Tag Archives: Genesis 3

January 1, 2024 Bible Study — Starting With God

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 1-3.

I love starting the year with Genesis chapter one: “In the beginning God…”  There is more to this passage than that, but that’s where it all starts, with God.  No matter what you want to analyze, it all starts with God.  Do you want to understand why certain things happened?  Start by thinking about God.  Do you want to know what your best course of action is?  Start by thinking about God.  Do you want to understand how the world works?  Start by thinking about God.  If you think about the God described in the Bible, certain things follow.  A God who created everything that is.  A God who specifically created mankind.  A God who cares about individual human beings, who cares about every individual human being.  A God who plans and directs the course of history.  A God who allows each human being to make their own choices, but desires for each of them to make the choices which are best for them.  If this God exists, then it makes sense that He would communicate with people, that He would create a record to accurately relate what He wants people to know.  Thus the Bible would exist as an accurate account of what God wants people to know about Him.  So, “In the beginning God…”  Let us start our year with God, and let us walk each day of that year with Him.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

January 1, 2023 Bible Study — Men And Women Are Equally To Blame For The Problems In This World

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 1-3.

It is so very appropriate to start the year with the Creation story(stories).  We really have two Creation stories here.  However, they are not in conflict, nor do they need to be reconciled because they are about two different things.  In chapter one we have the story about how the entire universe came to be, culminating in the creation of mankind.  I am convinced that the person who first told this story as we have it written down considered themselves to be living on the seventh day, when God rested from creating everything that is.

The second story is about how man came to be and how things came to be as those hearing the story saw the earth to be (and how we see the earth to be).  Today I want to focus on the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Before they ate from the tree, Adam and Eve were unable to do evil because they did not know what evil was.  The sin which Adam and Eve committed was to try and be like God.  When confronted by God about their wrongdoing, both Adam and Eve attempted to pass the blame to someone else: Adam blamed Eve, while Eve blamed the serpent.  Interestingly, Eve was not present when God gave the command not to eat the fruit from that particular tree as she had not yet been created (and while I do not think we should put very much theological thought into woman being created after man, I do believe that Eve being created after Adam has a lot to do with understanding the meaning of this story).  And, quite simply, Adam does not really have an out of blaming Eve for picking the fruit and then giving it to him.  Adam was there the entire time while the serpent attempted to convince Eve to eat from the tree.  As for Eve, even though she was not present when God gave the command not to eat the fruit, she knew that He had given that command.  Eve did not share the fruit with Adam because it was so tasty, rather she did so in order to share the blame with him.  To put it simply, Adam and Eve (man and woman) are equally to blame for the sinful state of mankind.

 

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

January 1, 2022 Bible Study — Thoughts On The Creation Account To Start The New Year

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 1-3.

Happy New Year

And so we begin a new year, I hope that all of those reading this will spend the new year serving God.

Today I noticed two things which I never thought about before.  The first I have heard people touch upon in various ways, but not in the way it struck me today.  The second I have never heard anyone mention, not even in passing.  So, at the end of chapter one, God tells the people He had created that He had given them every seed bearing plant as a food source and that He had given every green plant as food for all of the other animals (all beings that have breath).  This leads to two important conclusions.  One of those I have heard talked about before: at Creation everything (particularly humans) were vegetarian.  Some people use that as an argument for being vegetarian now, but that is not what really struck me about this.  No, what struck me is that this links the chapter one account of Creation to the the Account of the Fall given in chapter three.  However, the Account of the Fall grows out of the chapter two Creation account.  What makes this significant is the fact that many scholars, and others, see chapter one and chapter two as two completely separate, unrelated Creation accounts.  However, if the chapter one account is linked to the Account of the Fall, that means that it is linked to the chapter two Creation account.   I just realized that I have not stated what links this to the Account of the Fall.  That something is that before the Fall, nothing died.  In other words, in order for something to be carnivorous, something must die, but death did not first occur until after Adam and Eve sinned.

Which brings me to the second thing I noticed.  When people read the account about the Garden of Eden and try to figure out where on Earth it was located, they assume that current geography bears some resemblance to that which existed right after Creation.  The assumption is made that since we “know” where the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers are, that the other two rivers must have been nearby.  However, the account we have here declares that all four rivers, including the Tigris and the Euphrates, had their headwaters in the river which flowed through the Garden of Eden, in modern geography, the rivers we know as the Euphrates and the Tigris have separate headwaters and join together shortly before entering the Persian Gulf.  Now, it is worth noting that the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers are very close to each other, even though the rivers go in remarkably different directions for most of their length.  What struck me about the other two rivers is that the words used for the places they are described as flowing through describe places in Africa where those words are used elsewhere in the Bible.  Perhaps as importantly, the Hebrew word here which is translated as “Tigris” only appears twice in the Bible: once here and once in the Book of Daniel.   As I looked at this, it occurred to me (and I found several references online where others had the same thought) that perhaps these four rivers represented the four rivers where the earliest human civilization arose: the Yellow River in China, the Indus River in India, the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia, and the Nile River in Egypt.  The other thing which occurred to me is that the geography of the world would have been massively changed by an event like Noah’s Flood.  Going along with that thought was the recollection that modern geological science postulates that at one time in the distant past the positioning of Africa relative to Europe and Asia was massively different.  When I started writing this paragraph there was a meaning which connected my thoughts in these two paragraphs which I intended to conclude with.  Unfortunately, I have forgotten what that thought was.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

January 1, 2021 Bible Study The Original Sin: Not Being Satisfied With The Way In Which God Made Us

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 1-3. When I started this blog I initially decided to use the New Living Translation(NLT) for various reasons.  The reason which continued to apply was that, because it was a translation I had not used in any other setting, it provided me with a fresh look at the passages.  I realized during the last year that I have been using the NLT for this blog for so long that it no longer lets me see the passages from a fresh perspective.  SO, I decided that come the new year, which has now come, I would switch to using the NIV, which overall I prefer to other translations.

I am not quite sure where I am going with this, but I think I see a message for us from bits from each of the two creation stories and the story of the Fall.  In the first of the two creation stories (which I believe to be two different perspectives on Creation, not competing and contradictory stories), we learn that God created mankind in His image, and as male and female.  I think it is telling that the composer of this story included the idea that God made mankind male and female in the part where we are told that God created mankind in His image.  Then, in the second creation story, after Adam has reviewed all of the animals and found none of them a suitable partner, God makes a woman from one of Adam’s ribs.  The primary point of this part of this story being that Adam and Eve were one.  The writer editorializes that this is why a man leaves his mother and father and is joined with his wife.  This passage is the foundation of marriage.

Finally we come to the story of the Fall.  Adam and Eve sinned because they were not content to be as God had created them.  The serpent convinced them that if they ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they would be better than they were as God had created them.  This was their sin, they thought that God had not gotten it right and that they could do it better,  I think if you look around you can see how people today still think that God did not get it right and that they can improve on how He has made them.

January 1, 2020 Bible Study — Original Sin

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.  

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 1-3.

And a new year begins.  I want to begin with a thought experiment I have referred to parts of from time to time.  Let us assume that God as described in the Old Testament exists (I may talk about if and how the New Testament changes our understanding of God later).  So, this God created the Universe and everything in it and takes a personal interest in humans.  And that interest is not just in humans in general, or just a few humans, but each and every human.  I will expand on this as we go along (unless God directs my thoughts in another direction).

Which brings us to my understanding of today’s passage and what I think it means for us.  Part of the above assumption means that God could communicate to humans what happened that they had not witnessed.  However, nothing in my understanding of God suggests that He had any reason for humans to know in detail what happened before He created them.  So, there is no reason to expect that the description of what happened before the creation of human beings is correct in the details.  But there are a couple of things to take from it.  Entropy and death happen because of mankind’s sin.  And what was that sin?  The desire to know the difference between good and evil so as to be like God.  Ultimately all sins come down to attempts to substitute ourselves, or our desires. for God. 

January 1, 2019 Bible Study

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Happy New Year!

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 1-3.

There are three stories in today’s passage: two different, unrelated, stories about creation and one story about original sin.  The first story contains a few points that I want to bring out today.  God made mankind in His own image.  We were given the ability to be more than slaves to our physical wants and needs.  As part of that, He gave us dominion over the rest of Creation.  That does not mean that we may destroy and kil purely for our own enjoyment.  Instead, God gave us dominion over the earth in order to manage it and care for it.  Just as God tells us that the job of being a leader of people is to serve the needs of those being lead, so having dominion over the earth means serving the interests of those things over which we have dominion (what that means is more involved than I want to go into at this time).  The final point I want to mention is that this first story of creation establishes the week as the basis for scheduling human activity and the fact that we need one day of rest out of seven.

The second story of creation is about the creation of humankind. We can discuss the meanings of the elements of this story in many ways. However, I believe that the most important meaning from this story is that men and women were created to be complimentary to each other and that marriage was created by God as a unique kind of partnership between a man and a woman. The nature of this unique partnership stems from the distinct differences between men and women. I think that I am on solid ground drawing this conclusion, since Jesus Himself referenced this passage when discussing marriage and divorce.

The third story is directly connected to the second story and may not truly be a separate story, but it makes a separate point. In this story, when Adam and Eve sinned, God did not reject them, they withdrew from God. God came looking for them as He had every previous day, but this time they hid from Him. God still comes looking for us, because of our sin our natural reaction is to hide from God. Just as God made clothes to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness, so He sent Jesus to cover our sin. If we accept the covering which God has given us we can walk with Him once more.

January 1, 2018 Bible Study — Don’t Fall For Straw Man Arguments

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 1-3.

    As I read the account of creation I struggle with reconciling it with scientific knowledge. There are two reasons for this. First, the language used here is much more figurative than a modern writer would use to describe the same events. Second, a lot of “scientific knowledge” is built on things which were “learned” when the assumptions made by those who discovered the “knowledge” were things which we now know to be completely false (Darwin lived at a time when most atheists believed that the universe had no beginning but had always existed). Ultimately for me, my understanding of creation relies on two things. The scientific interpretation of how the world began rests on the assumption that there is no God, so there must be some other explanation for how the universe came to be. In other passages the Bible clearly teaches that death entered the world when Adam sinned. As a result, I find that this account is more useful in living my life than that which is put forth by “Science”.

    I find the account of the first sin to be the most instructive part of today’s passage, and a great way to start the year. My focus today is on something I do not recall anyone teaching on this passage mentioning. The serpent started his attempt to seduce Eve into sin with a straw man argument. As a result he set the stage for Eve (and Adam, who we are told a few verses later was right beside her) to think that God’s commands were unreasonable. The serpent’s opening statement was, “Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?” Well, we know full well that God said no such thing. Indeed, God had said that they could freely eat the fruit of every tree in the Garden, except for one. And Eve did indeed tell the serpent that. But by making his opening argument the serpent had planted the idea that God’s command might not be in the best interest of Adam and Eve. Which is the basis for his very next argument.

    The serpent made the argument that God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to keep them from becoming as powerful as He was. The serpent claimed that God gave that commandment in order to oppress them. Eve saw that the forbidden fruit looked good and accepted the serpent’s argument. It is worth noting that Adam was standing right next to her and did not come to God’s defense. Further, it never occurred to Adam or Eve to take the serpent’s argument to God and ask Him for a response. Adam and Eve accepted the serpent’s argument that eating the fruit would make them like God and never considered that that might not be a good thing, nor did they consider whether it was true. They never considered that having knowledge of evil served no useful purpose. Until they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they did not need to know how to tell right from wrong because they did not know how to do wrong.