Category Archive: Bible – OT – Genesis

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Noah and Adam

In The Gospel of Genesis, Warren Gage talks about some of the correspondences between the story of Adam in the Garden and the story of Noah after the Flood:

The structural and literary correspondence between the story of Noah’s sin and the record of Adam’s Fall is striking. Noah’s transgression begins with a vineyard (Gen 9:20) while Adam’s sin is set in a garden (Gen 3:1). Noah drank of the fruit of the vine while Adam ate of the fruit of the tree (Gen 9:20; 3:2), both being acts of deliberate disobedience resulting in the sinner’s awareness of shameful nakedness (Gen 9:21; 3:7). While Noah’s nakedness was covered by his eldest sons (Gen 9:23), Adam’s nakedness was covered by God (Gen 3:32), and both the sin of Noah and the sin of Adam issued into a fearful curse and enduring division in their respective seed (Gen 9:25; 3:15) (p. 12).

I find some of the parallels Gage points out instructive and they’re certainly worth exploring. I do think that Genesis 9 contains echoes of Genesis 3. But I’m not persuaded that Gage is reading the correspondences correctly.

First, he appears to assume that Genesis 9 records Noah’s sin, which, I gather, he takes to be Noah’s drunkenness.  At least, that’s what I conclude from what he says later on (p. 136).  Here, it sounds as if Gage thinks that Noah’s sin was drinking “of the fruit of the vine” and that doing so was an act “of deliberate disobedience.”  Perhaps Gage believes it is a sin to drink wine.  If not, then he hasn’t worded things well.

And, in fact, if the sin is not drinking the fruit of the vine, then the “parallel” with Adam isn’t as neat as Gage makes it out to be.  Adam’s sin was not that he glutted himself with the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  His sin was that he ate from it at all.  One bite would have been sin.  But if Noah sinned in Genesis 9, his sin wasn’t that he drank the fruit of the vine.  His sin was that he was drunk.  Again, that isn’t exactly parallel to Adam’s sin.

Nor is it clear to me that Noah sinned at all here in Genesis 9.  While the word translated “drunk” here does seem to indicate some degree of intoxication, the text does not indicate that Noah deliberately drank to get drunk or that he was a binge drinker or that he behaved improperly in any way.  We are not told that Noah was a drunkard.  We are told that when he drank this one time, the wine began to affect him and he went to sleep in his tent (or possibly, given the feminine suffix at the end of the Hebrew word for tent, in his wife’s tent).

As James Jordan says,

In English, “getting drunk” usually means becoming helplessly inebriated, but it does not have that meaning in Hebrew. All this statement needs to mean is that Noah drank enough to feel warm, peaceful, and sleepy. This is the kind of restful and relaxing use of alcohol that the Bible commends as entirely proper, on proper occasions. Possibly, of course, Noah was new to wine and accidently drank too much; but however the case may be, there is nothing to indicate any sinful action on Noah’s part. In this story, it is Ham, not Noah, who sins.

We are also told that Noah uncovered himself. That is, he was warm and lay down for a nap. Since he was inside his own private tent, he was hidden from view; that is, he was still covered by the tent itself.

And that’s another problem with the “parallels” Gage presents. There was nothing shameful about Adam and Woman’s nakedness in the beginning, just as there is nothing shameful about a baby’s nakedness or, for that matter, about the nakedness of a husband and wife when they’re alone together. Their nakedness is a problem only after they have eaten the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: they were naked and not ashamed, but now they are aware that they are naked, naked when they ought to be robed in glory, and now their nakedness is shameful.

Noah’s nakedness is a motif that does echo the nakedness of Adam and Woman in some way, but I’m not sure it echoes it in the way Gage thinks. Was Noah, after his alleged sin, “shamefully naked”? No, no more than it’s shameful for you to be naked when you’re taking an afternoon nap in your bedroom with the door closed. Noah wasn’t naked in public. He wasn’t naked when he ought to have been dressed. He was naked when he was napping and he was napping in the shelter of his (or perhaps his wife’s) tent. At the time, the tent was enough of a covering, as Jordan says.

The big problem with Gage’s attempt to line up Adam’s sin with Noah’s is that the sin that’s in view in Genesis 9 isn’t Noah’s sin but Ham’s.  Even if there was something sinful about Noah’s drinking, that’s not what the text focuses on.  Genesis 9 doesn’t say that the curse came upon Noah’s seed because of Noah’s sin, and so another of Gage’s “correspondences” breaks down.  Rather, the curse came upon Ham’s seed.

The curse on the seed is an echo of the curses pronounced in Genesis 3.  But then the parallel is between the serpent and Ham.  Ham is the new serpent in the Garden (vineyard).  He acts as an accuser, telling his brothers about his father’s nakedness, as if that nakedness were shameful, but the sons uphold the glory and honor of their father by refusing to look upon his nakedness, refusing to dishonor their father as Ham had done, and by covering him with “the robe” (not “a robe,” but “the robe,” which suggests that the robe was an indication of their father’s exalted position).

Ham is the serpent and his seed is Canaan and the subsequent Canaanites, while Shem in particular is the seed who will crush the serpent.  But who pronounces this judgment?  In Genesis 3, it was Yahweh who pronounced judgment on Adam and the woman and the serpent.  But here, the judgment is pronounced by Noah.  There’s no judgment on Noah himself, but Noah curses Canaan and blesses Shem and Japheth.  Gage to the contrary, the correspondence isn’t between Noah and Adam but between Noah and God, just as it is when God gave to Noah the authority to carry out the death penalty.

There’s progress here: Noah is greater than Adam because he does things that God alone did before.  God planted the Garden in Eden, but Noah now images God by planting this vineyard.  Adam was not the one who judged Cain; God was.  But Noah judges his sons.  Adam was not allowed to put Cain to death;  God reserved that right for himself.  But Noah is now authorized to administer the death-penalty. 

In fact, far from being a story about Noah’s Adam-like fall, this is the story of the authority, threatened but maintained, of a faithful ruler.  Noah is one of the “gods,” a term Psalm 82 uses for judges, because, when his “sabbath” rest is disturbed by a serpent in his vineyard and in his tent, he, like God in Genesis 3, curses the serpent and his seed and blesses his faithful sons.

Who Wrote Genesis?

While the “higher critics” (who are, to borrow from Chesterton, high primarily in the sense that meat can be called high) see Genesis as the product of an editor or a bunch of editors who, sometimes unthinkingly and sometimes skillfully, slapped together a variety of often-conflicting accounts, many of which were written around the time of the Kings or later and none of which date from before Moses, conservative scholars often argue for the Mosaic authorship of Genesis.

A primary prooftext for Mosaic authorship is John 7:21-23, where Jesus says that Moses gave Israel circumcision and includes circumcision as part of “the law of Moses.”  Since circumcision was given to Abraham in Genesis 17, the argument goes, Genesis 17 must have been written by Moses.

Maybe.  Or maybe not.  It’s possible that Jesus refers to Moses here because Moses edited what we now have as the book of Genesis.  Or maybe Jesus isn’t thinking of Genesis 17 here but rather of Leviticus 12.  (Question: Are there any passages in Scripture which clearly indicate clearly that Moses wrote the historical parts of Exodus through Deuteronomy or anything in Genesis?)

At any rate, it seems to me that conservative scholars sometimes draw certain questionable conclusions from the alleged Mosaic authorship of Genesis.  In his thought-provoking The Gospel of Genesis, Warren Austin Gage writes

… to Moses the exodus deliverance is the decisive theme of Pentateuchal history to which the story of creation, the record of the flood, the narrative of Abraham’s sojourn in Egypt and the Joseph stories are logically subordinate (p. 4).

and, in a footnote,

The creation is elaborately reenacted in the exodus-eisodus redemption from Egypt.  Noah, like Moses, is delivered by the ark from the waters….  The Abrahamic sojourn in Egypt (Gen 12:10-20) unfolds with (1) a famine to move Abraham to Egypt, (2) the jeopardy of the promised seed, (3) the plagues upon the house of pharaoh, and (4) the driving out of Abraham with much treasure — i.e., the story of the exodus in brief.  Joseph, like Moses, is rejected by Israel only to be appointed by god for his deliverance (cf. Acts 7:9, 25) (p. 4n5).

It sounds to me as if Gage thinks that Moses wrote the accounts in Genesis with the Exodus in mind, choosing them and shaping them in such as way as to reflect the events of the Exodus.  But that, I submit, is most likely backwards.  It isn’t that Abraham’s exodus from Egypt reflects Israel’s but rather that Israel’s Exodus under Moses follows the pattern of Abraham’s previous one.

The conclusion often reached by those who assume Mosaic authorship is that Genesis is focused on Israel and written for Israel in the wilderness.  So men such as Bruce Waltke and Mark Futato argue that Genesis 1 is intended as a foundation for the covenant established with Israel at Mount Sinai or that Genesis 1 is as polemic against the gods of Canaan to prepare Israel for their new situation when they enter Canaan.  And so forth.

Again, I grant that Moses may have had a hand in editing the book of Genesis, but I don’t see any reason to believe that Noah didn’t have the account of creation and the genealogy of Adam or that Joseph didn’t have the whole thing up to the narratives about his father.  Moses may have edited it, but what he edited likely existed before.

It also doesn’t appear that he was the only one or the last one to edit the book: Genesis 36:31 seems to have a later (but inspired) addition which likely dates from a time when Israel had kings.

But to assert that Moses wrote the whole thing so that all of it must be read primarily in terms of the situation in Moses’ time, in light of the Exodus, and as preparation for the Sinai covenant and the entrance into Canaan goes beyond biblical evidence and prevents us from reading Genesis correctly.

For instance, if we claim that the focus in Genesis 1 is on Israel, either as polemic against the idols that Israel would encounter or as foundation for the Mosaic covenant at Sinai, we may accurately capture an application of the passage — contrary to paganism, for instance, the sun isn’t a god and isn’t the ultimate source of light but rather was created by the one true God who had already created light first — but that focus on Israel and her (assumed) situation may make us overlook the global application of the passage.

In other words, if we see Genesis 1 as a polemic against pagan gods, we’re either making an application of what the text says or we are reading that polemic into the text.  The text itself gives us no hint that it is a polemic aimed at Israel in the wilderness.  Rather, it presents itself as a history of the creation of the world, with implications not just for Israel (who isn’t mentioned or even in view here) but for the whole world.

As Jordan points out concerning this assertion that Israel is the focus of Genesis, “such a reading of Genesis elevates the Sinaitic covenant above the Adamic, Noahic, and Patriarchal covenants, which are lowered to the status of mere preliminaries” (Creation in Six Days, p. 34).What about the rest of Genesis?  Is Israel the primary focus?  Gage says so:

While the chronicle of the origin of Israel is unquestionably primary to the design of Genesis, the beginnings of Israel’s national history are nevertheless embedded in a matrix of universal history, a broader context which affords a historiographical perspective to the author’s interpretation of Israel’s destiny (p.8).

Granted, Gage also speaks about the broader context.  But the nations, on Gage’s view, are only context.  The focus is Israel.

Now it’s true that the narrative of Genesis focuses on Abraham and then on Isaac and then on Jacob/Israel and on his twelve sons.  Israel as a nation, of course, is not in view here at all, but Genesis does present the history of Israel’s forefathers.  But is that history primary so that the nations are just “context”?  I don’t believe so.

First, that interpretation does not do justice to Genesis 1-11 but reduces it to mere background.  It isn’t the thrust of the book but merely provides a bit of the setting for the important stuff.

Second, this interpretation loses sight of the global significance of Israel.  It isn’t that God has chosen to work with Israel instead of with the world.  Rather, God declares that he has chosen Abraham — and hence Israel — for the sake of the world.  In Genesis 12, the covenant with Abram includes the promise that all the nations will be blessed in him.  And so much of the narrative of Genesis is about the interaction (good and bad) between Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph and the nations.

Third, this interpretation also fails to take into account the conclusion of Genesis.  Genesis doesn’t lose sight of the nations as it progresses.  At the end of the book, Joseph rules over the nations and they come to him for the blessing of food.

Certainly, the text does focus on Isaac, not Ishmael or Abraham’s other sons, on Jacob and not so much on Esau, and so forth (though one should be careful about saying so, since the text appears to focus on Joseph and not so much on Judah but that doesn’t imply anything about the significance of Judah in history).  But in all of that focus on the patriarchs, the nations are also always in view.  It seems to me that Israel’s origins aren’t the primary thrust of Genesis.  The world’s salvation is at least as primary.

Who wrote Genesis?  I don’t know.  Maybe Moses.  Or maybe Adam and Noah and Shem and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph with Moses perhaps doing some compilation and editing and some later editors adding their touches as well.  But at any rate, scholars ought to be careful not to use an assertion about Mosaic authorship to justify reading their guesses about Israel’s situation in the wilderness back into the text of Genesis.

Six-Day Creation

I read Gary North’s “Basic Implications of Six-Day Creation” (The Dominion Covenant: Genesis, pp. 425-454) in the hope that he’d say something about … well, about the basic implications of six-day creation.  Oddly enough, he doesn’t.

He does talk a lot about God as the creator and the implications of God’s creation of the world.  North has a great gift for summarizing complex positions in easier terms (though I have to admit that this essay doesn’t seem to be his best work: several times I couldn’t follow the flow of his arguments).

For instance, talking about the pagan view of “creation” in which there is no Creator-creature distinction and God, though higher on the chain of being than man, is still just part of “being in general,” he says, “At best, the pagan god is Dr. God, while we humans are only Mr.” (p. 429).

His brief discussion of the pagan chaos festivals (e.g., Saturnalia, Carnival, and Mardi Gras) as ritual returns to (what pagans see as) the primordial chaos in an effort to escape from law, order, and the “burden” of time and begin a new creation was suggestive, though more detail would have been helpful.

I also appreciate his emphasis on the connection between meekness and dominion: “It is meekness before God which gives man dominion over nature” (p. 437).  It would have been nice if North had added something about meekness before men, too.

All of that is good stuff.

But the title of his essay wasn’t “Basic Implications of Creation.”  It was “Basic Implications of Six-Day Creation,” and about that North said nothing.  All the implications he pointed out would still have been there if God had created the world in a moment instead of in six days.

So what are the implications of six-day creation?  Why didn’t God do it all at once?

Here are some of my thoughts:

First, Genesis 1:1 tells us that God created the heavens and the earth.  Those “heavens” are not the sky and outer space, which are the firmament heavens created on the second day (and probably expanded into “outer space” on the fourth day).  The heavens of Genesis 1:1 are the place where God’s throne is, where God is surrounded by the angels, who were also created at that time.  In fact, the creation of the angels appears to have been in Genesis 1:1a, before “and the earth,” because the angels (“sons of God”) sang when the foundation of the earth was laid (Job 38:7).

Heaven was created brightly lit, structured, and populated (by a host of angels).  Earth, in contrast, was dark, unstructured (tohu: without form), and unpopulated (bohu: without inhabitant) (Gen. 1:2).  The six days of creation, then, show God working with His creation, with what He formed in Genesis 1:1 at the beginning of the first day, to provide light, to structure the world (light and dark, evening and morning; waters above and waters below with a firmament in between; seas and dry land), and then to populate it (fish, birds, land animals, and finally man).

The six days of creation, then, set the course of history: God could have created the earth like heaven, lit, structured, and populated.  But instead he created it unlike heaven and gradually worked to make it more like heaven.  That’s what God is also going to be doing throughout history, moving the world from glory to glory, and culminating in bringing His people into His rest at the end (Heb. 3-4).

Even the progress from dark to light is significant, then.  God starts with darkness and moves to light, and so does the course of history.  There is increasing light: the increasing revelation from God throughout the history of God’s people in Scripture from the patriarchs through Moses to Jesus and the apostles, the increasing maturity and glory of God’s people, the increasing spread of God’s kingdom in the world in our history until the day when all will be light.  The movement from dark to light is eschatological and the six days thus point us to God’s increasing glory in history.

More than that, the six days then also set a pattern for man’s work.  As God takes hold of His creation, divides and forms and (re)structures it, beautifies it (e.g., plants on the dry ground), distributes it to others to enjoy and to rule for Him, and so forth, so man will also work with creation — with the addition that man, when he takes hold of God’s creation, is to give thanks.  And as God built a house for man to live in, man will now image and imitate God by using God’s creation — and multiplying — in order to build the word (and people in particular) into a house for God.

Looking at what I’ve written, I can see that I’ve gleaned a lot of this from James Jordan who, it seems to me, is one of the few guys who has devoted much thought to the implications of God’s six-day creation.  I think there are probably many more implications to glean from Genesis 1.

And that’s where you come in.  Why six days?  What are the implications, not just of creation (as in North’s essay), but of six-day creation?

Genesis

I’m currently preaching through Paul’s letter to the Philippians. But when I finish this series, I’d like to start on the book of Genesis. I have a number of commentaries, monographs, and articles on Genesis. But I’d like to know what you would recommend that I read (or hear, for that matter) on Genesis. What would be your “must have” commentaries? What articles provide not-to-be-missed insights?

I’m particularly interested in commentaries that pay close attention to the literary features of the text and to symbolism and typology, and I’d prefer commentaries that make me think, even if they are sometimes quirky and strange.

So … recommendations?

The God of Ice Cream

Worth reading: Tim Gallant on “The God of Ice Cream. I read this first when he sent me his Sunday sermon and wanted to post it, and then I discovered that he had already done so!

Wedding Homily, December 31, 2004

WEDDING HOMILY
for Tym van Braeden & Hester Barendregt,
December 31, 2004

Scripture: Genesis 1:26-28; 2:18-25; 5:1-3

Tym and Hester, marriage is interwoven into many of our best stories. There are novels and short stories and movies and songs about marriage, about the quest for marriage, about the wedding itself, about all the different experiences of married couples.

A wedding is a great ending to a story. Prince Charming rescues Sleeping Beauty and marries her and they live happily ever after. And a wedding will be the great ending to this phase of our story. In the end, King Jesus is going to take to Himself His bride, the bride for whom He gave His life, and they will live happily ever after.

But a wedding is also a great beginning to a story. Your wedding is going to lead to challenges and trials and adventures and pleasures that you couldn’t have experienced any other way. Your wedding is the start of a new story. And a wedding was at the start of the big story, the story of God and His people.

Why is marriage so central to the stories we tell and the stories that most of us live? Why are weddings so prominent in the Bible? The reason is that marriage is never simply two people coming together. From the beginning, marriage has been a symbol of something greater.

The glory of marriage is that marriage is a reflection — a created image — of the Triune God. That’s what we see here in Genesis 1. Before He creates man, God first deliberates. He says, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.”

God didn’t say anything like that before He created the animals. He didn’t deliberate or hold a council before He created them. But He did deliberate before creating man.

But with whom is God deliberating here? He isn’t speaking to the angels. Man isn’t created in the image of the angels. He isn’t simply speaking majestically, the way a king might call himself “we” in some official document. God doesn’t speak that way anywhere else. Nor is He simply speaking to Himself.

Genesis 1 tells us that there is one God. But here it also hints that this one God is not merely one. He’s also three. That’s something we know more fully from the rest of Scripture. But already in this chapter, we’ve heard about the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. We’ve encountered the Word of God, by which God created the world.

And now these three persons — Father, Word, and Spirit — deliberate together before the creation of man. That didn’t happen when God created the animals. It happens when He creates man. Why? Because the Triune God is creating man to represent Him and to share in His family life and family love.

In many ways, man is like the animals. He’s created out of the dust. He eats the same kind of food. He even receives a similar blessing. But only man is created as God’s covenant partner and only man is created in God’s image and according to God’s likeness.

But what does it mean for man to be “in God’s image”? We learn some of the answers by looking at what God does here in Genesis 1. God creates and man images God by creating, by making things. God rules and man is going to image God by ruling over God’s creation.

But that isn’t all that we learn here in Genesis 1 about how man images and reflects God. God deliberates before He creates man and He’s able to deliberate because God is not only one; He’s also three. And when God creates man in His image, He makes man into a creaturely copy of Himself. Verse 27: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

Individual people aren’t one and three in the way that God is. But God creates one man and then He makes a distinction. He takes a rib from the man and forms it into a woman so that now the one man becomes two people. And then He brings the man and the woman together in marriage so that the two of them become one flesh, united covenantally, united as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united in love and harmony and communion.

Both men and women are created in the image of God. Both men and women represent and reflect God on earth. Both share in the calling to subdue and rule the world. But the two together in marriage reflect and represent God in a way that men and women don’t as individuals.

“It is not good that man should be alone,” God says. It’s not good because it doesn’t fully image the God who is never alone, the one God who is also a community of love. And so He forms a partner for man, a partner who is different from the man.

God doesn’t create another man to help Adam. Instead, He establishes sexual differences. He creates man male and female. He creates a woman, a person who is like man in many ways but who is also gloriously unlike him.

Why? Because that bond between two very different sorts of people — equally human, equally God’s children, equally created in the image of God, but very different — that union between two different people best reflects Him in His unity and His diversity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

That’s the highest purpose and the glory of marriage, of your marriage: to reflect the unity and diversity, the union and communion, the covenantal love of the Triune God. And out of that union in love comes new life. And in that way, too, we image God.

Out of the union and fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit came the creation of Adam, whom the Bible calls “God’s son,” man who is created male and female in God’s image. And out of union and fellowship between man and wife come children, in their father’s image.

Tym and Hester, God has blessed you richly. Individually, you were created to represent God and to rule over His creation. But it is not good for the man to be alone and God has given you each other. Together, you will reflect Him in ways you cannot alone.

But that also gives you a calling. You know that not every marriage is a happy one. Not every marriage accurately represents and reflects the love and fellowship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You know that from experience and you can trace that story back to the beginning.

Adam and Eve didn’t have a happy marriage. Adam didn’t protect his wife when the dragon came and tempted her. Instead of crushing the dragon’s head, he allowed him to deceive his wife. And then, when he saw that his wife ate the forbidden fruit and didn’t die immediately, Adam ate it himself. Adam was self-centred. He grabbed for glory for himself.

And that is the story of the human race. That’s who we are by nature. In Adam, we’re self-centred people. Our relationships are characterized by selfishness, by grabbing for our own glory. We use other people — husbands and wives and children — for ourselves. Sin defiles the image of God; it robs us of God’s likeness. In Adam, it is impossible to image God correctly.

But Tym and Hester, you aren’t in Adam any longer. You’ve been baptized into Jesus Christ. You’ve taken off the old man and you’ve put on the new man, who is being renewed according to the image of God the creator. In Jesus Christ, you are new creatures, recreated and being renewed so that more and more you do reflect and represent God. Christ has restored you and is restoring you to the image of God.

And that has everything to do with today, with your wedding, and with your marriage ahead. God calls you to reflect Him in the way that you interact with each other. What is the Triune God like? We know Him best when we look at Jesus Christ, who did not regard His equality with God as something to be used for His own advantage.

Precisely because He was God, He poured Himself out, having become a man for that very purpose. He humbled Himself. He obeyed to the point of death, even the death of the cross.

That’s what our God is like. He’s the God who doesn’t look out for His own interests alone but who seeks the interests of others. He’s the God who regards others as more important than Himself. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are bound together in an eternal communion of love, a communion characterized by eternal self-giving, self-sacrifice, and service to each other.

And that’s the relationship that you are called to reflect together.

Tym, it’s going to be tempting to live as if you’re still single. You want certain things. You have certain goals. When you’re single, you manage your time and your money for yourself. But in a few minutes, you won’t be single anymore. You’ll be Hester’s husband and God calls you to love her with a love like Christ’s love, a self-sacrificing, self-giving love.

Sometimes that love will take the form of service, setting aside your priorities to glorify and beautify your wife. That love will take the form of protection as you lay down your life for her sake. That love will also take the form of headship and leadership as you lay down self-interest and take responsibility for her and for your family, even when it might be easier to let her make the tough decisions and bear the consequences alone.

Hester, you’ll be Tym’s wife, called to orient yourself toward him, called to submit to Him as the church submits to Christ and as Christ submits to the Father. God calls you to help Tym in his goals and his pursuits. And he’s going to need help — the particular sort of help that only you can give.

Sometimes that help is going to take the form of correction. He’s going to need your wisdom. Sometimes that help is going to involve humbling yourself to serve him when you’d rather not. But always that help is going to involve self-sacrifice, putting him ahead of your own inclinations and your own interests.

Every happy wedding points forward to the happy ending of our story, the wedding feast when Jesus Christ takes the church as His bride and no more sin interrupts our union with each other and with Him.

But every happy wedding is also the beginning of a story, as it was at the beginning with Adam and Eve. It’s a story that you are going to tell together, a story that you will live out every day of your lives.

You can tell that story one of two ways. You can tell it as the story of Adam, the story of self-seeking. But that story has an unhappy ending because it leads to death. Or you can tell the story as the story of Christ, the story of love, the story of self-sacrifice, the story that leads through humility and death to glory.

In Christ, you’ve been set free from sin, set free from the story of Adam, so that you can live in love. So live in Christ together. Trust Him and follow in His footsteps. And your story will reflect the glory and the love of the Triune God, who created you and who is renewing you in His image, according to His likeness.

Satan’s Fall

I was working on Genesis 3:14-15 this week in connection with a sermon I was preparing (thanks, Tim for sending me your notes on that chapter). In the course of that study, I began to wonder about the timing of Satan’s fall.

I suspect that, if we think about it at all, we’re inclined to say that we don’t know exactly when Satan fell but it was before Genesis 3. We might (rightly) reject the view that Satan fell before Adam was created. After all, on the sixth day of creation, God declares that everything He created is very good and that would include the angels.

I suspect the angels were created at the very beginning when God created the heavens (Gen. 1:1a: “In the beginning, God created the heavens…”), since they were singing when God laid the foundations of the earth (Job 38:4-7) and that happened in the second half of Genesis 1:1 (“… and the earth”).

At any rate, the angels are creatures, included in God’s creative work in the six days of Genesis 1, and therefore among the creatures which God pronounces “very good” at the end of the sixth day. So, contrary to Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan falls before the creation of man, Satan must have fallen after the sixth day.

But when? Again, we’re inclined to shrug our shoulders. We often think that a long, long time passed after the creation of man and before the Fall and that somewhere during that time, but up in heaven, Satan and his armies rebelled, we know not how. I’m more inclined to think that Adam’s fall happened very soon after his creation. After all, it doesn’t appear that Adam had yet eaten from the Tree of Life. If he’d been in the Garden for any length of time, you would expet him to have done so. It’s entirely possible that Adam fell on the seventh day, so that instead of entering God’s rest and giving him thanks for His creation, as appropriate on the seventh day, he rebelled instead (Rom. 1:18ff.).

As I was working through Genesis 3, I was struck by some of the things that it suggests with regard to Satan’s fall. I’d heard Jim Jordan say that he thought Satan’s fall happened in the course of his conversation with the woman (a view, if memory serves me correctly, he’d heard proposed by Jeff Meyers). “Hmmm…” I said to myself.

Before his fall, Satan was Lucifer, that is, the light-bearer. This name reflects Lucifer’s original calling, namely, to bear God’s light. To whom? To man.

We learn about Satan’s original calling by observing what the rest of Scripture tells us about angels and their work. Man was created “a little lower than the angels” (Ps. 8:5 as cited in Heb. 2:7), though that wasn’t man’s ultimate destiny (cf. Heb. 2:9). The Torah — the word means instruction, not law — was given by the ministration of angels (Heb. 2:2; Gal. 3:19), which, by the way, gives added significance to Paul’s statement in Galatians 1:8 (“Even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we have preached to you, let him be accursed”).

During the old creation (i.e., the events from Genesis 1 to the end of the Old Covenant) man was under the angels, to be instructed and trained by them. (Jim Jordan says in his Brief Reader’s Guide to Revelation that the presence of so many angels in Revelation indicates that the events John is describing took place in the time when man was still under the angels, that is, they refer to the time of the end of the Old Covenant in AD 70.)

Furthermore, we learn a lot about Lucifer’s original task by looking at the Angel of Yahweh in Scripture. After Lucifer fell, he was replaced as man’s tutor by the Second Person of the Trinity, acting in the role of the messenger (which is what “angel” means”) of Yahweh. That this Angel is himself Yahweh is made clear in several passages, among them Judges 6:11ff. and 13:17-23.

A brief digression: In Jude 9, we read that

Michael the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.”

Where is that story in the Bible? Well, “The Lord rebuke you” is from Zechariah 3. In that chapter, Joshua the high priest stands before the Angel of Yahweh and “the Satan” stands there to accuse him:

And Yahweh said to Satan, “Yahweh [Greek translation: The Lord] rebuke you, Satan! Indeed, Yahweh [the Lord] who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you!”

This is the dispute Jude has in mind. It’s a dispute over “the body of Moses.” “The body of Moses” isn’t Moses’ physical body; like “the body of Christ” (the church), it’s corporate. “The body of Moses” is Israel, brought back from exile but still defiled by sin, which Joshua the High Priest bears on himself and which is the basis for Satan’s charges against Joshua, Jerusalem, and Israel.

Zechariah identifies the parties of the dispute as the Angel of Yahweh and Satan. Jude identifies them as Michael and the devil, which implies that Jude understands the name of the Angel of Yahweh, the pre-incarnate Second Person of the Trinity, to be Michael, the same Michael who appears in Daniel and Revelation. Anyway, that’s a digression.

As Jim Jordan has pointed out in his lectures, before He was the second Adam, God’s son was the second Lucifer. That is, before He was incarnate as a man, He acted as “the Angel of Yahweh,” replacing the fallen Lucifer as man’s tutor. He led Israel to the Promised Land (Ex. 33:2) and to conquest (Josh. 5:13-16:5; Jud. 6:11ff., etc.). He also taught God’s people the Word of Yahweh (e.g., Gen. 18).

That’s the work of the Angel of Yahweh, man’s chief tutor up until the end of the Old Covenant. But in the beginning, the angel who came to man — God’s appointed tutor — wasn’t the Second Person of the Trinity taking on the role of an angel. It was Lucifer, who fell and became the devil (“the adversary”) and the satan (“the accuser”). In the beginning, Lucifer was to be the light-bearer, man’s tutor and guide who would train him and prepare him for his calling to subdue and rule the world (as the new tutor, the Angel of Yahweh, prepared Israel to conquer and rule the Promised Land).

But did Lucifer fall before he ever got around to carrying out that task? That’s possible. But in that case, it seems to me that he would have been replaced before he got to the Garden. It makes more sense to me to think that Lucifer fell as he was executing his calling.

In fact, Lucifer’s fall was that he perverted his calling. He “tutored” the woman, but he “tutored” her to disobey God.

What was his motive? Well, given that Adam and Eve were created a little lower than the angels but were intended eventually to have dominion over the angels (as Christ, as a man, now has dominion over the angels and as we shall eventually judge angels, 1 Cor. 6:3), the serpent’s motive may have been jealousy. He didn’t want to be like a drill sergeant who trains a man knowing that one day that man will be an officer and have authority over him. So he passed on perverted teaching to keep Adam and Eve from reaching that destiny. At least, that’s a plausible motive.

When did that perverse tutoring start? We often think that it must have started with the first thing the serpent said in 3:1b (“Has God said…?”) and that’s possible. As Eve’s sin begins with her thinking about doing what God had forbidden and as Adam’s started with his failure to guard the garden and protect Eve, so the serpent’s sin may have begun with him contemplating leading Adam and Eve astray before he ever opened his mouth.

But it’s also possible that his sin began between his first and second statement. His question in Genesis 3:1b can be taken as a veiled accusation of God (“Was God really so mean as to forbid you to eat from all the trees?”). But it may also be taken in a better sense. Teachers use these kinds of questions today so that the student will respond by correcting them, thereby showing that he really knows the right answer. “Jesus isn’t God, is He?” the catechism teacher asks, and the child quickly says, “Yes, He is!” It’s possible that man’s tutor, the angel in the form of a serpent, is doing that kind of catechesis.

But in 3:4, the serpent directly contradicts what God said: “You shall not surely die.” That statement (or perhaps the question in 3:1b), together with the thoughts and inclinations leading up to it, it seems to me, is the point in history where Lucifer fell.

A few more things in this passage appear to support this view.

Genesis 3:1 tells us that the serpent “was more cunning than any beast of the field which Yahweh God had made.” “More cunning” here doesn’t mean “sinful.” Rather, the implication is that being cunning is a good thing. Yahweh God made the serpent “more cunning” than the rest of the field animals (that is, the wild animals out in the world beyond the garden, as opposed to the tamer garden animals).

But if the serpent in 3:1a is still good (and given 1:31, we have no textual reason to think he was not still good), then his fall must have taken place either just before 3:1b or in the course of his instruction, when he contradicts God in 3:4.

And then there’s 3:14. When Yahweh God pronounces judgment on the serpent, he says this: “Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field.” That is to say, God declares Satan cursed because he has attacked the woman with lies. That is why Satan will be crushed by the woman’s seed.

But if Satan fell at some earlier time, before Genesis 3, we would expect him to have been under God’s curse and in for a crushing already. But Scripture says that he is cursed and forced to grovel and “bite the dust” and that he will eventually be defeated and crushed because of what he did to Adam and Eve in the Garden. That suggests to me that Satan’s fall into sin — for which he is cursed and sentenced to destruction — took place in the events of Genesis 3:1-5.

Finally, whatever we are to make of Yahweh’s message in Ezekiel 28 to “the ruler of Tyre,” who is described as wearing garments like Israel’s priests and who is described as “the anointed cherub who covers,” he is said to have been “in Eden, the garden of God” (28:13), placed by Yahweh “on the holy mountain of God” (28:14) and “blameless” at that time. His fall took place in Eden; he was thrown from God’s holy mountain (28:16). Again, I don’t exactly know what to make of this passage. The primary reference is to “the ruler of Tyre,” but the reference to the “anointed cherub” suggests that there may be some link with Lucifer. But if so, then Ezekiel 28 implies that Lucifer’s fall took place in Eden, the Garden of God, on God’s holy mountain.

Putting all of this together, it seems to me that Satan’s fall took place in the events of Genesis 3:1-5, in the seduction of the woman, which is the event for which God curses him to destruction.

When did his hosts fall? Perhaps at the same time somehow. Perhaps later.

But wouldn’t God’s curse on the serpent have frightened them enough to keep them from falling by following Satan (“Yike! Look what happened to him!”)?

Not necessarily. After all, they had seen that Satan’s lie had been successful in seducing the woman away from God and that the man had fallen too. Through sin, the whole human race came under the dominion of sin and death and of the devil, who held the power of death (Heb. 2:14-15). Perhaps some of the host of heaven followed Satan because, curse or no curse, they thought there was a chance that he might win. He’d done pretty well already and so far his head hadn’t been crushed, nor was it for many years.

I don’t claim that these thoughts are original with me; in fact, I’ve heard most of this stuff from others. But these are some things I’ve been mulling over this week. I invite your thoughts in response.

Babel

In connection with my reading of Genesis, I’ve also been reading James Jordan’s Primeval Saints. Here’s a quotation relating to the Tower of Babel:

Ever since this time sinful human beings have tended to view people who speak other languages as inferior, or even as only talking animals. The word “barbarian” comes from the way other languages sound in our ears: “bar bar,” almost like the barking of dogs. European conquerors treated Africans and Asians as barbarians, seldom bothering to learn their very rich and complex languages, despising the inescapable manifestation of the image of God in these cultures.

The Christian knows that God has established Christianity to create a true unity of confession … among all nations and peoples, but this unity will not destroy the diversity of languages. Instead, each nation and language will praise Him in its own tongue (Rev. 7:9). Enlightened Christians seek to recognize and appreciate the beauty of every language God has put into the human race. Good missionaries do not seek to destroy everything in pagan societies, but rather they bring the Bible to such cultures and let the Bible transform them into true cultures.

At Pentecost (Acts 2), God sent out the gospel in all languages. While the Bible is the original and pure form of God’s Word in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, the fullness of His revelation will not come until every language comes to express biblical truth in its own unique way. Every language has a particular set of perspectives on the Word of God, and thus every language is fitted to reveal God and praise Him in a special way. Throughout eternity the saints will delight to learn language after language, learning to praise God in new ways, age after age, forever and ever.

Godward Signs

I’ve been reading through Genesis for the last few days, and on Saturday I noticed something in Genesis 9 that I hadn’t spotted before.

We tend to think that God placed the rainbow in the cloud primarily to remind us that God won’t destroy the world with a flood — and, of course, that’s part of the function of the rainbow, which is why God tells Noah about the rainbow. But the rainbow has that man-comforting function because God says that He will look on the rainbow and remember the covenant (Gen. 9:16). The rainbow functions primarily, then, as a memorial for God so that when He sees it He will remember His promises and His people. In fact, that’s the purpose of many of the memorials in Scripture: they are God-appointed reminders to God of His covenant.

All of that was familiar to me already. But what I hadn’t noticed before was that, right after speaking about how He will see the rainbow and remember His covenant, God then says that the rainbow is “the sign of the covenant” (Gen. 9:17).

In our Reformed sacramental theology, we speak of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as “signs” (and “seals”), language we have learned from Scripture. But as we think about the sacraments as “signs,” we ought to take into account what Scripture means when it speaks of something as a “sign of the covenant.” And here in Genesis 9, the “sign of the covenant,” while it does have a man-ward function, serves primarily to remind God of His faithfulness to His covenant.

In this connection, we might think also of the signs God places on men’s foreheads in Ezekiel and Revelation. They are put there so that God will remember these people in grace and so that the people will not be destroyed in God’s judgment.

So too, then, with the sacraments. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as “signs” of the covenant, identify us to God as His people so that He maintains His covenant faithfulness to us. That isn’t their only function, of course, but it does appear to be one of their primary functions.

Perhaps this is old news to you (especially if your name is Mark Horne), but I can’t recall seeing much discussion along these lines — okay, I can’t remember any — in standard Reformed treatments of the sacraments.

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