Outside Reading 5--Matt Brennan

There is another quote later on in The Silence of Adam that specifically relates to how Adam’s silence during the Fall of Man applies in our lives:
“I count myself as one who believed in God. But when I am silent, I live as an atheist: I give witness to my belief that chaos is more powerful than God.”
Chaos can sometimes be considered darkness in our lives, in the sense that we are not sure how to handle these things. When we decide not to do anything when we encounter the darkness, we are forgetting about our God that is more powerful than darkness. Take for instance the story of creation in the first lines of Genesis: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.” If we were the ones looking over the dark earth, we would surely think that we were incapable of making a decision of what needs to then happen, much less we would think we were incapable of performing whatever could be decided. God did not do this. The scripture says, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that it was good.”
There are two things to mention here. (1) God did not sit on his hands anxiously wondering what he should do with this formless and void earth. No. He took action to perform what he knew would be good. (2) Emphasis should be placed on the fact that he spoke and conquered the darkness. When Adam was silent, he forgot he was made in the image of the all-powerful God, and therefore rejected Him. We also do this when we remain silent and do not speak up when we see things that are wrong—we tacitly give others permission (“witness”) to carry on with the things they do which are not glorifying God.