A Second Telling

Genesis 2:4-25

⁴These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

⁵When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground,

⁶and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground—

⁷then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

⁸And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

⁹And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

¹⁰A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.

¹¹The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.

¹²And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there.

¹³The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush.

¹⁴And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

¹⁵The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

¹⁶And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden,

¹⁷but 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.”

¹⁸Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

¹⁹Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

²⁰The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

²¹So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

²²And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

²³Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”

²⁴Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

²⁵And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Right at the beginning of the Bible we run into the very Hebrew/Middle Eastern way of storytelling. In the west, we like our stories to go in a straight line. Point A leads to point B and so on until we arrive at Z. For the Hebrew, storytelling goes in a circle. You tell the story, or parts of it, then you tell it again, bringing in different details or emphasizing a new point. Point A may not necessarily lead to point B. It might go to L or W. Here in Genesis 2, we find a retelling of the creation story with a completely different focal point; the creation of man and his amazing relationship with the Creator. As God creates Adam, He actually puts His hands to work, forming Adam out of the dust of the ground. Almost everything else had been spoken into existence. For the creation of man, He gets His hands dirty! He breathes life into Adam with His own breath and a soul is born. For the first time in the creative process, God actually calls something “not good”. Adam’s singularity was not good. So God set out to remedy that situation and we are introduced to Adam’s perfect counterpart, Eve, as God designs her out of the creative material that is Adam. It is a miraculous and fantastic story.

We learn that Adam had a job in paradise. It wasn’t all TV and chips for Adam. No, he was expected to work the garden, tending it and caring for it because it was a gift from God. It was to provide the new couple with food and something important to do. They were God’s partners in this new creation. They were emotionally, physically, spiritually, and intellectually naked and that nakedness carried no shame for there was nothing evil or bad anywhere. God’s creation was completed and it was perfect in every way. Marriage is instituted and the first family is born. God’s love poured out and it would have been amazing to be there.

We look back upon creation week with wonderment and rightly so for there is nothing on the earth right now to compare that time to as we have been ruined by sin. God’s answer to that problem will come up in the very next chapter. But in the first few Words of the Bible, we see God’s power, majesty, sovereignty, and all-encompassing love. We were not a cosmic accident, created when conditions were absolutely perfect to birth a single cell that eventually grew into the world we know today. But instead, our existence is the result of a thought-filled creation, designed and made with love and intentionality. God created us to love us and to receive our love back. The perfection of the design cannot be overstated.