We may not have thought much about fellowship before, but since it was taken away from us by the covid threats, it has been much more precious. We now realise what we have been missing all these weeks that we have been shut away from each other. In fact, fellowship is one of the ways that we are made in God’s image! Have you ever stopped to think how much God values fellowship with His people? In fact, that is why He made man, to have fellowship with Him!
Look at what we are told about the first man and how God would come to earth to walk with him in the cool of each day, after man’s work was done. Then how the animals were brought to Adam to name, but they didn’t give him the fellowship he yearned for, so God made a woman to help and complement him….this is true fellowship. But it was not the ultimate fellowship….that was completed when man (and woman ) could have fellowship; with their Maker. This was a complete fellowship such as nothing else could give.
Let’s read the account given in the Bible in Genesis, chapters 2-3…. There was one criteria to this….for this fellowship to remain unbroken, there must be absolute obedience to what God said. God gave them both just one rule… “you can eat of any of the fruit in the garden,” He said, “But do NOT touch the fruit of the tree in the centre, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil!”
Surely one rule would be easy enough to keep! It was, until the tempter came along, determined to break this fellowship between God and man. We all know the story of how Eve was tempted and how she gave in and then caused Adam to disobey God’s rule as well…they both ate the forbidden fruit! They knew immediately that their fellowship with God was gone!. First, they tried to cover their nakedness which was a dismal failure, and then they tried to hide when God came to have fellowship with them that evening. They didn’t want to see Him!
But God has a way of catching up with us. He knew what Adam and Eve had done….he knows all that WE do too! There was only one way to rectify their disobedience, and that was for the blood of an animal to be shed, and its skin taken to make a permanent covering for Adam and Eve. Then once more they could face God, but they had to take the consequences of their disobedience in taking away the fellowship that they had become familiar with, and had taken for granted. For Adam, it was having to work hard to grow his food; for Eve it was having to bear children in pain, and to look to her husband for protection. For them both, there was only one way to restore that precious fellowship that they had known with God before, and that was through the death of a lamb as a sacrifice. They clearly understood this and told their sons about it when they became old enough to understand. We read about this in Genesis chapter four, verses 1-6.
You might ask how we can have this same fellowship with God today. We don’t have animal sacrifices today, because God sent His only Son, Jesus Christ, to live a sinless life and yet wicked men took Him and killed Him with a vicious death. His sinless death covers ALL our sins and disobediences if we will only believe it for ourselves….. “The blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses me from ALL sin” we read in 1 John 1:7. So because of this, we can each experience true fellowship with God as He intended it to be!
