He indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you. – 1 Peter 1:20
All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. – Revelation 13:8
Therefore, when He came into the world, He said:
“Sacrifice and offering You did not desire,
But a body You have prepared for Me. – Hebrews 10:5
Divine Preparation Before Creation
What these verses reveal is divine preparation. God had a plan to save humanity from the consequences of Adam’s disobedience and the entrance of sin and death. This plan tells us something about the way Yahweh rules His creation. I am not one of those who think that God allowed the Fall to magnify His munificence. God did not need to add to His glory. Neither is He glorified by the misery wrought by the entrance of sin and death. As portrayed in the Bible the necessity of the plan of salvation was because of the willful rebellion of man. There was and is something so valuable in our being made in the image and likeness of our Creator, and that directed the wisdom and love and power of God down the course that it took. Yahweh “went ahead” with creation knowing the pain and the sacrifice it would entail. The depravity that man fell into should not blind us to the inherent value of humans as images of God. Hence, the second Person of the blessed Trinity had to become human if the imago Dei was to survive.
What is overlooked from texts such as those above is the fact that the divine Son had to become human to save creation. The way man was created was the way the divine wisdom designed him. To wipe fallen humanity off the face of the world and create a new humanity would be to admit God’s original purpose as faulty and in need of improvement. So, we must allow that man as a responsive and evaluating creature had to be open to the possibility to sin. And God’s glory is to salvage man from the path of destruction he has chosen and inherited. God gets the glory in the demonstration of who He is when confronted with human rebellion and disregard. God the Creator, in His pre-creational decision to be God the Provider of a fallen world, becomes the obscured God, but the God who shows mercy in history even while being disregarded.
Genesis 1
The story of the Bible opens with the six-day creation in Genesis 1, but behind the curtain, as it were, is the plan of salvation through the incarnation of the Son of God. Saying this does not mean that we should read the Bible as a redemptive narrative. The world needs redeeming or it will perish. Human lives are lived in the throes of the decisions of potentates, and the fortunes of armies, in lands possessed of various resources, topographies and weather patterns, the rectifying of these cash out to more than the plan of salvation. A cosmic battle rages, and the fate of nations is at stake. The culmination of God’s Creation Project is multifaceted.
Stepping back to gain a wider view we can see that God the Creator set things up in a “preferred” way. But He knew that Adam would fall and would plunge his posterity into chaos. I don’t pretend to know why things had to be this way, but it seems from the scriptural record that we must view the original intention in creation and the pre-creational intention to send the Son as one cloth. This necessitates that we find a central place for the investiture of the human will, its choice to disregard God’s prohibition, and the pan-millennial history of its rectification in Christ’s two comings.
In the first two chapters of Genesis everything looks really good. But the early promise is soon shattered by Adam’s willful disobedience and the entrance of sin and death. A key thing here is not to forget the fact that Satan, the serpent, is already in situ and therefore acts as a crucial player in the overall Creation Project. Could Adam have obeyed God? Indeed, he could. However, such is the makeup of the human will (whatever nuances have to be introduced for that subject) that God gave Adam a free choice to obey Him. The trajectory was already set, but the decisions of individual people were real decisions incorporated into that trajectory.
What we find in Genesis 1 is a sequential creation narrative. It begins with the making of waters. These waters are divided, and land appears. Then God puts plants and animals on the earth and in the seas. In each step (every 24-hour day) God issues a kingly decree: “Let the…(complete an action)…” The Creator is building layers into His creation. Finally, we arrive at the second part of Day Six and God now speaks differently. First, we read what seems to be an intra-Trinitarian communication, “Let Us make…in Our image, after Our likeness.” I completely reject any scenario which involves angels in the creation of man. This is not a “Divine Council.” God did not need the angels to create anything else in the first five days – indeed, it is probable that the angels themselves had just been created, and they certainly weren’t required for the culminating events of Day 6. No, the three Persons of the Godhead were involved here.
We see here that God makes man and then speaks directly to him; something He did not do in the previous days of creation week. This produces the impression that the creation of man was the apex of God’s activity in Genesis 1. Finally, God’s address to man included handing the responsibility of dominion to him over the rest of creation.
Genesis 2 & 3 and Hermeneutics
The account of the creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 is not a second creation story. It is a theological retelling of what occurred on the sixth day. Indeed, it very well could be that God’s forming of the garden in Eden and placing Adam in the Garden (Gen. 2:8) happened latter on Day Six. That is not my concern here. My concern is that Adam as he came from the hand of his Creator was a responsible being who could choose to obey or disobey God. God gives a prohibition to Adam in Genesis 2 which acts as a test with the potential to deepen the Creator/creature relationship. This potential was never realized. Genesis 3 records the Fall and its dire consequences.
One of the things we learn from these two chapters is that there is a slippage from man’s dependance to his independence. In Genesis 2 God’s descriptions and God’s appraisals are the standard. In Genesis 3 the serpent’s descriptions introduce another standard, and the temptation to eat from the forbidden tree open up the possibility of a third standard – independent human appraisal. We can see Eve appraising the tree independently in Genesis 3:6. She actually agrees with the assessment of the inspired writer in Genesis 2:9, but she evaluates the tree as an independent analyst. Then she entices her husband to eat the forbidden fruit and “their eyes were opened” (Gen. 2:7).
Open Eyes?
The words to Adam were clear and precise:
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” – Genesis 2:16-17.
Notice in Genesis 2 and 3 that nowhere does one find a covenant oath. God is not promising or pledging anything to Adam. He is commanding him and warning him. The word “commanded” in Genesis 2:16 is sava, which indicates a charge, commission, or command. It does not mean to take an oath. But more than this, the command is fixed. It is not to be paraphrased (note what Eve said in Gen. 3:2-3), nor is it to be spiritualized. God literally meant what He said (cf. Gen. 3:11).
When the inspired text says that the eyes of our first parents were opened in Genesis 3:7 it is not referring to anything remotely positive. Their eyes were “opened” to “see” or “know” things differently than the way God intended for them. Of course, a person can’t know what isn’t true, but that is the problem. Sin distorts the mind, and the mind distorts interpretation, which in turn results in believing lies as truth. And the new birth does not completely rectify the problem, as any reader of 1 Corinthians and Galatians can testify.
So, the Fall brought about independence from God in our interpretation of things, and distortion of knowledge which leads to distortion of how we interpret reality. These two powerful hermeneutical defaults, especially the former, affect the way we comprehend God’s Word. The only remedy is for us to bring ourselves under the authority of the words God actually uses.
