Personal

People die for all kinds of reasons. I died for the love of chewing gum.

        I didn’t realize the exact date (or that it was for gum) until maybe twenty years later when I found the stack of old calendars Mom kept. She recorded her kids’ dental appointments and other life-changing events on them. Great. I love to rummage through historical records.

        Scanning through the years, I found an entry for April 7, 1953, when I was nearly eight years old. Her note said I had gotten born for the second time. Then I remembered kneeling with her at our pale green sofa with its silver- and gold-colored metallic threads. She asked if I’d done bad things. I remembered lying, so I said Yes. Then she asked if I was sorry and wanted to let Jesus into my heart and forgive me. I said Yes and did it.

        I cannot explain how or why, but 20 years later, standing in her kitchen, reading her old note, I re-lived my earlier death and all its gummy details: 

        At about five years old, I stole some gum from an Acme food store. Mom was paying for groceries and talking just out of sight with the cashier. Marketers had put the gum right in front of me—at chin level. Yum. I liked that brand but decided not to ask Mom to buy it; she might say No. I reached for it. Then words came distinctly in an adult male voice: “Don’t take the gum.”

        What? Who said that? It didn’t sound like Dad, and he was at work. I looked around. Mom and the cashier were still talking. Being short then, I didn’t see anyone else.

        I reached out again, and the same unknown voice said: “That would be stealing; don’t take the gum.” I looked all around, still seeing no one.

        I reached for the gum a third time, but no words came. I took the gum. I knew it was stealing and stealing was wrong. I died then, but didn’t know it.

        Fast-forward 70 years. A Christian preacher said all human babies are born dead. That seemed wrong. Had they lied or stolen? I’m not sure if he meant dead in soul or dead in spirit (or both). He didn’t blame anyone, but I’d bet on Adam and Eve. Why?

        Death is a separation; things get lost. Even relationships can die, and the proof is separation—usually at multiple levels. When Adam and Eve did the only thing God had told them not to do, they got the consequences He warned them about: they died.

        For one thing, they immediately realized they were naked, so their deaths had a visible result: the loss of covering Glory. For another thing: A bit later God called out, “Adam. Where are you?” Of course He knew where Adam was. But He wanted to show the man (and us) that something invisible had gone wrong. When I was young, that invisible thing was commonly called “original sin.” For a long time I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but they said it passed to every descendant of Adam and Eve.

        So, what was it, really? A clue came much later in the Bible's account of another loss of Glory. Israel’s sins had gotten so bad with human sacrifice and other despicable things that the Glory of The Lord departed from the Temple in Jerusalem (Ezekiel 9:3-4, 10:3-4, 10:18-19, and 11:22-23). But something invisible departed there, too.

        The Temple also lost God’s inner Presence which had caused the Glory. The same mysterious but obvious thing happened to Adam and Eve. That inherited loss of close relationship is the reason I was born without a covering Glory. It is also the reason I was born separated from God’s inner Presence.

        The Christian preacher I mentioned had taken the mysterious thing a step further and said I had been born dead. But Paul writes in Romans 9:11 that Esau and Jacob, Isaac’s children in Rebecca’s womb, had done nothing either good or bad; they were innocent. We each die for our own sins (Ezekiel 18:4 and 20). Therefore, children are not born carrying their ancestors’ sins. Otherwise, when a pregnant woman dies, her unborn child would go to hell, and King David would have been wrong about going to his dead infant son (2 Samuel 12:23). We don’t die toward God until we ourselves sin for the first time. For me that happened when I deliberately stole the gum. Paul mentions his own first time in Romans 7:9. (“I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died.”)

        Children are not born dead. Thanks to Adam and Eve, they are born empty.

        That empty place inside every newborn human is what we spend our lives trying to fill with everything but God Himself.

        I started to fill the empty place by stealing gum. It was a tiny selfish beginning, but most beginnings are small—like the Big Bang: starting so small as to seem insignificant, but so heavy with consequence that it balloons and affects everything. One problem with sin is how to stop it. Another is what to do with them as they accumulate. Try saying, “It’s nothing” or “Everyone does it” to the victims of sins. It doesn’t work for them.

        And saying, “It’s nothing” or “Everyone does it” doesn’t really work for the offender either. Even if some victims are forgiving, the deeds are done, and consequences still come on like a freight train.

        I remembered my first offense decades after I did it. And if I hadn’t prayed at that sofa and turned my life over to Jesus Christ as the redeemer God promised to Adam, Eve, Abraham, and the world, I might still be carrying my own “original sin”—plus the other sins I’ve done and regretted since then. But when I admitted my sins that day and wanted to change into someone who wouldn’t do them (the technical term is “repentance”), God did for me what He’s done for multiplied millions of others: He took all my sins off my back and put them on Jesus, whose Spirit then stepped somehow into my empty place.

        The Bible story of humanity begins in Genesis, chapter three, with the loss of God’s Glory and Presence by those first two people. That continuing story will end with what the Book calls “the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:19-21). For each repentant human, the last of those restored things will be God’s full inner Presence, and then his Glory. Each restoration begins as Jesus says in the last book of the Bible, Revelation chapter three, when we take Him up on His offer: “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten, Therefore be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.”