I’m going to oversimplify so that we can see the big picture.
Humans were intended to be family for God. Granted, that was in the context of His much larger family, which included a lot of other kinds of beings we cannot comprehend, but mankind was meant to be family on some level.
The Fall represents rejecting family privileges by virtue of rejecting family obedience. This is why we say that Creation itself is feudal; God is the Head of Household and His household cannot operate without obedience.
At this point, we have to remind ourselves that “obedience” in the Western mind is a huge lie. All the pagan roots feeding into our imagery of obedience have obscured the original concept: Loyalty is not a duty and discipline. It arises first from love; otherwise, it has no power to bring obedience. It is the natural response of children to a loving Father, and it builds a trust and commitment that cannot be put into words.
So the way back from the Fall isn’t rule-bound; it’s all about that loving fellowship with the Father. This is so fundamental to how things work that the ancients seldom bothered to mention it directly. There was no other way to make sense of reality than to understand that feudal loyalty as love. And it’s now hard to put into words just how radically different this was from the mental track Western minds follow. For us, actual love is optional, whereas for the ANE, it was the essence.
This is why Westerners balk at the term “Biblical Law” as the wider image of God’s compassion and call to His wayward children. The framework of such Law is not the thing itself, but the rather obvious earmarks of what love looks like when it is returned to the Father. Who is going to confine to mere words the power of loving surrender, which is what “faith” means?
Love is not merely the flaming passion we notice in our shallow self-perspective. Love is a fundamental commitment to another’s welfare, which brings an ebb and flow of passion, but is not confined to the feelings themselves. Genuine love teaches us to widen our compassion to the community as a whole, and it is those within covenant family obedience who both generate and absorb that sacrificial love sourced in God. It restores all things to proper order.
So that Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden is not about “Law” as the Western mind envisions such a thing; that Sword is the commitment to God against our own fallen flesh. The flesh is our enemy within, a bottomless pit of appetite that consumes everything within reach. Sacrificial love is how we restore the broken Covenant of Creation. It is how we bring ourselves back into that loving fellowship and communion for which we were designed. Even at our worst, the Father desperately longs for us to return to His embrace.
Our fallen flesh is the essence of this world. This business of rejecting the world is the essential nature of redemption. We must shed the fleshly nature as much as possible. The whole fabric of this world is woven from a rejection of God’s loving and fatherly restrictions that protect His children. This world is you and I languishing outside of Eden. Our arrogant fleshly minds can think of a million ways we ought to be restored to Eden without the Flaming Sword, but flesh cannot by itself bow the knee to God and accept His fatherhood over us. It must be compelled by some higher faculty within the soul.
The heart must lead, or there can be no restoration.
