Schaeffer points out some compelling reasons to believe Adam was real. In light of the context of when Genesis 1-2 was revealed (the exodus), and in light of family being the building block on nationhood, it is hard to imagine building a nation without discussing where family came from. And it is hard to imagine that first audience not understanding what was said like so many today. They, with their knowledge, will grow up into a nation; we, with our theories, will fall apart.
I am reviewing Genesis In Space And Time by Francis Schaeffer to assess its impact on Christianity amid current discussions about Jewish supremacy. Does this book lead Christians towards a blend of Judaism and Christianity, or does it deepen their understanding of Christianity itself? I question the popular use of the term "Judeo-Christian" and equate it with Zionism, a sect many Christians find alluring, but I find harmful (Proverbs 14:12). Unlike these zealots, I seek God based on truth revealed by Him as stated in Romans 10:1-2 and Proverbs 24:5-6. Zealots have been warned about the only way to life abundant; there is only one way. (John 10:10; Matthew 7:26-27). Finally, I seek to understand how God formed one people into a nation; I look at the elements of nationhood. I am skeptical of America's shift since the 1960s towards being a melting pot. America abandoned foundational principles in favor of globalism and multiculturalism, which harm nation, family, and individual. Drawing parallels from the Exodus story, I stress the importance of remembering our history to avoid passing on a harmful legacy to our children. After all, our children ask for bread and deserve bread, not the snake we are creating and are about to pass on to them (Matthew 7:9-10). With these thoughts in mind, I invite you to study along. To go to the beginning of this series click here. To join me in this study on Gab click here.
God the Creator is our portion. He calls us to love and to worship Him for His bringing into being all that is. The Bible is not silent concerning why this should be so.
“Created”
The word created (Heb. bara’) is used only a limited number of times in Scripture. This is especially true of the specific form used in Genesis 1:1, 21, 27 and 5:1, 2. In the unfolding creation this is used at three crucial points. The first of these is the point at which God created out of nothing (1:1), the second the point at which God created conscious life (1:21), and the third the point at which God created man (1:27).
The third passage is especially interesting because the word created in this special form is repeatedly used: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” It is as though God put exclamation points here to indicate that there is something special about the creation of man. This is strengthened as we turn to the summary in Genesis 5:1, 2: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.” Both passages put a triple emphasis on the word. God is saying that three aspects of creation—creation out of nothing, creation of conscious life, and creation of man—are unique.
Differentiation
Genesis 1:2 reads: “And the earth was without form [this can be translated that the earth was waste], and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” At this point in the process of creation, that which has been made up to this time lacks differentiation. In other words, it would seem that we have here the creation of bare being. What God has made is without form; there is no differentiation between the parts. Then, as we go on into 1:3 and beyond, we find a continuing, unfolding differentiation. There are thus two steps: (1) creation out of nothing, and (2) differentiation.
The second step is not to be confused with the first. For one thing, in almost every case differentiation is introduced with let. For example, “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (1:3), or, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters … and it was so” (1:6, 7). In short, God says something like, “Let it be this way,” a different kind of act than creation itself.
The word let has an even more general usage in some verses. For example, in Genesis 1:14, after God says, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven,” he goes on to say, “Let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.” And in 1:26b he says, “and let them [men] have dominion.” That is, in these places God is not so much making something come into being, or even differentiating it as being, as he is indicating what this sort of being means. Note, however, that in most of the uses of the word let in this chapter God is still working by fiat, just as He did in creation. He is saying, “Let this take place,” and it takes place.
True Communication and Exhaustive Communication
We are considering here matters which lie far in the past and concern cosmic events. That raises a question: Can we really talk in any meaningful sense at all about them? It is helpful, first, to distinguish between true communication and exhaustive communication. What we claim as Christians is that when all of the facts are taken into consideration, the Bible gives us true knowledge although not exhaustive knowledge. Man as a finite creature is incapable of handling exhaustive knowledge anyway. There is an analogy here with our own communication between men; we communicate to each other truly, but we do not communicate exhaustively. A Christian holding the strongest possible view of inspiration still does not claim exhaustive knowledge at any point.
The Bible is a most efficient book. We must remember its purpose: It is God’s message to fallen men. The Old Testament gave men what they needed from the Fall till the first coming of Christ. The Old and New Testaments together give all that men need from the Fall until the second coming of Christ. Many other details which we need are also given, but the main purpose is kept central and uncluttered. For example, angels are touched on many times, but the Bible is not a book on angelology. What is told us about angels is true and propositional, but always in relation to men. Heaven is the same; we are given factual knowledge concerning what we need to know about Heaven, but not a great deal of detail. Cosmic creation is included because we need to know these things which were before the Fall. What the Bible tells us is propositional, factual and true truth, but what is given is in relation to men. It is a scientific textbook in the sense that where it touches the cosmos it is true, propositionally true. When we get to Heaven, what we learn further will no more contradict the facts the Bible now gives us than the New Testament contradicts the Old. The Bible is not a scientific textbook, if by that one means that its purpose is to give us exhaustive truth or that scientific fact is its central theme and purpose.
Therefore, we must be careful when we say we know the flow of history. We must not claim, on the one hand, that science is unnecessary or meaningless, nor, on the other hand, that the extensions we make from Scripture are absolutely accurate or that these extensions have the same validity as the statements of Scripture itself. But all that does not change the fact that biblical revelation is propositional, to be handled on the basis of reason in relationship to science and coordinated with science. The content of Scripture is not upper-story, and the whole of Scripture is revelational.
As we look at the differentiations that occur when God says “Let it be this way,” we can have confidence that this is true history, but that does not mean that the situation is exhaustively revealed or that all our questions are answered. This was the case with our forefathers; it is so for us and will be for everyone who comes after us. Indeed, as we stand before God in time to come, even as we see Him face to face, His communication then—certainly being more than what we now have—will still not be totally exhaustive, because we who are finite can never exhaust the infinite. What we know can be true and normative, and yet not be a completely detailed map containing all of the knowledge which God Himself has.[1]
God Divides
After the initial creation out of nothing, therefore, come the various differentiations. The first differentiation comes in Genesis 1:3, 4: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” (The word divided or separated is the key, for it is repeated over and over throughout this chapter.) The first differentiation is between darkness and light. When I was younger, I was puzzled by the fact that light is referred to at this particular place, and yet today we know that it fits with what science says at this moment. With the splitting of the atom the discussion shifted; light is closely related to energy, and it is not surprising that out of bare being light (in contrast to the sun) is spoken of as the first differentiation.
The second differentiation comes in 1:6: “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Some scholars who have tried to minimize the teaching of the Bible have said that the word firmament indicates that the Jews had an idea of a brass or iron covering over the world. But this is not the picture at all. Firmament simply means “expanse.” It is a rather broad word, as we can see from the fact that the firmament is where the moon and the sun and the stars are (1:14). Perhaps for our generation the word space would be the best equivalent. But it is also the place where the birds fly (1:20). In any case, the idea that it is merely a hard covering and reflects a primitive notion of a three-story universe is in error. Rather, what is being referred to is differentiation in the area of being—a differentiation of the openness that is about us.
In 1:9 the differentiation continues and concentrates on earth itself. “And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. Now we have sea and land. There is a constant refining, as it were, as we come down through these steps.
Genesis 1:11 contains a fourth differentiation: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, vegetation, the plant yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.” So the earth puts forth vegetation, and we have here a differentiation between nonlife and life of a vegetable sort.
Differentiation continues in 1:14–16 where God makes lights in the firmament and divides the day from the night on the earth. It is 1:16 which gives the most difficulty: “And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.” However, the primary emphasis is that on the earth the day is divided from the night. The primary thrust is a continued differentiation as existence moves from bare being to light (or energy) and on into a differentiated space, areas of water and earth, the nonliving and the living plants, and day and night on the earth.
Genesis 1:20 and 21 take up one of the most crucial differentiations—that between conscious and unconscious life. Let me point out, again, that it is at this particular place that the word created in its special form is used.
“And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales [or, the great creatures of the sea], and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”
Thus comes conscious life in the air. In fact, a better translation of 1:20b is “Let fowl fly.” The word let is not in the Hebrew, but the form of the word to fly requires it. In other words, let is used throughout this section—in 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14 and now twice in 1:20. But at this point of conscious life, the unique note of create is stressed, just as it was previously at the unique original creation out of nothing.
In 1:24, we come to the seventh differentiation: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creatures after their kind, cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after their kind: and it was so” (ASV). In this division, conscious life on the earth is distinguished from conscious life in the water and conscious life in the air. At this point, everything has been produced and differentiated with the exception of one thing, and that is man. And so we come, finally, to the distinction which is so overwhelmingly important to us.
God sets man apart from bare being, vegetable life, and the conscious life of fish, birds and animals.[2] Genesis 1:26 reads: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Man stands in marked contrast to everything which has been created before. First, as we have already seen, the word create is applied to him, and that means that God made man in a special way: Man was made “in the image of God.”
We should see this passage in relation to Genesis 2:7, where additional detail is added: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Lest we make too much of the word soul, we should note that this word is also used in relation to other living things with conscious life. So in reality the emphasis here is not on the soul as opposed to the body, but on the fact that by a specific and definite act God created man to be a living thing with conscious life. God made man in His image by a specific act of creation. This is strongly emphasized, as we saw before, by the fact that the special word create is used three times over, in both Genesis 1:27 and 5:1, 2.
Genesis 1 and Genesis 2
Some scholars today see Genesis 1 and 2 as two separate accounts, almost as if they were watertight compartments in which nothing from the one relates to anything from the other. But according to Scripture’s own exegesis of these chapters, this is not allowable. Actually, the first and second chapters of Genesis form a unit; neither account stands complete in itself. The two passages are complementary, each containing unique material that is important for an understanding of man.
But there is a stronger case for unity than the simple recognition of interplay and overlapping between the two accounts. Jesus Himself ties them together. Hence, in order to set this unity aside, we would have to deny the way Jesus approached the two chapters. In answering the Pharisees’ question concerning divorce, Jesus said, “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female.…” Jesus is alluding here to Genesis 1:27. But he continues: “And [God] said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.” These latter words in Matthew 19:4, 5 are a quotation from Genesis 2:24. So Jesus puts the passages from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 together as a unit.
Mark 10:6–8 gives further indication of this unity: “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.” This hearkens back to Genesis 1:27. Immediately following it Jesus says, “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife.” This derives from Genesis 2:24, and thus again the two are linked as one. Then Jesus goes on: “And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.” These passages tied together are the basis of Jesus’ moral standard concerning marriage. Jesus reaches back and puts together the creation of man in Genesis 1 with the creation of man in Genesis 2 to show a unity that forms the basis for his view of marriage.
More light is shed on the relationship between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 by a consideration of a literary structure that occurs throughout the entire book of Genesis: first, less important things are dealt with rapidly, and then the things more important to the central theme of the Bible are returned to and developed more fully. This is so, for example, in the account of Isaac and his two sons, Jacob and Esau. Esau’s story comes first, but it is Jacob’s which is most fully developed. Likewise, Genesis 1 first deals briefly with man in his cosmic setting, and then Genesis 2 turns to man and puts him at the center of the theme of the book. The Bible is, as we have said, the book of fallen men. Its purpose is to tell us, on this side of the Fall, who we are and what God wants us to know. Consequently, after God has dealt with man in his cosmic setting in Genesis 1, He puts man at the center, beginning midway in Genesis 2. While the accounts in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have a different emphasis in this way, they are not pitted against each other.
The Historicity of Adam and Eve
Jesus’ treatment of Genesis 1 and 2 also brings to the fore the issue of the historicity of Adam and Eve. It is difficult to get away from the fact that Jesus was treating Adam and Eve as truly the first human pair in space and time.[3] If we have any questions concerning this, surely they are resolved as we consider other New Testament passages.
Romans 5:12, for example, contains a strong testimony that Adam and Eve were in fact space-time people: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.…” Thus, there was a first man, one man. Paul continues in 5:14, “Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression.…” Adam, it is obvious, is viewed as being just as historic as Moses. If this were not the case, Paul’s argument would be meaningless. Romans 5:15 strengthens this: “But not as the offense, so also is the free gift. For if through the offense of the one, the many are dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by the one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” Here, therefore, is a parallel between the historicity of Adam (the first man) and two others—Christ and then ourselves. He is dealing with men in history when he deals with “the many,” and so he makes a triple parallelism—the historicity of Adam, the historicity of Christ, and the historicity of me.
The point Paul makes in Romans is strengthened still further in 1 Corinthians 15:21, 22: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” The emphasis is again on the parallel between the historicity of Jesus Christ (whom you must remember Paul had seen on the Damascus road) and the historicity of the man he here called Adam. First Corinthians 15:45 continues the same thrust: “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” The “so it is written” alludes to Genesis 2:7. If one wishes to dispense with the historicity of Adam, certainly he must wonder at such a strong parallelism between Adam and Christ.
Often it is said that this parallelism is only Pauline, but the Gospel of Luke gives us exactly the same thing. Tracing the descent of Jesus backwards, Luke lists a number of characters of history, including such people as David, Jesse, Jacob and Abraham, and ends as follows: “Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God” (Luke 3:38). Thus we have another triple parallelism—a parallelism between the objective, historic existence of a whole group of people we know to be historic through the Old Testament and New Testament references, the objective, historic existence of Adam, and the objective existence of God Himself. If we take away the historicity of Adam, we are left rather breathless! If we tamper with this ordinary way of understanding what is written in the Bible, the structure of Christianity is reduced to only an existential leap.
But let us go further. In 1 Timothy 2:13, 14 we read: “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” Here is something additional: Not only is Adam historic, but Eve in the midst of her rebellion is seen to be historic as well. And 2 Corinthians 11:3 further testifies to this: “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.” The parallel here is between Eve and myself. Paul appeals to those of us who are objectively real—who are in history—not to fall into a like situation. And without embarrassment, Paul obviously expects his readers to assume with him the historicity of Eve and the historicity of the details set forth in Genesis.
Notice too how clearly this is the case in 1 Corinthians 11:8, 9: “For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” Here the fact that Eve was created after Adam is an important part of Paul’s argument. One would also have to take into account the way in which Paul quotes the early part of Genesis in 1 Corinthians 6:16 and in Ephesians 5:31. (And finally, in 1 John 3:12, Cain is taken as historic, and in Hebrews 11, Abel, Enoch and Noah are placed as parallel to Abraham and all that followed him in history.)
We have, therefore, a strong testimony to the unity of Genesis 1 and 2 and to the historicity of Adam and Eve. They bear the weight of the authority of Paul and Luke and as well that of Jesus.
Questions & Notes
What we know can be true and normative, and yet not be a _________ _________map containing all of the knowledge which God Himself has. ↑
God sets _________ apart from bare being, vegetable life, and the conscious life of fish, birds and animals. ↑
It is difficult to get away from the fact that _________ was treating Adam and Eve as truly the first human pair in space and time. ↑
Click on the "Genesis In Space And Time" tag below to see all the posts in this series. To go to the start of this series click here.
