Genesis

I had small group tonight and we were studying Genesis 2. We got distracted by the inconsistancies and scientific problems of Genesis. I'm not sure if the group was interested in the distraction, but I saw it as a good opportunity to go for a bit of digging and challenging of the status quo.

We spent a bit of time where we tried to reconcile the issues, but we never came to anything statisfactory. At least not for me. I sent us all off to discover what we could about the whole thing and how we could understand Genesis. How do we reconcile the fact that things in Genesis 1-3 (and I reckon up to 11 at least) don't really work with what we see in science and history? And how do we figure out why things in Genesis 1-2 just don't match up?

Whenever you talk about it everyone has a different theory. There are all sorts of ideas that people have, some of them are good, some of them seem to be just clutching at straws. What I love about the whole discussion within a teaching context is that it challenges us to keep the Bible as the Word of God, even when the it doesn't seem to be fitting in with our ideas about how infallible history should be written. I love the offensiveness that it just doesn't seem to work. The challenge to look deeper, keep questioning, because the answer isn't apparent at first reading. I love the mystery that we may never be able to answer the questions of creation, yet we still can come to the Bible with faith that it is God speaking. It creates a healthy distance between we who are seeking answers and He who gives them. It keeps us on our toes, it makes us stay alert, we can't just take it at face value. The truth comes to us but it doesn't come without our searching, asking and trusting. Genesis asks us to give up our need to have the exact answers to the beginning of man, but instead it shows us where man begins.

I guess I'm rambling. But as you may be able to see, I really like what Genesis does because it doesn't work the way we want it to, it works the way God wants it to.