As soon as the word came to God’s Throne that Adam and Eve had fallen to the Tempter’s lies God the Savior set off for the Garden. It was God who went looking for His fallen creatures. It is God who today seeks and saves those who are lost. It is God’s will that all should come to the truth of His salvation, but so many do not. When God came seeking, Adam and Eve ran and hid. In fact, the most glaring reality of our lostness and our fallen condition is the way we run and hide from God. That is one of the reasons many do not come to where God’s Word is taught. When God’s Word is taught God is near. When God is near, sinful and fallen mankind runs and hides. People even to this day still do not seek after God.
One of the most vivid results of the Fall is the way sin captures and ruins all of us who are Adam’s children. Just a few of the more notable sinners in the world who have come to Jesus serve as powerful examples of this truth.
SAINT AUGUSTINE
One day in August 386, a professor of rhetoric named Aurelius Augustine sat despondently in his garden. Although the son of a Christian mother, he had abandoned his mother’s faith in favor of the Persian religion known as Manichaeism. He also took a mistress, with whom he lived for thirteen years. Abandoning Manichaeism as unsatisfactory, he continued a futile search for truth. Through the preaching of the church Father Ambrose, he became intellectually convinced of the truth of Christianity. Yet he held back, “prevented from accepting the faith by weakness in dealing with sexual temptation” (R. S. Pine-Coffin, “Introduction,” to Saint Augustine: Confessions [New York: Penguin, 1978], 11). Now, in the midst of his turmoil, he heard a child’s voice singing in Latin (“take and read”). In his Confessions, he describes what happened next:
I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall. . . . So I hurried back to the place where [his friend] Alypius was sitting, for when I stood up to move away I had put down the book containing Paul’s Epistles. I seized it and opened it, and in silence, I read the first passage on which my eyes fell:
Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites [Rom. 13:13–14].
I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled. (Confessions VIII, 12, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin [New York: Penguin, 1978])
Delivered from a life of sin and confusion, Augustine went on to become the greatest theologian the church had known since the apostle Paul
CPL-12 – Running from God (991219AM)
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