Chapter 1
Beginning
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
These are the first few verses of the Bible. I have learned in the past couple years that the best place to start with people is the beginning. There are many reasons. One is that when you properly understand the beginning of the Bible, you can better understand the entire Bible. The beginning shows forth the end. These beginning chapters of the Bible have so much in such a small amount. The text is terse.
If you didn’t know, the Bible was not originally written in English. Genesis was written in Hebrew, and the Hebrew words aren’t simply translated. Hebrew is a language of few words. These words usually mean concepts. God is Elohim (el-oh-HEEM). Elohim is the concept of a god. In fact, there is decent argument that the word elohim is plural. The way that you make a noun plural is that you add the “eem” ending. Did a plural God make the heavens and the earth?
Did “gods” make the heavens and the earth? Let’s keep going… Bara Elohim is the phrase for “God created.” Bara is a verb, which means that it is only three consonants, and the translation depends on what vowels they put on those three consonants, if there are any prefixes or suffixes, and the verb form that they use. Br’ is the verb (beth resh aleph). To be honest, this is kind of anticlimactic, because the only thing I want to prove is that God created. The verb form simply means, “created” (past tense of the verb). There aren’t any suffixes or prefixes, and there isn’t anything interesting that has happened to it.
My point, however, is that bara elohim places God as a creator. It isn’t simply that it says a god created. The wording works together to say, “There is a God over all other gods who actually created this world. He Himself identifies Himself as a creator.” For obvious reasons, we don’t translate it that way. Every chapter would take a book. Where as other gods need statues and temples and buildings and monuments built for them, this God created something for Himself. This is a revolutionary thought in the time that Genesis was written.
So this God is a creator. He is also recognized later as a spirit. The Hebrew phrase is ruach elohim. Ruach is what we translate as spirit, but there is a much bigger way of looking at ruach. I’ll speak on that in the next chapter. The spirit of God hovered over the waters. God is recognizing Himself as a spirit as well.
God said, “Let there be light.” The Hebrew word for light is or. I put it in italics so that you can know it isn’t our English word or. Or means light, but what kind of light? We think of light as being that you flip the switch, the lights come on. The sun gives off light. The moon reflects light from the sun during the night hours.
Or is different. Let me show you the use of the word from the Psalms: “Let the or of your face shine upon us.” Let the light of your face, or countenance, shine upon us. This light is something that is most likely visible, but it might not be. This light is a spiritual light. It is something that when we’re talking about light and dark we’re talking about the original state of the universe. When John says, “God is light, and there is no darkness in Him,” it is a reference to Genesis 1. God essentially is saying, “Let me, who is light, be a manifest part of this creation.”
This light is also referenced as Jesus in John 1. The light took on flesh. It is the “light of all men.” We read in the Psalms that God is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Same light. In another Psalm (106:20), there is wording that states that Israel changed “their glory” into that of a created calf. This idea of changing, or exchanging, their glory is another reference to the idea of the light being within mankind. This light is a spiritual light that is in all things, and you can sense this light in a very tangible way. I would challenge those of you who are interested to look into these concepts for yourself and see what ways God can completely reform your theology.
God recognizes Himself as a creator, spirit, and light. He is one (Deuteronomy 6:4) “elohim,” but He is multiple. Let me not turn away from this concept of light and dark so soon, though. This is something that we need to speak on before we can continue on.
I think that we all understand what I’m talking about when I say that God is a spiritual light. I think we all know what it means when it says “darkness was upon the face of the deep.” This is an exodus message that has been placed within the first few verses of Genesis. “We have been brought out of darkness and into His marvelous light.” Sound familiar?
Every time that we’re bullied, every time we hear of a bombing or school shooting, every time we see some sort of injustice, every hate crime (including rape), every lie, every time we rob someone of their humanity, and every time we experience inflicted pain and grief and sorrow, we see this darkness upon the face of the depths of our hearts and lives. And God says, “It can’t stay like this.”
God inserts Himself. He is the light. And the darkness cannot overcome it. That is the point. Darkness cannot celebrate victory when the light breaks forth. God is trying to get something bigger out in a poetic way. Darkness upon the face of the deep – yeah I’ve seen that. Let there be light – God has done this in me and through me.
Do you have a better understanding now? It is God’s character that He always hears the cry of the oppressed. He always responds to suffering and injustice. He cannot ignore the darkness and chaos. It is in His very nature and character that He must produce light when there is darkness. And He doesn’t stop with being light, but says that He will place Himself right there in the middle of the darkness with you and suffer and struggle through it. He will come into it, and out of the chaos, out of the darkness will start to produce light, and order, and life, and stability.
This is why the wording is “evening and morning was the first day.” We see it over and over again: evening and morning, evening and morning, evening and morning. It all points to being brought out of darkness and into light. “Let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light and it was good. And it was evening and morning, the first day.” Day two: God creates sky and oceans, and evening and morning was the second day. Day three: God creates land and seas, and plant life appears. Evening and morning are the third day. Day four: God creates the sun, moon, and stars (which fills that which He made on day one), and evening and morning are day four. Day five: God creates fish and birds (which fills that which God made on day two), and evening and morning are the fifth day. Day six: God creates animals to walk upon the land, and God creates mankind (which fills that which the Lord made on day three), and evening and morning are the sixth day…
God continues to bring more and more order, and to then fill that which He had made. He doesn’t stop with His creation and let evolution and natural selection take over, but instead continues to create. It is His nature. He is the creator. He brings life and order into that which was dark and chaotic. He then continues to bring more and more life and order into it. And when He gets done with all of the creation of the world, He creates rest. We can use this as an analogy for heaven, but I think it speaks greater for the journey that God takes us through here and now.
We all have experienced light and dark. We’ve experienced evening and morning. Some of us (most of us) are still experiencing greater and greater degrees of freedom and life and developing order. Rest isn’t something that comes afterward, but is something that we experience when God is wrought in us. Rest is the natural state of humanity. We aren’t to be stressed and running to and fro in hurry and always feeling the strain of life upon our shoulders. These aren’t natural feelings. These are remnants of darkness. As we continue to be stripped of the darkness and chaos, we are brought more and more into this eternal rest that transcends our conventional understandings of sleep and relaxation.
Rest (Sabbath in Hebrew) is not something for one day as it is mentioned in Exodus (Ten Commandments). It was originally intended for us to walk in it. Every moment is a Sabbath, because every moment we are with God, and He is with us. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a book on the Sabbath where he points out that the original intent was an eternal rest.
From Eden to New Earth
Genesis 2 bursts on the scene loud and proud. It speaks of the seventh day (which never has an “evening and morning” but just continues on), and on this day God rested. The word for rest is shabat (shaw-bawth). This wasn’t simply ceasing from work. It is a cosmic restoration and deep sanctifying act. This rest is more than “resting up” to go back to work tomorrow. It is ceasing our focus upon the temporal and diving into the eternal.
There is a place in Jewish mysticism that even considers the Sabbath (shabat) to be a bride (kallah). The idea they propose is that we accept the Sabbath with joy and thanksgiving like we would accept a wife. However, this bride seems to speak of us, the people of God, being united unto God and therefore rest being the product. God makes His creation, and the result of Him being an intricate part of this cosmos is a rest that lingers, and never ends. We, as the “bride,” are to be a description of this rest.
Naturally, this raises some significant questions. Does that mean that God is no longer an intricate part of this creation? If He is, then is the cosmos at rest? Is this really what rest looks like? If He isn’t, then where is He? Why isn’t He an intricate part of this creation? There is a deeper question to ask. Instead of looking upon the negative, a better question is to ask about the positive… If God placed Himself in this creation as an intricate part (the light), what does that mean?
When God says, “Let there be light,” this is the ground being broken. This is the “Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.” This is more than light. It is freedom. It is goodness itself. Words cannot sufficiently describe this reality. Which is why we use metaphors like darkness and light. Is God still an intricate part of this cosmos? Aren’t we really asking, “Does God still care about this place? Is all lost? Has the devil won? Are we stuck in this evil place?”
Thus we have the whole point of Genesis chapter one. It moves from evening to morning. The darkest night cannot stop the morning. There is still hope. There is still light. And we are here to celebrate this light. God has not forsaken us, but has equipped us with every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus. He is the light. He still delights in us.
The word Eden even means delight. So, in Genesis two, when God makes the garden, and He calls it Eden, He is calling it “delight.” The imagery to describe Eden is beauty, good, lush, pleasant, remarkable scenery. The way that God has originally (and therefore always) intended is that things would be good, pure, holy, sinless, beautiful, etc. It was not chaos and corruption.
All in all, if we look at the garden, we find the garden, man placed in it, there is beauty, there’s a river, there is what’s called the tree of life, and God gives the man work (purpose). Now lets move to the last two chapters of the Bible. If the Bible starts like this, then what does it end like? Revelation 21-22 can be summed up as follows: God makes a new Heaven and new Earth, puts man in it, there is beauty and a river, a tree of life, and God gives work (purpose) to mankind by ruling and reigning with Him forever.
So……...
The Bible begins and ends in pretty close to the exact same way. It begins with beauty and sinlessness and purpose for mankind and ends the exact same way. Anything within the rest of the pages is nothing more than an additive. God made it like this, and He is redeeming it to be like this, and everything else is only life between the trees.
I guess this is what Jesus meant when He said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.” This temporal land and kingdom we live in now is not the reality. This is only life between the trees. The reality is eternity, and if we cling to the one tree, and neglect the tree of life, we will miss it. This is why we must begin at the beginning, and not at Genesis 3.
Jesus was proclaiming a truth that we still struggle to see. His Kingdom, the light, the “good” is not found in this present age. It is found in another Kingdom. This world is temporary and fleeting. The true Kingdom is where heaven and earth meet. It is where God dwells with His creation. But where is that? Is it far off? Or, as Jesus says, is it “at hand?”
This is the Gospel, isn’t it? The good news isn’t that Jesus died on a cross, but that God still cares. Jesus’ death wasn’t everything. It was the agent used in bringing about everything. The “everything” is that God desires to be with His creation, and when He is with His creation, darkness and chaos have no place. Starting at Genesis three, we see that sin is in the world, and God redeems us from it. Starting with Genesis one, we see that God has always been redeeming and bringing creation into greater glory. It is a bigger picture than the fall of man and the redemption of man.
The Eternal Perspective
The Hebrew word that is translated as “in” in Genesis 2:8 could actually be translated as from. From Eden would be from eternity. So, for man to be placed “in Eden,” it could actually be speaking of a deep theological aspect of eternity.
In Hebrew, the word olam (oh-lahm) is used for eternity. The picture that it paints is “to the horizon, and then more.” The idea is that we can only see to the horizon, and eternity is past that. Time in the Hebrew mindset is likened unto direction. We can see. So, to see, in this sense, to the horizon and then some is speaking of as far ahead in time as we can possibly imagine and “plan,” and then some.
We are placed from eternity. We are placed on this earth, but not stuck on this earth. In humanity, heaven and earth are brought together. God and creation are brought together. It is within man being placed “from” Eden, or from delight, that the Jewish sages argued quite persuasively that Eden wasn’t necessarily a place as much as a reality.
The next thing to note is that humanity is placed in between God and earth. We have communion with the world, and we have communion with God. We are physical to be able to react to the world around us. We are spiritual to be able to react with God. If we loose our spirituality, then we become too much like the animals, and run about according to our senses. If we loose our physic, then we become too much like the angels and run around destroying our own bodies. Humanity was placed within these two. All three parts (spirituality, carnality, and soul) should work together harmoniously.
Thus, we are always spiritual, and always physical. When some one tells you, “I’m just not all that religious of a person,” the proper response is, “Are you human?” Too late. We have been given this life by God. We were placed from Eden into this world. When this starts to sink in, this really starts taking a hold on us. Our humanity is derived from heaven, not sin. Our nature is derived from eternity, not the garden. Our being is from Eden, not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God created us good, and sin/depravity/corruption came after.
Why does it matter? The ideology of our intrinsic nature to be sin brings about judgment. It is too much a temptation to call people fallen or depraved and not to think of them as lesser in our hearts. But to look at people as intended for good, then we find ourselves being heartbroken over sin. The reason I make this point isn’t so much about a theological argument as it is what that mentality seems to bear fruit of. To teach and preach that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry God seems to validate hatred, segregation, isolation, condemnation, and bitterness between brother and sister. Between congregation and congregation we find hard feelings. In the name of upholding the truth, we reject our brother because of a doctrine or creed they hold to. If we can’t even be open and inviting and willing toward our own brethren, then how are we supposed to see the world and all that the darkness and chaos that it is in without condemning them? How are we supposed to be the holy vessels to preach light when our own eyes are full of darkness?
Two Trees
With this, let us look upon the two options: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We all know the result of the fall. We see it daily. It’s like a never-ending movie from hell.
When we see the tree of life, the Hebrew word used for life is chay (clear the throat when you say hay). The name Eve in Hebrew was Chava. It was derived from the word chay. It means life. It means living. The Chava Elohim (the living God). We were given life as an option. Instead we chose the other. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? God will always give us that choice. Do we choose life, or do we pursue anything/everything else? Choose ye this day whom you shall serve, eh?
Death and Hell and Life and Heaven aren’t really things that happen at the end. They are moment-by-moment choices. And those choices have real implications.
In Luke 14:25-27, Jesus talks about taking up a cross. In Luke 9:23, Jesus talks about taking up a cross. In Mark 8:34-38, Jesus talks about taking up a cross. In Philippians 3:7-11, Paul talks about taking up a cross. What is interesting about Paul’s mention of the cross here is that he doesn’t use the word, nor does he stop with the cross. He completes the thought with saying, “When there is a cross, there is resurrection.”
Olam in the New Testament isn’t just eternity. It is life. It is resurrection. Olam in the New Testament is to live from, not to be striving towards. This is the point and definition of resurrection. Once we have obtained this life, we have no longer to fear anything. We are in Eden with God once more. The new Heaven and new Earth are future events and things, yes. But they are also here and now. They are amongst us.
“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life,” Romans 6:1-4.
Our very salvation constitutes that we are now in heaven and on earth together at the same time. Eternity is not after death. It is here and now. It is with us, amongst us, giving us energy and life and love and freedom. “We are seated with Him in heavenly places,” Ephesians 2:6. Jesus talked to Nicodemus about being in heaven and earth (John 3:13).
The true reality is from the Garden and City of God, not between the trees. The world we see and know is temporal, no matter how impressive. Persecution is momentary and light and temporal. Everything is brought into this reality when we see it. If we can truly believe this truth, we cannot be the same.
If we look at Hebrew 12:1 in the context of Romans 6:8-9, then we start to see something fascinating. The Church is not a building. It is the Universal people of God. It is a unified Body - now, past, and future.
The Incarnate God
There are two different words for the number one in Hebrew. The first is achath (ah-kath). The second is echad (eh-kod). The first is singular, the second plural. The Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4) is recited by devout Jews every day. It starts with, “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord – the Lord your God – the Lord; He is one.” The word here for one is echad. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.” Once again: echad. The whole scene of Sinai, with the smoke on the mountain and the Ten Commandments, is written in wedding language. God wished to be wed with His people. His desire was to become echad (one) flesh with His people.
We see in Exodus 25 the layout for the Tabernacle. Within this, we also find a very peculiar display of our salvation and uniting with God. The outer court had no roof. It had an altar of sacrifice. It had washing basins. This denotes our initial salvation.
The inner court was closed off to the sun. You can’t use worldly wisdom to find your way through. It was lighted by a 7-branch candlestick (menorah). There was showbread and an altar of incense. This is symbolism of our spiritual worship.
Yet, there is a deeper place still: the Holiest Place. This contained the ark of God. The ark was made from acacia wood, overlaid in gold, had four rods to carry it, and contained the Testimony (Ten Commandments), manna, and Aaron’s rod. On top was the mercy seat. This was made of gold, and there sat two cherubim on either side facing each other and looking down to the mercy seat. Their wings touch. And God said, “There, between the cherubim, will I meet with you,” Exodus 25:22.
We are the cherubim. These two angels are merely symbols of a bigger truth. They are on opposite sides, possibly denoting opposites like male and female, black and white, Jew and Gentile. They are one with each other and with God. They are echad with each other and God. Marriage is a symbol for this as well.
The definition of intimacy is belonging to or characterizing one’s deepest nature; of a very personal nature. Intimacy is revealing the deepest, most personal depths of who you are. Sex and intimacy, no matter what some might want you to believe, are not the same thing. Sex is not intimacy without being naked. Naked is the display of our deepest beings. Naked sex is marriage (can you follow that?). And this is what God asks for – intimacy, that is: James 4:8, Psalm 27:8, Psalm 46:10.
In Genesis 4, the word knew is used in the King James version of the Bible to say that Adam and Eve had sex. The Hebrew word is yada (yah-dah). It is used 947 times in the Old Testament. Here are a few examples: Psalm 9:10, 14:4, 18:43, Proverbs 1:23, Isaiah 1:3, and Isaiah 6:9. Yada comes from a deep soul searching of one another. The actual literal translation of yada is “to probe.” The Greek parallel in the New Testament would be ginoska. It is used in John 17:3, 22-23.
Jesus says, “This is eternal life: to know You.” He says later in the same prayer, “Let them be one, as you and I are one.” The word used here is heis. It would be the same as echad in Hebrew. Jesus’ prayer is that we would be one with God and with each other. We should be able to say, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father. I and the Father are one.” We are the incarnate God, the Body of Christ. This is the new Exodus; humanity and God have been married.
Though we aren’t God, He is in us, and we are in Him. This is the definition of incarnate. We are partakers of His throne, because we’ve been adopted heirs. We are God incarnate, though we would never say we are God. Those who claim they are God are not of God, but of the flesh. Let them be accursed forever.
The Apple of Deception
The plot thickened with a little critter called “the serpent.” This “serpent” in Hebrew is nachash (nah-kash). The noun means serpent, and the verb root of the three Hebrew letters means “to practice divination.” What is interesting is that the noun has a double meaning. It could also mean “whisperer.” In ancient culture, a whisperer would be called a “trickster.” A trickster is something (whether human or something else) who shares knowledge with God that is hidden from mankind, and uses it to deceive. The promises of the trickster are double edged: Adam and Eve gain knowledge, but lose Eden.
Now, one thing to note about Hebrew is that it is poetic. The little we know about the language tells us that there are only about 80,000 words. Compare this to English where the Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 words in current use. Some claim that a language can’t have over 200,000 words, but others say that Greek has about 500,000 words. Whoever is correct in this debate, the point is that whether we’re using our English or reading our New Testaments in Greek, there are at least double the amount of words that can be used.
Therefore, Hebrew needs to rely on poetry to paint a picture. When you want to say something is next to you in Hebrew, you would say it is to the hand. To the face means in front of. Someone’s arm could mean their arm, or it could mean their influence, power, prestige, and family line. So, when the word nachash is used, it literally means serpent. Yet, it could be speaking metaphorically of something deeper. You have to look into the culture of the time; you have to see the original language and all of it’s possible translations; you have to look at who is being spoken to (and where they might be); you have to ask who is speaking; you need to do a study on the word to see where else it appears in the Bible. All of this helps paint the bigger picture.
At the time that Genesis was written, and in the area that it would have been given (mainly, modern day Middle East), a snake would have represented danger, death, magic, secret knowledge, rejuvenation, immortality, and sexuality. All of this gets planted into the metaphor of a snake speaking to the woman. Moses would have known the gods of this land, for he was a shepherd in this area for 40 years. He knew that a snake would be a parallel with the goddess Qetesh.
Qetesh was the goddess of fertility for the Canaanites. She was also adopted by Egypt, and she is a hybrid of the goddess Asherah (for those of you who know that name…). Her temple was located in Kadesh of the Hittite land, and the name means holy. Qetesh’s picture is a woman holding a rose in one hand (fertility/sexuality), and a snake in the other (magic, secret knowledge, immortality, rejuvenation).
This whispering serpent (whatever it was) spoke to the woman, and she didn’t marvel at its speaking. This in itself brings about a whole new set of questions. Once again, I stand upon the poetry of the story, not necessarily it being literal. It is possible, but it isn’t provable that there was a snake that spoke and that it was absolutely normative and natural. (Even if my personal opinion is that they did speak.)
The snake asked a question. In all good judgment, the question is rather stupid, seeing as the answer is obvious. But this was the point. That is why the serpent was “more crafty than any other beast of the field.” What is interesting is that neuro-linguistic-programmers (hypnotists) use this technique while counseling. It draws out from their patients the “desired end” (namely, their deepest darkest secrets, and then causes the patient to believe all is well when nothing has been resolved).
The woman plays into it. She answers the serpent’s statement about what God actually said. “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the Garden’?” For all practical purposes, Eve answered correctly: “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” Satan then questions her response. Once again, hypnotism and deception is used to get Eve to doubt God.
Eve says, “If we eat of that tree, then we’ll die.” The Hebrew word is muth (mooth). Satan then responded with “temootoon” (not die, die). This is called Hebrew parallelism to drag out the point. Just like we would repeat this to show emphasis, Satan repeats the word to tell Eve that it isn’t really physical death, so it really isn’t death at all. Death was separation from Eden: out of Eden instead of “in Eden” or “from Eden.”
The Rise and Fall of All We Are
The woman, in her deception, eats the fruit. She then gives to her husband, and he eats the fruit. Then their eyes are opened and they see that they are naked. This is a phenomenal thing. They didn’t even know what naked or nudity was. Now they see. Now they feel shame. Nakedness and shame go hand in hand throughout every point in Scripture except Genesis 1 and 2. They were naked and they felt no shame. Now they are naked and they make clothing for themselves so that their shame may be hidden.
God then comes and interrogates. This is at least what the scholars would have us to believe. God simply comes and asks Adam where he is. Why is he hiding? Adam responds with, “I heard you in the Garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” Now, in verse 8 (just before God calls out to Adam), it is said that they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the Garden. The Hebrew word used for sound is qol (coal). It means voice. So it wasn’t that they heard the sound of footsteps. They heard the voice of God as He walked. Why is this important? Qol is an action word, and the Greek parallel to qol is kepugma (keh-poog-mah). Kepugm