Hi Syd,

Last week we discussed Genesis 1, chapter 2 and different creation stories. I ended with what I hoped was an enticement to keep going, that chapter 3 would introduce conflict, the earmark of all good stories. In the Bible that conflict continues all the way to the end. Jesus’ death on the cross assures the winner, but the battlefield has desperate enemy holdouts that need mopping up until Revelation, chapter 21. That's when all conflict is finished. There is a new heaven and earth; there is no more death, suffering and pain. The narrative that began in the garden has come full circle and all is new again.
The cause of the conflict, the villain, is introduced in Genesis, chapter 3, verse 1. The text says, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made...” There are two things important to understand right from the start. First, the serpent is a created being. He was made by God. Therefore the serpent cannot be on the same level as God. God is God. And no one is like Him!

Second, the Hebrew word for serpent is nachash. It means literally “the shiny one.” I know you have a fear of snakes, but the serpent that appeared to Eve didn’t look like the most beautiful and glistening reptile that ever was. If he did, Eve probably would have run away. Step into the scene. She was the "crown jewel" of God’s creation, so the serpent must have appeared superior to her in order for her to be in awe of him. The serpent was the most handsome, considerate, and charming thing she had ever seen!

As we’ll see later in Revelation 20:2, the serpent is Satin, or the Devil, the one St. John identifies as coming down from Heaven after the final apocalyptic battle. Eve doesn't have that revelation back in Genesis. Even so, you are probably wondering how Satin gets to the garden in the first place? Why would God allow it?

“Patience grasshopper,” as Caine’s master used to tell him in the 1970’s TV series Kung Fu. We’ll meet Satin again and again as we go through the Bible. He’s the nemesis of Christ and casts a shadow over all Scripture. He’ll sometimes step on stage and off again, but he’s always there until the end when he is defeated.

Once the Angel of Light, Satan can take whatever form he chooses. He often uses this trick to deceive humanity. He’s not the guy we see on Halloween dressed in a red suit with a pitchfork. He never appears as a slithering reptile, rather as something exceptionally beautiful and charming.

Verses 1b to 5 form the three-pronged anatomy of temptation. The tactics Satin used in the garden are the same ones he uses today against us! First, the Serpent questions God's Word: "Did God actually say...?" He does this to create doubt about what was really said.

Second, he is subtle. Look at verse 1a: “The Lord God” in Hebrew is Yehovah 'elohiym. Yehovah (also written as Jehovah) is the proper name for the one true God. God with a capital “G.” Now note how the Serpent questions Eve in verse 1b: “Did God actually say...?” Satan drops the Yehovah and uses just the word 'elohiym. Elohiym is god with a small “g,” a distinction that is not made in the English translations, but properly would be translated as “god-like.” The Serpent subtly downgrades God’s status. Eve, perhaps unconsciously, picks up on this and drops Yehovah too.

Third, the Serpent contradicts God's Word when he says, "You will not surely die." Then he gives his own word, here as everywhere else, an outright lie. He tells them that they will be like God, but neither he nor they can be like God.

We don’t know what the fruit was, but we’re pretty certain it wasn’t an apple as often depicted in paintings and folklore. Whatever it was, Eve takes some of it and eats. Then, according to folklore, she runs to find her husband Adam and tempts him, right? Not! In the Bible Adam has been there the whole time. Adam could have stopped her, but he didn’t. He eats the fruit of his own free will!

And while their bodies don’t die right away, something inside of them shrivels up at that moment. The peace and joy they once experienced is immediately gone. In verse 7 Adam and Eve suddenly know that they are naked. Breaking from God means He is no longer their covering. They are now in a state of rebellion or sin. Because they are the parents of humanity, their fall from grace affects us all. Sin is our inheritance.

As babies, our parentage and its defects are not our fault. But there does come a time for each of us when we’re pretty sure what’s the right thing to do. Then we go ahead and don't do it. If we have a conscious that hasn’t been hardened, we feel exposed and vulnerable.

Adam and Eve try to cover their sense of exposure and shame, to find a substitute for God’s protective love. But they do a lousy job of it! They put leaves over their private parts when it is what is inside of them that needs to be cleaned and covered. Before this chapter is over, God shows them that by the shedding of innocent blood, He is able to cover their naked rebellion. This is a foreshadowing of what Christ does for humanity on the cross.

In verse 14 God tells the Serpent, “Cursed are you and you’ll slither on your belly from now on.” It is interesting to note that Satan wasn’t slithering prior to verse 14.

We also see two bloodlines developing here. The seed of the women is a Messianic title for the one to come who will right the wrong. This is Jesus Christ, about whom we’ll study later. The seed of the serpent is the leader yet to surface in world history. He is called the antichrist, and we'll also study more about him.

In verses 3:14 and 15, the fall of humanity introduces the law of entropy into the world. All that was perfect in the created universe begins to disintegrate, lose energy, and become chaotic. To reflect back on our creation discussion from last week, everything we know about the universe is post "Fall." We really can’t comprehend what the world was like before this time period.

Sydney, I want you to now underline verse 15 in your hardcopy Bible. Yes, I know Mrs. Kanipplemeyer wouldn’t approve, but that doesn’t mean she’s right. Her job is to protect books. She sometimes doesn't see that a book can be like an everyday object that nurtures us like food. Besides, why upset her by letting her know? It is your book, not the library's. What you are underlining is the first foreshadowing of the resolution of the conflict. It comes as a killing blow to Satan when Christ volunteers to be the blood sacrifice to die upon on the cross. Now make a note in the margin of your Bible why you underlined this passage. Really, it is ok to write in your Bible!

In verse 16 God says that He will increase women's pains in childbearing. The word “increase” tells us there must have been birthing pains before the Fall. What is meant here is that tiny helpless children will come into the world. On the one hand, they will impart great joy and be a blessing from God. On the other they will also enter a great big disintegrating world. This is not the garden that Adam and Eve knew but a world of grief and sorrow. And they will surely die in this world!

Additionally, God says that a women's desire for her husband to cherish her will be perverted. He will manipulate and control her. Some people use this passage to say, "God is a jerk! It's not right that He cursed Eve because she disobeyed Him. He's just some misogynistic control freak and really not a loving God at all." I even heard a sermon one time in which a liberal female pastor described God as the perp in a domestic violence complaint.

But that’s all wrong! God is not prescribing what will happen, but describing what will happen because of sin entering in the world. It's like your doctor telling you what is going to happen to your body if you smoke, drink, don’t exercise and eat a bad diet. Doing so significantly increases the risks of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer, any one of which may cause a slow, painful and expensive death. Like God talking to Eve, your doctor is not cursing you, just describing what will happen to because of your actions.

In verses 17 to 19 God tells Adam that because he listened to his wife, he will be cursed. His existence will include the hard labor of wresting food from the earth and eventual death. Again, God is not cursing Adam, just describing to him the consequences of his actions.

Adam and Eve take the gift of the knowledge of good and evil prematurely. On the surface knowledge doesn’t seem as if it should be bad, but in the garden the knowledge is perfect; it is awesome knowledge; it is knowledge from God alone Who knows everything. With limited intellects and little time in training Adam and Eve aren’t ready for the tremendous responsibility of knowing good and evil. It is forbidden to them as driving a car is forbidden to a kid on a tricycle. Perhaps they were never intended to have such god-like comprehension. What we, their children, do with the knowledge of good and evil is filter it through our prejudices and changing emotions, condemn other people for what we decide is bad, view ourselves as generally good, and if we do something shady, let ourselves off the hook because we have a just-this-once, special circumstance understanding of what God really means by bad. In that kind of thinking lies all the brutality in the world. Vicious dictators and predatory child molesters believe what they need and feel are the parameters of good and evil.

If chapter 3 had not happened, Adam and Eve would live forever. God created humanity to be immortal. But God has to cut off eternal life because sin has entered the world. If He did not, life itself would become a literal Hell.

In verse 21 God is once again described by His covenant name of Yehovah 'elohiym. If you step into the scene once more, you can see God as a saddened father thinking to Himself, “My kids, Adam and Eve, are leaving the garden, and it is going to be cold out there.” In response God makes garments of animal skins for them to wear. But you can’t have garments of skin without death. And cold is just one problem. The bigger one is sin. It leads to death, and innocent death is the only thing that can cover or make up for sin. We’ll discuss this point in more detail again in Leviticus and in the second half of Exodus.

Finally in verse 24, Adam and Eve hang their heads in shame as they leave the garden. If we step into the scene one last time, we can see behind them the two carcasses of the animals that God killed to make Adam’s and Eve's covering. Just ahead of them there are Cherubim with swords drawn guarding the entrance to the garden, that perfectly inviting Eden that humanity will not enter again until the end of history.

We’re ending on a sad note because sin entered the world. According to the NEW OXFORD AMERICAN DICTIONARY, sin is: “An immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law.” Your parents probably taught you that doing things like not being nice to Mrs. Kanipplemeyer, lying, or stealing are sins. Well, they are wrong! Sin isn’t an act that you commit, but rather a condition of alienation and separation from God that manifests itself in outward actions. Too often we put the emphasis on the wrong place, the action, when in fact the action results from not having the right relationship with God to begin with. If we were in a right relationship with God, like Adam and Eve used to be before the Fall, we wouldn’t commit the outward actions in the first place!

We see sin manifesting itself in three ways. First, sin is subtle and distorts. Remember, the serpent was the most subtle of all the creatures that God made. Sin creeps into our lives and is a slippery slope that undermines our relationship with God and distorts our judgment. Adam and Eve should have gone to God and told Him what they did. But they didn’t because they rationalized their way out of it. They told themselves it was no big deal. Then they hid from God because it was such a little deal!

Second, sin gets bigger. It doesn’t stop; it snowballs. Mrs. Kanipplemeyer used to say: "Once you've told somebody a lie, you're going to have to tell another one pretty soon to cover up that one. And then you'll have to tell yet another one to cover up that one, and so on and so forth. It will never stop!"

Third, sin cascades down through generations. Sin doesn’t stop with you. The consequences of sin manifest its action on your children, grandchildren, neighbors, community, and sometimes the world.

Syd, this week we've looked at the beginning of the story and saw the conflict that developed that will drive the rest of the Bible narrative. We've covered lots of material these last three weeks, but if you understand the first three chapters of Genesis, then you'll find the rest of the Bible much easier to comprehend! Without those chapters reading the Bible is like starting a movie 15 minutes into it. Without knowing the beginning, you'll never quite get the rest of the story.

Next week we'll look at Cain murdering his brother and start in on Noah and the flood. It should be exciting! Say "hi" to your folks and remind me to tell you the story sometime of how your father and I locked Mrs. Kanipplemeyer in the bathroom of the Book Mobile.

Have a great week...

All the best,
TA

Tags: Adam | antichrist | Apocalypse | conflict | creation stories | Eve | Mrs. Kanipplemeyer | physics | Satin | The Fall

Dear Sydney,

You said that we should start the Bible like any good book, at the beginning. All right then, Genesis 1, chapter 1, verse 1, here we come!

Genesis in Hebrew means "beginnings.” It is the beginning of a great invention—time. The eternal gives us finite time. Then God adds the physical universe, the beginning of life forms within the universe, and the beginning of humanity. It is also the beginning of sin and death, and the beginning of God’s plan to give us a second chance.

God inspired Moses to write Genesis about 3,400 years ago, who also wrote the next four books of the Bible. Together these five are called the Pentateuch, or the Torah. In Genesis Moses recalls days earlier than his own lifetime, from the beginning of creation to Joseph dying in Egypt.

In verse 1, God says “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” This was written originally in Hebrew, as was the rest of the Old Testament, and the word used for God is elohiym. Elohiym is a plural noun (like "cars") but is being used here as a singular one (like "car"). It is technically a grammatical error. It could be that God doesn’t know the proper rules for grammar, but I think it’s safe to assume that is unlikely. Instead I believe that in this first verse of the Bible, God is already eluding to His triune state – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As a sidebar, it is interesting how all languages seem to flow toward Jerusalem. The languages originating east of Jerusalem, like Greek, English, Spanish, etc., are written left to right. While the languages originating west of Jerusalem, such as Hebrew, Sanskrit, Aramaic, etc., flow right to left. We’ll talk more about this later in our conversations about the deliberateness of God, but for now just file it away as a fact that you can pop out at parties.

Every culture, civilization, and religion, no matter what the era, has its own creation story, but what verses 1 and 2 say is radically different from all of them. The other stories tell of creation being the result of intergalactic dramas, cosmic chaos and gods running amuck. Humanity is always the pawn in a prize of planetary battles. You can read more about other creation stories in James Pritchard’s ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN TEXTS RELATING TO THE OLD TESTAMENT. What is described in Genesis, however, is unique. Something is created from nothing (ex nihilo in the Latin), many other things too, and each creation is a deliberate act by God.

If you read the Bible all the way through, a question you might have at the very beginning will never be answered. God is a given. It is further assumed that we intuitively know that. There are no elaborate arguments trying to prove that He exists. God is too sane and self-confidant to need to prove Himself to anyone. He has always existed and always will!

You indicated that you understood verses 3 through 25 because they are self-explanatory, so I’m going to add only one comment. See what God did. He created the universe, and then He filled it—first adding vegetation, then putting lights in the sky, then animals under the sea and in the sky, and finally humanity. When I think of this, I am reminded of renaissance painter like Michelangelo. He starts with a blank canvas, paints the background, adds figures to the foreground and keeps adding details, sometimes painting over sections he’s not happy with, all the while being deliberate, highly skilled and confident as to what the painting will look like when it is finished.

In verse 26, God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” This single verse has so many important things to talk about. Why did God use the word “us” instead of “my.” There are three explanations. The first is that God is speaking with the Angels and saying, “Let’s make humanity like us.” But there is nothing in the story about Angels assisting in creation, and Angels have not even been introduced as characters in the Bible yet, so it would seem unlikely that is what God means.

Second, there is the “Royal We,” as in the way kings and queens talk about themselves, or a certain high school teacher we both know: “Todd, we are not amused by your talking out of turn.” God could be talking like Mrs. Kanipplemeyer did, but He doesn’t do so anywhere else, so it would seem unlikely that He would start here and just drop it. The third and most likely explanation is that God was precise in His words and referring to “us” because He is a triune being – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In my estimation this would appear to be the second hint of the plurality of the Godhead in the Bible. We’ll talk about what the means later in our conversations.

In the passage above the word “man” does not mean male: rather it means the generic term of mankind or humanity. Male and female are shown by God to be fundamentally equal in the very structure of the verse that follows. A man does not represent the image of God nor does a woman. Together they do. This also applies to Whites or Blacks or Asians or any other race. God is too big to be defined by one group. Thus all the races together give us a clearer sense of the image of God. This same concept applies to churches, cultures, styles of worship, personalities, and the like.

Additionally, the concept of “in our image” is called the Imago Dei in Latin. It is from the Hebrew word tselem and means shadow. The “us” that God makes in His image is a reflection or a shadow of the “We” who is God. You and I and the whole world combined cannot be God; we can only be like Him. The Imago Dei is an important concept in the Christian faith. It is one idea that separates Christianity from other religions. Because God created humanity in His image, every human has inherent value, independent of his or her utility or function.

Mrs. Kanipplemeyer would scream if she could hear what I’m going to say next. Syd, I’m going to ask you to write in a book. With a pen if you like. Get out your hardcopy Bible and in verse 27 circle “created” and mark it with an A. Then circle “in his own image” and mark it with a B. On the next line circle “he created him” and mark it A’. Circle and mark “in the image of God” as B’. Draw lines between the As then between the Bs. You should end up with an X. The two As say the same thing. So do the Bs. This is called chiasmus and is a literary technique of stating and restating in order to make a larger point (and the shape of an X). It was a common practice in Hebrew poetry. It is a deliberate literary structure and implies balance, harmony, and equality in the text.

In verse 28, God tells humanity to not conquer, pillage or destroy the earth, rather to manage and creatively tend it. This is often times called the Dominion Clause and has been used wrongly over the years as the justification for all forms of exploitation of the planet and peoples.

Genesis 2:1-3 is really part of Genesis 1. They are the same literary unit, and it ends the creation story that began earlier. In Genesis 1:1, the literal position of the words in Hebrew read, “In the beginning created God, the heavens and earth.” Circle the word “created” and mark an A above it. Circle “God” and put a B above it. Then circle “the heavens and earth” and mark it with a C.

Now go to Genesis 2:1 and circle “the heavens and the earth” and mark it with a C. Go to 2:2 and circle “God,” marking it with a B. Then go all the way to the end of 2: 3 and circle “creation” and mark it A.

The first verse of chapter 1 says that “Created God the heavens and earth.” Genesis 2:1-3 reads “the heavens and earth God created.” The backend verse is the mirror image of the frontend verse. Once again, this is not an accident – rather a deliberate literary technique. It takes a story and frames it in a balanced way. It is called inclusio and is very common in Hebrew narrative, as well as in other languages. We will see this technique again elsewhere in the Old Testament.

We have a six-day story of creation in which every day or act of creation progresses towards the completion. Additionally, in every day of creation God says it was good, and at the end of six days He said it was very good! We have been introduced to a God, not of vengeance or chaos, but a God of creativity, order, and love.

Don’t worry Sydney I know we introduced a lot of material this week and only covered one chapter. Nevertheless, a lot of this stuff will serve as a foundation for future weeks, and we do not want to rush this portion of the text. For now just stay in the story that God is telling about His creating everything in six days. Our job as readers is to step into the world of the story and engage it on its terms, not our own. Next week we will get to some of the questions you raised in your earlier email, including when creation actually happened and whether the Bible conflicts with evolutionary theory.

In the meantime, have a great week!

All the best,
TA

Tags: Adam | chiasmus | creation stories | Elohiym | Eve | ex nihilo | Imago Dei | inclusio | literary technique | Michelangelo | Moses | Mrs. Kanipplemeyer | Old Testament | physics | Satin | Trinity