Genesis 1-3: Not Maximalist, Not Minimalist, But Seminal

D. A. Carson

(June 6, 2016. Rough draft only; more notes to follow.)

Five years after I graduated from McGill University with my first degree (in Chemistry), I read Francis Schaeffer’s Genesis in Space and Time.1 At the time I found it extremely refreshing, primarily because of the controlling question that Schaeffer raises. Schaeffer does not ask us to track out all theological themes lurking in Genesis 1-11, nor to settle all the debates over creation and evolution (both of which are maximalist approaches); still less does he encourage such systematic skepticism that little of these chapters remains useful to the Christian reader (a minimalist approach). Rather, he asks the question, What is the least that these chapters must be saying for the rest of the Bible to be coherent and true?

That is not the only legitimate question to put to these chapters, of course. A moment’s reflection coughs up questions about the cultural and historical background of the Ancient Near East, the literary genre(s) of these chapters, the characteristics of ancient genealogies, epistemological questions surrounding revelation of material that all sides agree makes reference to the pre-historical, the significance of creation week, the correlation (or absence of correlation) between these chapters and contemporary scientific findings, and much more.2 But Schaeffer’s question gets rather quickly to the heart of several important matters.

The purpose of this paper is to approach the Schaeffer question again, but with a twist. When Schaeffer probed how the material in Genesis 1-11 is tied to “the rest of the Bible,” he was thinking in terms of the structures of systematic theology. He was appealing to the analogia fidei; he was meditating on what some today call the theological interpretation of Scripture. That is certainly a useful approach; if this were a different kind of paper, it would be helpful to tease out why it is useful. The danger with it, however, is that it encourages reading the full-orbed doctrinal development generated by reflection on the completed canon back into the opening chapters of Genesis. In short, it is an invitation to read Genesis 1-3 anachronistically (in this paper I will gladly set Genesis 4-11 aside). The result may be another maximalist reading of these opening chapters, a reading very hard to justify from the chapters themselves. Yet surely for the believer who is convinced that one Mind stands behind all of Scripture (however rich and diverse are the themes and flavors generated by many human minds writing in three languages over the period of a

1 London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1972.2 On this latter point, it is worth pondering the argument of Kirsten Birkett, “Science and Scripture,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 948-986, to the effect that the interpretation of Genesis 1-2 has often gone astray by giving too much say to external stances, scientific and philosophical. See also the important work of Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006).

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millennium and a half), we are blind and impoverished if we do not see how these chapters are tied in countless ways to much of the rest of the Bible. A minimalist approach acts as if there is no God who declares that this is his Word, before which human beings are rightly to tremble. It provides lean gruel from Genesis 1-3.

A better approach is to show how seminal these chapters are. For example, there is no mention of the word “temple,” but temple themes are introduced; there is no mention of the word “covenant,” but the concept is lurking in the text; God is not said to be king, but the reign of God is on display for the first time; there is no philosophically sophisticated development of a coherent worldview, but the rudiments of one are not hard to find. In all of these cases, and many more, it is important to show how later biblical writers take their cues from Genesis 1-3, developing and shaping the seminal categories established here into a rich canonical theology that is the basis, finally, for all valid systematic structures.

This paper is seminal – “modest” might be a better word – in two further ways. First, it makes no pretension of isolating all the seminal seeds that grow to become mighty oaks elsewhere in the canon, but fastens on some representative saplings; and second, none of the themes that are included in the ensuing discussion is treated comprehensively. Each could easily become a major article or book, when in fact all I attempt is a seminal approach (that word again).

God Comes First

This rather prosaic point is not developed in Genesis 1-3 into massive structures regarding God’s ontology, in particular his aseity and self-origination. God is simply presupposed; he is introduced, not defined. His relationship with the universe can be teased out from the narrative that follows, and from many later Scriptures (for example, his aseity is explicitly affirmed in Acts 17:25). No proof is offered for his existence; the text offers no Archimedean fulcrum on which to stand. Entailments of this “firstness” are not yet spelled out: e.g., that all things, visible and invisible, are to the praise of his glorious grace; or that the summum bonum is the presence of this God, just as the greatest curse is his absence; that the climax of the story that now begins to unfold is the visio Dei (Rev 22:4).

Of course, “first” conjures up not only sequence, but status. God is incomparably great, utterly preeminent, a truth scarcely developed in these opening chapters of Genesis but massively asserted in the four chapters of rhetorical questions in Job 38-41, all of which questions serve as a meditation on creation, or in prophetic texts such as Isaiah 40:12, 21, 22, 26, 28; 43:15; 44:2, 24; 45:11-12; 45:9, 18, or in an apocalyptic text such as Revelation 4:11, or in a Christological text such as Colossians 1:15-17 (“all things have been created through him and for him”).

God Speaks; He Is a Talking God

That is the first action the Bible attributes to God: he speaks, and by his word calls first light, and then other elements of the universe, into being. Whether God’s creative word in

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this passage calls all things into being ex nihilo continues to be debated; the point certainly seems to be affirmed elsewhere (e.g., Psa 33:6), and his sway over the created order unequaled (recall, again, Job 38-41). However we construe this creation-by-word, it is not to be confused with mere maintenance of eternal “stuff,” as if God’s activity during creation week is indistinguishable from his ongoing providence, for God ceases from his creative work at the end of the sixth day of creation week, while his providential work is unending.

That God is a talking God may at first be disclosed in the activities of creation week, but soon develops into the way he communicates with his image bearers (Gen 2-3) and even with the serpent. Here the text offers no reflection on exactly what it means to affirm that God speaks (In what ways is it like or unlike human speaking?), still less a finely-grained depiction of oracular revelation, visions of the night, the role of prophets, the transcription of the word of God into something written, or the further extension of “word” terminology to refer to Jesus. None of this is yet transparent, yet the seedbed of all of it – that God is a talking God – finds its initial resting-place here.

Old Creation, New Creation

Later on in the Bible, various texts speak of “the new heavens and the new earth” (Isa 65:17; 66:22) or of “a new heaven and a new earth” (2 Pet 3:13; Rev 21:1). Without using that set expression, similar imagery is invoked elsewhere (e.g., Rom 8:18-25, where the “creation” waits to be renewed; 2 Cor 5:16-21, where the “new creation” has already begun, one of the many strands of inaugurated eschatology in the New Testament). More broadly, we also find a “new Adam” or “second Adam” Christology. All such expressions presuppose a first Adam, a first creation, a first “heaven and earth.” And that means that the realities depicted in the opening chapters of Genesis are treated as anchoring what turns into the meta-narrative of Scripture. As Webb puts it:

The fact is that [the] Bible begins with creation and ends with new creation, and that a narrative thread links all that is between the beginning and the end. Not only so, but this narrative thread is not just a chronicle, a list of uninterpreted events arranged in chronological order; it is much more than this. It exhibits all the elements of a classical plot: with initial state of rest, disturbance, quest, danger, and denouement, including arrival at a final state of rest.3

This simple point is disputed, of course, as is almost anything of value in the Bible, but it is difficult for those who see God’s mind behind the entire Scriptural revelation to disown this point. Those of us who teach introductory biblical theology to seminary students sometimes require an essay that outlines all the themes in Revelation 21-22 that first surface in the opening chapters of Genesis. Protology anticipates eschatology; the final massive glory finds its seminal beginnings in the account of the creation and the fall.4

3 Barry G. Webb, “Biblical Authority and Diverse Literary Genres,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 585.

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Despite the amazing diversity of literary genres found in the Bible, the Bible, read as a hole, embraces a story. In the words of Benjamin B. Warfield:

Precisely what characterizes Christianity, however, among the religions is that it is a historical religion, that is, a religion whose facts are its doctrines. Christianity does not consist in a tone of feeling, a way of looking at things – as, for example, the perception of a Father’s hand in all the chances and changes of life; rather, Christianity has to tell of a series of great redemptive acts in which God the Lord has actually intervened in the complex of nature and the stream of history in a definitely supernatural manner. If these facts are denied as actual occurrences in time and space, Christianity is denied; if they are neglected Christianity is neglected.5

One need only compare the Bible with, say, the Qur’an, to detect the uniqueness of the Bible’s structure in this regard. And the anchor is the opening chapters of Genesis.

God Makes Everything, and He Himself Is Unmade

Although it is not the purpose of Genesis 1-3 to provide the contours of a metaphysical worldview, yet the simple postulate of this heading – God makes everything, and he himself is unmade, an affirmation reiterated in Scripture – effectively rules out an array of stances that have often held sway. The Bible’s depiction of reality cannot be confused with pantheism, as if God is no more than all of the reality of the universe but is to be identified with it, nor with panentheism, as if the universe is to be identified with God even though God is rather bigger than the universe. Still less does the Bible sanction Gnostic dualism, in which matter is somehow intrinsically inferior or specifically dirtier than the spiritual world, requiring that the ultimate God be protected from any charge of being sullied by direct involvement with creation. Such protection may remove God from the material world by a series of emanations that finally results in a suitably compromised Demiurge. Nor can the depiction of Genesis 1-3 be squared with Deism, for the God of Genesis interacts with his image bearers in intimate conversation, which is not the style of the proverbial watchmaker. And certainly from the perspective of these chapters, philosophical materialism must be viewed as painfully reductionist. Equally ruled out is the kind of ontological dualism embraced by Star Wars: there is one amoral “Force,” which can be turned to the dark side or to the light side. Already in the narrative of Genesis 3, the author refuses to depict the serpent as the opposite side of God, the dark god as opposed to the light god. Rather, of the few things we are told about the serpent, perhaps the most salient is that he is the most “crafty”6 of the wild animals that the LORD God had made (Gen 3:1), thus establishing that the serpent is part of the created order.

4 Perhaps this is the place to observe that the headings in this essay do not invariably cover mutually exclusive categories, primarily because some of them, like this one, invoke a big picture, while others focus on details enmeshed in the big picture.5 Benjamin B. Warfield, in his review of Hugo Visscher, Van den Eeuwigen Vrede Tusschen Wetenschap en Religie, in Works 10.479. I am indebted to Fred G. Zaspel for this reference.

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None of the philosophical details are worked out in Genesis 1-3, of course. Nevertheless the trajectories are established here, trajectories that make the distinctions between the Bible’s presentation of God and the pictures of God postulated by these alternatives abundantly clear.

God Makes Everything Good

This point is established not only by the explicit affirmations of Genesis 1:25, 31, but also by the symbol-laden description of the nakedness of Adam and his wife (2:25): “they felt no shame,” because, as it were, they had nothing to hide – unlike the situation in the next chapter, when, after disobeying God, their first instinct is to hide, to cover up (3:7). This instinct God approves (3:21): after they sin, they are right to be ashamed. We sometimes forget that the best nudist colonies (if I may use the word “best” of nudist colonies) have operated under a certain theory: the human problem is that we are constantly trying to hide, so the solution is to hide nothing, to be completely open. Let us start by taking off our clothes, and we will thus be on a course toward the complete openness that will usher in utopia. Of course, this approach never works; the problem of sin and shame is much deeper than mere hiding, so the solution demands more than mere openness. In any case, the point of the depiction of Genesis 2-3 for our purposes is that originally God made everything good, and there was nothing to hide.

At one level, this feeds into the massive narrative of the entire Bible: originally, creation is good: God himself declares it to be so, for that is the way God made it. With the rebellion of Adam and Eve, not only Adam and Eve but the serpent and the very created order come under God’s curse (3:14-19) – presumably because Adam, Eve, and the serpent are all constituent parts of that created order. That establishes the problematic that the rest of the Bible addresses. The line of the solution passes through complex turns and twists, but runs through the cross and resurrection to reach its climax in the new heaven and the new earth.

In other words, the fact that God makes everything good establishes the baseline for what goes wrong. The source of moral evil is not God; it erupts from rebellion against God. The opening chapters of Genesis do not offer their readers a meditation on how such rebellion was possible in a world that God made good: such agonizing reflection is left to much later writers (e.g., Rom 9:19-23). Nevertheless the reality of this anarchic rebellion ultimately sets the stage for the kind of salvation that is needed – but more on that later. Meanwhile, this approach to what goes wrong is confirmed if we rightly understand the expression “the knowledge of good and evil,” forever tied to the tree of Genesis 2:17. If Henri Blocher is right, and this expression refers not so much to human experience of good and evil as to choosing to establish what is good and evil for ourselves, then once again we perceive that the baseline of goodness established in Genesis 1 and 2 is

6 The English word “crafty” has negative overtones of sneakiness, a moral failing; the Hebrew word is morally neutral, and depends on context for its moral flavor: e.g., it is rightly rendered “prudent” or the like in Prov 12:23; 14:18.

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breached when human beings decide for themselves what is good (3:6), thus succumbing to the serpent’s brandished temptation, “you will be like God” (3:5).

Creation Establishes Human Accountability to God

The narrative development in Genesis 1-3 establishes the ground of human accountability: God made the first humans, giving them unique privileges and responsibilities, along with one specific prohibition and a warning of what would happen should that prohibition be defied. They are accountable to him. The point is heightened in a variety of ways in later Scriptures. For example, Psalm 19 insists, in powerful poetic images, that the created order declares the glory of God, daily pouring forth “speech” even though there are no “words” or “sound” to this speech. This revelation of the glory of God is then strengthened by the revelation that comes to us in words (19:7-11). In the light of such revelation, the psalmist begs to be preserved from willful sins, errors, and hidden faults (19:11-13). Paul insists that from the time of “the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom 1:20). In other words, what is disclosed in creation makes people accountable to God, such that if such revelation is ignored, they are without excuse. Natural law thinkers like to say that there are certain things people cannot not know – though in reality they “suppress the truth by their wickedness” (1:18). We may begin to glimpse just how much revelation we suppress when we try to imagine, by an almost desperate exercise of our imagination, how we would view God and everything in the universe he has made, if there had never been a fall.

A more whimsical way of asserting the same point – that creation establishes human accountability to God – is by reflecting on how we should respond to a friend or neighbor who tells us, in effect, “Look, Bob, I don’t mind if you follow this Christian stuff, if you think a lot of Jesus and find him satisfying. But we all have our own forms of spirituality, and frankly I don’t want your Jesus. And if you keep pushing your Jesus down my throat, to be perfectly frank I’ll not want your friendship, either. So back off!” How shall we respond? Of course, it may be the part of wisdom to back off a little, to ensure that there are open lines of trust and friendship that are not consumed with bearing witness and the like. But sooner or later, is not the Christian obligated to say something like this? “Mary, I really don’t mean to be offensive, and I’m sorry if I’ve been pushy. But there is a sense in which, at one level, I can’t back off. For if Jesus is who he says he is, then spirituality is not like a smorgasbord, a buffet in which you get to pick and choose and create your own dish. Rather, the God of the Bible made you, and therefore you owe him; and one day you will have to give an account to him. If I share Christ’s love with you, it’s because I love you, and because you are in grave danger if you do not become reconciled with the God who made you and to whom you and I will both one day have to answer.”

Let Us Make . . .

What shall we make of this plural form – “Let us make . . . in our image” (1:26)? The commonly suggested answers to this question circulate in the literature. Perhaps God is

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addressing the heavenly council, which somehow participates in the ensuing act of creation. This nicely accounts for the plural forms, but it accords poorly with the insistence at the beginning of Genesis 1 that God made everything – and even with the very next verse which, after the plural form in v. 26, reverts to the singular: “So God created mankind in his own image” (1:26). Others suggest this is a royal “we” or even an editorial “we.” Still others insist that this is the first textual evidence that God is Trinitarian.

If we follow the pattern of argumentation we have followed so far, perhaps there is a way ahead. It may go too far, and would certainly be anachronistic, to label these plurals explicit Trinitarian references. For a start, there is no hint of three persons: so far as the evidence of these chapters go, if we reject editorial and royal solutions, the reference could be to two or to twenty six or to three thousand and forty-one persons. As far as the social Trinity is concerned (a category much loved today), there is no hint of, say, the Father sending the Son, the Son obeying his Father, and the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. There is no discussion of the Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s love for the Father (as in, say, John 17). But once again, we would not be far wrong to say that we detect here an adumbration of what will later be disclosed as to the Trinitarian nature of God.

The Image of God

The issues surrounding this expression are so complex that it may help to survey them in several discrete topics.

(1) Like certain species of demons, the proposals for what is embraced by being made “in the image of God” are legion: intelligence, speech, creativity, the right to rule, something ill-defined but ontological, and many more. Most of these proposals are nurtured by synthetic analyses of every instance of “image” in Scripture, including passages that speak of Jesus as the image of God (Col 1:15; cf. 3:10). Perhaps, however, once again, we will do better first to grapple with the merely seminal information these opening chapters provide regarding the image of God, and then lean forward to uncover how this theme develops in later Scriptures.

(2) The initial declaration to make human beings in the image of God is so that mankind may “rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (1:26). In other words, God rules, and his image bearers are commissioned to rule, too – presumably under him. The same theme is picked up in v. 28, and is presupposed by the responsibility given to Adam to name all the creatures.

(3) The progress of the narrative depicts a relationship between mankind and God characterized by personal interaction that includes speech. Nothing similar is predicated of any other creature in the material world. This relationship with God is again hinted at in the depiction of God walking in the garden, the created abode of

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Adam and Eve, in the cool of the day (3:8) – even though in that context Adam and Eve try to hide from God and avoid the relationship.

(4) The interesting mix of plural/singular pronouns referring to God in 1:27-28, to which we have already made reference, is paralleled by the interesting mix of plural/singular pronouns referring to human beings: God created Adam, mankind, in his own image, so that he might rule; male and female he created them. Although, arguably, the stress on the social Trinity has got out of hand during the past few decades, the tight textual link between God’s “Let us” and the image language that specifically insists that God made them male and female warns us that some sort of connection is being established, even if it is not yet fleshed out. Thus Genesis 1 makes it clear that Adam and Eve, and men and women, are equally made in the image of God.

(5) On the other hand, the second creation account, Genesis 2, quite clearly depicts Eve as coming from Adam and being brought into being for Adam. Like him, she is a human being, made in the image of God; yet she is differentiable from him, not presented as needed in order to complete him, but as God-given in order to complement him. When the apostle Paul appeals to the order of the creation of male and female as part of his reasoning regarding the differences between man and woman (1 Cor 11:8-9; 1 Tim 2:13), he is thinking of more than mere chronological priority, for after all, pigs were created before both of them: rather, the apostle’s point is that Eve was created for Adam (1 Cor 11:8-9), which is no more than the articulation of a proposition that arises out of the narrative of Genesis 2. Something similar could be said regarding the order of deception in Genesis 3 – and Paul says it (1 Tim 2:14).

(6) Whatever the distinctions between the man and the woman, their coming together in a God-ordained one-flesh union is presented as archetypal marriage. In consequence, at least three massive structures are teased out in the rest of Scripture, or (to change the metaphor) they grow from these small seeds. (a) An array of Scriptures address the nature of marriage, the sin of adultery, the insistence that marriage be between one man and one woman: Jesus’ “from the beginning it was not so” argument (Matt 19:8) establishes the archetypal nature of what takes place in Genesis 2. The plethora of passages addressing the betrayal of adultery and the norm-twisting distortion of homosexual union reflect the normative status of Genesis 2 as seen through the lens of the wretched and tragic fall of Genesis 3. (b) The archetypal marriage of Genesis 2 also feeds into the massive typology between, on the one hand, God and Israel under the old covenant, and, on the other, Christ and the church under the new. There are many nuances: in the latter, for example, Paul develops a tight set of typological parallels between husband and wife, on the one hand, and Christ and the church, on the other (Eph 5:21-31); elsewhere, he tells the Corinthians that he has betrothed them as a pure virgin to Christ (2 Cor 11:2); and yet again, the final vision of the Apocalypse, in a spectacular mixture of metaphors, anticipates the marriage supper of the Lamb with his bride, the new Jerusalem (Rev 21:9). (c) Related to this typology, but as its negative mirror image, many biblical writers depict apostasy as a kind of spiritual adultery. In Hosea, God goes so far as to depict himself as the almighty

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cuckold. All of these elements go way beyond Genesis 2 and 3, but Genesis 2 and 3 establish the controlling structures from which these elements spring.

(7) The imago Dei terminology does not establish human beings as divine; equally, human beings are not immaterial. Genesis 1 establishes that human beings are created on the sixth day, along with the animals, and Genesis 3:19 asserts that human beings upon their death return to the dust of the earth from which they sprang. When David, picking up on themes from Genesis 1-2, rejoices that God has made human beings rulers over the works of God’s hands (Ps 8:6-8), he also acknowledges how miniscule they are in comparison with the glories of the heavens (8:3-4). And transcendently greater than everything in the created order, human beings included, is God himself: “LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (8:1,9)

(8) Perhaps this is the place to reflect on the hints in Genesis 1-3 that point in some way toward eschatological fulfillment. There is no passage in these chapters that asserts the “old” heaven and earth will give way to a “new” heaven and earth – though perhaps the point is implicit when it becomes clear that even though the created heaven and earth are soon under the curse of God, God does not wipe them out. If there are signs of grace in the narrative (on which more below), the curse does not have the final word, and that presupposes something new is coming. The seeds are being sown. Along similar lines of logic, the failure of the “old” Adam, granted that God does not simply wipe him out, demands a new and better Adam. Paul will eventually declare that Jesus is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Col 1:15) – a combination of expressions that call to mind how human beings “image” the invisible God in the visible creation, and enjoy the responsibility of rule over the created order, even if Paul goes on to affirm things of Jesus that could not be affirmed of any other human being. Although “image” terminology is not deployed in Hebrews 2:5-18, the auctor of that document goes to considerable length to emphasize that God will not subject the world to come to angels, but to human beings, and thus Christ comes as a human being, not as an angel7 – or, for that matter, as a butterfly, stick of rhubarb, waterfall, or baboon. We do not yet see the created order submitted to human beings (a clear allusion to Gen 1-3), but we see Jesus, the human being “who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb 2:9-10).

(9) It is worth insisting that this vision of human beings made in the image of God has virtually no connection with secular views of “image” themes and the consequent emphasis on human rights. The biblical theme of imago Dei, even though it is but seminal in Genesis 1-3, is tied to dynamic relations with the triune God, to the restored image in Christ Jesus, and thus to the Bible’s entire storyline.8 In other

7 This calls for meditation on the fact that there has arisen a redeemer for fallen human beings, but not for fallen angels.8 See especially Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, “Human Dignity and Human Justice: Thinking with Calvin about the Imago Dei,” TynB 66 (2015): 121-36. See also Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry, NSBT 36.

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words, while we insist on the seminal nature of the way these themes are introduced in Genesis 1-3, we insist equally that the connections between these seminal hints and their later developments are real enough that the seminal themes themselves should not be long explored without reflecting on their full-orbed growth depicted in the flowering of biblical revelation.

Divine Attributes and Functions

The opening lines of these three chapters assume God’s existence and power, distinguish him from the universe he creates, and show him to be a talking God: we have already noted these things. But there are numerous other attributes or characteristics of God that surface seminally in these chapters, of which we list but a handful. (a) God reigns; he is king. He is no mere constitutional monarch; he exercises power and authority. Kingship language does not surface here, but throughout the narrative God rules, even when that rule is contested (Gen 3). This sets the stage for such royal themes as the providential reign of God (e.g., Ps 145), that subset of God’s total reign under which there is life (e.g., John 3:3,5), and the way in which God’s kingdom “comes,” whether through the coming of the messianic king or in the consummation. (b) God is the ultimate Judge, a theme tied both to the fact that he is the Creator and to the fact that judging is a royal function. Moreover, this judging function is sharply to be distinguished from the judging function of judges in modern Western courts. The judges we know are expected to recuse themselves if they have in any way been adversely affected by the crime or by the alleged criminal they are judging. This is not the case with God. The sin of rebellion depicted in Genesis 3 is sin against God. God is the One who has been slighted; his is the authority that human beings attempt to usurp. That reality – that the sins we commit are first and foremost against God, and indeed that this “against God” element is bound up with what makes sin sin – is something which, much later, David understands after committing adultery and murder (Ps 51:4). We fallen human beings have learned to recuse ourselves from cases where our objectivity and fairness might be in jeopardy if we remained on the bench, but God’s objectivity and fairness are never in jeopardy even though he never recuses himself, despite the fact that he is the ultimate offended party. (c) God’s meting out of the curses and punishments depicted in Genesis 3 anticipates a Bible characterized by many judgments precisely because it is a Bible that reports so many sins. The expression “the wrath of God” or the like is not found in Genesis 1-3, yet it is hard to deny that the first adumbration of such wrath is on display in Genesis 3 – the first of about six hundred occurrences of the expression in the Old Testament alone, on track for the biblical depictions of the final holy wrath in hell itself. (d) Equally, however, Genesis 1-3 preserves signs of grace, even though, once again, the word is not found. I am referring to more than God’s kindness in creating a good world, but to the specific displays of unmerited grace9 dispensed on human beings even after they have sinned and have no claim on God’s forbearance and forgiveness. In particular, God seeks them out, even when they now want to hide from him (3:8-9). Even within the pronouncement of

9 Some might imagine that “unmerited grace” is a tautology, and indeed that is Paul’s customary assumption. For some in the first century (e.g., Josephus), however, grace is something that God dispenses on those who deserve it, for otherwise God would be unjust. See the complex discussion in John Barclay, Paul and the Gift.

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the curse on the serpent, the text looks to the promised seed from the woman that will crush the serpent’s head (3:15) – the so-called protevangelium that is surely good news for human beings, a rich sign of grace. God provides animal skins for clothes (3:21 – more on this below). Even the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden may be interpreted as a sign of grace, for they are thereby prevented from eating of the tree of life and (apparently) being sustained forever in a state of ongoing chaotic rebellion. The story is thus driven forward to what turns out to be the only enduring solution to sin. The combination of these two subpoints – viz., (c) and (d), the wrath of God and the grace of God, both on display in nuce in the first three chapters of the Bible – establish that God simultaneously stands over against his rebellious image bearers in righteous wrath and in transforming grace, in punishment and in forgiveness. Thus the combination of these themes lay the groundwork for what we must be saved from, and what saves us. (e) More broadly yet, the interplay between the sovereign good God and his creatures, briefly illumined by the narrative in Genesis 1-3, plays out in the rest of the Bible. In the Bible, it is writ large in the running tension between the spectacular depictions of the sweep of God’s sovereignty and the morally accountable actions of both angels and human beings. We read of God’s personal interactions with both angels and human beings such that their accountability is never mitigated by his sovereignty, while his sovereignty is never jeopardized by human action and accountability. Thus, within Genesis 1-3, the serpent, though made by God, entices Eve to sin, while God remains good. This God is so powerful that he makes the entire universe, so personal that he talks with his image bearers on one small planet, so humble that he calls for them when they try to hide from them. Certainly there is no generalized theory of the dynamic relationship between God and his sentient creatures, but the groundwork is being laid for passages such as Isaiah 10:5-19 and Acts 4:27-28, guaranteed to keep the Calvinists and Arminians among us in a constant state of debate.

The Serpent

Once again it is useful to distinguish what Genesis 1-3 tell us of the serpent, and what later Scriptures disclose. These chapters do not make clear whether the serpent is meant to be an embodiment of Satan or of evil, or a symbol of Satan or evil. The serpent, as we’ve seen, is a created being, but how or when the serpent became evil as opposed to belonging to the unqualifiedly “good” creation, we are not told: was there a fall before the fall? Later Scriptures are much less reticent. Revelation 12:9 speaks of “that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray,” who is ultimately destroyed along with “his angels.” He can be depicted as a roaring lion, and as an angel of light deceiving, if possible the very elect. The Book of Job depicts the Satan as reporting to God along with other angels, both good and evil. In the days of his flesh, Jesus faces temptation from the devil (Matt 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-11) and frequently exorcises demons. The apostle Paul recognizes that the warfare of Christians includes a cosmic dimension of struggles against powers of darkness and rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms. None of these details is fleshed out in Genesis 3, but it is hard to deny that the first adumbration of such themes is briefly laid out in these opening chapters of the Bible.

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Sacrifice?

We have already had reason to refer to Genesis 3:21: “The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” The question to ask is this: Since animal skins cannot be obtained apart from the death of the animal, is this a subtle reference to animal sacrifice, and thus, through lengthy biblical typologies of Passover and Yom Kippurim, to the sacrifice of Jesus? Even as conservative a commentator as F. Derek Kidner argues, “It is unduly subtle, and a distraction, to foresee the atonement here: God is settling immediate rather than ultimate needs, for both are his concern.” Kidner may be right, of course – and certainly it would be anachronistic to read the massive sacrificial structures of the Mosaic law back into Genesis 3. In light of the pattern of subtle seminal strands coughed up by these chapters and developed in the rest of the canon, however, one may at least wonder if this is at least a subtle adumbration of animal sacrifice that was so much a part of the Mosaic covenant, and therefore of the still more penetrating world of sacrifice brought to fulfillment under the new covenant.

Major Redemptive-Historical Structures

This brief section could easily and justifiably become as long as the rest of the paper. I shall restrict myself to three areas, and provide only the most cursory observations.

(1) Many scholars, not least systematicians in the Reformed tradition, detect in these chapters a “covenant of works.” Michael Horton provides an eminently able defense of this stance. Even if the word “covenant” is not present, the fundamental elements of a covenant, which he details, are present; the word “covenant” itself would add little. By contrast, Paul Williamson, impressed by the fact that the word is absent from these chapters, and less convinced than Horton that many covenantal details are lurking in the linguistic undergrowth, prefers not to detect anything as structured as a covenant here. But perhaps there is an alternative: it may be slightly anachronistic to detect a full-blown covenant here, but it may not be inappropriate to detect the beginnings of covenantal structure, an anticipation of the powerful covenantal structures that will shape the entire canon.

(2) The creation week culminates in the seventh day when “God rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done” (Genesis 2:3). The seven-day week is preserved even when the church stretches out into the Gentile world, where a ten-day week commonly operated. Strictly speaking, God does not in Genesis 2:3 command human beings to observe the Sabbath (though one may wonder exactly what is meant by affirming that God blessed the seventh day). At the giving of the law, however, when God provides the reason why human beings are to observe the Sabbath, it is because the Lord rested from his work on the seventh day and blessed that day (Exod 20:11) – an unambiguous reference to creation week. The importance of observing the Sabbath is greatly stressed by the prophets, and by Nehemiah in the post-exilic era. But the notion of “rest” is then fleshed out further in various ways: to enter into the land of promise is to enter the

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land of rest (successfully achieved under Joshua). Yet that land cannot provide all the rest that God has in mind, for in Psalm 95, centuries after the Israelites have entered into the land of rest, God is still promising his people rest provided they do not harden their hearts. The writer to the Hebrews pulls together all these pieces, and one or two more, to establish a complex typology of the ultimate rest, salvation itself (Heb 4). Part of that typology includes an exegesis of Genesis 2:2: As God rested from all his work of creation, so those who want to enter God’s rest (as it is called in Ps 95) must cease from their work, too (Heb 4:9). The point for our purposes is again clear: the seminal ideas of these long trajectories regarding creation week, Sabbath, and rest are already lying on the surface of the text in Genesis 1-2.

(3) No one has done more than Greg R. Beale to argue that the temple theme in Scripture begins in the Garden of Eden. The temple is the place where God displays his glory and meets with his image bearers. Once human beings have fallen, it is the God-ordained place where sacrifices are offered to enable sinners to meet the living God. The temple theme continues through such transient episodes as Jacob’s meeting with God at Bethel, the complex history of the tabernacle, the establishment of the temple in Jerusalem (along with the establishment of the Davidic dynasty), Solomon’s magnificent prayer of dedication, the fall of the temple and its reconstruction in much reduced form after the exile, the temple vision of Ezekiel, Jesus’ claim to be the true temple, i.e., the ultimate place where the glory of God is disclosed and God meets with his sinful image bearers (John 2:19-22), passages where the church (or, in one case, where the body of the individual Christian) is the temple of God, all the way to the vision of the new Jerusalem where the entire city is built in the shape of a cube, calling to mind the most holy place, for in the new Jerusalem there is no mediating priest who passes behind a veil to gain access to God: all of God’s covenant community are constantly in his presence. Or, otherwise put, John sees no temple in that city, “because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev 21:22). The reason for providing this sketchy outline of the development of the temple theme in the Bible is that once again the seed, hints, and adumbration of a theme in Genesis 1-3 bursts forth across the complex and glorious trajectories of Scripture to bring us to the consummation.

Creation in Books of the Bible

By and large, in this essay we have moved from specific themes or texts in Genesis 1-3 to the development of such themes and texts in the rest of Scripture, in order to underscore the seminal nature of the Genesis material. There is another way of making the same point: we might focus on how Genesis creation material, or creation and fall material, is taken up and developed by one biblical book or corpus. There have not been many studies along such lines, but they are not unknown. We have already had reason to note the high density of texts from Genesis 1-3 in Revelation 21-22, and trace some of the creation/Adam/sin themes in the Pauline corpus. Recently, Carlos Raúl Sosa Siliezar has

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carefully scoured the Gospel of John for its use of creation imagery.10 Still more recently, Matthew Seufert has studied “The Presence of Genesis in Ecclesiastes.”11 More studies of this kind would prove highly instructive.

Conclusion

This study has attempted to show that the most faithful and fruitful reading of Genesis 1-3 is neither maximalist nor minimalist, but focuses on what is seminal. Those wanting to study, preach, and teach these chapters should do so in a way that simultaneously avoids anachronism and reductionism.

A side benefit of this essay, and perhaps what might be of most benefit to those engaged in the DABAR project, is the reminder of the astonishing array of biblical themes already introduced, however seminally, in Genesis 1-3. The study of the doctrine of creation is wonderfully enriched when such links are carefully teased out and explored, and horribly emaciated when they are bypassed.

10 Creation Imagery in the Gospel of John, LNTS 546 (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2015).11 WTJ 78 (2016): 75-92.

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