Dear friends,
One of the high points, if not the high point, of Genesis 1 is the creation of man, both male and female, in the image of God. There we are told of our responsibility to govern the earth, to multiply and to fill it. When we turn to chapter 2 of Genesis we are again told of the creation of man. This time it is in much more detail, and yet it still gives the same prominence and importance of man in God’s creation. Today’s podcast is a discussion of the movement of Genesis 1 to Gen 2 where we look at man in the garden.
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Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: We have been discussing the great matters of Genesis in the first couple of chapters. Today, we go further into chapter 2, looking at the man in the garden.
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Let's get back to man in the garden. We come to chapter 2, and we've got another creation story.
Peter Jensen: This has caused a fair bit of interest over the years because one way of thinking about it is to say that we have two different authors here. One author wrote chapter 1, and he had his version of the creation. Someone else wrote chapter 2, and he gives a different version of the creation of man. So, were they in conflict with each other? Were there different authors? In chapter 2, man was made from dust and woman later, whereas Genesis 1 says, "In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them". So is there conflict?
Phillip: I love watching sport. I was at the football the other day watching a game of footy, and I saw something really good, a great move. I immediately looked for an action replay, but then I was at the footy. There was no TV there. There was no replay possible. It struck me that we have culturally accepted that you can watch the same event, the same try, five times from five different angles. The fact that you have two accounts doesn’t mean there are two contradictory authors. Are they just different angle shots of the same event? I think we've got to look at Genesis 2 itself and work out what is going on.
Peter: Is it giving a more detailed account of what we read in Genesis 1, with fresh insights? Is Genesis 1 more or less like the headlines? That's the essence of the matter; now, here's what happened. Is that a fair way of putting it?
Phillip: Yes, Genesis 1 tells you man is created in the image of God; Genesis 2 tells you how man was created, presumably still in the image of God. We'd need to sort that out from the passage.
Peter: Genesis 1, male and female, he created them; Genesis 2, male.
Phillip: Yes, though by the end of Genesis 2, the two become one flesh, so the fact of male and female is there in Genesis 2; it just takes 30 verses to spell out what took one verse in the headline chapter. “Made from the dust of the earth", that's not in chapter 1, but you're not told in chapter 1 what we're made from. It is not in any way contradictory.
Peter: What do we learn further in Genesis 2 about what you may call the essence of our humanity? We read about this spirit of life that the Lord has blown into the nostrils of the man. There are all sorts of questions that arise from this, but let's start there.
Phillip: The life essence question is a very interesting one. That God could make from dust the human, yet the human still not be alive. And life is something external but placed internally into mankind, into humans. He makes living creatures. That's an extraordinary thing that God is able to do. But is the life he imparts to them his own life, the Spirit? I don't know. The word Spirit is the word “breath,” although this is a slightly different word, if I remember correctly from the Hebrew, but it certainly is that which enables this dust to now breathe is life, and that comes from God.
Peter: Does that mean that what God is infusing into the man at that point is a soul? I mean, if you think about it, perhaps when we die, our soul escapes from our body; our real essence is our soul. Is that the idea here?
Phillip: No, I don't think so in terms of the concept of humans being made up of different elements. The man is the man; the body is the creation. We are bodies that are breathing, that are living. We are not vases that contain a supernatural element to them. The pattern of language, especially in the New Testament—I haven't looked at it in the Old Testament carefully—but in the New Testament, the pattern of spirit, soul, body, and flesh is not a consistent technological phrase. Sometimes the soul is used interchangeably with spirit. But there is a sense in which there is the inside of us and the outside of us; I am a body, and I have the spirit. That is, I'm breathing. And when I cease to breathe, I'm dead. So when I give up my breath, when I give up my spirit, I die. In Matthew 10:28 Jesus said:
And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
I don't want to go to a tripartite man, but I don't want to go to epiphenomenalism that there is nothing other than my body either.
Peter: If you think of life after death, the Lord has created us as bodily creatures, and he intends to continue with us as bodily creatures. That is why we have a resurrection from the dead.
Phillip: Which is a resurrection of the body. In one creedal statement in the Anglican Prayer Book, in the baptism of adults, the Apostle's Creed says, “the resurrection of the flesh.” Generally, “flesh” is used in the New Testament in a negative sense, rather than just interchangeably with body, but sometimes it's just interchangeable. It certainly emphasizes the flesh, the carnality, the physicality of our existence. Therefore, to have eternal life without bodies would not be to have our eternal life.
Peter: 1 Corinthians 15 makes so much of the body and the resurrected body, and in the end says, in verse 49:
Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
That's an interesting contrast. Still man, still bodily, but now our dust father, who let us down a bit, his image goes, and it is replaced by the man from heaven, Jesus.
Phillip: It is this Genesis 2 reference to which it is making an allusion. We have got to take seriously what it is saying here. But do you think that we were born immortal?
Peter: I wouldn't use that language because I think of God as immortal, and I think he is the one true immortal. Were Adam and Eve destined to die at some point? Were they going to age? My own instinct is to say yes, but it's an instinct; I don't think I'm able to appeal to scripture here, but you have a slightly different view.
Phillip: It certainly was the plan and purposes of God that we would die and be resurrected so that death was always in the plans and purposes of God in creation, though that's not being said here particularly. There is a tree of life here to which they have access, and after they've fallen and are driven out of the garden to be kept from the tree of life because they're now dead. Death has now entered into their existence. But this is contrasted with Jesus. In John 5:26 we are told, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.” Jesus’ life was inherent in being God the Son. It is inherent in God, whereas it's not inherent in us. It is breathed into us in the first place and sustained by access to something external to us, the tree of life.
Peter: Even if you use the word immortal of Adam originally, it would be a dependent immortality as we know because it was removed as such. So human beings from the beginning have only had what we have because we're sustained in it by God.
Did Adam and Eve age?
Phillip: I don't know. Yes, they did, in that time continued, before leaving the garden, of course. But was their ageing like yours and mine, bagging, sagging, balding, and deteriorating? No, that's all part of death. That's all part of dying. Before eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, I don't think they're dying; they're living.
Peter: I sometimes wonder, if Adam had come to a cliff and fallen over it, would he have been injured? Is his life on earth, in the garden, admittedly, so real, so like ours, that those things would have happened? And if so, then what next? I think that when we ask such questions, we've got to recognize that the Bible is immensely selective. It only tells us what we need to know at this point. All our speculations are just that, speculations, and maybe as far removed from the truth as you could imagine.
Phillip: But what we need to know and what we are told is quite extensive. In what we're saying so far about immortality, we are denying a lot of Greek philosophy. We're denying Hinduism. We're denying Buddhism, all of which say we are spiritually immortal. We were before we were made and before we were born. We will be after we have died, and we will be in reincarnation. And so we are immortal. The Bible is saying that we have a beginning under the creation of God. And our life is, you said, dependent, contingent upon God's continuing to give us that life. It is something outside ourselves. When we come to death, then we come to the resurrection, which has to be of our body. It's not a karmic reincarnation. It's a resurrection of us that goes on into eternity because of God-given life, not because of an immortality of the soul.
Peter: So the great gift of this passage is to focus our attention on what really matters and not engage in some of the silly questions that I've been asking, but to focus our attention on what is the essence of the matter. And it does that very successfully, as you've just indicated.
Phillip: The essence of chapter 1 is that God made us to be in his image to have dominion over the world. In chapter 2, it is what man is set in the garden to do, to be the gardener, to look after God’s created order.
Peter: Which immediately makes nonsense of the idea that his subduing the earth and filling it is an exploitation of the world. Rather, he is to garden; he is to care for the earth. He is to eat its fruit. This is, if you like, the birth of agriculture in the very beginning. Work is not something that is a burden but something that is integral to the human condition. We were made to work; we were originally made to be farmers, looking after the world in which we find ourselves. Integral to humanity is the idea of work, which, by the way, I think we do also in eternal life; it is not just a matter of sitting around singing hymns, it's a matter of actually working under the Lordship of Christ in the new creation. However, returning to Genesis 2, work is integral to being human. The picture we have here is not of human beings on a perpetual holiday.
Phillip: We are in the image of God, who is a worker. He himself worked and rested from his labour, as we spoke of the other day. But he's a worker, so if you're going to be like God, you're going to be a worker. The work is in the garden, but the garden is not perfected. The garden needs maintenance. The garden needs tilling, caring for, and looking after. The creation in chapter 1 had to be subdued. The animals have to be subdued. What we have in Genesis 2 is “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work and keep it.”
The garden is beautiful. It is a wonderful garden. Paradise is what it is called. God made the trees beautiful. That's a fascinating phrase in itself. That the sense of beauty that we have is part of being like God. That beauty is a reality, not just in the eye of the beholder, because we are like God. But the animals are not seen to have that. The animals are not seen to be the workers. We may put the mule and the donkey to work, but the mule and the donkey do not by themselves work. No animal works. And they don't, as best we know, see beauty and analyse beauty in the way in which we see and analyse beauty. So, it is saying things about humans in the garden which are thoroughly consistent with chapter 1 but that are surprisingly illustrative or illuminating of what we are.
Peter: Now you've just said something that really requires attention. You've said what we are. And you're speaking to a retired gentleman living on his superannuation and free to travel the world and be on perpetual holiday. Is it part of the essence of humanity that we work? And if so, why aren't I digging roads?
Phillip: I'm glad you aren’t because you're not very good at that kind of thing. There are people that I think are better. Retirement is a strange perception of very wealthy people. To live for retirement is to take the day of rest a little too far. We should continue to work. Though the work we do gets limited in time by our physical strength with which to do it. And it is right to rejoice in the work that we have done. To sit under your own fig tree and to watch your grandchildren is a kind of imagery of heaven, which we have in the promised land. So it is not wrong to do it, but it is very wealthy.
Peter: By retirement, we mean retirement from the job or profession that has dominated a fair bit of our lives, both in preparation, say at university, and then all the decades in which we do such work. And so when we retire, we think we have retired from work. But what it really means is we've retired from that work. But it is an opportunity for us to do other work. I often think of the phrase in the New Testament about good works. In Ephesians 2:10
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Christine and I often pray that the Lord will help us to find and do the good works that God has prepared for us to walk in today. Our work may simply be to do the good works that God has called upon us to do, avoid being self-centred, and engage in love of neighbour. And even when, as sometimes happens, you are living in a nursing home and unable to leave your room without help, you can still work in the sense that you can still pray, and through your prayers, God does great things. And so we never cease to have the opportunity to work, though it's not remunerated.
Phillip: Remuneration is the key; people have defined work as that for which you get paid. When I think about a young mother with a baby, no one works harder. That is the hardest work that you possibly will ever do in your lifetime.
Peter: You should have twins.
Phillip: Yes, you did, didn't you? Yes, the first six weeks is survival, and yet, because unpaid, it's not considered to be work. That's a false view of work. We continue to labour, to work in all kinds of ways, whether we're remunerated or not. That's not what is being said by work, and thank you for drawing attention to the good works that God prepared beforehand for us to walk in. That’s still work, isn't it?
Peter: It is. Take one possibility: you can volunteer for things, which you can do free of charge if you have sufficient funds, with bodies like Anglicare and others that do very important work using the skills of a lifetime to do it, or with your local church. The possibilities for such are endless.
Phillip: Now after the fall, work does become hard, both the judgement that falls on the woman in terms of childbearing and the judgement that falls on man in terms of the sweat of the brow, because of the hostility of the environment outside the Garden of Eden that we live in. We have a few episodes of Two Ways News to come before we get to that stage. At this point I think we can rejoice in God's creation of us as the gardeners in his garden, as the workers.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this sermon by Phillip from a series on Genesis. It’s called The Promise of Humanity.
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