by Kenneth F. Sheets
To Adam and Eve, God, the Creator, existed. They never had a thought or question regarding His presence or His existence. He had brought them into existence, and they existed in Him. Simply . . . He existed! He was here . . . He was there . . . not as a place, a “location,” but as a presence, an existence. He was, then, in a sense, everywhere, but still, even in their finite thinking, He was not everywhere as in every “location” . . . but as in every “existence” that existed, He existed.
The Creator could openly manifest His presence to them, or He could allow them to interact as though He were not present, as though they were completely free to apply His design and interact with His creation according to their own perception and the authority He had delegated to them. Indeed, whether He specifically manifested His existence or did not manifest His existence at all, this did not change their perception of their relationship to anything in the creation, including their relationship to one another. He was “there,” and He was “everywhere,” and they, in His own image and likeness, were to represent His existence in every function and interaction of His design, and they did so in every “there” and “everywhere” that existed. At times, He so manifested His presence that they perceived Him to be accompanying them, to be “walking with” them, in their going about in His garden, but the decision to do so was His, not theirs.
They existed not only within His creation but within Him, because the entirety of the creation was within Him, and thus, they had no thoughts, not even the least concept, of “another God,” “another Creator.” He was the only God who existed, not because they simply had no contact with other “Gods,” but because they existed within His being, and thus, He pervaded the entirety of the dimensionality He had created and wherein they existed. It was not as if He “was everywhere,” because their existence was bounded by His person and nature. To them, no sense, no concept, of any existence outside His transcendent person existed. His perfect person and nature simply was manifest in and through and over everything that existed, and every thing, every creature and being, that existed had been brought into existence within Him by His direct activity.
To them, He was the transcendent Creator of all that exists; He was the origin of all that exists, everything having come into existence according to His pre-creation design and His direct activity to bring it all into existence in accord with that design. Thus, He was not only creator, but owner, designer, definer, sustainer, and absolute authority of all that exists. He, the Creator, could be named, but only by Himself. No finite being, nor any group of finite beings, possessed the knowledge and ability to name Him. Whatever name they applied to Him would be rooted and limited within their finite human perspective. Their only choice in the matter was that they adopt His own perspective of Himself, because He was the only being who knew perfectly the name that would perfectly represent His person and nature to every being and every thing that existed and would ever exist in the future. Thus, He revealed to them His own chosen name . . . ‘Ehyeh, “I exist,” the name that humans of all time could use, the name that would always perfectly represent His person and His presence in every moment in every situation of human existence.
No other being, in any way or to any degree, like Him existed.
As the transcendent Creator, the originator, of all that exists, He could never be separated in any way or to any degree from anything that existed, nor could anything that existed be separated from Him or any aspect of His design. Everything that existed possessed the perspective that it had originated and existed within His being and was subject to the criteria of His design . . . and no escape from that existence and all of its controls and influences was possible to any extent.
He had not created outside His person.
Nothing that existed could exist “outside” His person.
All that existed, every thing, every function and interaction, existed within Him.
He had already provided for every aspect of their existence.
Thus, He intended that they be totally dependent upon Him in every aspect of life.
He was worthy of their complete trust.
He was constantly “intervening” in their existence to bring blessedness upon them.
As His created beings, the humans did not think in terms of adhering to a set of criteria in order to remain in an unalienated relationship to the Creator. They simply interacted with Him and His creation as He had designed those interactions to occur; this was the way that He had revealed to them for operating the systems of the creation. The criteria were not “laws” or “rules”; they were just the way things had been designed, and the humans operated all these systems in that manner. Everything worked as it had been designed and put into place by the God Who Existed, the God who manifested Himself to them in three distinguishable but perfectly integrated persons, not as individual Gods or persons of God operating separately and independently, but as three manifestations of the one God, interacting in perfect concord both with one another and His creation. No standards or criteria of “righteousness” or “wrongness” existed; the only standard that existed was the one comprised of His design. Just as when a lady goes into her kitchen to prepare a meal. She does not attempt to bake something by putting it into the refrigerator, nor does she wash dishes by placing them on the floor and walking on them. A carpenter does not try to saw a board by beating it with a hammer. There are ways of doing things according to the ways in which they are made, the ways they are designed to be done. These ways do not define whether a person is “righteous” or “unrighteous” in the sight of God; they are simply the ways that conform to design.
Other humans may proclaim one way “right” and another “wrong,” but for Adam and Eve, no external human “judges” existed. They knew how to do things, so they did them that way . . . and it all worked perfectly. Even their eating of the forbidden tree was not an action that was “abnormal” in any way. The fruit was fruit, edible, attractive, and apparently delicious; the only thing which made it to be avoided was that eating it was not an aspect of God’s design for His human beings. Eating or not eating were not criteria of “rightness” and “wrongness”; they were simply criteria of the Creator’s perfect design, and the first two humans did not think in terms of “right” and “wrong.” They simply functioned and interacted in the design of the Creator, and this design has never changed. Interacting with God is not a matter of keeping a set of rules or laws or criteria in order to be “right” with Him. Interacting with God is just a matter of living life as He designed it to be lived, that is, of walking in His design, a design which is the design of the Spirit just as it is of the Father and the Son, without a sense of having to do things a certain way to be “righteous” and avoiding other ways in order to not be “unrighteous.” Walking in His Spirit is simply operating life according to the way its Creator designed it to be operated.