(1) Energy: the word "enthusiasm" comes from the Latin roots "en"/ inside + "theos" (God)----literally God within. Genesis 2:7 says it this way: The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.
We live, or have energy, literally by the breath / (Hebrew-ruah) of God within us---and His breath/ ruah is not static, but moving. Other translations of ruah are "breeze, wind, zepher." When we are connected to the living God, we have LIFE, energy, breath. His breath, energy, life in us integrates our bodies, minds, emotions, and spirits so that we do not pull apart from the center, but work as a whole unit, as He designed us to work.
When sin/ disobedience enters the picture, as Genesis 2:17 tells us, when you eat of it, you will surely die, disintegration begins pulling us apart from our center.
The old King James translation "you will surely die" is an attempt to render into English what the Hebrew actually says: on the day you eat of it, dying, you will die. Because our translation into English is faulty, people for centuries have been trying to puzzle out what God meant---or if He lied----when He said, "on the day you eat of it, you will....die." What He said was "dying, you will die." Now it begins to make some sense.
When we fail to receive within ourselves the breath, energy, spirit of God, we begin to disintegrate and lose our energy---we begin to die by degrees. Genesis portrays sin as eating---taking some poison into our bodies so that we begin to disintegrate, not all at once, but little by little---passing on our disintegration to the next generation, where it disintegrates even more, and so on to the next generation. Finally, we get to Genesis 4, where Lamach says to his wives:
I will kill (or have killed) a man for wounding me,
a young man for injuring me.
If Cain is avenged seven times,
then Lamech seventy-seven times.
Genesis pictures sin as pulling apart from the center---lack of communion, harmony, with God, with our fellow man, and with nature. Lack of harmony in the first generation becomes hatred and murder in the second. Nature refuses its yield altogether by the time of Cain; he has to build a city because the ground is hardened against him, and "everyone who sees me will want to kill me."
Into this universe of hatred, misunderstanding, lack of harmony, God sends one man---Abraham--who will begin to re-integrate and bless and restore fruitfulness to the earth. By obedience, Abraham continued to walk with God to restore the earth and to unite all peoples.
It starts with one person, and then with a family, and then with a tribe, and then with a nation---under God---finally extending to the whole world. Sin is disintegration within ourselves, within the world. It takes a man/woman connected to the Spirit of God to re-integrate and unite all things, restoring them to their original harmony with God and with one another.
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