C: The context of Fasting – Struggle, Distractions and Yearning:

C: The context of Fasting – Struggle, Distractions and Yearning:

The Gospel of Genesis!

Think of Genesis 1-2 as the original blueprint design for mankind and his relationship with God. They would walk, talk, listen to each other.

In this context, don't read Genesis primarily as a Science text book! Instead, simply ask what message is God giving us about our friendship with Him.

The message is that God created man(kind) as His delegated ruler over creation, and then enjoyed a close relationship with him.

His custom was to walk with man in the perfect Garden of Eden. There was nothing between God and man.

Then mankind/humanity was tempted to declare independence, to become like God, to stop being delegated ruler, and try to take the top spot.

At once, Sin changed the relationship. It damaged, separated, and in some way broke the connection between God and us, and His Creation.


This is what 'Sin' is: Not just the list of wrong things we do because 'Nobody's Perfect'; it's actually the state we're in separated from God, and the wrong things we do are the symptoms of our disconnect from a Holy God, the inevitable results of the state we're in, cut off from the Perfect Holy God.

That's why now in our normal state, us humans find even the idea of God hard to fathom, let alone relating to Him, knowing Him.

From our perspective, in our sinbound state of independence and separation He seems strange, hard to reach, distant.

We are stuck in this separated state, blocked out from God. We can't rescue ourselves, God had to come to rescue us.

For this to work, we had to be perfectly represented. That's why God took on human flesh, and Jesus was born, grew up, and lived as 100% God, and 100% man – the strangest but most vital equation in history!

So, when Jesus died on the cross, he voluntarily took on Himself the consequences of the state we're in. This includes death, both as both an inescapable inevitable consequence of our damaged imperfect state, AND as the punishment for our sin. He dealt with them so completely that God raised Him back to life, with even death – the final unavoidable result of sin – defeated.

Now, when you accept Jesus' unfair swap - He took our death, we take the gift of His Life,

Eternal Life, Life unseparated from God,
reconnected to God as originally intended,
Life that Jesus offers us as a result of the cross,
Eternal Life that wipes out death from our ultimate existence,

But Life that starts now
and which Jesus defines NOT just in terms of the absence of death,
but the restart of knowing God now,

John 17:3:
'Eternal life is to know you, the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ, the one you sent'......

...... now, if you accept Jesus' offer at the cross,
you live in an in between state,
back in relationship with God,
alive Eternally,
but still struggling with human sin(s) on a day to day basis,

and living in a damaged world,
longing and waiting for final transformation
into our (and creation's) ultimate perfected state.

Jesus' offer to you if you haven't done so yet, is that you can have sin (the state, separation) taken away,
relationship with Him restarted,
and an ultimate place in Eternity.


If you have accepted that offer,
you are now in that in between struggle.


That is why we can know and hear God,
but it can be a battle,
we do get distracted, we make mistakes,
and we can often find it hard to hear God.

Jesus died to remove the barriers,
but we still live in the struggle, the yearning,
the groaning at sin,
and the hopeful anticipation of Eternal unseparated perfect total redemption.

For now, we need to be disciplined to cut out the remnants of what keeps us from God, and focus on Him.

Fasting is best seen in this context,

as a method to acknowledge, control and remove some of the distractions we are struggling with,

and to identify and eliminate our wrong priorities in life,
and to “Hunger after God.” (John Piper)