It’s important to let the words of the Bible speak for
themselves; to read and study it outside of a dogmatic (meaning holding certain
principles as incontrovertibly true) perspective, otherwise you may be adding
bias. Christianity has certain foundational beliefs that influence how a
christian perceives what s/he reads, even what s/he considers ‘the
Bible’. Judaism does too. Even humanism and atheism can be
dogmatic, as they also include a bias.
It’s really hard to read without a bias! It’s pretty
much human nature to want to believe we have things quite figured out, and so
we tend to read looking more for confirmation for our own beliefs, than reading
to discover.
Here are some things I’ve discovered in my own study, that I
didn’t know before:
Genesis 1 doesn’t actually say that God created the world
out of nothing. It uses language to say
he ‘formed and filled’ a shapeless mass. It neither says God made the
original mass … nor does it say he doesn’t. Its focus is instead that
God’s word (think ‘law’) caused actions, which made something formerly without
use or purpose … useful and purposeful. It can be seen as a teaching that
this is what mankind (who carries the ‘image’ of God) is also to do … to act
according to God’s word, to ‘cultivate’ what was received, to keep and maintain
it, to bring out its purpose.
These first few chapters of Genesis also teach that God
gives freedom (you may eat of any tree in the garden…this included the ‘tree of
life) yet within boundaries (but not of the tree that is in the middle of the
garden). This wasn’t a hard thing to do. It didn’t require ‘faith’
or ‘belief’ it required trust that God meant what he said, the kind of trust
that would result in an action of voluntarily remaining within the boundary.
The ‘six days work, seventh day rest’ is also a boundary, this one on time and
authourity.
It’s not hard to understand, in looking around us at
creation, that we didn’t make it; that instead we received it. It came
from outside us. In reading through history, there are no claims that mankind
or any other creature created itself or anything else. Neither historical
or current evidence offers anything different.
The idea that creation ‘evolved’ through a process requires too
much blind faith, faith that isn’t supported by evidence. If someone
leaves a mess in a room, even many years later, it’s still a mess in a
room. What is in the room is more likely to have ‘devolved’ into more
basic components than ‘evolved’ into something greater. It requires even
blinder faith to believe that somehow a process of ‘evolution’ also just
happened to end up with a creation that works together so marvelously. And not
only works together, but acts according to some sort of pattern, some sort of
predetermined order. There is significant and logical evidence for a Creator.
So what’s written in these first few chapters of Genesis as
a ‘given’ makes logical sense. A power (an ‘el’ in Hebrew, a mighty one)
formed and filled and ordered things to run the way they do, according to a
planned purpose. To me, this makes the most sense, that this writing is
referring to that mighty power outside ‘us’, outside even the universe (as even
the universe is subject to it). One way to understand these chapters is
to see the point primarily as being to introduce the order of creation, the purpose within which things are intended to
be managed.
Mankind is intended to be the ruler of creation, as the ‘el’
is the ruler of mankind. If the purpose of the el is to produce, to
cultivate and to enhance, to manage benevolently, then this should be the
purpose of mankind.
But there is a choice given to humanity, that isn’t given to
any of the other creatures. This choice is to willingly submit to this
order … or not to. Consequences are given for both actions. ‘You
shall surely die’ if you turn away. And instead of trusting the el,
humanity trusted in the interpretation of a created being. And they
‘died’. More on that in the next post…
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