The divisive issue in the Garden of Eden was not only about disobeying the commandment of God…but also about the derailment of the essential…tragically irreplaceable…of building a personal relationship over time between Adam and Eve…and God.
Adam and Eve could have answered the serpent in an informed, insightful, worldly savvy way: “What you are saying to us is interesting and appealing, but there is no hurry in this matter. We will discuss the pros and cons in what you are suggesting…with God…think it over…and get back to you in a few days.”
Adam and Eve did not trust the word of God…His character and truthfulness…long enough in time…over the course of a few short days…to wait and speak with Him before charging straight through into disobedience and self-destructive, independent self-sovereignty…which has plagued the human race ever since…and is problematic in my own journey of faith from time to time.
This is why a God-invented, God-composed journey of faith has this component of gaps between what we can accomplish in the worldly conventional zone of “occupy till I come” normalcy…and what we cannot do on our own…that creates a divinely crafted environment…spread-out over time…where we need God to intimately participate and intervene in the course of our lives.
This is what we universally see in the narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible…brilliantly transcendent above anything within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
Setting up the unique circumstances whereby we can have a personal relationship with the living God…who created the heavens and the earth…can only be crafted by God.
We cannot…on our own…craft or contrive a similar quality of life-altering, beneficially inspiring dependence upon God like we see in the life-scripts of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Hannah, Ruth, David, Esther and Mordecai, Jeremiah, Elijah, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Peter, James, John, or Paul…to name only a few from the Bible.
This component of the gap between what we can do in the realm of worldly conventional normalcy…and what we cannot accomplish without divine help from God…such as produce a son of promise Isaac…or become governor of Egypt as a Hebrew…or deliver the Israelites from Egypt via the ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea…all the way through the Bible up to the calling of Paul to become a missionary evangelist for the faith he was previously seeking to destroy…all of these things are totally and completely outside of humanistic imagination and invention.
This gap…beautifully and succinctly described in Hebrews 11:1…that is common to every biblical narrative story of faith…can only occur within a context that is itself divine…that is above our capacityto imagine, invent, or contrive within the narrowly restrictive realm of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
Now is the time in human history to recognize that this is quite remarkable.
Now that modern science understands the unique role of information in the complex, functionally integrated, and coherent systems we find in the microscopic molecule DNA, in the Big Bang creation of the universe, in the Anthropic Principle that identifies the fine-tuned mathematical constants in the equations of physics and chemistry that allows for complex life like ourselves to exist, and in the twenty-plus conditions in our solar system that makes life on earth possible…it is also now time for a more straightforward, broader, and insightful appraisal of human nature.
Human beings were created with an incredibly sophisticated capacity for moral reasoning and judgment…with the unimaginably privileged capacity to enter into a relationship with the God who created our universe and this amazing earth we inhabit.
The central issue under consideration in this current world environment…is that we were created to be in a personal relationship with God…which is the core of the Christian gospel salvation message…of the good news that Jesus Christ is alive and risen from the dead…and that this God-created capacity enables people to receive Jesus Christ into our lives…by grace through faith…and to step-up into God-crafted journeys of faith as entirely new people in Christ…filled with purpose and meaning beyond our wildest imagination.
Going our own way apart from God is going the wrong way.
No topic could be more important in the fields of Christian apologetics and Christian discipleship today…and in the world at-large.
One of the beautiful discoveries of our modern era…is that the narrative stories of faith in the Bible were not written by us.
They were recorded by human writers…but the storylines were not written through human literary imagination.
The contrasting dichotomies of the two worldviews of autonomous self-sovereignty…and the cross-of-Christ centered narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible…could not both be the products of human imaginative fiction-writing…could not both conceptually originate out of the atheistic worldview of naturalistic materialism.
The amazing separation…the two-edged sword that divides truth from error from the Christian perspective…thousands of years old now but coming into clear focus in these upcoming last days (Dan. 12:10)…is that we either by free-will choice enter into our God-composed adventure of faith life-script as patterned for us in the biblical narrative stories of faith…designed to create a context for a personal relationship with God…while achieving something monumental and positive for mankind…come what may…or we try to convince ourselves or God into doing things our way…to talk ourselves or God into doing things according to our plans.
Anyone who has ever themselves been engaged in a God-composed journey of faith life-script…a genuine calling of God…knows the difference between these two options…and has faced the choice of continuing on…in our walk of faith following Jesus Christ…in the narrow way that He has laid-out for us…or to take the opposite course instead…of attempting to talk God into doing things our way (Gen. 17:17-18; Jn. 3:30; Gal. 2:20).
The complexity, sophistication, and intellectual maturity of this two-worldview dichotomy…far surpass any humanistic or naturalistic explanation.
From A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity
The Cross in the Christian Life 