Genesis 1-11 Retold (Part 1)

In the beginning God built a temple. And that tells the whole story. The whole story. To miss this story is to miss the whole point of God’s work.

God built a temple because, well, that’s where gods live, right? And God wants to live on the earth he created with us. Still does. And will.

On a mountain God planted his garden temple/palace to live with his human creatures (Ez.28:13-16). In that garden God walked in communion and fellowship with Adam and Eve. And they’re just us, you know. All humanity.

What’s more, God made them (and us) priests in this garden temple. Royal priests because they (we) are children of God the Great King. This is that “image of God” thing.

What God started there he intends to spread the length and breadth and height and depth of the whole creation. Remember the river from Eden that branched into four to water the rest of the then uninhabited earth. Why water it if people weren’t going to live there. Yep, God wants this whole world full of his royal priests caring for each other and the creation as if it belonged to them.

And it does, in a sense. Two senses, actually. Creation belongs to us and us to it because without it we can’t live. You know, breathing and all that. And God has made us the creatures who are to direct creation to its full flourishing. And under his wise lordship that just what we would do.

Except we didn’t!

When Genesis was written Egypt and Exodus were in Israel’s rear-view mirror. Everything that happened to them since creation was seen through the spectacles of Egypt and Exodus. What happened to humanity in the garden was no different. When trying to explain what happened to royal priests gone astray, their story-tellers used Egypt-Exodus imagery.

We wonder what an oddity as a walking, talking snake leading Eve and Adam to sin might mean. For Israelites there was no mystery here. They knew. They’d actually seen and heard one!

You see, Egypt’s Pharaoh wore a turban adorned with likenesses of two enraged cobras. Each night, so the story went, Pharaoh and his cobras descended to the abyss and did battle with the forces of chaos and emerged victorious securing stability for Egypt for another day. This walking and talking snake, Egypt’s deity personified, ruled Egypt and the world with unrivaled power and authority.

When Israel’s story-tellers described what happened to Adam and Eve in the garden they chose this most powerful and visceral image. Somehow, for no reason, against all odds, with everything stacked in their favor, a Pharaonic temptation to be lord and ruler of their own world rather than royal priests in God’s world assaulted them. Tickled their fancy actually. And led them to imagine God was withholding the real goodies (being gods) from them!

 Once fancied, such a thought proved irresistible (though it should have been easily rebuffed). Illusions of grandeur led to the reality of fruit-stealing and eating, the one thing God told them not to do. He’d given them everything they need including a tree of life that nourished is creatures with his very own life.

There was also another tree there in the middle of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of how to do everything. This truly god-like knowledge was not the creatures by right nor even by divine permission. It was a gift God doubtless would dole out to them as needed to deal with whatever they faced. Seizing it as if by right, however, poisoned its fruit and those who ate it.

Later, when these erstwhile temple keepers fancied themselves gods, they became temple builders in Babel (Gen.11:1-9). And even God allowed that were this project successful, “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” But I get ahead of myself.

Adam and Eve knew they’d screwed up. Trying to play hide and seek with God instead of open and honest fellowship with him spilled the beans. They confessed what they had done. Sort of. Now so thoroughly disoriented and disordered they resorted to the blame game to excuse themselves.

But God was having none of it. Everything got turned upside-down and wrong-side out. To the serpent, that proud, erect, boastful Pharaonic stand-in, God made him mute, now slithering on his belly instead of strutting proudly through the streets of his country. Still a threat to injure humanity with a bite on his heel, God warns that this people he believes to have undone will endure and survive his threat to them and at the end of the day crush him under their heel!

But that time was not now. Turning to the woman and the man God warns their efforts to multiply and full the earth and husband it toward true flourishing will be frustrating, painful, and ultimately unsatisfying. Indeed, instead of being equal co-partners in the care of this creational temple God entrusted to them, they will play endless power games with one another. Men would exercise an authority over women not theirs by divine design and women would execute all sorts of gambits to endure or undo this oppressive authority. Yes, the battle of the sexes started here in Eden. Not by divine design, mind you! But by a creaturely power grab from God which distorted everything.

Worst of all, God promised they would die for breaking trust with him. And in a sense they did. They were dead to serving God’s purposes as his royal priests and furthering the divine-human fellowship he intended. But physical death did not ensue for them for many years.

And therein lies the good news of these stories in Genesis 1-11. In a word, they tell us God’s bark is worse than his bite! Yes, it’s true.

-Adam and Eve will die. But not until they have spawned a race that God will somehow use to undo the damage they have done and help him achieve his creational dream.

-Cain will wander, lost east of Eden for murdering his brother Abel. Vulnerable to the then normal practice of revenge he rightly fears his wanderings will not be long. He cries to God plaintively and God respond with a protective mark shielding Cain from this otherwise almost certain fate.

-Despairing of his now rebellious and violence-filled creation God decides to undo it with a flood. And all life on earth is destroyed. Except God can’t quite fully pull the trigger on this judgment and spares Noah and his family in the famous ark. This family restarts the project anew after the flood waters recede. And God promises never to de-create the world like this again.

-And it’s a good thing God promised this. The restart proves no better than the original. Pharaonic humanity undertakes its own temple-building project in Babel. They want to secure their own significance and security. Become the gods they believe themselves to be. United in this project against God (they all speak the same language), their prospects seem bright. But God, unable to see clearly what they are doing from heaven (the Babelians’ temple apparently didn’t quite make it up there), comes down, assess the danger, creates confusion and misunderstanding among them, and scatters them, throughout the world. This is but a back-handed way of achieving his goal of having humanity fill up his creation.

You see it? Every time God judges humanity for its blatant, unjustifiable, treasonous, and, frankly, unforgiveable slaps in his face and defacing of his creation, God backs off and does not/cannot bring himself to carry it through to the end. Every time God leaves an escape valve to keep the project going no matter how deep the disrepair into which humanity has fallen. It almost like the ancient narrator glimpses what Paul will late declare: “Where sin abounds, grace super-abounds!” (Romans 5:20).

Or, as I like to put it, God’s bark is worse than his bite. This foreshadows the larger biblical teaching that God dies for us so that we might live. But that’s way ahead in the story and I have no time to explore that here.

These tales of the prospects and plight of humanity in general set the stage for God’s response. How’s he going to fix this mess? Just mitigating punishment is not enough. A good start, to be sure. And a portent of better things to come perhaps. But we’re begging to know what that “better” is and how God will accomplish it. When these stories end when a note of Sarai’s (later Sarah) barrenness, this seems a fitting if despairing epitaph for the human project.