This post is part of a series called “Your Assignment”, about our part in God’s Story. To read from the beginning, click here:
The Start
God existed for forever and then one day he starts making stuff. Light, earth, water, everything. God makes these beings that are like him, and gives them everything else he has ever made. Pretty sweet deal for the first two beings. The first thing God says to these beings will be the subject of the rest of this series:
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”.
What is God’s goal with this commandment? Is it a burden? A prohibition on the joy of singleness? What does God want to see?
I think He wants to see a world with a giant human family, with humans going around enjoying and ordering the world just like God ordered creation in the first place. We know He wants to live among them, because he lived among Adam and Eve.
He gives them a choice to experience corruption, because he makes the humans like himself, in that, they have a choice. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a redundant title because they already knew what was good. They just didn’t know evil yet.
Most of us know they choose corruption. But check this out:
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring.
God says that the evil character represented as the serpent would have offspring. Now, evil is multiplying, just like Adam and Eve were supposed to do. There’s going to be conflict between two families: families of the serpent, and families of Adam, or, true humanity.
Adam and Eve have descendants until humanity is so evil that God wipes them all out in a flood. What was happening there? Genesis 6:1-8 describes evil spirit beings bearing children with people: literal families of the serpent.
And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. - Genesis 6:12
So humanity was continuing to choose corruption, and in doing so they had identified with the serpent. Physical and spiritual corruption were happening here. God didn’t want any more babies of the serpent’s lineage. You probably wouldn’t either. God wiped them all out, and was super grieved about it. But he chooses one man and his family to start over with: Noah.
Round 2: A Fresh Start
It’s pretty dark that NINE chapters into human history, it seems like God wipes the Etch-A-Sketch clean and starts over. But, keep in mind that this is 1,000+ years into history, so it’s already 1/6 of the way up to today.
So Noah and his family get off the boat and do you know what God tells them?
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…”
The lesson is that, despite corruption for 1000 years, God still wants the same thing he wanted when he made Adam. Indeed, he STILL longs for what he wanted, even after 6000 years of corruption, even today. This series is all about God wanting the same thing throughout history: lots of people, living in harmony, knowing Him.
Round 3: ….. so quickly?
You might begin to notice a pattern with the Bible, which is great, because patterns help us make sense of things.
Mankind chooses corruption again, centralizing their power in the form of a tower: “[we the people refuse to fill the earth]”. So they stomp on God’s dream, and God scatters them into (probably 70) different language groups. The idea is that with the separation of languages, mankind will remember God’s punishment for refusing to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”.
Again, God chooses one man and his family to start over with.
The Torah, the first five books of the Bible, zooms in on this one man, Abram, and tells his story up close and personal. They make it really obvious that the rest of the Torah is a continuation of Abram’s family and story.
The basic story outline that will continue, forever, is that God’s family and the serpent’s family are competing for our lives. Eve’s offspring and the serpent’s offspring will be in conflict, but someone from Eve’s family will crush the serpent.
And that someone will come from Abram.
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely,