“Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” Genesis 2:7

If we go back, way back to the story of human beginnings, we find information that can breathe new life into our faith today. In the formation of the first human we see a plan for humanity that is still the plan for us today. We find an implied covenant between our God and Adam that reveals our purpose for being. it also reveals the life you and I can have here and now.

Our God “breathed into (Adam’s) nostrils the breath of life….” Whether symbolic or literal, we find our God injecting into the man he had formed the “breath of life.” The Hebrew for “breath” is also that for spirit – He breathed into Adam the spirit of life. It is this that made him a living being, a soul.

It is this that separates humanity from all other life forms; we have a soul connected to a spirit. That spirit enables us to experience union and communion with our God. And for a brief time, Adam and Eve experienced that union and communion. They shared in the life of God, the work of God, the joy of God.

It is hard to image a more robust, fulfilling, meaningful, and joyful experience than to share in the divine life of the triune God. It is this divine life of God in us that is the original covenant between our God and ourselves. He created us to live not by our own lives but by His life in us.

Of course, Adam rebelled. That divine life is the life that “died” in the first humans that day, and the eternity of their living was removed as well. Spiritual death was their experience, and following at some point, physical death, too.

In Hosea 6:7, our God describes the treachery of their covenant-breaking choice: “But at Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me.” Yes, before any covenant was spoken, the master covenant between our God and humans was already in place. That covenant allowed humans to live by the very life of God in them; they did not need to live by their own abilities and resources and in fact they were not equipped to do so.

The broken covenant led to power and majesty of sharing in the divine life and nature. Now that deal was broken. The die was cast for humanity. We would all live without the primary, divine operating system that would make life work. Originally designed to live life completed by the life of God Himself, humanity was now doomed to live without it.

Human life is now without hope because our divine operating system, the indwelling life of our God, is not present in us. We are not equipped to live successfully without that life in us. History has proven that critical lack repeatedly. Hopelessness is now the lot of all humanity without some kind of divine intervention.

But God….

Image via Doug Lewis, canoe partner on a trip through the Missouri River Breaks (pictured).