Having been introduced at the end of chapter 11, Abraham now steps centre stage. Except he's not called Abraham yet. He's just plain old Abram. And at the age of seventy-five, Abram is called to leave his country, his people and his family, and follow God to a new land. It must have been a terrifying prospect, but God never asks without giving something in return, and so He gives Abram His assurance. He promises that He will bless him and make him into a great nation, and bless all people on earth through him. (Make a note of that - all people. It was always God's plan to bless the Gentiles as well as the Jews.) So Abram faithfully packs up and leaves with his wife (Sarai), his nephew (Lot) and his entire household.
As Abram is travelling through the land of the Canaanites, God tells him that He will give the land to his offspring, "so he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him" (chapter 12, verse 7). Abram worshipped God where He saw Him and built an altar as a lasting reminder. Later on (chapter 13, verse 4) Abram returns to the altar and worships God there. It seems that worship was a central part of Abram's life, but is it the same for us? Do we remember to worship God where we see Him? Do we leave reminders for ourselves and signs for others? Do we revisit important moments in our walk with God and thank Him for them? Something to think about, maybe.
But back to the story. Before Abram returns to the altar he has a slight detour into Egypt, where he pretends that Sarai is his sister so that the Egyptians will treat him well instead of killing him in order to get her. It seems to work and Pharaoh takes Sarai into his palace and gives Abram all sorts of animals and servants, but God clearly isn't too happy about the situation and so He strikes Pharaoh and his household down with unspecified serious diseases. When Pharaoh realises that Abram and Sarai have lied to him, he is understandably annoyed and orders them to leave the country. No serious harm is done to the pair, but I should imagine they wouldn't be welcome in Egypt again. Abram only lied to protect himself, but it still lead to trouble. A sin is a sin no matter what the reason - the end does not justify the means.
Having left Egypt and revisited the altar, Abram and Lot decide to go their separate ways in order to ensure they have enough space and to prevent conflict between their households. Abram lets Lot choose which direction he wants to head in, and he selfishly chooses the fertile looking valley of Jordan. At this point he probably thinks he's got it made, but that plan backfires when he gets caught up in a war between various kings, and Abram has to rescue him when he is carried off by the victors. It just goes to show, appearances can be deceptive.
It also shows just how little changes. Kings united in order to fight other kings, a war motivated by a greedy desire for power and land, innocent civilians caught up in it all...it all sounds depressingly familiar, doesn't it? It seems that human nature leads generation after generation into violence and destruction. But that is only our fallen nature. We were not designed to be like this, and so there is hope if we can get back to that original design. If only there were a 'restore factory settings' button, it would be so much easier. But there isn't, so we must do it the long way - we must work at it.
In chapter 15, God makes a covenant with Abram. This comes in two parts - firstly, He promises Abram that his descendants will be as many as the stars in the sky; and secondly, He promises that He will give the land He marks out to Abram's descendants. He even gives Abram a miraculous sign so that he may know that His word is true, like putting His seal on a document or His signature on a contract. God has already made a covenant with all of mankind, but He still makes covenants with us as individuals. Our relationship with God may not be exclusive, but it is still personal.
At the point at which this covenant is made, Abram is eighty-six and childless. If his descendants are going to be as numerous as the stars in the sky, he needs to work fast. Sarai appears to be unable to conceive, so she decides to speed things up by giving Abram her servant, Hagar, who soon falls pregnant. Despite this being the aim of the exercise, it makes things rather awkward between Sarai and Hagar, and so Sarai ill-treats her until she runs away, but the Angel of the Lord finds her and sends her back to Sarai. She runs, and God chases after her. How awesome is that? Hagar's response is to call God "the God who sees me" - she gives Him a new name because she suddenly knows Him in a different way. There are so many different aspects to God and we can all know Him in our own way, and we'll know Him in different ways at different times in our lives.
And so Hagar gives birth to a son, Ishmael, and God renews His covenant with Abram. He repeats the promises He made before, and just as Hagar gave God a new name because she has seen a new side to him, so God gives Abram and Sarai new names - from now on they will be Abraham and Sarah, because they have entered a new stage of their lives. He also introduces Abraham's side of the covenant - he and all of his males descendants must be circumcised, and anyone who does not do so will be cut off from his people. This isn't God being petty. He's not saying "you have to be nice to me or I won't be nice to you", He's saying "I need to know you're as dedicated to me as I am to you". And I think that's only fair.
Genesis 17 ends with God promising Abraham that Sarah, his ninety year old seemingly barren wife, will bear him a child. It's no surprise that he fell on his face laughing. It must have seemed ridiculous. But something in Abraham must have believed Him because that very day, he and all the males of his household were circumcised. Abraham held up his end of the bargain, trusting that God would do the same. Do we have that same faith? Or do we wait for God to do something for us before we will do something for Him, just to make sure?
Friday 30 July 2010
Thursday 29 July 2010
Genesis 10-11 - The Table of Nations and the Tower of Babel
The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 is an account of the sons of Noah, listed according to their "clans and languages, in their territories and nations" (verse 4). This then is the beginning of the division and organisation of the human race. The beginning of civilisation. Simple really, but one does wonder where all these people came from. Many people have commented on the implied incest here - after the flood, only eight people remained to repopulate the earth, four of whom were blood relations - but there would have been no need to marry closer than cousins. That may sound wrong, but it was allowed by Jewish law and is in fact still legal in most countries. And anthropological studies suggest that the founding population of humanity was relatively small, and so some inbreeding would have been necessary. So it does work. Sort of.
But it's interesting that even as humanity began to divide itself into clans and nations, interbreeding would have meant that they were all still pretty closely related. It just goes to show how arbitrary these distinctions were. Still are, if you ask me.
I'll be honest here. I always used to hate passages like this - they were just long lists of unpronounceable names - but it strikes me now that each one of those names represents a life. We may not know much about these people, but we know they existed. And that means they lived and loved and laughed. The pages of the Bible are bristling with life. Quite thrilling.
But onto Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel. This story presumably took place during the time of the sons of the sons of Noah, because it explains why they split into their separate "clans and languages". It all starts when men begin to work together to build a city with a tower in order to "make a name" for themselves (verse 20). People often talk about how the men who built the tower wanted to be gods, but that is not their express intent. I don't think they were trying to be God, I think the real problem was that they were trying to be great without God. The tower was their own idea built for their own glory.
When God saw this, and realised that while men worked together there was nothing they could not accomplish, he decided to "confuse their languages" and scatter them across the face of the earth. I don't believe He did that to stop us achieving anything, I believe He did it to stop us achieving everything. Why? Because not everything is right or good for us. And in an age where progress appears to have increased at an exponential rate and everything seems possible, it's an important lesson. Improved communications and the spread of the English language mean that we are close to having a common speech again, and people are working together across national boundaries to build new towers of science and medicine and technology. That sense of global community is fantastic, and there are people doing some incredible things, but we must careful that we do not cross the boundaries of what is right and good, and to do that we must involve God at every step.
Genesis 11 ends with a more detailed account of the line of Shem as far as Abram, whose story will be the focus of my next few blogs.
But it's interesting that even as humanity began to divide itself into clans and nations, interbreeding would have meant that they were all still pretty closely related. It just goes to show how arbitrary these distinctions were. Still are, if you ask me.
I'll be honest here. I always used to hate passages like this - they were just long lists of unpronounceable names - but it strikes me now that each one of those names represents a life. We may not know much about these people, but we know they existed. And that means they lived and loved and laughed. The pages of the Bible are bristling with life. Quite thrilling.
But onto Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel. This story presumably took place during the time of the sons of the sons of Noah, because it explains why they split into their separate "clans and languages". It all starts when men begin to work together to build a city with a tower in order to "make a name" for themselves (verse 20). People often talk about how the men who built the tower wanted to be gods, but that is not their express intent. I don't think they were trying to be God, I think the real problem was that they were trying to be great without God. The tower was their own idea built for their own glory.
When God saw this, and realised that while men worked together there was nothing they could not accomplish, he decided to "confuse their languages" and scatter them across the face of the earth. I don't believe He did that to stop us achieving anything, I believe He did it to stop us achieving everything. Why? Because not everything is right or good for us. And in an age where progress appears to have increased at an exponential rate and everything seems possible, it's an important lesson. Improved communications and the spread of the English language mean that we are close to having a common speech again, and people are working together across national boundaries to build new towers of science and medicine and technology. That sense of global community is fantastic, and there are people doing some incredible things, but we must careful that we do not cross the boundaries of what is right and good, and to do that we must involve God at every step.
Genesis 11 ends with a more detailed account of the line of Shem as far as Abram, whose story will be the focus of my next few blogs.
Wednesday 28 July 2010
Genesis 6-9 - Noah and the Flood
Genesis 6 begins with a mystery. It tells of how the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and took them to be their wives. But who are the sons of God? Angels? Fallen angels? Sons of Seth? Kings? And who are the daughters of men? Mortal women? Daughters of Cain? There are countless theories but nobody knows for sure, and at this remove it's unlikely we'll find out. Maybe we should just enjoy speculating.
This chapter also contains references to giants and "heroes of old, men of renown". Maybe this means there is some truth in the myths and legends of ancient and classical civilisations. Maybe there really were monsters and warriors once upon a time. How exciting!
Genesis 6 then moves on to tell of how the world had become corrupt and the people wicked. God saw this and "His heart was filled with pain". Another translation says "It broke His heart". It's sometimes easy to forget that God has feelings too, but He does. We were created in His image, and so we only have feelings because He had them first. Maybe if we stop seeing him as a detached emotionless being and start trying to understand his character, we can start to have more meaningful relationship with Him. And maybe if we think about how our actions pain him, we might behave a little better.
Having seen how wicked His creations have become, God begins to regret having made them. Being God, He can do something about that, so He decides to destroy all of humanity and the birds and beasts alongside them. I'm not sure what the animals had done, but the author of Genesis is at great pains to point out that "every inclination of the thoughts of [man's] heart was only evil all the time" and that "all the people on earth had corrupted their ways", with the exception of the righteous Noah who was spared. God didn't wipe out humanity for the sake of a few bad eggs, and He didn't kill the innocent - He destroyed only those who had sinned. For the wages of sin are death, right? God is just, and sometimes that may seem harsh, but it is not cruel or arbitrary.
So, God decides to destroy the earth with a flood, presumably because the earth was covered in water before the creation, and so a flood would symbolise a rebirth or a fresh start. He tells Noah and His family to build an ark big enough to hold his family and one pair (or seven pairs - I'll come to that later) of each living thing, so that they can repopulate the earth afterwards. God gives Noah some pretty detailed instructions as to how to build this boat - type of wood, dimensions, number of floors etc. According to those who know more about shipbuilding than I, an ark built to those instructions would be seaworthy, and modern ship are still built to similar ratios. God doesn't tell us to do something and then just leave us to muddle through on our own. He gives us guidance and support, and it's worth listening because His ideas really work.
I said I'd come back to the one pair/seven pairs thing. God tells Noah to take one pair of every clean animal, and seven (presumably seven pairs) of every clean animal. This struck me as odd because the laws about cleanliness aren't found until a fair bit later on in the Bible. So is the instruction about clean animals an anachronism, proof that the story was written centuries after it was supposed to have happened? Is it a later addition to the text, inserted to give a sense of continuity to Jewish history? Does it matter if it is inaccurate, or is the message more important than the facts? Or does this mean that the laws were actually set up much much earlier than we think, but just not recorded until Moses' time? So many questions.
Anyway, Noah builds the ark as per instruction, and gathers his family and the appropriate animals onto it just in time for the rising of the flood. It's a good job he was so obedient, or none of us would be here. Just one man changing the entire course of human history. It's a powerful idea, isn't it?
Noah and co were on the ark for nearly a year. That must have tested his endurance and his patience somewhat. There must have been times when he wondered if God had forgotten about him and was going to leave him floating there forever. But I guess there wasn't much he could do about it, so he just kept floating. Maybe there's a lesson in there. When things get tough, just keep floating.
When the flood waters do eventually recede and Noah finally stands on dry land again, the first thing he does is build an altar and make a sacrifice. His first action, his immediate response, is to thank God. That's why God saved him. Because his heart was in the right place and he had his priorities sorted. So many times something good happens and it's six hours or two days or a week before I remember to thank God for it, but I want to be more like Noah. I want gratitude and praise to be a reflex.
So Noah thanks God, and God responds with a promise. "Never again will I curse the ground because of man even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood" (chapter 8, verse 21). God knows that man hasn't changed. He knows we'll screw up again and again and again, yet He still makes that promise. He knows that we'll break His heart and He'll have the power to exact the perfect revenge, but He chooses not to use that power. God is not good simply because that's who He is - He's God, He can do anything and be anything He likes - He's good because He chooses to be. And the only thing that can explain it is that He loves us. That much. It's just mindblowing.
And that promise is the beginning of a covenant between man and God. Because the covenant is an agreement, not a rulebook. It's easy to focus on the law and see the covenant as nothing more than an oppressive list of dos and don'ts, but God promises far more than He asks, and His promises come first. We need to celebrate those promises and hold onto them as our asurance. The covenant isn't mean to be a burden, it should be a joy.
So if God's side of the agreement begins with a promise not to destroy the earth, what about man's? Well, God gives two commandments - don't eat meat with blood in it, and all blood must be accounted for. (He also says go forth and multiply, but that one's just common sense really.) I'm not entirely sure why eating bloody meat was so bad. Maybe it was to separate us from the animals, or maybe it's just because blood is so precious to God. It's clearly important because it is by the blood of Christ that we are saved. The second command, about accounting for blood, basically means that if you kill you will be killed. I think this was maybe more about preventing murder than avenging it. God had promised not to destroy life, so it's only fair that He should expect us to do the same.
Chapter 9 ends with Noah getting drunk and then cursing one of his sons for mocking him. Which just goes to show the Bible has its fair share of random.
This chapter also contains references to giants and "heroes of old, men of renown". Maybe this means there is some truth in the myths and legends of ancient and classical civilisations. Maybe there really were monsters and warriors once upon a time. How exciting!
Genesis 6 then moves on to tell of how the world had become corrupt and the people wicked. God saw this and "His heart was filled with pain". Another translation says "It broke His heart". It's sometimes easy to forget that God has feelings too, but He does. We were created in His image, and so we only have feelings because He had them first. Maybe if we stop seeing him as a detached emotionless being and start trying to understand his character, we can start to have more meaningful relationship with Him. And maybe if we think about how our actions pain him, we might behave a little better.
Having seen how wicked His creations have become, God begins to regret having made them. Being God, He can do something about that, so He decides to destroy all of humanity and the birds and beasts alongside them. I'm not sure what the animals had done, but the author of Genesis is at great pains to point out that "every inclination of the thoughts of [man's] heart was only evil all the time" and that "all the people on earth had corrupted their ways", with the exception of the righteous Noah who was spared. God didn't wipe out humanity for the sake of a few bad eggs, and He didn't kill the innocent - He destroyed only those who had sinned. For the wages of sin are death, right? God is just, and sometimes that may seem harsh, but it is not cruel or arbitrary.
So, God decides to destroy the earth with a flood, presumably because the earth was covered in water before the creation, and so a flood would symbolise a rebirth or a fresh start. He tells Noah and His family to build an ark big enough to hold his family and one pair (or seven pairs - I'll come to that later) of each living thing, so that they can repopulate the earth afterwards. God gives Noah some pretty detailed instructions as to how to build this boat - type of wood, dimensions, number of floors etc. According to those who know more about shipbuilding than I, an ark built to those instructions would be seaworthy, and modern ship are still built to similar ratios. God doesn't tell us to do something and then just leave us to muddle through on our own. He gives us guidance and support, and it's worth listening because His ideas really work.
I said I'd come back to the one pair/seven pairs thing. God tells Noah to take one pair of every clean animal, and seven (presumably seven pairs) of every clean animal. This struck me as odd because the laws about cleanliness aren't found until a fair bit later on in the Bible. So is the instruction about clean animals an anachronism, proof that the story was written centuries after it was supposed to have happened? Is it a later addition to the text, inserted to give a sense of continuity to Jewish history? Does it matter if it is inaccurate, or is the message more important than the facts? Or does this mean that the laws were actually set up much much earlier than we think, but just not recorded until Moses' time? So many questions.
Anyway, Noah builds the ark as per instruction, and gathers his family and the appropriate animals onto it just in time for the rising of the flood. It's a good job he was so obedient, or none of us would be here. Just one man changing the entire course of human history. It's a powerful idea, isn't it?
Noah and co were on the ark for nearly a year. That must have tested his endurance and his patience somewhat. There must have been times when he wondered if God had forgotten about him and was going to leave him floating there forever. But I guess there wasn't much he could do about it, so he just kept floating. Maybe there's a lesson in there. When things get tough, just keep floating.
When the flood waters do eventually recede and Noah finally stands on dry land again, the first thing he does is build an altar and make a sacrifice. His first action, his immediate response, is to thank God. That's why God saved him. Because his heart was in the right place and he had his priorities sorted. So many times something good happens and it's six hours or two days or a week before I remember to thank God for it, but I want to be more like Noah. I want gratitude and praise to be a reflex.
So Noah thanks God, and God responds with a promise. "Never again will I curse the ground because of man even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood" (chapter 8, verse 21). God knows that man hasn't changed. He knows we'll screw up again and again and again, yet He still makes that promise. He knows that we'll break His heart and He'll have the power to exact the perfect revenge, but He chooses not to use that power. God is not good simply because that's who He is - He's God, He can do anything and be anything He likes - He's good because He chooses to be. And the only thing that can explain it is that He loves us. That much. It's just mindblowing.
And that promise is the beginning of a covenant between man and God. Because the covenant is an agreement, not a rulebook. It's easy to focus on the law and see the covenant as nothing more than an oppressive list of dos and don'ts, but God promises far more than He asks, and His promises come first. We need to celebrate those promises and hold onto them as our asurance. The covenant isn't mean to be a burden, it should be a joy.
So if God's side of the agreement begins with a promise not to destroy the earth, what about man's? Well, God gives two commandments - don't eat meat with blood in it, and all blood must be accounted for. (He also says go forth and multiply, but that one's just common sense really.) I'm not entirely sure why eating bloody meat was so bad. Maybe it was to separate us from the animals, or maybe it's just because blood is so precious to God. It's clearly important because it is by the blood of Christ that we are saved. The second command, about accounting for blood, basically means that if you kill you will be killed. I think this was maybe more about preventing murder than avenging it. God had promised not to destroy life, so it's only fair that He should expect us to do the same.
Chapter 9 ends with Noah getting drunk and then cursing one of his sons for mocking him. Which just goes to show the Bible has its fair share of random.
Tuesday 27 July 2010
Genesis 1-5 - Creation and the First Family
The first thing that strikes me when reading Genesis is that there is no definitive creation story - chapters 1 and 2 actually give two slightly different accounts, with chapter 2 offering an alternative order of events and putting a greater emphasis on the creation of man. To my mind, the fact that there are two versions doesn't prove that the Bible is unreliable. It just shows that the opening chapters of Genesis were never intended to be history or science and so should never be read as such. They are stories and metaphors which tell deep and important truths, not hard cold facts. For the purposes of this blog, I will work on the understanding that they are God-inspired stories and I will take them and study them at face value in order to try and understand what God is saying through them.
It seems to me that the Genesis creation stories aren't really about how the universe was created. They're about why it was created. The author doesn't seem to be all that interested in the means by which God separates the waters and hung the stars and created the animals. There are no long-winded high-minded scientific-sounding explanations. God just goes ahead and does it. It's the one thing the two creation stories agree on. And that's what really matters - the fact that whatever went on in the beginning, God was behind it. The universe came into being because God willed it. Science and religion are often presented as being mutually exclusive, but I don't believe that's the case. Genesis leaves plenty of room for science to explain the how - all it wants is for us to accept the why.
Something I've often wondered about when reading Genesis 1, is the use of the word "good". At the end of each day, God looks at his work and says that it is good. He was obviously pleased with how things were going, but good is pretty low down on the scale of positive terms. Why didn't He say it was "excellent" or "awesome" or "absolutely ripping"? Is the writer just being temperate, or is good meant to carry its other connotation of morally correct or pure or right? Of course this is really a question of translation. What exactly does the original Hebrew word mean? Answers on a postcard. [EDIT It seems the original Hebrew word doesn't carry the same moral connotations as the English "good" - it roughly translates as beautiful or pleasant. Thanks to Daniel for his help on that one, although I don't know why I didn't just look it up in my dictionary in the first place. Call it a premature senior moment.]
While we're asking questions, Genesis 1:27 says that God made man and woman in his image, but what does that really mean? The obvious answer is that we're all created to be like God, but that only raises all sorts of new questions about who God is and how we can be like him. Such questions cannot be answered in a few simple answers but must instead be lived. I believe that the more I experience God, the closer I get to understanding what it means to be like him, and the more closely I resemble what an old minister used to call my "original and intended shape". There is however one question I would like to give a little thought to, and that's why we are not all the same if we were all made in God's image. I think mankind is perhaps a little like a hall of mirrors, each of us relecting a different image of the same original, and so being made in the image of God is about being like him not being like each other.
Chapters 2 and 3 tell the story of the temptation and fall of man. God tells his new creations that they may eat anything except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but of course they give in to temptation and eat the fruit anyway. I never really understood why the that knowledge was forbidden - surely we should know the difference so that we can avoid evil and choose good, I thought. But then I thought that maybe it is because we know about good and evil that we think we can differentiate between them and make our own judgements, and unfortunately we often get things wrong. Knowledge has led to pride and independence and confusion. Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were in a state of innocence where they relied on God for moral guidance, and that's where we need to get back to.
But why put temptation there in the first place? Maybe it was because God wanted Adam and Eve to choose to obey Him, and they could only choose obedience if there was a possibility of disobedience. God gave us free will, and that meant giving us choice - to follow Him or not. And He still gives us that choice.
It's maybe worth thinking a little about why Adam and Eve made the choice that they did. They ate the fruit of their own free will - it's not good trying to shift the blame - but it is clear that there was another influence involved. The serpent came to them and tempted them. He told them that God had lied and that if they ate the fruit they would not die, but instead they would become like Him. And they chose to believe him over God. Isn't that the reason for so many of our sins? God says one thing and the Devil says another, and we choose to believe the Devil because his seems the more attractive option. But as Adam and Eve soon find out, that's not the case. God speaks out of love and will only tell the truth, whereas the Devil speaks out of malice and with him there are always lies and hidden traps. Maybe we need to be aware of these opposing influences and take care as to who we choose to listen to.
As I'm sure will become evident, I care passionately about women's rights and am very interested in the what the Bible has to say about women, and there are a number of passages in Genesis that are particularly important in that respect. First, there is the creation of woman. In Genesis 1, woman appears to have been created alongside man and there is no distinction made between them apart from their gender. In Genesis 2, Adam is created first, but then because he is lonely and finds no companion among the animals, God makes Eve from one of Adam's ribs. God says He will make a "helper suitable for Adam", which makes Eve sound a bit like a skivvy, but I have looked into this one and if I'm reading my Hebrew dictionary right, the word used in the original Hebrew is to do with completion. Eve was made to complete Adam, and that in itself does not necessarily imply a difference in status. [EDIT It seems I looked up the cross-reference in the Greek section of my dictionary instead of the Hebrew section. Oops! The Hebrew actually translates as counterpoint or opposite. So Eve was made to complement Adam, not complete him, but that still doesn't imply a difference in status.]
In fact, there is no implied difference in status until chapter 3, where one of the consequences of the fall is that God appears to make women subservient to men - in verse 16, God tells Eve "your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you". However, it is interesting to note that God will, not shall. The difference may be slight but it is important. God is simply saying that it is going to happen, not commanding it. It was not His will. Also, the fact that male dominance was a consequence of the fall implies that it was not the case beforehand, i.e. male and female were created equal. That was how God designed us and so that is how we should be.
Just a few quick points now, related to specific verses. First, Genesis 3:21 is perhaps one of my favourite verses in the whole Bible. Adam and Eve have just done the one thing God told them not to do, and He has had to punish them for it, and yet we are told "The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them." He didn't leave them to it. He didn't even tell them how to make clothes for themselves. He actually made the clothes Himself and then dressed His children in them. Isn't that awesome? And we see the same thing a little later in the way that God protects Cain in his exile. Right at the beginning of human history we see that God is just, but He is also merciful.
Second, in Genesis 3:22, God says "they have become like us". Does that mean God is not unique? Are there other gods like him? [EDIT I should have pointed out in my original post that I do not believe this to be the case. However appealing a Norse or Greek-style pantheon may be, I believe in one God. At any rate, Judaism has always been defiantly monotheistic. So is God rather speaking of other spiritual beings such as angels?] Is it a reference to what we would call the Trinity? How like God are the other beings that form the "us"? Just a few things to ponder.
Chapter 4 finds Adam and Eve living outside of Eden and starting a family of their own. And it's not long before that goes wrong too, when Cain kills his brother Abel because He is angry that God favoured Abel's sacrifice and not his. But why did God praise one sacrifice above the other? Maybe because Cain gave some of his crops, whereas Abel gave the best of his livestock. God wants our best, and He knows when we don't give it.
Genesis 4:10 is one of those verses that really jumped out at me - "Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground". How the earth must scream. I found Genesis 4:26 interesting too. "At that time men began to call on the name of the Lord." Does that point to a time before religion? Is this the point at which formal religious practice began? Why did men not call on God before if Adam and Eve and their children had know Him so intimately? Were the stories before this point later inventions to explain the origins of man and his position in the world? Is this the point at which fable becomes history?
Genesis 5 is mostly genealogy, charting the father-son succession from Adam to Noah. However there is one point of interest - verse 3 says that Seth was born in the image of his father. So Adam was created in the image of God and then Seth was born in the image of Adam. That should mean that Seth was also the image of God, but by the time he was born, Adam had already sinned. He was no longer the perfect image of God, and so neither was Seth. I don't believe in original sin - we're not sinners until we've sinned - but I do think that we are influenced by our human ancestry. We are born in the image of man but we can be made again in the image of God.
It seems to me that the Genesis creation stories aren't really about how the universe was created. They're about why it was created. The author doesn't seem to be all that interested in the means by which God separates the waters and hung the stars and created the animals. There are no long-winded high-minded scientific-sounding explanations. God just goes ahead and does it. It's the one thing the two creation stories agree on. And that's what really matters - the fact that whatever went on in the beginning, God was behind it. The universe came into being because God willed it. Science and religion are often presented as being mutually exclusive, but I don't believe that's the case. Genesis leaves plenty of room for science to explain the how - all it wants is for us to accept the why.
Something I've often wondered about when reading Genesis 1, is the use of the word "good". At the end of each day, God looks at his work and says that it is good. He was obviously pleased with how things were going, but good is pretty low down on the scale of positive terms. Why didn't He say it was "excellent" or "awesome" or "absolutely ripping"? Is the writer just being temperate, or is good meant to carry its other connotation of morally correct or pure or right? Of course this is really a question of translation. What exactly does the original Hebrew word mean? Answers on a postcard. [EDIT It seems the original Hebrew word doesn't carry the same moral connotations as the English "good" - it roughly translates as beautiful or pleasant. Thanks to Daniel for his help on that one, although I don't know why I didn't just look it up in my dictionary in the first place. Call it a premature senior moment.]
While we're asking questions, Genesis 1:27 says that God made man and woman in his image, but what does that really mean? The obvious answer is that we're all created to be like God, but that only raises all sorts of new questions about who God is and how we can be like him. Such questions cannot be answered in a few simple answers but must instead be lived. I believe that the more I experience God, the closer I get to understanding what it means to be like him, and the more closely I resemble what an old minister used to call my "original and intended shape". There is however one question I would like to give a little thought to, and that's why we are not all the same if we were all made in God's image. I think mankind is perhaps a little like a hall of mirrors, each of us relecting a different image of the same original, and so being made in the image of God is about being like him not being like each other.
Chapters 2 and 3 tell the story of the temptation and fall of man. God tells his new creations that they may eat anything except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but of course they give in to temptation and eat the fruit anyway. I never really understood why the that knowledge was forbidden - surely we should know the difference so that we can avoid evil and choose good, I thought. But then I thought that maybe it is because we know about good and evil that we think we can differentiate between them and make our own judgements, and unfortunately we often get things wrong. Knowledge has led to pride and independence and confusion. Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were in a state of innocence where they relied on God for moral guidance, and that's where we need to get back to.
But why put temptation there in the first place? Maybe it was because God wanted Adam and Eve to choose to obey Him, and they could only choose obedience if there was a possibility of disobedience. God gave us free will, and that meant giving us choice - to follow Him or not. And He still gives us that choice.
It's maybe worth thinking a little about why Adam and Eve made the choice that they did. They ate the fruit of their own free will - it's not good trying to shift the blame - but it is clear that there was another influence involved. The serpent came to them and tempted them. He told them that God had lied and that if they ate the fruit they would not die, but instead they would become like Him. And they chose to believe him over God. Isn't that the reason for so many of our sins? God says one thing and the Devil says another, and we choose to believe the Devil because his seems the more attractive option. But as Adam and Eve soon find out, that's not the case. God speaks out of love and will only tell the truth, whereas the Devil speaks out of malice and with him there are always lies and hidden traps. Maybe we need to be aware of these opposing influences and take care as to who we choose to listen to.
As I'm sure will become evident, I care passionately about women's rights and am very interested in the what the Bible has to say about women, and there are a number of passages in Genesis that are particularly important in that respect. First, there is the creation of woman. In Genesis 1, woman appears to have been created alongside man and there is no distinction made between them apart from their gender. In Genesis 2, Adam is created first, but then because he is lonely and finds no companion among the animals, God makes Eve from one of Adam's ribs. God says He will make a "helper suitable for Adam", which makes Eve sound a bit like a skivvy, but I have looked into this one and if I'm reading my Hebrew dictionary right, the word used in the original Hebrew is to do with completion. Eve was made to complete Adam, and that in itself does not necessarily imply a difference in status. [EDIT It seems I looked up the cross-reference in the Greek section of my dictionary instead of the Hebrew section. Oops! The Hebrew actually translates as counterpoint or opposite. So Eve was made to complement Adam, not complete him, but that still doesn't imply a difference in status.]
In fact, there is no implied difference in status until chapter 3, where one of the consequences of the fall is that God appears to make women subservient to men - in verse 16, God tells Eve "your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you". However, it is interesting to note that God will, not shall. The difference may be slight but it is important. God is simply saying that it is going to happen, not commanding it. It was not His will. Also, the fact that male dominance was a consequence of the fall implies that it was not the case beforehand, i.e. male and female were created equal. That was how God designed us and so that is how we should be.
Just a few quick points now, related to specific verses. First, Genesis 3:21 is perhaps one of my favourite verses in the whole Bible. Adam and Eve have just done the one thing God told them not to do, and He has had to punish them for it, and yet we are told "The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them." He didn't leave them to it. He didn't even tell them how to make clothes for themselves. He actually made the clothes Himself and then dressed His children in them. Isn't that awesome? And we see the same thing a little later in the way that God protects Cain in his exile. Right at the beginning of human history we see that God is just, but He is also merciful.
Second, in Genesis 3:22, God says "they have become like us". Does that mean God is not unique? Are there other gods like him? [EDIT I should have pointed out in my original post that I do not believe this to be the case. However appealing a Norse or Greek-style pantheon may be, I believe in one God. At any rate, Judaism has always been defiantly monotheistic. So is God rather speaking of other spiritual beings such as angels?] Is it a reference to what we would call the Trinity? How like God are the other beings that form the "us"? Just a few things to ponder.
Chapter 4 finds Adam and Eve living outside of Eden and starting a family of their own. And it's not long before that goes wrong too, when Cain kills his brother Abel because He is angry that God favoured Abel's sacrifice and not his. But why did God praise one sacrifice above the other? Maybe because Cain gave some of his crops, whereas Abel gave the best of his livestock. God wants our best, and He knows when we don't give it.
Genesis 4:10 is one of those verses that really jumped out at me - "Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground". How the earth must scream. I found Genesis 4:26 interesting too. "At that time men began to call on the name of the Lord." Does that point to a time before religion? Is this the point at which formal religious practice began? Why did men not call on God before if Adam and Eve and their children had know Him so intimately? Were the stories before this point later inventions to explain the origins of man and his position in the world? Is this the point at which fable becomes history?
Genesis 5 is mostly genealogy, charting the father-son succession from Adam to Noah. However there is one point of interest - verse 3 says that Seth was born in the image of his father. So Adam was created in the image of God and then Seth was born in the image of Adam. That should mean that Seth was also the image of God, but by the time he was born, Adam had already sinned. He was no longer the perfect image of God, and so neither was Seth. I don't believe in original sin - we're not sinners until we've sinned - but I do think that we are influenced by our human ancestry. We are born in the image of man but we can be made again in the image of God.
Monday 26 July 2010
Welcome!
The Bible is not a short book. It's not a particularly easy one either. But it is an important one. It's history and law and poetry and prophesy and biography and philosophy and guidance. It's a record of the covenants forged between God and His people. And above all it's a revelation of the beautiful awesome glorious nature of God.
I want to learn more of Him from the old covenant, and I want to understand the new covenant better so I can celebrate His promises and live the kind of life He asks for in return, and so I've set myself a task. I'm going to read through the Bible - Genesis to Revelation - and I'm going to blog as I go in the hope that it will help me organise my thoughts and be a springboard for further thought and study.
This isn't going to be an exhaustive guide to the Bible, and I'm not trying to present myself as any sort of authority, this will just be a record of my own personal musings.
I would love for you to join me and share this journey with me, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and your wisdom and your questions, because I'm not going to figure this out all by myself. So pick up your Bibles, get reading and get commenting.
Well then, here we go. Welcome to The Covenant Project...
I want to learn more of Him from the old covenant, and I want to understand the new covenant better so I can celebrate His promises and live the kind of life He asks for in return, and so I've set myself a task. I'm going to read through the Bible - Genesis to Revelation - and I'm going to blog as I go in the hope that it will help me organise my thoughts and be a springboard for further thought and study.
This isn't going to be an exhaustive guide to the Bible, and I'm not trying to present myself as any sort of authority, this will just be a record of my own personal musings.
I would love for you to join me and share this journey with me, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and your wisdom and your questions, because I'm not going to figure this out all by myself. So pick up your Bibles, get reading and get commenting.
Well then, here we go. Welcome to The Covenant Project...
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