The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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MOVEMENT SEVEN Good
It is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.
The writer John tells us that Mary saw Jesus after his resurrection but did not realize it was Jesus. Jesus asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
“Thinking he was the gardener, she said . . .”1
I love that line “thinking he was the gardener.” It is so loaded. Jewish writers like John did things like this all the time in their writings. They record what seem to be random details, yet in these details we find all sorts of multiple layers of meaning.2 There are even methods to help decipher all the hidden meanings in a text. One is called the principle of first mention. Whenever you come across a significant word in a passage, find out where this word first appears in the Bible. John does this in his gospel. The first mention of the word love is in 3:16—“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” We then discover that love is first mentioned in Genesis 22 when God tells Abraham to take “your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love” and offer him as a sacrifice. John is doing something intentional in his gospel: He wants his readers to see a connection between Abraham and his son, and God and God’s son. John’s readers who knew the Torah would have seen the parallels right away.
Back to the empty tomb and Mary’s inability to recognize Jesus. She mistakes him for a gardener. Where is the first mention of a garden in the Bible? Genesis 2, the story of God placing the first people in a . . . garden. And what happens to this garden and these people? They choose to live outside of how God made them to live, and they lose their place in the garden. Death enters the picture and paradise is lost.
John tells us that Jesus is buried in a garden tomb. And Jesus is mistaken for a gardener. Something else is going on here. John wants us to see a connection between the garden of Eden and Jesus rising from the dead in a garden. There is a new Adam on the scene, and he is reversing the curse of death by conquering it.3 As one writer put it, “It was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”4 And he’s doing it in a garden. He’s reclaiming creation. He’s entering into it and restoring it and renewing God’s plans for the world.
Jesus is God’s way of refusing to give up on his dream for the world.
Our Environment
To look at God’s restoration plans in greater depth, we need to go back to how God creates the world and what he thinks about it. The Bible starts with God making the ground and the seas and calling them “good.” God makes land that produces vegetation and it is “good.” Over and over this word good is used to describe how God perceives what he has made. It is all “good.”
Notice what God does with his “good” creation. “Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.’ And it was so.” The next verse is significant: “The land produced vegetation.”5 Notice that it doesn’t say, “God produced vegetation.” God empowers the land to do something. He gives it the capacity to produce trees and shrubs and plants and bushes that produce fruit and seeds. God empowers creation to make more.
This happens again in Genesis 1:22 when God blesses the creatures of the water and sky and then says, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” Once again God gives creation—here it is fish and birds—the ability to multiply and make more. God doesn’t make more fish; God gives fish the ability to make more.
An important distinction.
God empowers creation to make more and in doing so loads it with potential. It is going to grow and change and move and not be the same today as it was yesterday, and tomorrow it will move another day forward. Creation is loaded with potential and possibility and promise.
God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation, commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it. The words he gives are words of loving service and thoughtful use. From day one (which is really day six), they are in intimate relationship and interaction with their environment. They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence.
This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues.
And until that last sentence makes perfect sense, we haven’t fully grasped what it means to be human and live in God’s world. Everyone is an environmentalist. We cannot live independently of the world God has placed us in. We are intimately connected. By God.
Not only are we connected with creation, but creation is going to move forward. It can’t help it. It is loaded with energy. It’s going to grow and produce and change and morph. This point is central to the story: The garden of Eden is not perfect.6 Nowhere in Genesis does it say it is perfect. The word the Bible uses is good. There is a difference. When we say “perfect,” what we generally mean is “static” or “fixed” or “unchanging.” It has reached a state in which there is going to be no more change. But this is not what Genesis says about the garden of Eden. Good means changing and growing and advancing and producing new things. And so these people are placed in the midst of this dynamic, changing, alive, vibrant environment and charged with the divine responsibility of doing something with it. Creating, arranging, ordering, caring for—doing something with it.
These first people have a choice: to do something with it in harmony with God or to use it for their own purposes. And not doing something with it is a choice as well. It would be a sin to abuse creation and distort it and rape it and exploit it, but it would also be a sin to do nothing with it. Because doing nothing with it would essentially be saying to God, “You have made nothing of interest to me.”7
So the issue of eating the fruit then is far bigger than Adam and Eve simply disobeying God. They are throwing off the whole deal. God made this magnificent world with endless possibilities of creativity and beauty and meaning, and they miss it. They decide to steer the thing in a different direction. A direction of their choosing.
God has given us power and potential and ability. God has given this power to us so we will use it well. We have choices about how we are going to use our power. The choices of the first people were so toxic because they were placed in the middle of a complex web of interaction and relationships with the world God had made. When they sinned, their actions threw off the balance of everything.
Weather.
Trees.
Oceans.
It is all one, and when one part starts to splinter and fracture, the whole thing starts to crumble. These people cannot be separated from their environment. One part falls out of harmony, and everything is affected. As one text says, “The whole creation has been groaning.”8 It is all thrown off.
This is how the Bible starts.
Unlimited potential.
Unbelievable promise and possibility.
And then fracturing, splintering, chaos.
Moving Forward
Will creation always be like this? Fractured? Chaotic?