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To resemble himself God created mankind,
To reflect in themselves his own heart, will and mind,
To relate to each other, male and female entwined.
Then he affirmed their unique position with words of encouragement: ‘Produce many offspring, for you are to occupy and control the whole earth. The fish in the sea, the birds of the air and the animals on the land are all yours to master. I am also giving you the seed-bearing plants and the fruit-bearing trees as your food supply. The birds and the beasts can have the green foliage for their food.’ And so it was.
God surveyed all his handiwork and he was very satisfied with it … everything so right, so beautiful … six days’ work well done.
Outer space and planet earth were now complete. Since nothing more was needed, God took the next day off. That is why he designated every seventh day to be different from the others, set apart for himself alone – because on that day he was not busy with his daily work on creation.
This is how our universe was born and how everything in it came to be the way it is; when the God whose name is ‘Always’ was making outer space and the planet earth, there was a time when there was no vegetation at all on the ground. And if there had been, there was neither any rain to irrigate it nor any man to cultivate it. But underground springs welled up to the surface and watered the soil. And the God ‘Always’ moulded a human body from particles of clay, gave it the kiss of life, and man joined the living creatures. And the God ‘Always’ had already laid out a stretch of parkland, east of here, a place called ‘Eden’, which means ‘Delight’. He brought the first man there to live. The God ‘Always’ had planted a great variety of trees in the part with beautiful foliage and delicious fruit. Right in the middle were two rather special trees; fruit from one of them could maintain life indefinitely while the fruit of the other gave the eater personal experience of doing right and wrong.
One river watered the whole area but divided into four branches as it left the park. One was called the Pishon and wound across the entire length of Havilah, the land where pure nuggets of gold were later found, as well as aromatic resin and onyx. The second was called the Gihon and meandered right through the country of Cush. The third was the present Tigris, which flows in front of the city of Asshur. The fourth was what we know as the Euphrates.
So the God ‘Always’ set the man in this ‘Parkland of Delight’ to develop and protect it. And the God ‘Always’ gave him very clear orders: ‘You are perfectly free to eat the fruit of any tree except one – the tree that gives experience of right and wrong. If you taste that you will certainly have to die the death.’
Then the God ‘Always’ said to himself: ‘It isn’t right for the man to be all on his own. I will provide a matching partner for him.’
Now the God ‘Always’ had fashioned all sorts of birds and beasts out of the soil and he brought them in contact with the man to see how he would describe them; and whatever the man said about each one became its name. So it was man who labelled all the other creatures but in none of them did he recognize a suitable companion for himself.
So the God ‘Always’ sent the man into a deep coma and while he was unconscious God took some tissue from the side of his body, and pulled the flesh together over the gap. From the tissue he produced a female clone and introduced her to the man, who burst out with:
‘At last you have granted my wish,
A companion of my bones and flesh,
“Woman” to me is her name,
Wooed by the man whence she came.’
All this explains why a man lets go of his parents and holds on to his wife, their two bodies melting into one again.
The first man and his new wife wandered about the park quite bare, but without the slightest embarrassment.
Now there was a deadly reptile around, more cunning than any of the wild beasts the God ‘Always’ had made. He chatted with the woman one day and asked: ‘You don’t mean to tell me that God has actually forbidden you to eat any fruit from all these trees?’ She replied: ‘No, it’s not quite like that. We can eat fruit from the trees, but God did forbid us to eat from that one in the middle. In fact, he warned us that if we even touch it, we’ll have to be put to death.’
‘Surely he wouldn’t do that to you,’ said the reptile to the woman, ‘he’s just trying to frighten you off because he knows perfectly well that when you eat that fruit you’d see things quite differently. Actually it would put you on the same level as him, able to decide for yourself what is right and wrong.’
So she took a good look at the tree and noticed how nourishing and tasty the fruit appeared to be. Besides, it was obviously an advantage to be able to make one’s own moral judgements. So she picked some, ate part and gave the rest to her husband, who was with her at the time and he promptly ate too. Sure enough, they did see things quite differently! For the first time they felt self-conscious about their nudity. So they tried to cover up with crude clothes stitched together from fig leaves.
That very evening, they suddenly became aware of the approach of the God ‘Always’ and ran to hide in the under-growth. But the God ‘Always’ called out to the man: ‘What have you got yourself into?’ He answered: ‘I heard you coming and I was frightened because I haven’t got any decent clothes. So I’m hiding in the bushes over here.’ Then God demanded: ‘How did you discover what it feels like to be naked? Have you been eating the fruit I ordered you to leave alone?’ The man tried to defend himself: ‘It’s all due to that woman you sent along; she brought this fruit to me, so naturally I just ate it without question.’
Then the God ‘Always’ challenged the woman: ‘What have you been up to?’ The woman said: ‘It’s that dreadful reptile’s fault! He deliberately deluded me and I fell for it.’
So the God ‘Always’ said to the reptile: ‘As a punishment for your part in this:
Above all the beasts I will curse
Your ways with a fate that is worse!
On your belly you’ll slither and thrust
With your mouth hanging down in the dust.
For the rest of the days in your life,
There’ll be terror, hostility, strife
Between woman and you for this deed
Which you’ll both pass along to your seed;
But his foot on your skull you will feel
As you strike out in fear at his heel.’
Then to the woman he said:
‘Let the pain of child-bearing increase
The agony, labour and stress;
You’ll desire a man to control
But find yourself under his rule.’
But to the man, Adam, he said, ‘Because you paid attention to your wife rather than me and disobeyed my order prohibiting that tree:
There’s a curse on the soil;
All your days you will toil.
Thorns and thistles will grow
Among all that you sow.
With a brow running sweat
You will labour to eat;
Then return to the ground
In the state you were found.
From the clay you were made;
In the dust you’ll be laid.’
Adam gave his wife the name Eve (it means ‘life-giving’) because he now realized she would be the mother of all human beings who would ever live.
The God ‘Always’ made some new clothes from animal skins for Adam and his wife and got them properly dressed. Then the God ‘Always’ said to himself; ‘Now this man has become as conscious of good and evil things as we have been, how could we limit the damage if he is still able to eat from the other special tree and live as long as us?’ To prevent this happening, the God ‘Always’ banished the man from the Park of Delight and sent him back to cultivate the very same patch of ground from which he was originally moulded!
After he had been expelled, heavenly angels were stationed on the eastern border of the Park of Delight, guarding access to the tree of continuous life with sharp, scorching weapons.
THE RESULTS OF THE FALL
Chapter 3 is usually referred to as ‘the Fall’, when man fell from the beautiful state described in Chapter 2. It could all have been so different. If Adam had not tried to blame Eve, or even God, but had responded in repentance, God could have forgiven him on the spot. History might have been very different. Instead we have Adam’s pathetic attempt at cover-up with fig leaves to mirror his folly.
The nature of the punishment is well worthy of note. Adam is punished in relation to his work, and Eve in relation to the family. The reptile becomes a snake (even today there are very small legs on the underside of a snake).
Their former relationship with God is destroyed. Their relationship with each other is also affected: they hide from each other and God pronounces a curse over them. In Chapter 4 the first murder takes place within the family, as envy gives way to defiance against God’s warning.
Let us now focus on three areas in the subsequent story where God’s reactions to the situation are especially seen.
1. Cain
Somebody has pointed out that the sin committed by the first man caused the second man to kill the third. Here we have Adam’s own family. His eldest son kills his middle son, and for the same reason that they killed Jesus centuries later: envy. Envy was responsible for the first murder in history and the worst murder in history.
Cain means ‘gotten’ – when he was born, Eve said ‘I have gotten’ (in the King James translation) him from the Lord. Abel means ‘breath’ or ‘vapour’. God favoured Abel, the younger child of the two, because he did not want anybody ever to think they had a natural right to his gifts and inheritance. Often in Scripture we see God choose a younger person over an older one (e.g. Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau).
The problem that divided them was that God accepted Abel’s sacrifice and rejected Cain’s. Abel had learned from his parents that the only sacrifice worthy of God was a blood sacrifice – the result of a life being taken. God had already covered the sin and shame of his parents by killing animals and providing a covering for Adam and Eve from their skins. A principle was being established: blood was shed so that their shame could be covered (it began there and continues through to Calvary). So when Abel came to worship God he brought an animal sacrifice. Cain simply brought fruit and vegetables.
God was only pleased with Abel’s sacrifice, not with Cain’s offering. Cain was angered by this. In spite of God’s warning that he should master sin, Cain leads his brother away from his home on a false pretext, then murders him, buries him and totally disowns him (‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ he asks).
A clear pattern emerges here: bad people hate good people, and the ungodly are envious of the godly. This is a division that goes all the way through human history.
So God’s perfect world is now a place where goodness is hated, and the evil people excuse their wickedness. Anyone who presents a challenge to the conscience is hated. We could say that Abel was the first martyr for righteousness’ sake. Jesus himself said that the ‘blood of the righteous has been spilled from Abel, right through to Zechariah’.
The narrative goes on to chart the line of Cain and it includes some interesting elements. Alongside the names of Cain’s descendants are listed their achievements, most notably the development of music and of metallurgy, including the first weapons. Urbanization also came from Cain’s line. It was Cain’s line that began to build cities, concentrating sinners in one place and therefore concentrating sin in one place. It could be said that cities became more sinful than the countryside because of this concentration.
Thus what we might see as ‘human progress’ is tainted. The ‘mark of Cain’, as it were, is on these ‘developments’, and that is the biblical interpretation of civilization: sinful activity is always at its heart. Polygamy also came through Cain’s line. Up to that point one man and one woman were married for life, but Cain’s descendants took many wives, and we know that even Abraham, Jacob and David were polygamists.
There was a third brother, however, Adam and Eve’s third son Seth. With him we see another line beginning, a Godly line. From the line of Seth, men began to ‘call on the name of the LORD’.
These two lines run right through human history and will continue to do so right to the end, when they will be separated for ever. We live in a world in which there is a line of Cain and a line of Seth, and we can choose which line we belong to and which kind of life we wish to live.
2. Noah
The next major event is the Flood and the building of Noah’s ark. The story is well known, both inside and outside the Bible. Many peoples have tales of a universal flood within their folklore. It has been questioned whether it was a real event and whether it literally covered the whole earth. The text does not indicate whether the Flood went right round the globe or just covered the then known world. Certainly the Middle Eastern basin, later called Mesopotamia, the huge plain through which the Tigris and the Euphrates flow, is the scene of all the early stories of Genesis and was definitely an area affected by flood.
The Bible’s focus is not so much on the material side of this story as on the moral side. Why did it happen? The answer is staggering. It happened because God regretted that he had made human beings. ‘His heart was filled with pain’. This is surely one of the saddest verses in the Bible. It communicates God’s feelings so clearly, and these led to his resolve to wipe out the human race.
What had happened to cause such a crisis in God’s emotions? To answer this we need to piece together the Genesis narrative with some parts of the New Testament and some extra-testamental material quoted in Jude and Peter.
We are told that between two and three hundred angels in the area of Mount Hermon sent to look after God’s people fell in love with women, seducing them and impregnating them. The offspring were a horrible hybrid, somewhere between men and angels – beings not in God’s order. These are the ‘Nephilim’ in Genesis 6 – the offspring of the union between the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘daughters of men’. The word is sometimes translated as ‘giants’ in English versions. We do not know exactly what is meant – it is just a new term for a new sort of creature. This horrible combination was also the beginning of occultism, because those angels taught the women witchcraft. There are no traces of occult practices before this event.
The immediate effect of this perverted sex was that violence filled the whole earth; the one leads to the other when people are treated as objects and not as persons. Genesis 6 tells us that God saw that ‘every imagination of man’s heart was only evil continually’. He felt that enough was enough.
But God did not judge immediately, he was very patient and gave them full warning. He called Enoch to be a prophet to tell the human race that God was coming to judge and deal with all ungodliness. At the age of 65 Enoch had a son, and God gave him the name for the boy, Methuselah, which means ‘When he dies it will happen’. So both Methuselah and Enoch knew that when Enoch’s son died God would judge the world.
We know that God was patient, because Methuselah lived longer than anybody else who has ever lived – 969 years. When Methuselah died it began to rain heavily. Methuselah’s grandson was called Noah. He and his three sons had spent 12 months building a huge covered raft according to God’s specifications. Just one family, a preacher and his three boys, three daughters-in-law and his wife, were saved.
After the Flood, God promised never to repeat such a thing as long as the earth remained. He made a covenant, a sacred promise with the whole human race: not only would he never destroy the human race again, but he would support them by providing enough food. He would ensure that summer, winter, springtime and harvest came regularly. At a time when famine is common in various parts of the world, this promise may seem to have been ignored. But there is far more corn in the world than we need – it is just not evenly distributed. Everyone could be fed if the political will existed.
God put a rainbow in the sky to signify this covenant. The two things we need for life on earth are sunlight and water, and when they come together the rainbow is visible.
When God made this promise he also demanded something of mankind. He commanded that we must treat human life as sacred and therefore punish murder with execution. When a nation abolishes capital punishment, it says something about its view of human life.
3. Babel
The next incident that affected God deeply was the building of the Tower of Babel. People wanted to build a tower that reached into God’s sphere of heaven, effectively to ‘challenge heaven’. The text says that they wanted to build a name for themselves. We know roughly what the tower would have looked like: such a tower was called a ziggurat, a great brick structure with staircases extending heavenwards. On the top of such towers there were usually astrological signs. But it was not so much for worshipping stars that Nimrod (king of Babylon, or Babel) built that tower – it was more to express his own power and grandeur.
The Tower of Babel offended God very profoundly. He said that if he let them continue there was no telling where it would end. So God gave the gift of tongues for the first time, to confuse the people. They could no longer understand each other. From then on humanity split, scattering and speaking different languages.
There is an interesting footnote to the story of Babel. Among the people scattered at Babel were a group who climbed over the mountains to the east and eventually settled when they reached the sea. They became the great nation of China. Chinese culture goes right back to that day. They left the area of Babel before the Cuneiform alphabet replaced the picture language of ancient Egypt. All languages were pictorial right up to the time of Babel. The language they took to China they put down in picture form. The amazing thing is that it is possible to reconstruct the story from Genesis 1 to 11 by looking at the symbols which the Chinese use to describe different words.
The Chinese word for ‘create’, for example, is made up of the pictures for mud, life and someone walking. Their word for ‘devil’ is made up of a man, a garden, and the picture for secret. So the devil is a secret person in the garden. Their word for ‘tempter’ is made up of the word for ‘devil’ plus two trees and the picture for cover. Their word for ‘boat’ is made up of container, mouth and eight, so a boat in the Chinese language is a vessel for eight people, as was Noah’s ark.
We can reconstruct the whole of Genesis 1–11 from the picture language in China. When these people first arrived in China, therefore, they believed in one God, the maker of heaven and earth. It was only after Confucius and Buddha that they got involved in idolatry. The Chinese language is an independent confirmation from outside the Bible that these things happened and were carried in the memories of people scattered at Babel, who then settled in China.
JUSTICE AND MERCY
Two themes predominate in these chapters: from the Fall of Adam onwards we see both human pride and God’s response of justice and mercy. He showed justice to Adam and Eve in banishing them from the garden and telling them that they would one day die, but also mercy in providing a covering for them. He showed justice to Cain in condemning him to be a wanderer, but mercy in placing a mark on him so that no one would kill him. He punished the generation of Enoch (although not Enoch himself), but we see his mercy in saving Noah and his family and his patience in waiting, as he gave Methuselah such a long life. What does the rest of Genesis tell us about God? Let us look further, and see what kind of relationship he had with his people through the generations and events which followed.
The sovereign God
There is a double thread running right through the portrayal of God in the Old Testament which requires an explanation. It is a juxtaposition which only becomes clear through reading the book of Genesis.
The God of the whole universe
On the one side the Old Testament claims that the God of the Jews is the God of the whole universe. In those days every nation had its own god, whether it was Baal, or Isis, or Molech, and religion was strictly national. All wars were religious wars, between nations with different gods. Israel’s God (Yahweh) was considered by other nations to be just the national god of Israel. But Israel herself claimed that her God was ‘the God above all Gods’. Indeed, the Israelites went even further, asserting that their God was the only God who really existed. He had made the entire universe. All the other gods were figments of human imagination. These claims were, of course, extremely offensive to the other nations. You can read of them in Isaiah 40, in the book of Job and in many of the psalms.
The God of the Jews
The other side of the picture painted in the Old Testament is that the God of the whole universe is the God of the Jews. They were claiming that the creator of everything had a very personal and intimate relationship with them, one little group of people on earth. In fact, they were claiming that he had identified himself with one family; with a grandfather, a father and a son. According to them, the God of the entire universe called himself ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’. It was an incredible claim.
God’s plan
This astonishing two-fold truth that the God of the Jews is the God of the universe, and the God of the universe is especially the God of the Jews, is explained for us in Genesis – indeed, without this book we would have no ground for believing it.
The book of Genesis covers more time than the whole of the rest of the Bible put together. The beginning of Exodus to the end of Revelation covers around 1,500 years, a millennium and a half, whereas Genesis alone covers the entire history of the world from its beginning right through to the time of Joseph. So when we read the Bible we must realize that time has been compressed, and that Genesis covers many centuries compared to the rest of the Bible.
This time compression is also true within Genesis itself. We have noted already that Chapters 1–11 form a quarter of the book and yet cover a very long period and a considerable breadth of people and nations. The second ‘part’ of Genesis, Chapters 12–50, is a much longer section taking up three-quarters of the book, yet it only covers a relatively few years and a few people – just one family and only four generations of that family. This seems to be a huge disproportion of space if Genesis is claiming to tell the history of our whole world.
It is clear, however, that this difference in proportions is quite deliberate. There is a deliberate move away from looking at the whole world to focus in on one particular family as if they were the most important family ever to have lived. In one sense they were, for they were part of that very special line from Seth of people who called on the name of the Lord. As far as God was concerned, the people who called on him were more important than anyone else because they were the people through whom he could fulfil his plans and purposes.
This approach serves to remind us that the Bible is not God’s answers to our problems; it is God’s answer to God’s problem. God’s problem was: ‘What do you do with a race that doesn’t want to know you or love you or obey you?’ One solution was to wipe them out and start again. He tried that, but even the father of the righteous remnant saved through the Flood (Noah) got drunk and exposed himself, demonstrating that human nature had not changed. But God did not give up. He was concerned about human beings; he had created them. He had one son already and he enjoyed that son so much he wanted a bigger family, so he was not about to give up on the problem of mankind.
