January 2: Genesis 2
A Foundation for All of Life
This chapter is full of details that will echo throughout the rest of the Bible - and indeed your whole life. For instance, what is the nature and role of rest every seventh day (1-3)? Debates aside, we rest because God rested.
What is the role of a man in this world? It is to “work” the creation and “keep” it (15), “it” being the fruit his work bears, be it wealth or a woman, that first paycheck or a large inheritance, a family or a society. He works and keeps creation with authority over all other creation - that’s what the naming implies (19).
What about singleness? While some are are gifted for it (1 Cor. 7:7-8), in general “(i)t’s not good for man to be alone” (18). Singleness is usually a suffering, not a gift.
What is the relationship between a man and his wife? On the one hand, Adam was formed first, and she’s the helper. Yet she was formed not from his heel, but from his rib (22). There is both hierarchy and equality.
What is the attitude of God in all this? It is overflowing, jolly generosity. Note the first command God gives to man. Not a prohibition, but the command to feast:
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden . . .”
No wonder almost every religious season God will later command will be a feast.
And surely God was generous to man when He made woman, not least with the beauty He vested her with. Ancient Hebrew had no word for “best.” Instead you would say this is the “X of X.” So Adam exclaims about Eve:
. . . bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!
She’s like me, but . . . really improved!
Yet one geographic detail touches on the Bible’s central theme. There is Eden, and within Eden, east of Eden, God placed the Garden (8). And within the Garden He planted the Tree of Life (9) and the Tree of Good and Evil. Adam and Even would eat of the second tree, and be expelled. So the Jewish temple would take on this same geographic shape. The temple signified man’s way back to God, back to Eden.
Thus Jesus would one day hang on a tree of death, transforming it by his resurrection into a new Tree of Life. At that moment the temple curtain was torn in two, and the way back to Eden was opened. All that’s required of those who return is to eat of that new Tree of Life, by faith in Christ. He is our new and better Adam.