Chad Bird Hitch Hiking with the Profits Chpt 1

English Standard Version Chapter 1

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Chapter 1 Humanity’s Mom and Dad Warning: we’re starting our journey a bit awkwardly. In the front seat are humanity’s mom and dad—and they’re both in their birthday suits. Strange, I know, but that’s how our story begins. So, climb into the back seat, avert your eyes, and just listen. We’ve got a vast territory to cover in a short amount of time, all the way from a garden paradise to the east of Eden, past a cemetery full of graves. And along the way, a bright light of hope begins to shine. Welcome to where it all began: Genesis 1-5. At the beginning of the Bible’s story, we meet a Father who never tires of handing out gifts to us, his children. He’s giving us a wide world that he built and a specific garden that he planted. He’s giving the Pacific Ocean, ponderosa pines, the Milky Way, and hummingbirds. He is God the Giver to humanity the receiver. As he does so, he’s dotting his I’s and crossing his T’s, double-checking every tiny particle of creation, to make sure we have the perfect home to dwell with him. Because dwelling with him is what it’s all about. He is our Emmanuel, a Hebrew name that means “God with us.” And if God is with us, and we are with him, then that, my friends, is paradise come true. The opening chapter of Genesis is a day-by-day documentation of how the Lord is a builder, but a highly unusual one. He did not pull up early on a Saturday morning at the celestial Home Depot to purchase a truckload of earth, air, fire, and water to piece together a world. All he did was open his mouth.

“Let there be light,” he said, and light there was. “Let there be an expanse,” he said, and an expanse there was. Words alone were his tools. He spoke everything into existence. And this is not a one-off thing with him. It’s God’s ongoing mode of operation. He speaks, stuff happens. We learn something vital from this: the origin of everything not-God was, and still is, the word of the Father. Or, to be more precise, the Word of the Father. For, as the story rolls on, we will see that his capital “W” Word is not a mere vocable; the Word is the Son of the Father. One of Christ’s first followers, John, will tell us about this Son by hearkening back to Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word [Jesus] was God” (John 1:1). Therefore, in the beginning was the Father, with his Son and Holy Spirit, creating the heavens and the earth. We describe our world as a planet, but for the people of the Old Testament, it was envisioned as a big temple. God makes it, organizes it, and furnishes it for his habitation. Temples are carefully structured spaces, where everything and everyone has a place and function. That’s what is happening in Genesis as the Lord creates, divides, forms, and fashions water, dry land, heavenly lights, plants and trees, and finally animals and humans. The Lord is meticulous about everything, but in a healthy way. He’s not slapping something together, higgledy-piggledy. He’s precise. He’s exact. And he’s pleased with his work, for seven times he applauds it as “good” and “very good.” After six days of putting together this world, crafting his cosmic temple, the Lord rests on the seventh day. In other words, he moves in. Home sweet home. Every temple has its priests, who offer sacrifices, pray, work, and serve as guardians of the holy things of God. Our world was—and still is—no different. The first two priests were a man and a woman whom the Lord made on Friday, day six of creation.

They were like the rest of the world, in that the Lord brought them into being, but they were also unlike the rest of the world. We humans are part heaven and part earth, you might say. We bridge the gap between God and everything else. How so? Adam was made from the soil and Eve from his side, but of them the Lord said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Gen. 1:26). Nothing else in all creation was made in God’s image and likeness, creatures who mirror the Creator, his walking and talking icons in this world.

We are not biological products of evolution, souls trapped in a “bag of flesh,” or one more cog in the machine of a cosmos where we are ultimately no more important than a snail or microorganism. Humans are priestly kings and queens who simultaneously serve the Lord in this worldly temple and have dominion over all other creatures. After this panoramic view of creation, we step into a unique place in this world named Eden. This is a mountaintop area, the peak of which is a garden paradise. Animals frolic about. Fruit trees decorate the soil. And the waters of a river ripple outward and downward, dividing into four streams that bathe the rest of the world with the vitality of Eden. Here the Lord places his male priest called Adam and his female priest called Eve. If the world is a temple, then this garden is the Most Holy Place in this temple, for here the Lord walks about with his children. All is well. God dwells with the father and mother of humanity.

The world is as it should be. They are as they should be. Adam and Eve have two main jobs. In Hebrew, these duties are to avad and shamar (Gen. 2:15). The verb avad is a multifaceted word. It means to work,

serve, and worship. They will work the ground as farmers. Serve the Lord as his priests. Worship him as their God. The verb shamar means to watch, guard, and keep. Later in the biblical story, when the Lord has Israel make a tabernacle, and still later the temple, the priests shamar these sanctuaries to make sure nothing unclean enters the sacred space. Adam and Eve are thus the guardians of this mountain paradise. In freedom, this husband and wife can work, play, worship, make love, raise families, and expand the borders of Eden as the human family grows. To sustain their ongoing life, they can eat the fruit from one special tree called “the tree of life.” From another tree, called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” they are never to eat. It’s the only “No” that God gives them. As their Creator, he alone determines what is good and bad for them. There is no ethical system of rights and wrongs. And there certainly is no humanly devised morality by which Adam and Eve decide what is best for themselves. What is best for them is to live in the love, freedom, and joy of the Father. That is how they continue to flourish as human beings. This flourishing, however, soon gave way to floundering and falling. We don’t know how soon things fell apart. Hours? Days? Weeks? Whenever it happened, the train wreck of humanity was immediate, catastrophic, and ongoing. A serpent, whom the Bible later tells us was a rebel angel named Satan, tempted Eve. He lured her to question whether what God had said to her was true. What’s more, he depicted the Lord as miserly, a divine Scrooge who was holding out on them, keeping them back from the humans they could be. In response to this twofold temptation—to ditch God’s word and to doubt his lavish love—Eve sank her teeth into the forbidden fruit. Adam soon followed suit, and before that food was digested, the entire creation died a death that is still an ongoing demise today. We inhabit a dying world. The aftermath of this first human rebellion against our Creator was the shattering of peace and perfection. Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall of Eden, and we all know how that story ends. In the coming chapters, we will occasionally note how the Lord did a hard reset of creation, but each time the cracks in the soul of humanity began to show immediately. Only at the end of the story will there be a true and lasting new beginning in Christ. With a lost Eden in our rearview mirror, driving forward into human history, we can confidently say that everything from tsunamis to suicides, from divorces to overdoses, from droughts to birth pangs, has the DNA of Genesis 3 all over it. Adam and Eve were booted out of paradise to fight stubborn soil and to eke out a life in a land that now seemed to be thumbing its nose at them. Making matters worse, there was no snail-paced descent into the darkened chaos of evil, for the very next chapter of human history has yellow crime scene tape wrapped all around it. In Genesis 4, Cain, the firstborn of Eve, murdered his younger brother, Abel. Man murders man. The soil, once a blessed gift to humanity, was stained with the lifeblood of a man. That fratricide is followed, in Genesis 5, with a genealogy, the sad refrain of which is “and he died…and he died…and he died.” Graves soon pockmarked the face of a once pristine and lovely world. The Lord of life, contrary to what he wanted, introduced death to humanity. Long after, the apostle Paul summed it up this way: “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). And those wages never go unpaid. Smack dab in the middle of this gloomy account of How Everything Got Totally Jacked Up, a dazzling beam of light did begin to shine. In fact, this light served as a tiny, unsetting sun of hope from generation to generation. Before the Lord exiled our parents from Eden, he spoke these words to the serpent: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel (Gen. 3:15). This curse upon the serpent was a blessing upon us. War had been declared. There would be enmity—hostile, deadly, ongoing battle—between those of God and those of the devil. But a day would come when the serpent would sink his fangs into the heel of a man who would simultaneously squash the head of that viper. Long after Eden, on a hill right outside Jerusalem, the Son of God and the offspring of Mary, Jesus, would die a cruel death upon the cross. But under his heel was the flattened, lifeless head of humanity’s ancient foe. The Lord would, in his own sweet and perfect time, set things right. That hope, like a vein of gold, can be traced all through the rest of the Old Testament story. And to the next chapter in that story, we now turn to hear about a floating Eden-Ark and its famous captain, Noah.