Texts: Genesis 1: 1-5; 3: 1-7; 17b-19

1. CREATION

Once upon a time, God began creating a cosmos—our cosmos. He may have created others—many others—before us, but this is the story of the cosmos we know. The old King James Version read, “In THE beginning,” but this isn’t the best translation. Modern Jewish scholars begin the book with, “When God began creating the heavens and the Earth, etc.” It may be the beginning for us, but it is not the beginning for God. It is not the beginning, it is a beginning. So starts Genesis, and it’s not the first draft of describing the origin of our world.

In Mesopotamia to the east, we read of the creation as the god Marduk slaying his wife Tiamat and severing her body parts to create the heavens. In Greek stories, following initial chaos, Gaia(earth goddess) and Uranus(sky-god) marry and give birth to monsters: Crosos, Typhon, and the Titans. The gods argue, fight, and lie just like humans. Finally, Zeus defeats them all and brings order. In Egypt, the god Atum creates (in a way you don’t want to know, trust me) Shu and Tefnut, who are air and moisture. Shu and Tefnut make some children who become earth and sky. These make more children with the names Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set, and Nephthys. Remember that the Jews came out of Egypt and normally would have been influenced by what they learned there. Funny thing is, there seem to be few if any traces of Egyptian mythology in the Genesis story. Neither do we find Greek nor Mesopotamian influence. It is as if Genesis is given as a unique alternative to what the rest of the world had to offer.

And unique is hardly a strong enough word. In all the other stories, the gods’ work is to bring order out of the chaos. In Genesis, God creates all that is from sheer nothingness.  Tohu va bohu---Hebrew words for the initial conditions—“formless and functionless” literally. From the cold emptiness of nonexistence, God speaks:“Let there be light!” and boom! Big Bang. He needs no tools, no materials; his Word alone suffices. What is more, once he sees what he has made he pronounces it to be “good,” which means that our world has inherent value because God proclaims it. The cosmos can’t be pointless because God has imbued it with value. It is good.

This pronouncement goes through all creation, right down to you and me. Think of it a second: no matter how down you may feel, God has said, “You were made good for good.” You and I do not have to construct our value; it is absolute because it comes from God.

And the crown of God’s creation is humankind. He makes us male and female in the image of God. Understand: for the ancients, image was everything—an image contained the essence of what it represented.  In Egypt (and elsewhere) the king was understood to be the image of the deity. Idols were the norm and the idols contained the image of the deity.

Idols worked like this: you have an idol made by a craftsman, then you take it to the local priest. The priest takes it, blows into it the breath/spirit/wind of life, and then returns it to you spiritually energized so that the god’s magic would work for you. That was fairly universal. How odd then, for us to read that God, not unlike the ancient priests, forms Adam to contain God’s own image, then breathes into his nostrils the breath of life and spirituality. The same way that men make idols, God makes humankind. Thus we contain the image or essence of God.

After Adam settles in and names a bunch of things, God decides that it would be better for his creatures not be too comfortable in solitude, so he made us social—to find our completion in connection with others—so God created Eve. Then the trouble started.

2. FALL

It was so simple:

“That tree is poison. If you eat it—or even touch it—it’ll kill you.”

[blank stares from Adam and Eve]

“It means you will die—die as in death.”

“What is this death and dying?”

Do we forget that Adam and Eve were created to be immortal? They and their world were not created to decay and die, but to live forever—in the flesh—in a world that never perishes, never erodes, and never grows old.

And the snake says, “I can help you learn what death means. The tree is the experience of death, which is the knowledge of death, for there is no knowing without experiencing. You must eat in order to know death, otherwise you will never have this wisdom.”

Imagine what life would be like before a knowledge of good and evil. Bad things may happen, but you wouldn’t know they were bad. Without conscience, without judgment, we would just ride along on instinct like animals.  Animals have instinct. They neither obey God nor disobey. They just are. Some animals grieve, but unlike humans, do they know they’re grieving? No. They don’t anticipate the possibility of grieving nor do they avoid it—they just live in it, not knowing good from evil. It just is, and they live within it.

Both human consciousness and conscience derive from the divine command “You shall not eat of it.” The interdict creates morality, conscience, and spirituality.

Adam and Eve had it all—paradise, immortality, and fellowship with God. Even with all that—the ball in their hands and clear field all the way to the end zone— they fumbled. All they had to do was keep going, but they failed.

Some say it was the desire to rise up and be like God that appealed to them. Others say their sin was mere ignorance, and curiosity kills the cat, but for all our attempts to parse out the reasons for the fall, we finally must admit that sin is an unsearchable mystery. They fumbled, and we have been a race of fumblers ever since.

3. CONSEQUENCES

We know little about the fall itself—even less about the paradise of Eden—but we are all familiar with the consequences of the fall because we have been living with them ever since.

Immediately, the knowledge of death was upon them. They knew evil because they had committed it. Enter shame. They experienced evil and had become that evil. Their nakedness is a defiled conscience. Their nakedness is the result of betraying God’s trust—throwing God’s commandment under the bus—and their souls were laid bare in shamefulness.

The results are horrific. Not only are they poisoned, but the entire cosmos is transformed from eternal to terminal. When God says, “cursed is the ground because of you,” it means the whole world fell with them. The universe has been slowly dying ever since, losing heat and increasing its entropy and disorder. Creation may have been created to be immortal, but now it is all on a relatively fast track toward certain death. Thanks, Adam.

Nature fell with us. Nature is no longer our friend. She is utterly indifferent to human suffering and just as happy for a healthy virus to thrive as you and or me. We are born in competition against the elements from our birth. We must work in order to eat and labor to survive.

What’s more, though we now perceive our own nakedness with shame, we have lost the inner knowledge of who—and Whose—we are. We do not know our own intentions or motives with any certainty. As Paul says Romans 7:15:

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” 

or in Corinthians 13, he says “we see in a mirror dimly” meaning we are separated from anything like intimate self-knowledge as well. 

What follows is nakedness—a searing sense of wrong—and then comes the blame game.

God asks Adam what happened. Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the snake. The curse spreads. Adam and Eve have a couple boys: Abel and Cain. Jealousy leads to murder and it is a quick, downward spiral from Eden to total wickedness.

All humankind’s problems—our selfishness, ignorance, fighting, warring, and wickedness stem back to an initial brokenness whereby we separated ourselves from God. From God’s perspective, I think we have a lighter story. Not to minimize the tragedy of the fall and all the wickedness that arrived in its wake, but we have a God who is greater than our world, greater than our dying cosmos, who, amazingly, love us.

I helped my niece to learn to ride a bicycle. She was a very cautious child, fearful of any kind of injury and risk-averse by nature, so when I agreed to help her learn how to ride her bike, she was more in charge of the process than I. So patiently I sought to win her trust. I walked alongside her as she sat on the seat and skidded each tennis shoe a quarter inch of the sidewalk. I had her put her feet on the pedals but it made her feel out of control—she didn’t like it—so I continued slowly, gradually with her. Finally she plucked up the nerve to put her feet on the pedals as I walked along with one hand on the seat and another on the handlebars. Sensing my oversensitivity toward her, she seemed to resent being coddled and let me know she can steer just fine by herself, but when I let go of one hand, she panicked. In time, she was essentially riding the bike herself while I hung on to the seat just in case.  Finally, I let her go ahead. She pedaled about twice before crashing on the neighbor’s lawn (harmlessly, by the way), but was crying, angry as a hornet at me for having letting go, blaming me for making her crash. I told her she was doing fine and would have been riding if she had just kept pedaling. But she was hurt and angry and stormed into the house to feel sorry for herself.

Maybe you’ve been there, but I think this may be how God looks at us. We are filled with fears and angers and blaming, and when something doesn’t go our way, we blame anyone n ear—our parents, our personal enemies, or Donald Trump—for our condition.

I think God sighs patiently and says to us, “So, do you want to ride the bike or not?”

What looks to us like the disaster of the human condition and a dying cosmos looks to God like a small, temporary affliction that will be soon overcome. He’ll take the blame because he’s big enough to absorb it. And soon enough, we’ll all be riding.†