I was mesmerized as I stood staring at Michelangelo’s AD 1512 masterpiece, The Creation of Adam that was on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The artist depicts God reaching out of heaven and touching the outstretched hand of a perfect man who was made in God’s image. This painting is so famous you can probably picture it in your mind. I can easily imagine the Lord saying “I bless you” to this flawless specimen of a human being.

Several years after I saw The Creation of Adam, I visited the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and I saw John-François Millet’s painting Man with a Hoe. This painting, first displayed in Paris in 1863, depicts a large, dirty, brutish man bent over a hoe attempting to turn rocky, thistle-ridden soil into a productive field. He is clearly exhausted by his backbreaking labor. Millet was a religious fatalist who believed that people were tragically condemned to bear a heavy burden. As I looked at Millet’s weary man, my mind flashed back to Michelangelo’s Adam. I thought, Is this what Adam looked like after the Fall? And my heart broke. I believed that God could bless the Adam of Eden, but could He bless the Adam in the wilderness who was broken by the Fall?

The first thing God said to the first human beings was, “Bless you.” But then they sneezed. God gave Adam and Eve free will. They were given a choice as to whether they would live in God’s full blessing or go their own way. They chose their own way, and therefore chose a curse rather than a blessing. The plague of sin was introduced to the human race, and the whole world fell sick. Adam went from the wonder of meeting God every day and working and caring for the Garden of Eden and its limitless bounty to being a profusely sweating, exhausted man who was trying to break up rocky soil in a barren wilderness. Michelangelo’s glorious Adam became Millet’s Man with a Hoe. Can God bless this guy?

That burdened guy is us. Making mistakes. Suffering pain. Torn by broken relationships. Fighting burnout. Slammed by world events. Far too often lonely, anxious or sad. Can God bless troubled us as we attempt to navigate the terrain of a damaged world? The answer quite simply is yes. He wants to. He can. And if we let Him, He will.

Before humanity fell sick, God had prepared the cure. He stood in the Garden and looked at the man and woman, newly cursed with an awareness of evil, and said, “I’ll be back.” He told them that a man would come from the woman who would reverse the curse and restore the blessing. And history began moving forward, eagerly waiting for that man to appear.

And at the perfect moment in the fullness of time, Jesus came and did what needed to be done to redeem humanity—to win back what had been lost—and to reconcile us to God and His blessing. If we believe in Jesus and are in relationship with Him, we can live and grow in that blessing despite the brokenness in us and around us. In the letter to the Romans in the New Testament, Paul said:

For if, by the trespass of the one man [Adam], death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

To live in the blessing God wanted for us in the beginning does not mean that life is perfect. We are still broken people in a broken world. The more we know Jesus and grow to be like Him, however, the more we live like the Adam who was blessed, and the less we live like the Adam who was cursed. The more we submit to God’s rule in our lives, the more we reign in life through Jesus Christ. We will not experience the totality of this reality until the age to come, but we can taste it now.

Because of Jesus, the wounded God-image in us is being healed. Because of Jesus, the world around us—the world we influence—looks more like Eden and less like wilderness. We should live with an expectation that everything in our life is becoming more and more the way God wanted it to be in the beginning and wants it to be now.

Check this out: God blessed Adam and Eve, and then they got sick. Did God change His mind about what He wanted? Of course not. Move forward. God started over with Noah and his family. Guess what God does? “Then God blessed Noah and his sons.” Move forward. God makes a covenant with Abraham through whom Jesus would come to redeem the world. Guess what He says to Abraham?

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

Then we are told that at the end of his life, “Abraham was now very old, and the Lord had blessed him in every way.” Move forward. Abraham had a son named Isaac. Guess what happened? “The Lord blessed him.” Move forward. Isaac had a son named Jacob who was so insistent to continue the line of blessing that he had an encounter with God and prayed for God’s blessing. And guess what happened next? The Lord “blessed him there.”

Move forward thousands of years. Move forward to now. Move forward to you. What do you think God wants to do to you? You may feel broken, burdened and perhaps even exhausted as you live in a world that far too often seems to be plagued. But God wants to bless you. And He wants you to become more like that first man or woman in the place of paradise in the beginning before the world fell sick. And because of Jesus you can.

Excerpted from The Lord Bless You: A 28-Day Journey to Experience God’s Extravagant Blessings by Terry A. Smith. © 2023 by Terry A. Smith. Published by Chosen Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group. Used by permission.