day 2

 Do you ever have a random thought and wonder why you have never thought this thing before?  I had one of those yesterday.  About Adam.

Adam and Eve were the only people who have ever existed who were not babies !.  They were formed as adults.  And because death did not exist and there was no decay they were made to be eternal creatures - presumably eternally the age they were when they were made.   I had never really stopped to think about this before.   I knew that ageing and decay and death were a result of the fall, but I'd never really considered that for the length of time between being formed and eating the fruit Adam and Eve didnt get any older.  We dont know how long that was.  It could have been weeks, but it might have been decades or a hundred years.  In that time they didnt gain wrinkles or go grey or start to have aches and pains.  They were eternally youthful.  When Jesus came he was an embryo and a baby, an infant and a child and a teenager.   Adam was only ever a man.   I was thinking that this had to be the case because there would have been  nobody to nurture and care for Adam if he had been created a  baby.  But of course that's not true because God was there.   Had God wanted to I'm sure He could have formed a baby out of the mud of the ground and breathed life into it.  He could have cared for that baby until he was fully grown and then taken Eve out of his side.  But He didnt.  He made a man.  Why?  God never does anything without a really good reason.  I wonder whether Adam had the  body and brain of a 33 year old when he was formed.

Having not been babies or children themselves, how did Adam and Eve cope with being parents?  They had probably witnessed the birth of animals and seen adult animals caring for their young.  But thats a whole different ballgame from being the very first woman on earth to be pregnant, carry a baby to term and deliver it.   The whole being born thing really is incredibly mysterious when you think about it.   Among all the created beings on earth we, as a species, have the most complicated and dangerous and unlikely way of reproducing.  Babies heads are way too big for easy births.  Our children are dependent on us for so long that they are incredibly vulnerable to attack or disease .  It seems to me that God could have chosen a different way for us to arrive into our families.  But other than Adam and Eve, He didnt.  

Another thing to consider is that Adam was 130 when he had his son Seth . So we presume he might have been over 100 when he had Cain and Abel and Eve must have been equally ancient.  In those first days of people inhabiting the earth the Bible tells us many of them lived to be 7, 8 or even 9 hundred years old.  So maybe having babies at age 130 was like us having them at 17.   It bends my brain to think about this stuff but I always fall back on the verse in 2 Peter 3:8 

With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

God clearly intended the pure unfallen Adam and Eve to reproduce. Had they not sinned they would have been the parents of a world of eternal beings. Presumably their children would have grown until adulthood and then remained at the peak of physical and mental development for ever after. Living in sinless perfection in the garden with God naked and unashamed.  The fall ruined it all and brought pain to childbirth, sickness and disease, ageing and infirmity and ultimately decay and death.   We now have to live in the reality of this. And its not always easy.   I personally find it comforting to remember that God's original plan for us all was not the one we are currently experiencing.  He destroyed the power of death and one day we will all live in glory with bodies so different from the ones we currently inhabit.  In the meantime we have to negotiate all the joys and woes of ageing. 

Im probably going to approach this quite randomly, just posting what occurs to me or what has caught my attention as we go along. And I might post at random times rather than first thing - apologies to Chris who likes to read over breakfast 😊