Experience Intimacy with GodSample

God Created Man to Be in Relationship with Him

God is a God of relationships. God Himself is also in relationship: God, Son, and Spirit - the Trinity. As God Himself is in relationship, He also created us for relationship. In Genesis 1:26, we read that God says: “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.” When God created man, He did this with the intention to be in relationship. He wants an intimate relationship, a relationship in which you really ‘know’ each other.

In the beginning, that relationship existed without any interference between God and man. God was in Adam and Adam was in God. Adam was created in God’s image and God breathed the breath of life into him (Genesis 2:7). God’s Spirit was in Adam. They walked together and were intimately connected to each other. That is how it was ‘intended’ from the beginning of creation.

Adam and Eve, however, rebelled against God. Satan asked them, “Has God indeed said, you shall not eat of the tree in the middle of the garden? [the tree of good and evil] Do you know why? Because God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.” Adam and Eve believed the cunning words of Satan.

Satan suggested in Genesis 3 that God didn’t have their best intentions at heart, that God didn’t want them to have the very best there is, and that He kept something from them.

Adam and Eve didn’t realize that they were already like God and that they had everything they needed in life. They were deceived and did precisely the thing that God didn’t want for them. They ate of the fruit and immediately died.

Everybody knows that Adam and Eve became old, so they didn’t die physically. No, they died ‘spiritually’. The spirit in them was ‘dead’ because of sin. With that, their intimacy, their relationship with God also died.

God never wanted that. But God is holy and can’t go together with sin.

So, God couldn’t be ‘in’ man again because the perfect spirit—according to His likeness—in man had died. But still He remained with man, because God is also love. If you read your Bible, you see that God uses multiple ways to be close to mankind and to eventually come and live in man again. You will read more about that later in this plan.