face-to-face relationship with God Himself, and all of creation at their helm) the initial interaction between God and man is this: "God blessed them." How many of us have the first instincts of "Do! Do! Do! Do this, then hope there's blessings for doing so."? Isn't it true. We hope that He will bless us. The truth of the proper paradigm of being a child of God is this: He blesses us. And THEN sets us on mission.
And again, i will go into more detail on the mission on a later post, but for now consider that it has something to do with interacting with the whole of creation around us and teaching others to do so with their talents.
But my main point comes from the next verse, verse 29:
"Then God said, 'I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.' And it was so."
After showing the ultimate sign of grace of providing everything imaginable before man and woman were even ABLE to earn a single blessing, God assigns them a mission and then points them towards fulfilling their hunger.
What are YOU hungry for the most? At the end of your life, what will you hope to say was accomplished through you? What injustices in the world make you angry? What are you doing to correct that injustice?
Inside each of us is a hunger, a desire, a thirst. God placed it there, and He also leads us to a variety of options it seems of how to properly nourish that hunger. However, in Genesis 3, that hunger was sullied on something that didn't fill man and woman, it fed a lust instead of nourishing a hunger.
We've all been there. We've eaten candy instead of a meal and paid the price. We've toiled in greed instead of laboring in generosity or self-sacrifice and found ourselves still wanting more. We've acted quickly out of anger to only see the situation get worse instead of better.
Your hunger has many options, but they are all along one path: righteousness. When we step outside the bounds of God's righteousness, or His rights, or His right-ness, we step into the boundaries of sipping on the salt-water of greed, lust, quick-fixes, and dead-end decisions.
Notice that the food God pointed man and woman to all had the same characteristic: seed. The ability to reproduce.
If we fill our hunger on things that end with the meal, we will be left hungry again. But if we fill our hunger on things that are able to lend itself to more, that can be reproduced in others, that bring us to life even if it makes us tired, then we will not only be satisfied, we will be more hungry! Proverbs 13:12 says, "a longing fulfilled is a tree of life." Notice how just one longing can not only reproduce a fruit, it reproduces a fruit factory! This is true, eternal, abundant life at work, when our desires are not only fufilled, but reproduce more desire AND more fruit.
There are probably those of you reading that have questions you wish i could answer. "Well what is my hunger?" "What is my desire i should persue?" But if i simply answered it for you, you would be full. Let your questions lead you to more hunger.
May you feed your hunger with hunger.
p.s. For you baseball fans and/or coincidence watchers i found this interesting ten minutes after i published this. Andy Pettitte retired on this day. If you take his first initial with his last name, you get A. Pettitte or "appetite." And few things would better describe this player now that i think about it.
Can you go a little more into the difference between the righteous hunger you describe as opposed to what might be called our 'cravings?' In hindsight, having already been punished with the negative consequences of eating candy instead of a hearty meal, it's easy to know we didn't sate our hunger properly. But in the moment, don't we believe that we are precisely addressing that hunger? If I'm slighted or looked down upon, doesn't my craving for retribution feel an awful lot like my hunger for acceptance, equality, or success? Perhaps worse, how can we gain a clear understanding of what will satisfy the long-term hunger that rumbles in our souls' bellies when we are distracted by so many of life's day to day cravings(food, ambition, lust, entertainment, etc)? To put it another way, I've heard it said that we sometimes think we are hungry when we are actually just thirsty. But spiritually speaking, what can we use as a glass of water to help us know what's really going on in terms of our own hungers?
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