In my recent commute to work, I was listening to Genesis on mp3 and it was very interesting as I began thinking as I listened. These were the few thoughts and questions I had.
1. I realised Adam and Eve actually had quite many years in the garden of Eden before they became discontented and wanted more. They bore another sin names Seth after the death of Cain, when Adam was 130 years old (Gen 5:3). So they would have had many years in Eden before they sinned and were banished.
2. Adam and Eve didn't seem sorry for what they did when they disobeyed God. They did not feel that they needed forgiveness. Was forgiveness something that "existed" then?
3. If Genesis counted for the hundreds of years men lived as literal years, why do we take each of the creation day as millions and billions of years? Moreover, other parts of Scripture interpreting the creation days as single days.
4. Why did God go through all the trouble with the flood? Why don't he just wipe them all out expect Noah?
pearlie
Our UMC pastor Adam Hamilton wrote a book, Making Sense of the Bible, that addresses those questions and many more Pearlie. Here is an excerpt from an interview that he did.
ReplyDelete"The Bible represents the people of God coming to understand how the order of creation came to be. Genesis wasn’t intended as a science lesson, as we understand science today. The Bible is making profound claims about the connection between God and the world—and this is profoundly true. It wasn’t intended as a science lecture.
I encourage people to read the opening of Genesis. The first chapter is beautiful poetry with the refrains coming back—”evening and morning” and this beautiful liturgical language about the nature of creation as it unfolds. People need to understand that this is an archetypal story that was repeated down through the generations around campfires and in homes and the Genesis stories do express deep truths. We need to understand the great value of these stories.
If we free ourselves from all this noise from some of the Fundamentalists about this somehow conflicts with science, then we can begin to appreciate again the deeper truths here. Did a snake appear and speak in a garden in the literal way the scene is described in Genesis? That’s not the point. The point is the real truth of such an experience: Who among us hasn’t heard a serpent speaking to us at some moment in our lives? We’ve all faced temptation—haven’t we? And, often, that temptation feels as real as a serpent speaking to us."
Thanks for the book recommendation. I will check it out.
ReplyDeleteI'm not looking at it from the perspective of conflict with science but really reading it with fresher eyes. Like in church today, the sermon was from Genesis 3, and I noticed more interesting things I need to check out. For example, the serpent was referred to as one of the animals that God had created. How was it referred to as Satan? And this serpent can talk.