The Divine Creator, Master of heaven and earth, reached forth His hand and blessed the whole, and Adam and Eve began their life at the Garden of Eden in that primeval happiness and intimacy with God, of which their sin was so soon to deprive them and the world.
Though we do have no knowledge about the where about of the Garden of Eden except from the biblical description which places it amid four rivers and names the Euphrates as one of these. Students have usually guessed its location between Ur, Calneh, near the mouth of the Euphrates, a region where the garden might include seashore, river-meadows, and mountains, and the ancient coastline of the Persian gulf.
Noah’s landing place, Mt. Ararat, the centre from which his descendants went forth for the second peopling of the earth, is fairly settled upon as being in the great culminating range of Armenia, the tremendous peaks which tower at the Euphrates’ source. The site of Babylon or Babel has been definitely established by modern research, as has also that of Ur, the city whence Abraham set out upon his journeyings.
There were the waters and by time the dry land appeared and became more and more coloured by plants or cultivated, step by step developing to its present outline. Throughout history there came people who wanted to notate these developments and how man evolved in that big system of things. These successive steps, as detailed in the Bible narrative, are told also by the investigations of science, which show that our globe must indeed have progressed through just this development. Though the biggest fault many people make is that they all want to see it happening in their notation of time, forgetting that God has an other view of minutes, hours and days.
2 Peter 3:8 (ESV): 8 But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
It is with this knowledge that we should look at the creation of the earth and at the evolution of our world which is still continuing to evolve and undergoing many changes, regularly presenting to mankind for him newly discovered animals and plants.
It was of the productions of God’s fourth day, the sun and moon, with all their wonder and splendour entered the Bible narrative. Those elements at the sky could be used by man as signs. The lights in the firmament of the heaven were given by the Creator so that man could divide the day from the night and have them for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years. That is to say, man from a very early period measured his days by the sunlight, his weeks and months by the changes of the moon, and his years by the shifting of the sun and stars. By them he knew the coming of spring and fall, and when to plant and when to reap his crops. They served as guides to travellers by land and sea.
In the wording of the writer of the Bereshith or the Beginning of everything we can find some indication of multiplying elements and even abundance.
Genesis 1:20 (ESV): 20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.”
Psalm 104:25 (ESV): 25 Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great.
Genesis 8:17 (ESV): 17 Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—that they may swarm on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.”
Genesis 9:1 (ESV): And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
As the culmination of the sixth day of effort, God had created man, formed from “the dust of the ground” the first male and as a companion who might be with him and share his joy in God’s teaching and uplifting, from the rib of man the first female was created, who also could reproduce and bring forth new generations. Both were made in God’s image, with intellect, with an eternal soul, even with something of God’s own creative power, able to create new things.
God was even willing to give responsibility in the hands of man and gave him the right to give the things names. As such in the glow of God’s inspiration Adam named them; and he was given dominion over them, and dwelt among them as their ruler, in peace and joy. At first the beasts had no fear of Adam, nor of one another; for as yet death had not come into the world. Adam did not live, as do we, by meat, by devouring other lives.
The first book of the Bible mentions the need of the first man to have other company than those animals. God could see that it was not so good that man was alone.
Genesis 2:18 (ESV): 18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
God’s first charge to man, or perhaps it were better to say the first wisdom He instilled into him, His first fatherly counsel, was that man should live on the fruit and herbs, that his “meat” should be of these alone.
Genesis 2:20–23 (ESV): 20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
Those first human beings had no shame and found no reason to be clothed. Naked they were part of a universe that was in unison with God’s Wishes. Together they could enjoy early happy days of innocence, ignorant of any evil, because there was not yet such thing. They were at first happy in the presence of God, conversing with Him as with a father, conscious of His ever-presence and at ease and security therein.
God, in His love and joy for His beautiful new creatures had made them a garden, a beautiful paradise for their dwelling in which they could dwell freely. Out of the ground made the Elohim God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, in a marvellous garden surrounded by four great rivers .
God had provided only one or two restrictions. They had to follow His Words and should not eat from a certain tree, which would bring the eater of its fruit, the knowledge of good and bad. The writer of the Torah (or The Law) use symbolically a creeping animal, the serpent. Also later the serpent has usually been treated by artists symbolically to represent that temptation that came over man. The serpent’s cunning words suggest human nature arguing with itself; the baser, beastly parts stirring the mind to ambition and rage and fear.
The more sophisticated ‘animal‘ or ‘possessor of an anima or soul‘ got so much taken by the inner voices that his own thinking got so strong that he dared to go against the Wishes of the Most High. The 1st Adam and the first mannin or first woman could see that their Maker could do everything and had all wisdom. Would it not be nice for them to have such wisdom and power themselves?
The idea that when they would eat of that forbidden tree, they would become like God “… ye shall be as gods” was so much carrying them away from the Will of God that they did not mind trying it.
Genesis 3:5–7 (ESV): 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
As the first human beings had chosen to go against the Will of God and as such went wrong or sinned, their offspring became ‘infected’ as it were by that attitude of them.
Genesis 3:16–24 (ESV): 16 To the woman he said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband,and he shall rule over you.”
17 And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; 18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
20 The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. 21 And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
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Preceding articles:
Man in the image and likeness of the Elohim #8 The Formation of woman #1
Man in the image and likeness of the Elohim #9 The Formation of woman #2
Forbidden Fruit in the Midst of the Garden 1
Forbidden Fruit in the Midst of the Garden 2
Forbidden Fruit in the Midst of the Garden 3
Genesis – Story of creation 5 Genesis 3:1-12 Eating of the fruit-tree of knowledge
Genesis – Story of creation 6 Genesis 3:13-24 Enmity and curse
Next: First mention of a solution against death
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Additional reading
- Creator and Blogger God 3 Lesson and solution
- A god who gave his people commandments and laws he knew they never could keep to it
- Atonement And Fellowship 1/8
- A look at the Failing man
- Looking for a primary cause and a goal that can not offer philosophers existing beliefs
- Story of Jesus’ birth begins long before the New Testament
- With child and righteousness greater than the law
- An anarchistic reading of the Bible (2)—Creation and what follows
- The Origin of Life on Earth: Creation or Evolution?
- Old Earth creationists and other conservative Christians denying any evolution
- Evolution of life but not according to Darwin’s evolution theory
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Messiah For All 