Telling God's Story - Chapter 6: Creation and Fall

Chapter 6 is the first chapter in Part 2 of this book. The theme of Part 2 is "Reading the Story for Yourself: The Five Acts of the Bible." In this part of the book Peter Enns introduces the narrative pattern of the Bible.

Basically the Bible's big story has a 3-part structure to it:

1. Creation: the story of creation (Genesis 1-2)
2. Fall: the story of how something goes very wrong (Genesis 3-11)
3. Redemption: the story of what God does through Israel to set it all right again (all the rest of the Bible)

Part 2 of Telling God's Story deals mainly with how the redemption part is fleshed out from Gen. 12-Revelation 22. But in chapter 6 the author looks at what we are meant to understand about God's work in the first 11 chapters of the Bible.

"Right from the very beginning, the Bible is making a point about who God is and how his people are supposed to respond." Keep in mind that Israel was surrounded by nations who worshipped many gods, and they had their creation stories as well. The creation stories of the other nations typically involved conflict among the gods; in other words, creation was the result of violence and conflict.

Genesis 1 is a strong contrast and argument against these other stories. The purpose of the creation story in the Bible is to show that the God of Israel (Yahweh) is the true and good Creator and that Israel was not to fall into the trap of worshiping other gods. This truth of God as Creator is repeated all through the Old Testament, and the Bible continually gives 2 main reasons why Yahweh is to be worshiped: first, He is the Creator of all, and second, He is the Deliverer (from Egypt then from Babylon).
A second theological lesson we get from Genesis 1 is that the creation story shows God making order out of chaos, putting everything into its place. In days 1-3 God brings form out of formlessness; in days 4-6 He makes things to fill the void/emptiness of the form of the first 3 days.

The idea of bringing order out of chaos is very important for our understanding of what's going on in the Old Testament story. "God is setting boundaries: the sea goes here, the land goes there; birds live here, crawling things live there. But the biggest boundary is between God and humans."

The fact that God created humans in His likeness and image shows how special humans are to God. This is in stark contrast to the other ancient creation stories where the gods are fighting and taming the forces of chaos, and they create humans to do all the dirty work or to be slaves to the gods or to entertain them. The true Creator God loves and cares for humans who He has made His representatives on earth.

However, in the story of what we call "the Fall", something very important was lost, and the rest of the Bible tells the lengths God goes to get it back. What was lost was the order that God had brought to the chaos by establishing boundaries. Humans, in eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thereby usurping God's place by taking things into their own hands, attempted to destroy the boundary that distinguishes between God and those He created in His image. This reintroduced chaos into God's order, making humans "agents of chaos...This is the root of human woes: forgetting the place that God has made for us."

Though there are other functions of Gen. 4-11, the main one is to show the spreading effects of chapter 3. We see the general human condition which is marked by chaos...the first crime is committed when Cain murders his brother; the Flood is a "reversal of creation" as God allows chaos to undo the order He established. (Later in Exodus we see this reversal of creation in several of the 10 plagues where creatures and creation cross boundaries that God had established: frogs in homes, darkness overcoming light, etc.) The story of the Tower of Babel is "another attempt to obliterate the line between humanity and God."

Genesis 12 through to the end of Revelation tells us what God did about this.

We'll look next at chapter 7: "Redemption: Abraham and Moses".