Now listen! Today I am giving you a choice between life and death, between prosperity and disaster. For I command you this day to love the LORD your God and to keep his commands, decrees, and regulations by walking in his ways. If you do this, you will live and multiply, and the LORD your God will bless you and the land you are about to enter and occupy.
But if your heart turns away and you refuse to listen, and if you are drawn away to serve and worship other gods, then I warn you now that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live a long, good life in the land you are crossing the Jordan to occupy.
Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live! You can make this choice by loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and committing yourself firmly to him. This is the key to your life. And if you love and obey the LORD, you will long in the land the LORD swore to give your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
All Wham! references aside, Moses seems to practically beg Israel to “get it right”… The tone in this passage is such that you get the feeling that God (through Moses) is just cheering on his people to make the right decisions so that they can have a life of fullness and peace. Even when Moses cautions the people, he doesnt’ say, “God will destroy you; he says you will be destroyed.
What does it mean that God is inclined towards us, cheering us on to obedience and life?
If you’re anything like me, it’s tempting to think that, prior to Genesis 3, life was pretty good for Adam and Eve.
After all, my thinking goes, what did they have to do besides hang out with God and be super-spiritual.
Can you imagine the conversations?
“Why yes, Eve, that’s EXACTLY how I would interpret that scripture.”
However, I’m not really sure it was like that. In fact, Genesis 1v26 drops this uncomfortable bombshell:
Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”
That’s a lot to do. In fact, it sounds suspiciously like…
work.
In other words, the garden wasn’t just about hanging out; it was about working.
In other words, this means work is not just a means for us to pay our bills; to get along in this broken world.
It means that God gave us work as a gift.
For me, there are two implications here:
1. My work is a gift.
2. Everyone has a right to work.
It’s tempting to think that my work is a curse, but Genesis implies that work is something noble, something given…
It’s grace.
Somewhat relatedly, everyone has a right to this grace. It’s not up to us to deny someone the right to contribute, to feel a part of something.
Once my wife and I were talking to a church about possibly going on staff with them. In our conversations with them we asked about their view of women in leadership.
Our contact responded, “Well, let me tell you guys, I am married to a really strong woman, and we run our marriage as completely equal; I would never deny my wife an opportunity to lead or teach. However our pastor—and therefore our church—doesn’t hold that view. Unfortunately, we don’t allow women elders or leaders here.”
We responded, “Hmmmm, well, that’s a bit of a challenge for us.”
He responded, “Yeah, our pastor just feels like it’s a matter of Biblical conviction for him.”
To which my (awesome) wife said, “And it’s not a matter of Biblical conviction for you?”
… Needless to say (maybe), we weren’t able to go on staff at that church.
It’s a matter of Biblical conviction for us.
It seems as if there’s a perception that those of us who hold to an egalitarian view of men and women in leadership come to that conviction through our understanding of culture, that it’s based a little more on the “fuzzy” area of what God is doing in the world.
However, to come to that confusion would be to ignore:
Genesis 1:27, where God says that man and woman are both made in His image.
The prophet Joel (and the book of Acts), where God says He will pour His Spirit out on men and women.
Romans 16:1, which mentions Priscilla as a deacon of the church (the only person out of the 27 people mentioned that is given that title).
Romans 16:7, where Paul tells us that Junia—a woman—is an apostle.
2 John, which is addressed specifically to a woman.
Multiple accounts in the Gospels, where Jesus entrusted his message (of life in John 4; of Resurrection) to women.
Now, before I go on, let me mention something: I realize that a whole host of passages can be lined up that claim that women are somehow secondary to men and under their authority. I get that.
I don’t necessary agree with those interpretations, but I can’t deny that those passages are in the Bible.
In fact, I’ll even defend your right to interpret those passages that way (though I don’t necessarily agree with you).
But neither can you deny the passages that I base my egalitarian view on.
My only point here is that we egalitarians aren’t making this stuff up. We are sincerely trying to obey the revelation of God and Jesus through the Bible under the power of the Holy Spirit.
In my church, we talk a lot about words of life. They are meant to be words that encourage people and call them into a deeper, more joyful way of living. However, there’s another paradigm that sometimes enters into the words we listen to. There are other words out there that are much more difficult to hear, sometimes so much so that they don’t feel much like “words of life” at all. In fact, they feel a bit like.
Death.
At least, they hurt pretty bad.
Once I was with my family and I was wondering about how I hadn’t been more successful in my somewhat anti-climactic musical career, and my beloved sister just looked at me and said, “Well it’s probably because you were just too lazy and too unhealthy to be successful.”
Ouch.
But the thing is, even with words that direct, and that challenging (and trust me: I don’t really like to hear words like that), I wasn’t crushed. I didn’t yell, or lash back.
In fact, I realized that I was sitting in front of deep truth, and I had to choose whether to hear and embrace it, or turn away.
To that end, I chose to hear it, and some remarkable things happened:
That truth actually released me from some regret and some preoccupation with my past failures as an artist. I realized that I really was responsible—in a way—for my lack of success.
It led me to continue to confront those two themes—laziness and “un-health”—in my life, which has led to some cool healing.
Now, I take it as a given for Christians that we understand that sometimes death needs to happen before new life can take place.
Good Friday happens before Easter.
To that end, sometimes words of life don’t feel like words of life at all. They can feel like words of death: hard and challenging even sad. But when they are spoken by people we trust, and spoken in a manner that is designed for us to grow, these hard words can kill something inside of us that needs to die in order for growth, new life, and healing to take place.
However, I also know that words can be uttered with the intent to destroy, not resurrect; to reduce, not instruct; to hurt and not love. So before you decide to “hear” hard words, I’d offer a few suggestions:
Consider the source:do you trust them? Do you trust that they love you? Are they people of the light?
Consider the environment:were they angry when they said it (my sister was not)? Were you in a fight?
Consider the implications:what would happen if you took their words into your heart? In my case, I sensed that Beth’s words would set me free, and so I could allow them in.
I’ve heard other harsh words in my life, but what about you? Have you heard hard truths that ultimately invited you to grow in profound ways?
Seth Godin is understandably one of the most popular and compelling writers and thinkers today. He’s been pretty influential in my circles, and I’ve definitely internalized some of his thoughts. I’ve seen him speak a couple times, and read 2 or 3 of his books.
All in all, it’s good stuff.
However, I’ve had on- and off-again tensions with some of the concepts, especially as they are confronted by, well, the gospel.
(Let me just say that I am “owning” that this is probably just my own baggage; I’m merely throwing these thoughts out there because they’ve been on my mind lately.)
Most recently, I’ve had to come to terms with how the desire to be “extraordinary” and a “linchpin” (some of Seth’s key concepts) intersect in my soul to do some not-very-good things…
You see, for someone who struggles with pride and arrogance, hearing the call to make your world all about doing “something amazing”, or “living your strengths”, etc., etc., can be a little like trying to control a modest outdoor fire in your backyard by pouring kerosene on it.
Even understanding that the point of “being extraordinary” is to serve people, or an organization or mission, feels remote.
For a narcissist (struggling or otherwise), the world ALWAYS revolves around them. They are ALWAYS seeking to be extraordinary, to be noticed, to be the smartest/cutest/strongest/most talented person in the room. It’s a normal (though pathological) state of mind.
For me, I need to balance “linchpin” thinking with the constant realization that I am sick. Recognition and accolades (that often come with being extraordinary) feed my false self, this scared, insecure child that needs to be reminded how special he is.
To counteract linchpin thinking, I need, to stare into the void, to quiet the obsessive and compulsive thoughts of my false self, and to return to the smaller, quieter voice of God that says, “You are enough.”
To learn humility.
To learn to serve.
To learn to focus on others.
To learn that being a linchpin is NOT all there is to life.
(Even though sometimes it’s fun.)
I still love Seth; and I will continue to read his books and wrestle with this stuff, but I just thought I’d put these out there.
For a season now, I’ve been pursuing a spiritual direction, and trying to be a better “director” of people’s souls myself.
I was recently going through Peterson’s Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity—which has shaped me as a pastor as much as any other book I’ve ever read—with a friend, and re-read what he has to say about giving spiritual direction.
(Incidentally, I think that “spiritual direction”—or mentoring, or whatever you’d call personal, spiritual influence—is one of the most desperately needed activities in our culture. I think much of 21st century North American culture has no need for a bigger, better, faster worship gathering. We need a more sober, consistent spiritual direction and discipleship for God’s people).
So here’s what Peterson says:
Cultivate an attitude of awe with and for every person you meet with. Every meeting is a privilege, and an opportunity to see God work.
Cultivate an attitude of ignorance. We can make assumptions about peoples’ motives and feelings. Most of the time they are wrong. We do better to assume nothing and ask questions. (This is something I’m trying desperately to grow in.)
Cultivate a predisposition to prayer. Prayer is the furnace, and oftentimes what people really want from us is to learn to run the furnace for themselves. They don’t want our advice; they want to learn how encounter God for themselves.
I know no advice for you save this: go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise: at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.
Seen through the eyes of a Gospel Artist, and one who is called to change, this is a great quote. I actually we believe we are all called to create a gospel-shaped life. We take the destiny of Christ-likeness (or at least we do, if we choose), and begin our pilgrim path of change and evolution.
Have you ever considered that change is possible? That you are called to create (along with God through the Holy Spirit) a life that is shaped by God?
What would it look like if you were called? What could your life look like if you decided to create something wonderful and beautiful?
What would it look like if you chose to be an artist?
Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”
God created humanity
In God’s own image,
in the divine image
God created them,
male and female
God created them.” (Genesis 1:26-27)
So God has this creation.
Day after day the rhythm is repeated: God creates, then sits back and enjoys it, and then evaluates it…
And it’s goooood.
But, somehow, not good enough.
So after the world is complete, God decides to do one more masterfully creative thing…
He makes humanity.
This is no small thing.
With this moment of creation, the first glimpses of our biblical “spine” start to come into view.
Or, to put it another way, this God is up to something.
Broadly speaking, there are three things that we learn about humanity in the creation story. They’re not complicated, but these three things have profound significance for the rest of our story, so it’s important that we understand them.
One: Image
As verses say, we bear the imprint of God’s image on us. At this point in our story, what do we know about this god’s “image”?
He creates things
He enjoys His creation
He even creates human beings, and when He does it, He says it’s very good…
So whatever human beings are, or whatever they become, one of the ingredients of our spine is that we are marked with the image of this creating, singing, celebrating God. We are called to measure our lives by our likeness to Him.
Two: Work
In verse 28 of chapter one, God tells Adam (from the Hebrew ‘adam, which is not a proper noun, but rather a generic name for humanity; see Robert Alter’s book on the Pentateuch for more discussion), “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.” In Genesis 2, we are told that God puts humanity in a garden (v8).
Here’s the thing about gardens: they take work.
So God gives humanity work to do: they farm and keep the land (v8 and v15), and they name the animals (2:19-20).
So here’s another little piece of our spine that is beginning to take shape: this God invites—even expects—His creation to co-labor with Him. Whatever work there is to do, God allows humanity to be a part of it.
Work is a part of the divine plan. The garden isn’t all about sitting around, sipping lemonade and listening to lame angels’ songs.
It’s about making sure God’s creation is in balance…
… Oh, and also: don’t forget about the image thing. When we work, we have to work in God’s image. We have to do things the way He would do it (this becomes increasingly important).
Three: Freedom
“In the fertile land, the LORD God grew every beautiful tree with edible fruit, and also he grew the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (Genesis 2v9)
“The LORD God commanded the human, ‘Eat your fill from all of the garden’s trees; but don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you eat from it, you will die!” (2v16-17)
So God creates a planet that He loves. He creates a creature to co-labor and create and steward this world. Then He tells the human to not eat of a certain tree…
… Then God retreats, and lets the human choose.
(… The outcome isn’t so good.)
This God gives us the freedom to choose, even when the results can be disastrous.
Why?
I think it’s because of love.
After creating an entire universe and world, it would be a pretty small thing to put, say, a really tall hedge around the two trees. A fence. Anything.
But this God wants humanity to be able to choose.
Because you can’t love without a choice.
I think that if all God wanted was creatures to do His bidding, He could’ve easily eliminated choice or chance. But this God wants more. He wants community. He wants love.
Freely given.
And you can’t freely give something if you don’t have the option to not give.
So here we stand, and in a way it’s quite simple:
There’s a God.
He created a something: a world.
That world matters to Him. A lot.
He created someone.
That someone matters to Him an awful lot, but…
God is going to let that someone choose to be in relationship with Him.
And that’s going to cause an awful lot of trouble.
The concept of a train is simple: wheels on rails. The rails constrain the wheels and prevent them from wandering, but they also give the wheels a smooth the path to travel. Unlike a car, a train can’t go
wherever it wants—it has to travel the path that the rails follow—but a train can trust the rails, and as long as they haven’t been destroyed or damaged, the rails will take the train where it needs to go.
If you’re anything like me, I’d prefer to think of myself as a free-ranging vehicle (a Jeep 4×4, especially): I can go anywhere and do anything I’d like, and I will continue to grow into the person that I need to be and that God wants me to be.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
After 40-something years on this earth, I am able to say with a fair amount of certainty that left to my own devices I will wander to and fro, and “growth” will remain far from the top of my “to do” list.
I don’t make such a good Jeep.
I need rails, things that keep me on track.
Maybe I make a better train.
Now, rails have other words too:
systems
routines
habits
disciplines
rules
These “rails”, as long as I follow them and choose to stay on them, tend to take me to the places I want to go spiritually. (To extend the metaphor just a bit, it’s important to remember that the point of a train is not to just “ride the rails”; trains go places; the destination is what’s important. When the rails become the point of everything, we’ve lost the point.) At first, they feel odd: constrain you; they cramp your “style”; they stretch you, and may challenge you to do things that aren’t in your “nature” (“Well, I’m not really a Bible reading person, ya know?!?!”). But, after a while, they don’t feel as odd or forced. You find yourself moving with them, anticipating their turns. You’re working with the rails now.
Specifically, here are some of the rails and “constraints” that I use:
a regular habit of focused prayer and mediation each morning
a discipline of regular Scripture reading and studying
a commitment to regularly (1-2 times a month) sit down with 1-2 older spiritual mentors and humbly submit to their leadership and suggestions (again with the humility)
a system of managing my time, projects and energy (I use both electronic and paper calendars, and a combination of OmniFocus and Apple’s Reminders)
a method of examining the overall direction and theme of my life
As some of these rails have become cemented into my character, I have had to rely on the externals a bit less, but the principles remain the same: I submit to the rails.
Because I have somewhere to go; a person to be; a redemptive movement to play a part in.
And I trust the rails to take me there.
Do you have any rails? What are they? Do you need to reevaluate any of them?
William Blake [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
When God began to create the heavens and the earth—the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters—God said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared. God saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness. God named the light Day and the darkness Night.
There was evening and there was morning: the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5)
… And so our Story begins.
And with it, the controversy: how long did it take God to form the Earth? How old is our planet? In North America, there are whole museums dedicated to proving that creation closely follows the Genesis account, and that the Earth is significantly younger than most geologists would claim (10,000 years vs roughly 4.5 billion). The debate goes on and on (if you want to read a poignant account of it, check out A.J. Jacobs’ Year of Living Biblically).
But the troubles with Genesis don’t end there.
Over the years, scholars have become aware of other ancient near eastern “creation stories” that bare troubling similarities to Genesis, and these similarities have given rise to troubling questions:
* What do these other stories do to the claim of the Bible’s uniqueness?
* Is Genesis plagiarized?
… And so on.
Without getting into too many details, there are multiple stories that have remarkable similarities to Genesis, including the same sequence of days in creation, the same association and rhythm of light and darkness, etc; there are other stories of floods (not to mention Hammurabi’s Code, which has a lot of similarities to the 10 Commandments).
Broadly speaking there are two extreme responses to these facts: either you throw the Bible (and in particular, Genesis) as myth and irrelevant, or you try to intellectually justify and “conquer” the other myths as somehow inferior or “stolen” from Genesis.
As a person of faith, I can’t do the former; as a thinking human, I can’t do the latter. Bluntly, it’s difficult to be intellectually honest and say that those other stories ripped off Genesis (and not vice-versa).
So where does that leave me?
But what if there was another way to look at Genesis? A way that “liberates” the text from having to be utterly unique?
What if this approach to Genesis is also intrinsically related to what Genesis may actually be trying to tell us?
Hint: It’s all about YHWH.
The best way to understand things at this point is to understand that Genesis isn’t written in a vacuum: it’s written (and still read) in a culture where everyone has an origin story…
Who started this whole thing off? Zeus? Marduk? Geology? It’s almost like a “my dad can beat up your dad situation”, and into the mix comes this people (the Jews) with a story that says, “Well we have a God too—in fact just one—but that’s all we’re going to need.” They seem to look at the cultures around them and say, “We agree with you on the basics of the story: stuff surely got created and put here, but what we are disagreeing with is simply the who behind the what.”
What’s more, the folks who wrote Genesis weren’t newspaper people, historians, or journalists.
They were God-people.
Priests, prophets, spiritual leaders.
They were consumed with this God—this YHWH—they’d encountered, and they wanted to explain the world in terms of who He was/is.
Some people say that in God’s eyes there’s really only ever one sin, and it’s idolatry (we’ll here more about this in Exodus), and Genesis seems to start the story off in a similar way. Genesis is saying, in a sense, you have to get this one thing right: there’s God… Just. One. God. He’s the One who did all this.
Now this is saying plenty.
Genesis may not be so much interested in the details of creation, but it’s highly interested in the author. Indeed, a lot of the details in Genesis can be found in other origin stories of the ancient near east, except for one small detail:
God.
Can we solve the debate of the age of the earth? Did Adam have a belly button? Was there a serpent?
Ultimately, I don’t know, but I know there was a God…
And somehow He is a creator, and He made a planet that was good, and then He made human beings…
And they were VERY good…
(Well, mostly…)
Next up: Genesis B (or the Great Challenge of Humanity)
![William Blake [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://thisisericcase.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/europe_a_prophecy_copy_d_object_1_bentley_1_erdman_i_keynes_i_british_museum.jpg)
this is eric case 