Fellowship in Eden

It is one of the most wonderful verses in Genesis 2, if not in the whole Bible. We are told in verse 16 that the Lord came right up to Adam and said to him, 'Feel free to take from the Garden that I have made. Help yourself to all the fruit hanging from the branches.' Here is a God who isn't silent; our Creator is a personal God who speaks very kindly and yet firmly to Adam; 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die' (v1 7). That wasn't one solitary curt conversation as the Lord perforated his life and then disappeared. We are told in the next chapter that 'the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day' (v8). They heard the sound of his walking. Isn't that awesome? It is not that they saw his glory, but that he appeared in some physical way - not as a spook -and that meant Adam and Eve could hear him treading on a branch and breaking it, pushing through bushes and leaves approaching them. This is the first of the theophanies of God in the Old Testament, those preparations for the incarnation. The Son of God was longing to come to the earth and do his saving work and so there were times when he took on the appearance of human flesh and drew near to such men as Abraham, Joshua, Samson's parents, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Adam and Eve.

Here in the Garden of Eden the Lord obviously did this every day because when our first parents don't turn up for their appointment with him he inquires aloud, Where are you? (Genesis 3:9). So each day man the creature met with God the Creator. The servant met with his Master, and what did they talk about? What would you say to God? 'Why...?' Aren't there a hundred questions you have for God? ' Abba Father, why is this like'this?' And then if you were Adam you'd also need to ask him how. Adam hadn't had a family, a father, a teacher or a tradition to teach him anything. He'd never observed another person doing a single thing and so he was utterly dependent on his wonderful Lord. He'd ask him about the duties and tasks of each day. 'Father you have told me to fill the earth and subdue and rule over all the creatures, and so how do I work the Garden and take care of it? (v15). You are a wonderful Gardener, so teach me.'

So each day God would speak to man and he'd ask Adam, 'So, how has it been today?' The Lord would enquire, 'Where have you been working? What have you been doing?' You remember the last Adam, the Son of God, risen from the dead, meeting with the disciples as they are fishing, and he says to them, Friends, haven't you any fish? (John 21 :5). He makes suggestions to them as to where they should throw their nets; then he tells them to bring him some of the fish which they've just caught. That would be the kind of conversation that Adam and Eve had with the Lord day by day, the things you talk about with your best friend. In the cool of the day God would come and he'd say, 'Friends, what sort of success have you had today working in the garden?'

Adam might tell him of a lamb or a calf that had been born, of fish that he had seen jumping up the falls, or that he was thinking of looking for gemstones, or that he thought he has spotted a seam of gold. 'I think I'll go across to Havilah tomorrow and pan for gold. I might find some aromatic resin there. I know that Eve will like some onyx stones.' Did he tell God that he had gone swimming in a pool in one of the rivers, or that he and Eve had prepared a delicious new dish? God would smile upon him and would bless his labours. Or God might say to him earnestly, 'Have you seen your enemy about? The old serpent, are you watching out for him? Don't fall into temptation,' he would urge Adam and Eve. Adam never had to say sorry for anything he said, or did, or failed to do, and so Adam constantly lived coram Deo, before the face of his God, and he never had to confess any sins to God. Sinning was utterly alien to his nature as made in God's image. Daily he could sing his Father's praise:

'This is my Father's world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world: I rest me in the thought
Of rooks and trees, of skies and seas; His hands the wonders wrought.

'This is my Father's world, the birds their carols raise
The morning light, the lily white, declare their Maker's praise.
This is my Father's world: He shines in all that's fair;
In rustling grass I hear him pass. He speaks to me everywhere.'

Maltbie D Babcock, 1901

as dressed in a jacket, sweater and tie. Africa is a continent of riches - the vegetable abundance is legendary - and there is the vast mineral wealth - diamonds, gold, copper, oil, uranium, cobalt, bauxite and so on. Africa is also a prey to violence (in Kenya rape is the topmost crime), corruption, disease, drought and famine. In Kenya the parliament has passed a new constitution which is not universally popular, and there were street demonstrations in Nairobi the day before we arrived. Students enthusiastically joined in the protest; one man was killed in this mini-riot. In the papers were headline articles, photographs of bleeding men, and troubled leading articles questioning whether the police use of guns was not becoming a first rather than a last resort.

During the colonial period in the history of Africa white patterns were imposed on black landscapes. Nearly half the frontiers fixed during the Victorian scramble for Africa were straight lines, cutting through some 190 culture groups. Kenya's eastern and southern borders are such lines on maps for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Later civil wars were encouraged by such artificial boundaries and spurious national identities. Initially there was a tiny educated class to sustain democracy. Fifty years ago black Africa's population of 200 million included only 8,000 people who had been to secondary school.

The dawn of African independence was joyful and expectant; today there is a more sombre mood. Kwame Nkrumah inherited one of the richest countries in Africa with a competent administration and an established parliament. By 1965 Nkrumah had reduced Ghana to a corrupt and bankrupt despotism. Elsewhere the new rulers followed suit with looting on a large scale, starving their country's hospitals, schools and roads of funds. Mobutu, the ‘Zairean Caligula’, ran the most grotesque tyranny of all, chartering Concorde for his own personal use, seizing a third of the state's revenue; other tyrannies took barbaric and bizarre forms. Idi Amin, Mandela, Mugabe, Gaddafi, Nasser, Mobutu, Obiang - you couldn't make up their stories. Since Nkrumah's days Africa has been through 186 coups, 26 wars and seven million dead. There are many areas in which it is impossible for missionaries to work.

Africa contains 70 per cent of the world's AIDS sufferers. By 2000 a fifth of South African adults were established to be HIV positive, yet Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, treated Aids as a white capitalist conspiracy. Today Africa is the world's poorest continent. Half its 880 million inhabitants live on under a dollar a day and its entire economic output is less than that of Mexico.

Western political and economic policy has not been uniformly helpful, to say the least. Western farm subsidies and tariff barriers cripple African producers, outweighing foreign aid. Tony Blair and the leaders of the richest nations in the world cannot redeem Africa. The condition of these countries is beyond the reach of foreseeable government solutions. That is frustrating to the multitudes who, having rejected the redemption of Christ, have to pin their hopes in the redemption of Caesar. African rulers and the politicians who run their nations are regarded by the citizens as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival. From the outside Africa looks hopeless, but inside Africa the continent never feels hopeless. Africans live on a mixture of stoicism, humour and hope. The influence of the Christian gospel has been immense, enabling Africans to survive calamities and thwarted expectations that would drive unbelievers to despair. In the church the people speak positively of better days ahead at all levels of national life. The non-Christian African hopes the environment will steadily become too unhealthy for vice to thrive. The Kenyan man in the street thinks, ‘This government is not what the people hoped for, but it is our government. We elected it and if it doesn't measure up we can dump it come 2007.’ The Christian is encouraged by the amount of light and salt in the nation.

There are always spurts of economic improvement throughout the vast continent; more Africans have shoes than twenty years ago; more homes have corrugated iron roofs, thatch has almost disappeared, and even the iron roofs are being steadily replaced with tiles as the tide of prosperity slowly spreads out from the cities, in spite of political failure. The number of African millionaire businessmen has increased greatly. Democratic freedoms also advance; in an increasing number of countries presidents have been forced to allow newspapers to print stories that twenty years ago would have landed their editors in jail for life. Radio stations now broadcast the views of callers that formerly would have brought swift retaliation. Almost everyone with a job has a mobile phone, so news and views spread ten times faster than before. Someone has asked whether the Rwandan genocide could have happened if there had been mobiles; they are certainly transforming commerce.

Newspaper editors have much more to target. After decades of dictatorship, in December 2002 Kenyan voters swept Mwai Kibaki to power in Kenya at the head of his N.A.R.C rainbow coalition on an anti-corruption ticket. 'Corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya,' Kibaki promised. Then the very first law Kibaki's parliament passed rewarded politicians with 172 per cent salary increase. MPs' take-home pay is now about £65,000 per annum (compared with a British MP's £57,500 gross) and the Kenyan MPs' fat package of allowances includes a £23,000 grant to buy a duty-free car, together with a monthly £535 fuel and maintenance allowance.

It seems an obscene decision when Kenyans' average annual per capita income is $200. Teachers, civil servants and police are paid a pittance. Will men of quality aspire to those professions if the pay demeans the office?

The largest slum in the world is a couple of miles from the Nairobi parliament building. The Kibera neighbourhood occupies one square mile of space where 1.2 million people live. A huge infusion of refugees have gravitated to such slums dotted around Nairobi. Hundreds of thousands of Rwanda Tutsis fled to Kenya from Hutu genocide. Sudanese non-Muslims flowed down from the northwest. Victims of revolution in faraway Congo, from nearby Zimbabwe and from distant Somalia and Ethiopia have all drifted into gatherings of refugees from those nations in the various slums. They attend the churches and sit together in groups, as do the members of distant Kenyan tribes who have come to the capital looking for work.

The city's poor residents burn whatever they can to keep warm. Wood, charcoal and even dung are the primary sources of energy in Kenya and much of Africa, providing heat for the home and cooking. Clean fuels such as natural gas and electricity are luxuries. Why do most Africans in the 21st century have to rely on dirty energy sources which encourage widespread respiratory illnesses? For the same reason that they are poor; in many countries, though not in Kenya, beneficial economic activities are prevented by their oppressive governments. A business cannot be started without a licence, and licences are available only to those with government connections. Even if it were possible to operate a business few would have the necessary capital. While their governments have been borrowing as if there were no tomorrow, most Africans cannot obtain a loan at any reasonable rate of interest.

The former British High Commissioner to Nairobi is the outspoken Sir Edward Clay. Last year he denounced the 'Mount Kenya Mafia' as gluttons who were so overfed they left the signs of their theft in their trail as clearly as if they had been sick. He said in the language of an Old Testament prophet at his most disdainful, ‘The evidence of corruption in Kenya amounts to vomit, not just on the shoes of donors but also all over the shoes of Kenyans and the feet of those who can't afford shoes.’

In February this year Clay boldly produced another set of accusations alluding to the fact that £550 million had been stolen since Kibaki's government assumed power two years ago. Kenyan ministers responded by accusing the British envoy of being a white colonialist whom nobody need listen to. Britain is a nasty former colonial power - that happens to have just increased Kenyan aid massively to £1 million a week. More aid equals more Mercedes-Benzes while the tax-paying Brits funding all of this drive around in their Vauxhalls and Rovers.

On June 8 Kenya's 2005-6 budget was read out by finance minister David Mwiraria to a cheering parliament. It declared that the government had allocated £3 million for the purchase of a fleet of new vehicles for the Office of the President. A further similar sum has been set aside for the maintenance of the existing car-pool of vehicles. Does this expenditure have anything to do with the arrival of £1 million a week in aid from the UK?

African nations have to produce their own prophet-like Edward Clays, pitiless in their resolve to make pariahs of black Africa's cruel and rotten governments. Where is the satire, where the anger, where the mockery and derision that these men deserve? That is one duty of a Christian journalist. Didn't Christ dismiss Herod as a fox and the Pharisees as a nest of vipers? Should not the law of God be declared from the pulpits to the WaBenzi as earnestly as to any other sinners? On the flight to Nairobi on July 12 one read a report in the Times of the son of the President of Equatorial Guinea, Teodorin Nguema Obiang, who had just spent nearly one million pounds on three luxury cars in a shopping spree in South Africa. Most of the citizens of Equatorial Guinea survive on less than a dollar a day. He stayed in Cape Town in the £700-a-night Mount Nelson Hotel and ran up a bill of £1300 for champagne.

The pulpits properly do not focus on such people because those men of greed are not sitting in the congregation. They are a soft target for preachers who want to display huffin'-puffin' moral outrage while avoiding exposing the sins of the very people sitting before them. Preachers need also to pray for all that are in authority, even when moral leadership is lacking in many nations. This passivity of the people before a ruling class of greedy men is suffocating the people of Africa. You ask how such men can stay in power all over the continent. The reason is that political revolution is virtually impossible in contemporary dictatorships, and the small people in Africa passively tolerate, even in some cases sneakingly admire, their leaders' greed and rascality. The cult of the Big Man is the taproot of Africa's suffering. That culture has to change, and nothing but the gospel of the God-man who displayed greatness in self-denial and in the sacrificing service of others can do it.

Evangelical Christianity has been an immeasurable force for good in this continent. It has overcome superstition with truth; into the immorality of paganism it has brought the ten commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. It has brought a message of forgiveness of sins and a reconciled God to those who did not know the Christ of the Bible. It has injected the power of the indwelling Spirit enabling ordinary men and women to live lives of self-control, modesty, love and holy living. It has established the family and brought its own censures against polygamy. It has educated, treated, fed and brought hope to a multitude of Africans. It has quietly worked against evil systems, such as apartheid and African tyranny. Humble men and women have spent heroic lives in little villages in the hills and bushes of Africa spreading a gospel of grace, education and godliness, preaching the free offer of God's mercy to all men. All the support we rich Christians in the west can channel into the support of such men, especially in bringing the best Christian books to them, must be encouraged.