Genesis 1-3 – Part II: The Second Creation Account

causality, miracle, creation, God

In Part I of this series, I spoke of the value of the allegorical language used in the first creation account in Genesis. God communicates His divine truth through images and metaphorical language, and we should understand the truth He is communicating without trying to take the account literally. The same applies to the rest of Genesis 1-3.

Genesis 2:4-25 offers us another account of creation. This account quickly gets to the creation of man (2:7). Remember, God’s creative act and man’s Fall truly happened, but He is not trying to communicate these things to us scientifically.

Genesis 2:7-8 – God creates Adam directly from the earth. This shows man’s direct connection to the earth and his responsibility for it, including responsibility for other human beings. Then God breaths into him. First of all, God does not breathe in a literal sense; He is pure spirit. This is another indicator that God is communicating to us allegorically.

Secondly, God breathing onto or into man occurs only one other time in Scripture. In John 20:22-23, on the evening of the Resurrection, Jesus appears to the disciples in the Upper Room and breathes on them saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Therefore, as God gave Adam and Eve the ability to create new life, He gives the disciples the ability to restore life through forgiveness of sins, which results in the infusion of grace.

Also in Genesis, it says that “man became a living soul.” Man is not merely physical. He is a body-soul composite. God does not make any other creature like this. Before the Fall, the soul governed the body rather than the other way around. The same will be true when we receive our glorified bodies at the second resurrection.

Furthermore, notice that God forms man outside the Garden and then places him in it. This image illustrates God’s benevolence. It also shows that the Garden does not belong to man properly but is his by way of gift. Spiritually speaking, God takes man out of spiritual desolation and brings him into spiritual wealth.

In Genesis 3:23, after man sins, he loses God’s gifts (i.e., grace, the Garden, dominion, and life) because he rejected them. Additionally, one reason Adam’s (vs. Eve’s) sin was especially grievous was because God gifted the Garden to him directly but to Eve indirectly through Adam.

Genesis 2:8-15 – God creates a garden (Eden) and places Adam in it to “till it and keep it.” Tilling and keeping the Garden would have been easy in the dominative state before the Fall because man did not have to struggle to exercise dominion.

Next, in the Garden, God plants the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Context indicates that both were pleasant to the sight and good for food (2:9, 3:6). Again, God does not create evil.

Genesis 2:16-17 – God tells Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil or he will die. Now, knowledge of good and evil is not in itself evil. However, attempting to obtain knowledge by evil means is evil. Adam and Eve should have walked with God to attain knowledge. Rather, they came to understand evil directly by obeying Satan and disobeying God’s command not to eat from this tree.

Genesis 2:20-22 – God creates a “helper” for Adam. The husband and wife must help one another to care for their familial garden. This means that help is reciprocal. If someone is my helper, justice requires that I somehow help that person help me. Think about parent/child, husband/wife, and employee/employer relationships.  Each person helps the other. If God makes my wife to help me, I must help her by giving her everything she needs to help me. This is the correct understanding of equality. Man has the primary responsibility for ensuring everything works in proper order. This is another reason that Adam, rather than Eve, is blamed for the Fall.

Genesis 2:22-24 – God makes Eve from Adam’s side (think about Christ’s bride made from His side on the cross, John 19:34). The teaching here is explicit. The two become one. Man “clings” to his wife. “Clings” implies an unbreakable bond. Imagine clinging to a life preserver in a turbulent sea. Nothing will pry you from that preserver. This is how a husband and wife must cling to one another. They must not allow anything or anyone to break them apart. Accordingly, marriage is a covenantal relationship of fidelity that is indissoluble until death.

Finally, in Genesis 2:25, it says they were “naked and were not ashamed.” Adam and Eve lived in a state of original innocence and integrity, filled with sanctifying grace, until Original Sin.

In Part III of this series, I will discuss that terrible event – the Fall of Man – and its consequences for the rest of us.

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17 thoughts on “Genesis 1-3 – Part II: The Second Creation Account”

  1. What was forbidden to Adam and Eve was Knowledge of Good and Evil.

    “The Church still prizes the Moral Sense as man’s noblest asset today; although the Church knows God had a distinctly poor opinion of it and did what he could in his clumsy way to keep his happy Children of the Garden from acquiring it.”

    1. Wrong again, Crisis. The moment God gave Adam and Eve the command to not eat from the tree is the moment they knew good from evil, but they didn’t know evil perfectly like God knows it. Their sin was in their trying to become like God in a way that was not proper to their nature. They first sinned in their decision and then they sinned by their actions.

    2. That is an interesting point, Capt Crisis. It is clear that God did not want mankind to have a moral sense, or the knowledge of good an evil, hence the Eden story. So it doesn’t make sense that the Catholic Church touts “moral sense” as a great virtue when in fact it is a fruit of the Fall and hence an evil. Similarly, the Catholic Church is very selective in what parts of the Bible should be read literally and which should not. It’s almost as if the Catholic Church made up its own non-biblical religion. The Catholic Church is a church of men inventing their own God and belief system. It is not the God of the Bible. It has taken me a while to realize that, but it seems clearer all the time. The Church wants to rub out the hard spots of biblical belief, and waters it down when convenient to make it more palatable in its search for larger numbers. But the Lord who wiped out the followers of Baal by the thousands is still the same Lord.

    3. Crisis, did they know good from evil at the moment God commanded them to not eat from the tree? Yes or no?

    4. The tree was called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you don’t eat from that tree, you will not have that knowledge. I don’t know any other way to read it. Particularly since we are told that after they ate the fruit, “their eyes were opened”.

      So the answer to your question is, “No.” They didn’t know about good and evil before they ate from it. Nor did they realize they were doing anything bad (or “evil”) by disobeying God’s instruction not to eat from it.

    5. So, you’re saying they are not culpable for their actions, thus not committing the Original Sin. Your belief is both heretical and stoopid with two O’s. But I expect this from you, Crisis.

    6. I pointed out a reasonable observation that any intelligent child would have. If you were teaching Catechism, would you respond in such a fashion? I hope not.

  2. It is indeed a slippery slope when people say, on the one hand, that the Bible is the inerrant word of God; and on the other, it shouldn’t be taken literally. It’s a short hop from that thinking to then selectively picking what we like as true and what we don’t as false or “allegorical.” Thus, we say the universe wasn’t actually created in 6 days, because that sounds hard to believe. But then we say that woman was actually created from Adam’s rib, because we approve of the idea of female subordination to males. I don’t think we can cherry pick the Bible, calling what we like literal, but what we don’t like or don’t understand mere allegory or symbolism. This subjective interpretation is what allows gays to say the destruction of Sodom wasn’t because of homosexuality, or that the Flood didn’t occur because we can’t figure out how mixing predators and prey on a big boat for 40 days would allow the prey to survive the voyage. Not to mention the conundrum of how the boat didn’t sink from the many tons of manure that would have weighed down the bilge within a few days. We can’t be picking and choosing with the Bible. Either it’s all true because it’s the word of God and God can do anything, or it’s just a collection of Bronze Age mythology written down for whatever political/religious motives the actual rabbinical scribes had at the time. This modernist parsing and rationalizing is the slippery slope to Hell.

    1. @SeanO’Riada. The factor you leave out is the Church’s Tradition with a capital T as well as the long history of Catholic biblical interpretation which is remarkably consistent from the time of the Eastern and Western Fathers. It’s not unanimous on every point, of course, but where there is unanimity in interpretation, the Tradition’s interpretation is considered authoritative. No Father of the Church or serious theologian at any time in Church history, for example, attributed the destruction of Sodom to a lack of “hospitality” (gag). That’s modernist nonsense. The rest of your examples read like a bunch of Bronze Age myths. Nate’s articles are perfectly in line with the Tradition and neither he nor the sane biblical traditions do any cherry picking. Enough of the skepticism.

  3. an ordinary papist

    Good news : the doctor says it’s not a concussion, try loosening my hippie headband a bit.

    1. an ordinary papist

      Let me know when you get to T-Rex, I’m more of a Jurassic Park guy.

    2. an ordinary papist

      But I do admire your faith, Nate, make no mistake about that. It’s just that I could never get
      my head around a Father putting a deadly snake in the grass and then putting His children there to play.

    3. I like your response about the snake in the grass, and I’ll just say this:
      When God created Adam and Eve, they were perfect, but they did not have the opportunity to exercise their free will. God gave them a command not to eat from the tree, but without temptation, they would not have been able to make a choice for or against God. One can imagine an innocent young child mindlessly obeying his parents. The temptation (enter Satan) gave them something to wrestle with. Do I stay with God despite this temptation or do I disobey Him, thereby turning from Him? Clearly, they chose to excise their free will by listening to a fallen angel rather than God. Similarly, we are given countless opportunities to turn toward or away from God. Thanks OP!

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