Deeper Dive
God is Responsive
“God’s plan for you is only for you. He has tailored both you and His plan for you uniquely just as you are unique before Him. He created you specifically as you and you are not comparable to anyone! You only have to live with His view of who you can be and nothing more or less. He knows exactly what He created within and the opportunities you have to fulfill His gifting in you. God knows your circumstances and those who influence you but He is greater. As the note says,
“Always remember that You are Worthy and Enough.”
Again, let’s go back to the beginning, see what the pattern is, is God responsive to His creation.
Genesis 2:7 “Then the Lᴏʀᴅ God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”1
So God didn’t just make another something and move on to something else. Man was formed and then God breathed into him Life so that he became a life-bearing creation.
Genesis 2:8 “And the Lᴏʀᴅ God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.2
God then gave man a place to be which the following verses note not unsurprisingly as a place of good resources. Man wasn’t left to fend for himself or to wander aimlessly.
Genesis 2:15-17 “The Lᴏʀᴅ God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lᴏʀᴅ God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”3
God gives the man opportunities to serve with God and to have responsibilities for those opportunities. Man has a moral structure. (God does not explain ‘death’ at this point but we will find out that “die” is primarily separation from God.) There is no reason for man to doubt God, nothing is hidden in that sense that God has been open about choice and consequences.
Genesis 2:18 “The Lᴏʀᴅ God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”4,5
God is fully aware of man, his needs and opportunities and provides everything appropriate for fullness of Life. Life is Good with God. God never intended for us to come up short in anything we need to live with Him in the place of His creation. And everything was Good. As long as mankind, created in the image of God, continued in relationship with God and responsive to God’s higher understanding, mankind had everything we needed for fullness and peace with God.
But then we took the God-given opportunity, the authority that goes with choice and determined to act in dis-agreement with Truth as given by God. We did it our way.
The rest of the Bible is the history and unveiling of how God enacts all that is necessary to counter this dis-agreeing without dishonoring His own identity. He can never contradict Himself so the Plan is quite brilliant in that it fulfills our need for redemption and His requirement of justice. All it costs is the earthly life and death of God’s Son, Jesus. And for us to come back into agreement that it was necessary because of our willful rebellion and commitment to stay in agreement with Him once again, to live not by our own works but by His mercy and grace.
Yes, God is Responsive to our being, our needs, our failures and yet true to Himself. We could ask for nothing less in the true God.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Genesis 2:7 (ESV) – https://
2 Genesis 2:8 (ESV) – https://www
3 Genesis 2:15-17 (ESV) – https://ww
4 Genesis 2:18 (ESV) – https://www
5 editor’s note: we address the man/woman sequence and ‘helper fit for him’ issues in the blog section