The second chapter of Genesis ends with a sentence that we probably wouldn’t end a chapter with today if we were writing a book: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25). The man and the woman stood naked before each other, and there was no shame or fear of being hurt by the other.
In other words, they could be naked before each other on a physical, mental, and spiritual level, presenting themselves as they really are, and not be afraid of being belittled, wounded, used, marginalized, despised, abused, and so on (the list is long). The rest of the chapter further shows that at the beginning of human history, life was indeed meaningful, deep, unclouded, positively complex, and diverse.
Man and woman enjoyed freedom. They could eat from all the trees in the garden in which the Creator had placed them. Evil was confined to only one tree. Evil had not yet spread everywhere in the world, as it has now, like a rapidly spreading virus that wreaks havoc at every turn.
Created for True Life With the Creator
God created man and woman as a counterpart and interlocutor. Man and woman met their Creator and conversed with Him face-to-face (cf. Gen. 3:8). When God created man and woman, He blessed them and spoke to them. He communicated with them. And God and humans talking together implies that man and woman were designed for being together with God and for communicating with Him. One could say that communication between the Creator and them is the key to life. God presents man and woman with a deeply meaningful purpose for living, wherein true life and growth are possible and can flourish.
Focusing further on the creation of human beings, Genesis 2 highlights that God took dust into His hand, formed man from the dust, shared His breath of life with him, and placed him in a garden that man and woman were invited to cultivate and preserve—a garden in which human freedom, dignity, and togetherness, as well as the principles that guarantee them, were cultivated and preserved. God thus invited man and woman to a great project based on mutual trust, where genuine and fulfilling life was the norm.
Man and woman could experience their full humanity. Life was profound and fulfilling. There was no gnawing sense of emptiness within them. There was no loneliness, no alienation, no indifference. There was no powerlessness in the face of evil that paralyzed and drove them to despair. They were naked, authentic, true to themselves and to their Creator, without any sense or cause of shame.
Broken Trust and Profound Loss
It did not stay that way, however. As Scripture explains, the man and the woman broke the Creator’s trust by choosing to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree from which God told them not to partake. They took for themselves the fruit that God had purposely withheld from them in love. The result? Evil spread at lightning speed into the human family, becoming the new and pervasive reality. Even worse, evil spread into the human heart. Life became disturbingly ambivalent. Good and evil intermingled, with many seemingly gray areas.
Man and woman lost what was most valuable to them. They lost the garden, the reality for which God had created them, in which God had placed them. Their new world was full of thistles and thorns, among which they worked by the sweat of their brow. Pain penetrated their world. All the nuances of pain—physical, emotional, and so on—became the new normal.
The relationship between man and woman became difficult. Invisible walls separated them. They accused one another rather than take responsibility for themselves and their actions. The balance of power between them shifted. One dominated the other. There was no longer a togetherness between them. Instead, there was a deep rift between them, fostering feelings of utter loneliness previously unknown to them.
Man and woman were now naked in a different way. Loneliness and fear crept into their hearts. And this time they were afraid that the other person would recognize their nakedness and take advantage of it. Man and woman made themselves coverings to hide their shame, their inner selves, their weaknesses, the ambivalence reigning in their inner worlds.
They were vulnerable indeed. They had lost the fullness of their freedom because evil, the unwanted and yet chosen intruder, had enslaved them and robbed them of their integrity. The human strategies they devised to protect themselves, to search for meaning in a now-broken world, or to deal with their deep sense of emptiness, would also enslave them.
The existential emptiness we struggle with—the deep void within us that constantly demands fulfillment yet remains unsatisfied by anything in this world—has a source outside God’s original intention for us.
The Greatest Loss
But perhaps the greatest loss of all was that they no longer could see their Creator face-to-face. The communication between them and the Creator was no longer as it had been before. Something fundamental was missing, something for which they were designed. Something in man and woman that had allowed them to live deeply fulfilled lives was now broken and lost.
If we reflect on our personal story from the perspective of the Bible, and consider the Creator who Himself reveals our human story, we come to realize that the beginning of our human story was very different than we experience it today. Even if our lives remain too complex for us to fully fathom and explain, the existential emptiness we struggle with—the deep void within us that constantly demands fulfillment yet remains unsatisfied by anything in this world—has a source outside God’s original intention for us. This emptiness stems from the losses we suffered as humans when we chose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thus opted for the intrusion of evil into our reality.
Genesis 3 and the rest of the Bible recount the “natural” consequences of this fatal decision. We cope with these consequences every day of our existence, having to deal with them day by day, wittingly or unwittingly. The loss of the garden, of our freedom, of our integrity, of real togetherness, and of the relationships for which God intended us, creates an existential void in us that desperately needs to be filled. This void drives us, and everyone devises ways (wise or unwise) to fill this gnawing existential emptiness, to keep it at bay so that it doesn’t completely overwhelm us or make us feel its full horror.
Nevertheless, everyone feels it now and then, when the hustle and bustle that constantly keeps us on our toes stops, and it becomes quiet. It faces us when the busyness of modern life subsides, when there is nothing left to distract us from the feeling of inner emptiness and loneliness.1
Thirsting for the One Who Alone Can Satisfy
And often we ourselves don’t understand what we really want, what could adequately fill this existential void. As the Jewish philosopher Abraham J. Heschel writes about this existential emptiness, this loneliness that we feel:
“The thirst for companionship, which drives us so often into error and adventure, indicates the intense loneliness from which we suffer. We are alone even with our friends. The smattering of understanding which a human being has to offer is not enough to satisfy our need of sympathy. Human eyes can see the foam, but not the seething at the bottom. In the hour of greatest agony we are alone. It is such a sense of solitude which prompts the heart to seek the companionship of God. He alone can know the motives of our actions; He alone can be truly trusted. Prayer is confidence, unbosoming oneself to God. For man is incapable of being alone. His incurable, inconsolable loneliness forces him to look for things yet unattained, for people yet unknown. He often runs after a sop, but soon retires discontented from all false or feeble companionship. Prayer may follow such retirement.”2
The Bible speaks of a Creator God who does not leave us alone with this challenge of existential emptiness. He alone can be fully trusted to provide the way for us to cope with feelings of emptiness.
First, despite our brokenness, He does not leave us alone. He continues to communicate with us because we were created for communicating with Him, for being together with Him. He perfectly understands our personal stories and knows exactly what we are missing. He knows what existential emptiness is. And He has paved the way for human beings to find the way back to true life even in the midst of a broken and ambivalent world.
From God’s perspective, every human being is destined to be restored to their initial integrity, to their true human dignity and freedom. Every human being is destined to become like a small Garden of Eden, “like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail” because the Creator God continually guides us through the desert of a broken world, satisfying our “soul in drought” (Isa. 58:11).
This Creator God has lovingly reigned over and accompanied human beings throughout human history, unobtrusively caring, loving, and seeing. In relationship with Him, every human being can reach the maturity that allows them to deal with feelings of existential emptiness even as we await the final and full restoration of what was lost in Eden.
As the saying goes (often attributed to French philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal): “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man.” It’s an innate need of the human heart, a need that only God can satisfy.
1 It is not for nothing that we speak today of the “distraction or attention economy.”
2 Abraham J. Heschel, Man’s Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Aurora Press, original edition 1954, reprinted 1998), pp. 17, 18.
