I’m the type of person who likes to have things with nice neat answers.  I don’t like a lot of contradiction or even things that seem to defy logic.  That’s why I tend to avoid Genesis.  While I believe that God created the earth, I don’t see any reason to get into the 7 literal days verse 7 “eras” conversation.  Nor do I really get why the Bible tells us people lived to be 800 years old.   Is that a metaphor?  A real life span?  Couldn’t they count?

For a while I struggled looking for answers to those questions.  Then I realized all of that is less relevant to my life than answering another question: was Jesus a real person?  If he was real (yes) and he was God (yes) then I can simply take his word for everything else.   So if Jesus vouches for Genesis, then that’s good enough for me.   I can’t “prove” Genesis, but I can “prove” Jesus.

Why do I share all of this?  Because over the last few weeks I’ve been doing something called “The Story Formed Life.”  It’s an 11 week course that focuses on the story of the Bible.  This has forced me to wrestle with those topics I haven’t spent much time dealing with.  Particularly in Genesis.

As I re-read Genesis, what stands out is the amount of authority and freedom God gives us.

God gives Adam the authority to name the animals and the freedom to pretty much do whatever he wanted.  It was an ideal place.  If you take your average person today what’s their biggest concern: finding the “right” job.  We spend hours worrying about what we were meant to do.  Billions of dollars searching for new jobs and getting professional development.  Yet we still feel like our work has no meaning.

Adam on the other hand was literally created for his job.

It’s often easy to think of God, especially the so-called “Old Testament God” as someone who’s distant and vengeful.  But the real God of Genesis shows us a God who cares so much for his creation that he gives us perfect freedom and perfect autonomy.  Of course that doesn’t mean absolute freedom and autonomy.  God placed certain rules and restrictions on Adam.

But that wasn’t enough for Adam.

He and Eve chose to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  And with it, they gave up their freedom and authority.  They walked away from the perfect job because they thought they could get something better.

How often do we do this?  How often do we give up the authority and freedom God gives us for something less filling?  Something more restrictive?

God gave Moses the 10 Commandments.  And the priests took that and turned it into hundreds of highly detailed laws.  As Christians we take the freedom Jesus brings and wrap it in formal prayers, religious obligations, and moral thuggery.

Obviously we aren’t that different from Adam after all.