Genesis 2: Original Blessing

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch 

January 21, 2018

Rev. James Forbes, the retired pastor of Riverside Church in New York City, is an African American pastor and he values the African American religious tradition. In fact, he was raised Pentecostal. But he is also aware that much of that is pretty alien to the standard Presbyterian or the standard secular American. He commented once that

Black people in my community talk about God and
sometimes talk to God. It’s always interesting when some
of them have been to mental hospitals and they’re getting
ready to meet staff and get a chance to come out if they
prove to be well from their neurosis or psychosis. And we
have to counsel them: Now, when they ask you do you hear
voices, don’t you tell them, “Yes, I heard God tell me this
morning that everything’s gonna be alright.” I mean, it’s so
real that someone who did not understand the worldview
would think that here’s somebody hallucinating. For us,
God talks and walks with us.1

For many people, to say that “God is my friend” as Marvin Gaye does on his classic album, “What’s Goin’ On,” or “Jesus is my Friend,” as Beth and Scott Thompson do in their award- winning country song, isn’t just a metaphor, it’s a statement of their personal reality, their personal experience of God and Jesus. But it’s hard for a lot of Americans to understand: to many, it borders on insanity and sounds extreme. When I was a chaplain on the mental ward of the hospital, one of my jobs was to explain to staff the difference between heartfelt expressions of faith and the deluded ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic. For many non-religious or differently religious people, it is hard for them to tell the difference.

But this is the way that God interacts with humanity in the Second and Third Chapters of Genesis. God is personal. God talks directly to Adam and Eve. God walks in the garden in “the breezy time of day,” as one Jewish translation puts it. God “took the human and placed him in the Garden,” suggesting that God personally picked Adam up as a parent would pick up a child. God personally breathes life into the human, an act of deep intimacy, almost a kiss. And God personally takes Adam’s rib and fashions the Woman from it.

We are told about this deeply personal and intimate God by a biblical author that scholars call The Yahwist. Last week I told you about the Priestly writer of Genesis Chapter One. The Priestly editors and writers told their part of the Biblical story during the period of the Babylonian Exile, from 603 BCE until 533 BCE. But this Yahwist writer reflects a much older tradition, probably the oldest in the Bible. Many scholars think the Yahwist wrote during the height of the early monarchy, possibly as far back as the 10th Century before Christ, during the time of King David, when the religion of the Hebrews was still young. That would mean Genesis 2 was written some four hundred years BEFORE Genesis 1. By the time of Genesis 1 and the priestly writers, this sense of an intimate, personal God had been replaced by a more staid, distant, incredibly holy God, the kind of God known best through theology and worship. There was an understanding that God is too holy to interact directly with human beings. You could say that the Priestly God of Genesis One is a Presbyterian God and the Yahwist God of Genesis Two is a Pentecostal God. And it’s important to say that one isn’t right and the other wrong. The truth is, both are enshrined in scripture, which means they are legitimate ways to be in relationship to God.

But don’t you think that we Presbyterians are missing out on something? We Presbyterians are right that God is certainly holy, but isn’t there a sense of loss in feeling like God is also wholly distant? Don’t you sometimes feel secretly envious of those people around whom we are so uncomfortable, who talk about Jesus as if he’s in the room with them, and we think they’re crazy or silly, but also we think, “Wouldn’t it be cool if my relationship with Jesus was like that?” We are aware that something has been lost.

You’re right. Something has been lost. According to the Biblical authors, when the world was first created, everything was different. The world was “very good.” It was filled to abundance with plants and creatures. Human beings were created not only to tend this garden paradise, but to live in a deep harmonious relationship with each other, all of nature, and the loving, personal God who created them. The prophets would long for that original Edenic state, saying, “They will not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). This “knowledge of God” that the prophet is longing for was once the true state of human beings. The word “knowledge” in this usage doesn’t just mean, “I can state facts about God.” It means you know God as intimately as one lover knows another lover, with a sense of profound commingling of spirit that is almost impossible even for one human with another. It means a relationship filled with passion and deep mutual awareness.

And humans didn’t simply have that relationship with God, but with nature and with each other. Violence did not exist and there was no such thing as alienation, and therefore no need for reconciliation. God and all creation lived in a state of individual distinctness, yet also in a state of full and complete harmony and union.

Often when we read the early stories of our creation, we go immediately to “The Fall,” or to the concept of “Original Sin,” as if the whole point of the first three chapters of Genesis is to tell us just exactly how bad we are. This has been especially true of Western Christianity since Augustine and of Protestantism since the Reformation. It gives us the impression that brokenness is the most important thing about being human, and about our sad, fallen world. But that’s not the message of the first two chapters of Genesis. In fact, the message is the opposite. God creates the world good and when God creates humanity God says that it is “very good.” The world was created for us, and we for the world. The world is beautiful, majestic, wonderful.

And what of God’s relationship with humanity? Human beings are the pinnacle of God’s creation, the star in God’s crown. We are made in the image of God. God has personally breathed God’s life, God’s very spirit, into us to give us life, through a vivifying intimate kiss of divine love. And God loves us, deeply, intimately, personally. We were created to be in unique relationship with God, the relationship of child to loving mother or father, or perhaps even the relationship one lover to another. We were made to walk in the garden together with God.

This is the doctrine known as “Original Blessing,” and the Original Blessing precedes “Original Sin.” This original blessing is what we were made for, and it’s what we need to get back to. In Genesis, the story of Creation and Fall doesn’t tell a story as simple as the Puritan formulation, “In Adam’s Fall, sinned we all.” In Genesis, humans have within us two warring natures, the one of the Original Blessing, and the other of the Original Sin. Each of us takes the path of Adam and Eve, and which choice will we make? The path of Original Blessing, in which we are aligned with God’s harmonious will for us and for creation; or the path of Original Sin, rebellion against God, and self-centered assertion of our own will and desire over God and creation? Though the Genesis story makes it clear that rebellion is likely and quite human, it also doesn’t assume that the human fall is preordained.

Later Christianity, and especially the Apostle Paul, comes to interpret human nature differently, to understand that sin isn’t so much a choice as it is a built-in flaw of human character. But it’s important to remember that for Paul, what sin is is really alienation from God. It’s larger than simply making the right or the wrong decision. It is the impossible distance between us and God, a distance that is beyond our ability to overcome. Furthermore, sin is empirically verifiable. Just look at the world around us and human inhumanity to other humans. The evidence of sin and its consequences is, sadly, all around us. We are far from God’s intent for us. How can that distance be closed? How can we ever get back to a state of Original Blessing?

The answer, Paul says, is that God helps us back to that state of Original Blessing, by sending Jesus to be the bridge between humanity and God. Faith in Jesus returns us to that state of Original Blessing, or at least puts us on the path of that return. We can have the same relationship humans had with God in the Garden of Eden, that deep, intimate, personal relationship, if only we put our trust in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. It will be imperfect, and we will be imperfect, but it will still be real.

And it only starts in this world. It finishes in the realized Kingdom of God. This is the shared witness of both the Old and the New Testaments. As Jews began to develop a theology of resurrection, they pictured it as a return to Eden, a return to Paradise, to the way things were at the time of the Original Blessing. The prophets pictured the arrival of God’s Kingdom as a return to Eden. Isaiah:

The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
7 The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
8 The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
9 They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.
(Isaiah 11: 6-9)

Jeremiah:

“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the LORD.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the LORD,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the LORD.
(Jeremiah 31: 33-34)

This passage from Jeremiah is a promise that one day God’s people will return to that deep, soul-to-soul bond that God had with Adam and Eve in the time of the Original Blessing, that powerful spiritual knowledge of God, that unique oneness with God that we have lost but which we all secretly long for, because it will complete us. It’s a marriage between heaven and earth, and we Christians celebrate it in the Book of Revelation as well:

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”[a] for the
first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and
there was no longer any sea. 2 I saw the Holy City, the
new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from
God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.
3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people,
and God will dwell with them. They will be God’s people,
and God in person will be with them and be their God.
4 ‘God will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be
no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old
order of things has passed away.” 5 The One who was seated
on the throne said, “I am making everything new!”
(Rev. 21: 1-5)

What we believe, you see, is that the Creator God is not done creating. At the end of time, God will make all things new— including us. Including nature. Including the universe. Including all relationships, whether between people and people, or people and nature, or people and God. Ultimately God’s creative impulse to make all things and declare them good, God’s Original Blessing, will win out, as it inevitably must, because God is God and God’s will cannot be thwarted. And God’s will—God’s perfect will—God’s original impulse— is blessing. And when God says something is blessed, one way or another, it will be so. Thanks be to God. Amen.