In the beginning……
In the last post on the subject of ‘The Bible’ we looked at the early chapters of the first book of the bible to demonstrate that the various books of the Bible must be read in context and giving due regard to the original target readership. However we also need to recognise that the Bible in it’s entirety is ‘the Word of God’; it was written by a multitude of different authors over several millennia; some of it is to be taken literally and some not. But how do we tell which is which?
In this post we will look a bit more closely at the early chapters of Genesis. WE established last time that the creation story wasn’t necessarily to be taken literally and we explained why. The essence of the creation story is that the world, indeed the universe, was created at God’s command, not by some mindless spontaneity. The mechanism by which it came into being is the domain of the scientist and not for consideration here. If we accept that then, also accepting that the initial readers (and indeed readers up until the middle of the second millennium) had no concept of a universe that didn’t have the earth at its centre , then progression of creation from the separation of dark and light right up to the creation of all living things is not really very problematical, remembering that the timescale is not intended to be taken literally. However, when we come to the creation of ‘man’ it does require a bit of unwrapping.
‘God created man in his own likeness’ (Genesis Chapter 1 verse 26). What does that mean? It is self evidence that humans as distinctly different from all other animals. Not genetically – humans and chimpanzees share 96% of the same genetic material and humans and chickens share around 60% of the same DNA! Nevertheless humans are very different from every other living thing in that we have the abilities; of reasoning and making decisions way beyond instinct, of abstract though, of perceiving the existence of God, of having the potential to become God like. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the possibility of evolution as the mechanism as to reaching our physical form, but Genesis does make it clear that God created us with a distinct and separate dimension from the rest of creation. We call that ‘the soul’. From the Genesis story it seems that God created a male only. He then looked around for something else that he’d created to find the man a companion. How come? All other creature (with the odd exception) have both male and female so why only male humans? This part of the story is not primarily looking at procreation but at companionship – God created humans to be social not solitary. Did God really create a woman from Adam’s rib? There is no way of telling but the essence of this passage is that God created woman with the same spark of divinity as man. They were created equal.
Next time we’ll explore the ‘talking snake’
