I suppose if we’re going to spend the next year wandering through the Bible together, there’s really only one reasonable place to start. In the beginning. Conveniently, that’s where the Bible starts too.
Before we get very far, I should probably explain what we’re doing here, because I don’t want anybody showing up Sunday morning expecting Bible study and discovering they’ve accidentally wandered into my head.
I’m not a preacher. I don’t have a theology degree. I don’t own a pulpit, and nobody should be making major decisions about eternity based solely on something I wrote while drinking coffee.
These are Bible Takes. My takes. I’m going to read these stories, tell them the way I see them, ask questions, occasionally wander off the approved path, and probably point out a few things that would have gotten me sent into the hallway during Sunday school. You’re welcome to agree with me. You’re equally welcome to think I’ve completely lost my mind. Either way, we’ll probably have some fun.
So Genesis opens with, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
That’s it.
No introduction.
No explanation of where God came from.
No childhood stories about young God growing up.
He’s simply there, and apparently He has decided to spend the day creating everything. That’s a fairly ambitious opening chapter. Personally, if I accomplish three things before lunch, I start feeling pretty good about myself.
First comes light, then sky, then land and water. Vegetation starts growing, the sun and moon show up, stars fill the sky, creatures start swimming around and flying through the air, and eventually animals are roaming around on land. God keeps looking over what He’s made and calling it good, which seems reasonable considering He started with absolutely nothing. Eventually He gets around to human beings, and this is where the story starts becoming strangely familiar.
Enter Adam.
Adam has himself a pretty nice arrangement. He lives in a garden where food grows everywhere. There’s no mortgage, electric bill, car payment, property tax, health insurance deductible or refrigerator making a strange noise at two in the morning. He apparently doesn’t even need pants. Retirement planners really don’t discuss this option enough.
God gives Adam the Garden of Eden and basically tells him to take care of the place. Adam wanders around naming animals, which must have been an interesting afternoon by itself. I’ve always wondered how far into that project he got before he started running out of ideas. Lion. Tiger. Elephant. Giraffe. Then several thousand species later some little brown thing scurries past and Adam says, “I don’t know…vole.” God apparently accepted it.
Eventually God notices Adam is alone. Maybe He looks down and sees this single naked guy wandering around the garden talking to animals and thinks, Yeah, this situation probably needs some attention. So He creates Eve, and now we’ve got the first couple. They have paradise, food, each other and apparently absolutely no reason to argue about money. Life is pretty good.
There is, however, one rule.
There’s a tree in the garden called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and God tells them not to eat from that one. Everything else is fair game. Every other tree, every other piece of fruit, the whole garden is theirs. Just leave that one alone.
This is where my mind starts wandering a little sideways, because I’ve always wondered why God put the tree there in the first place. He created the garden. Presumably He had some say in the landscaping. Put the tree on Mars. Problem solved. Instead, it’s sitting right there where Adam and Eve can see it, and God essentially says, “You can have everything you see except that.”
Anybody who has ever raised a child knows exactly where this is headed. You can put a kid in a room containing 437 toys and say, “You can play with absolutely anything in here except that little red truck,” and suddenly every other toy might as well disappear. That kid wants the damn truck.
Which makes me wonder if the tree was ever really about the tree. Maybe it was about choice. Because if Adam and Eve had no ability to choose something other than God, were they actually choosing God at all? I’m not telling you that’s the answer. It’s just something I think about. What interests me is that the first human story in the Bible contains both freedom and a boundary, and we humans have been inspecting boundaries ever since.
Then the serpent shows up.
Now, this part gets more interesting when you actually read it instead of relying on the pictures we remember from Sunday school. The serpent doesn’t come slithering into the garden wearing a little red cape with horns and carrying a pitchfork. He starts a conversation. He asks Eve, “Did God really say…?” That’s basically it. One question, but it’s a pretty good one because he isn’t exactly telling her what to do. He’s getting her to reconsider something she already knows.
Did God really say that? Are you sure? Maybe you misunderstood Him. Maybe He’s keeping something from you. Maybe eating that fruit wouldn’t actually be such a big deal.
And there it is. Possibly the oldest sales pitch in human history: What could it hurt?
I don’t know about you, but most of the dumb things I’ve done in my life didn’t begin with me thinking, “Mark, this decision has enormous potential to become a complete disaster.” Usually there was some version of, Eh…it’ll probably be fine. Apparently that particular piece of human reasoning goes all the way back to Eden.
Eve looks at the fruit. It looks good, she eats it, and then she gives some to Adam. Adam eats it too. We should probably stop here for a second because Eve has taken quite a beating over this story through the years. Sometimes it gets told like poor innocent Adam was somewhere on the other side of Eden trimming a hedge when Eve tracked him down, tackled him and forced forbidden fruit into his mouth. That’s not exactly what Genesis says. Adam eats. Nobody tackles him. Nobody pries his mouth open. The man eats the fruit.
Immediately their eyes are opened. They now possess the knowledge of good and evil, and what is the first profound realization humanity achieves with this newly acquired wisdom?
They’re naked.
We’ve just unlocked one of the great mysteries of existence, and apparently the first thing mankind figures out is, “HEY! YOU’RE NAKED!” This causes enough concern that Adam and Eve start sewing fig leaves together, which raises several practical questions of its own. Mostly I wonder how long Adam wore fig-leaf underwear before deciding knowledge might have been overrated.
Then they hear God walking in the garden, and they hide. God calls out to Adam and asks, “Where are you?” This may be my favorite part of the whole story because I’m no theologian, but if we’re working from the premise that God just created the universe, I’m going to assume He hadn’t actually misplaced Adam. It’s not like God was wandering around Eden thinking, I swear I left that guy right here.
Maybe the question wasn’t about Adam’s location. Maybe God was giving Adam the opportunity to come out.
Adam eventually explains that he was hiding because he was naked, and God asks the obvious question: Who told you that you were naked? Uh-oh. Anybody who has ever been caught doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing recognizes this moment. God asks Adam whether he ate from the tree, and Adam responds in a way that proves human civilization is now officially underway.
He blames his wife.
Actually, it’s better than that. Adam essentially says, “The woman YOU gave me gave me the fruit.” That is spectacular. The man has been alive for what amounts to about fifteen minutes and has already figured out how to blame both his wife and God in the same sentence. Men have been refining the technique ever since.
Then God asks Eve what happened, and she blames the serpent. Suddenly everybody has an attorney. Nobody says, “Yep. That was me. I screwed up.” The serpent fooled me. The woman gave it to me. You gave me the woman. We’re only three chapters into the Bible and humanity already has passing the buck pretty well perfected.
There are consequences, of course. The serpent gets his. Eve gets hers. Adam gets his. Life outside the garden is going to involve pain, sweat, work, frustration and eventually death.
In other words, Monday.
Eventually Adam and Eve are sent out of Eden, and this is usually where the story gets wrapped up fairly neatly: Adam and Eve disobeyed God, sin entered the world and paradise was lost. I’m certainly not arguing that isn’t part of the story. But there’s another part that always catches my attention because it sounds less like some strange ancient tale and a whole lot more like people I know.
They had everything. Seriously, everything they needed was right there. They lived in paradise with every need provided, and there was exactly one thing they couldn’t have. Eventually that one thing became more important than everything they already had.
Now that sounds familiar.
Give us ninety-nine things and put number one hundred behind a fence, and sooner or later we’re going to wander over to the fence. We’ll stare through it. We’ll wonder why we can’t have what’s over there. We’ll probably convince ourselves that whoever put up the fence is being unreasonable. Then somebody comes along and asks, “Did God really say…?” and suddenly the ninety-nine things behind us don’t look nearly as interesting anymore.
Maybe Genesis isn’t only telling us how humanity began. Maybe it’s telling us something about humanity. About wanting. About choice. About boundaries. About our remarkable ability to convince ourselves that the one thing we don’t have is probably the one thing we desperately need, and then discovering after we finally get it that maybe there was a reason for the fence.
I don’t know exactly how every sentence in Genesis is supposed to be understood. There are people with far more letters behind their names than I have who have been arguing about that for thousands of years, and somehow they’ve managed to keep the argument going without my assistance. I’m perfectly happy to let them continue.
I’m just reading the story.
And when I read Adam and Eve, the strange thing isn’t how different they were from us. It’s how familiar they are. I recognize Eve standing there looking at the fruit. I recognize Adam taking a bite. I definitely recognize Adam explaining why what happened wasn’t entirely his fault. And if I’m being completely fair about it, I recognize myself standing somewhere near that tree too, with paradise behind me and one thing I can’t have sitting in front of me, thinking, Well…what could it hurt?
Welcome to Bible Takes. We’ve made it three chapters into the Bible, and we’ve already got naked people hiding in the bushes, a talking serpent, forbidden fruit, the first marital blame game and humanity getting evicted from paradise.
Only 1,186 chapters to go.
This ought to be interesting.