Adam and Eve, Part 4

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . . God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
Genesis 1.1, 27

“Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. . . . So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.
The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.”
Genesis 2:7, 21-22

“So also it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living soul.’The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual.
The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven.”
1 Corinthians 15:45-47

Not everything Genesis 1 tells us was called into existence was created out of nothing. For instance, dry land appeared when God called into being the expanse separating the waters above from the waters below. After the dry land appeared, God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation. . . . The earth brought forth vegetation.” (Gen. 1.11-12) Further, God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: . . . God made the beasts of the earth after their kind.” (Gen. 1.24-25). Plants and trees, along with the beasts of the earth, seem to fit. Fish, sea monsters and birds are a sort of anomaly: they do not fit (how can something live in water and fly in the air?).

Now, making appears to be, and probably is, synonymous in some contexts in Gen. 1 with create. For instance, Gen. 1.31 says “God saw all that the had made.” So, what he created, he made. Yet, as with vegetation and animals, the making was different from when God created. The earth sprouted vegetation and brought forth animals. A direct connection is made in both those contexts between the earth and what came into being. Vegetation and animal life did not come from nothing, but from the earth (both seem to “fit” the earth). Here, though, we face another paradox.

Genesis 2.7 says, “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” If the word create implies something is brought into being out of nothing, the “seeable” from the “unseeable,” then a fundamental conflict exists between Genesis 1.27 and 2.7 (God created, on the one hand, and formed from the dust of the earth on the other). A further conflict is found between 1.27 and 2.21-22 (Eve came from a rib, not nothing). Did God create human beings according to 1.27, or make them “from what is seeable,” according to 2.7 and 21-22? Genesis 1.27 declares God created human life, and when he did, he created both males and females simultaneously. Genesis 2.7 says God formed Adam from the dry dust of the earth, and later made Eve from one of Adam’s ribs.

In Genesis 1, a clear distinction is made between the appearance of animal life and the creation of human life. Further, Gen. 1.20-21 declares God created fish, sea monsters and birds. Genesis 2.19 says birds, like animals, were formed “out of the ground.” Is the Bible’s account of creation in conflict, if we indeed have two creation stories? If Genesis 1.1-2.4 is one story and 2.4-22 is another, irreconcilable differences do exist. Human beings were either created from what was not (Rom. 4.17; Heb. 11.3), or they were made from things already in existence (Gen. 2.7, 21-22). We must choose one or the other. Both cannot be true.

A more appropriate and defensible position is to see the creation account of Genesis 1 as the story of the coming into being of all things. In Genesis 2.4f, we have another story altogether. In the case of Adam and Eve, we have the account of the origin of the people of God, the “story of Israelite origins.” Even more compelling is the idea, based on the statements of Paul to the Corinthians, Adam was the first man in the story of sin and death and redemption and life, and Jesus was the last and second man in that progression. In Adam, sin and death entered into the human experience and cursed everyone. In Jesus, who “crushed” the serpent’s head (Gen. 2.15), forgiveness and life were made available to all.

One is not required to see in Adam and Eve the “historical parents of the entire human race,” but to see in their fall the beginning of the universal curse of sin and death.