Adam, There Is a Glitch in Your Fig Leaf!

By Teddy Donobauer

In the well-known fairytale about the Emperors new clothes by H C Andersen the deception about the Emperor’s new clothes is subscribed to by the entire adult world. But the children see through it. The emperor was naked and did not know it. The story pinpoints the massive vanity and self delusion that we as men are capable of. It is the front page news of every daily paper, every day.

Since the dawn of time man has been hiding from God because he knows that he is naked. His attempts to hide that nakedness has created a thousand forms of “fig leaves”, but there is always a glitch that shows his real and very guilty self. As ignored and downgraded as the Bible may be, it still tells the story of man’s fall and his possible restoration. The imagery about that and templates for it are all in that library of God’s interaction with man.

That is what this book is about.
Or if you like: “When everything else has gone wrong: read the instructions.”

Teddy Donobauer has studied men and male hood and the Bible for over fifty years. He knows himself and male frailty in depth. He speaks out of his own journey through life and hopes that his quest for reality would be useful to his “brothers in arms.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Feb 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664114883

Teddy Donobauer

The author’s search for his authentic self has been going on for 74 years. Through fatherless childhood and teenage years without other role models than ‘modern man’, he has meandered through a few occupations, educations, relationships and cultural environments in search of ‘Behold a man’. Most men he has met have been no better or worse than he found himself to be. But he was never alone. An inseparable shadow has followed him. And finally it dawned on him that shadows prove that there is a light somewhere creating it. Having seen that light he has borrowed the torch which he uses here to point to the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with the grief of being a man. Born and raised in Austrian mountains and on the West Coast of Sweden, studied Theology in UK and Sweden, Bible Teacher, Professional Chef, Caregiver, Auto-worker at Volvo, teacher of Philosophy and Religion and Languages. Married and lives in South Yorkshire in the UK. A Christian male in search of Man.

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Copyright © 2021 by Teddy Donobauer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The New American Standard Version © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020

by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission. All Rights reserved.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/27/2021

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CONTENTS

By Way of Introduction

Chapter 1 God Made Man in His Image

Chapter 2 A Glitch in the Fig Leaf

Chapter 3 First Major Glitch: Males and Alcohol

Chapter 4 Circumcise!

Chapter 5 Leave first, then cleave

Chapter 6 Mother and Son

Chapter 7 I Love You

Chapter 8 A Man Is as Good as His Word

Chapter 9 The Missing Father

Chapter 10 Behold the Man

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Adam, where are you?

When the tide comes in slowly, the unwary and ignorant are often marooned on an island of sinking sand. One step in any direction, and they step into quicksand or quagmire. And there may be no rescue team on the shore when it all happens. It has happened, but when did it happen?

When did what happen? The demise of men. When did the virtual abdication from most positions of leadership in the church happen? When did the men by and large suddenly cease to be responsible fathers? When did the separation of the sexes suddenly hit the steep decline that has resulted in deeper and wider distances between the original partners? When did the process start to reduce men to contributors to sperm banks? When did the gentleman exit to the left and the rapist glide onto the scene from the right? When did the men start forming brotherhoods that see women and children as their playthings and then start to assert their right to use them whichever way they pleased?

Happen it did, and not suddenly but over time. Because, from the way things look today in our societies, the evidence is massive that something has gone monumentally wrong. The entertainment industry has picked up momentum showing forth every negative male behaviour there ever was. And making millions in the process. The gambling industry likewise preys on (mostly) men’s dreams of get-quick-rich-quick fixes, ruining millions by destroying their own lives and the lives of their wives and children. Their despair and lack of direction sees them supporting a billion-dollar booze, beer, and drug industry. The materialistic trap has been set, has sprung, and holds millions in its absolute sway. The religions of the day are sporting events where they gather by the hundreds of thousands and live their lives by proxy. Those on the field become mental and emotional substitutes for the spectators’ own lives. Screaming at them, cheering for them, and becoming lifelong fans and avid worshippers of the stars of their teams is the new religious reality. Others worship their own physical bodies and live as if they could stave off the inevitable by diet, gym workouts, and whey products.

Not a few are porn and sex addicts whose lives of imagined perfection helps them fantasize and act out all sorts of perversions and violent hatred against women. And women, children, and animals are objectified and dehumanized in the process. Lust is in; love is out.

The big pharma industry supplies ever more pills to combat ever more anxieties. The increasing health issues are clogging up the health services with more and more solitaire sufferings. Loneliness and lack of connection and no sense of belonging to anything shadows more and more people, both men and women. Success is measured in things that never satisfy. Movie and TV stars commit suicide in spite of having almost made it and almost had it all. The views that the growing generation of boys have of girls is not a healthy foreboding of how they will treat them when they have become adult males. The girls, in turn, are so bereft of control over their lives that they already, at age 14, have serious emotional problems, leading some 110,000 14-year-old girls in the United Kingdom alone to self-harm—playing with death to feel alive.

And it is all so sad. What is more, it is unnecessary. The sheer waste of human lives and human potential is mind-boggling and spells national costs to society way beyond all calculation. It could all be very much different if humankind had not decided to become more and more like demons whilst believing themselves to become even better than God.

It is the story of Adam and his fig leaf as told by the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. And that will bring a smirk to some faces. What could those old legends have to do with our modern-day problems? Well. What does Euclidean mathematics have to do with the maths of today? When were the basic terminologies of logic and reason developed and laid down? Where are the roots of virtually all laws in most of the world? No one denies the validity of those foundations for those particular fields. Lots more could be cited. But say the Bible, and the Pavlovian reflex action is a sneer and a laugh and a grin and a finger pointing to the head. Or worse. But the last laugh will be on those who think that way. Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees wrote and sang lyrics that sum it up: I started a joke … but I didn’t see that the joke was on me.

I have been on this theme and track all my conscious and reflected life. I have myself shared in many of the sins of my kind, and I am ashamed to be one of us. I am in some ways shadowing my own journey through the pages ahead. I am not talking to you; I am talking to us—we males wanting and needing so badly what will make us men.

Years ago, I was speaking at a youth rally in a church in Sweden. My topic was about what makes a real man. One cheeky teenager raised his hand and asked me, What do you consider yourself to be? I was a tad stymied and realized that I was in danger of making a fool of myself. I thought about it for a few moments, and the answer came to me slowly: I am a male in the process of becoming a man in order to become a human. I was almost impressed by my apparent insight, but I instantly knew that it was a gift from God, not a result of my own intelligence.

After all, if that sort of insight were common knowledge, why are we in a mess?

I stick to my guns even now, forty years later. They are loaded and pointing at us.

There is an old quip that keeps coming back all through life: Either the Bible will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from the Bible. The fact that most people stay away from the Bible does not in itself demand that all they do is sin, but it is apparent that sin is all they do. And, shamefully, some do it with the Bible in hand—and even defend their actions by referring to it as an authority for wrongdoing. But that begs the question: What is sin really?

The story starts as all stories do—in the beginning. Without that beginning, you have absolutely no clue as to what the end will be. We must read the entire story to understand its component parts.

1

God Made Man in His Image

Franz Joseph Haydn wrote the colossal oratorio called The Creation. Coming to the sixth day, the soloist sings the words:

"But all the work was not complete ;

There wanted yet that wondrous being,

That, grateful, should God’s power admire,

With heart and voice His goodness praise …

And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him."

All the works of creation still lacked the essential keynote: a living representation of God Himself. Creation in itself was the joyful outpouring of creative genius, a bubbling and unstoppable stream of magnificent variations on a theme. All the universe that we know consists of about eight hundred components. Combined in an incredible array of variety, they make up all we know. The basic elements are so perfect that they can combine into everything, from single cells to pachyderms, from microscopic amoeba to thirty-tonne whales. Inorganic elements enhanced with the life principle become everything organic. Similarities are then to be expected. We share our essential physical entity with everything from bananas to gorillas, to varying degrees. This is evidence of a master craftsman using the same building blocks to create vastly diverse entities. But to the men of today, that is a lost continent. They think that this similarity proves common descent, and they are increasingly frustrated to find that the only thing creation has in common is the continuity of everything in its own way. Hedgehogs refuse to develop steel spikes to protect themselves against car tires, red and fallow deer are conspicuously lacking in airbags, and gnus still feed the crocodiles along the migration routes in Africa, refusing to learn to build safe bridges.

Humankind was missing. Everything else was made in its own image. The things that are, are what they are. When man gave names to all the animals, it was this essential being that was understood and that placed the things into the world of useful terms. But there was one element missing: the very image of God had no visible physical representative as yet. Contrary to all other things, this latest creation—the crown of it, so to speak—was to be not only itself, but also, in being itself, it was show forth the Creator of all things. So humankind was created in the image of God; male and female did God make them and called them Adam on the day they were created—Adam because they were formed from the same elements as ordinary, well-composed garden soil. Physically, we are merely a compound of the same elements as the earth we walk on, emanate from, and shall return to. From dust to dust, and all that. Had the inorganic elements not been brought together in the right order and the life-giving breath of God not been added, we would still be mere mounds of soil. And without God’s breath, that is again what we shall be. At least, our bodies will.

Admittedly, the physical frame can be of incredible beauty, and it is our single most idiotic strain that we can admire that beauty without giving the Creator of it a second thought. The idea that God could be seen through humankind is laughed at, and the industries of the world are all hell-bent on majoring on humankind’s physical being only, leaving the link between humans and their Maker out of the reckoning. Allowing God to enter makes mincemeat of every major industry, so it must not be allowed! The wheels must keep turning, and humankind must be prevented from thinking the one thought that would turn them from this self-occupation to the issue of their reason for being: