GeckoFocus: Images From Genesis

GeckoFocus: Images from Genesis

By Nicholas Jones

Version: 1.02, March 7, 2021

ISBN:  9780463095874

Copyright 2018 Nicholas Jones.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This author allows excerpts of up to 10 pages to be printed for personal use or in discussion groups and teaching classes, as long as it is provided without cost. Quotes may be reprinted for purposes of review and critique.

Previews of this eBook can be found at the author’s website GeckoFocus.com, along with copyright conditions and supplements.

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Scripture quotations not otherwise specified have been taken from:

The New American Standard Bible®,

Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973

1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.

Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

Scripture quotations annotated by (NIV) have been taken from:

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV®

Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™

Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

I wish to express my appreciation for making this translation available.

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Cover photo taken at Cockatoo Downs Farm-stay by Alison Winter.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Created Mortal:

A hindsight look at several divisive issues in Genesis. This is an important prelude to subsequent articles.

2. Experts miss the point:

Even experts interpret scripture incorrectly when they use the wrong image of God.

3. God’s image:

The greatest export from Genesis.

4. Judgement or Consequences:

What we misunderstand.

5. Seed and Fruit:

The symbols are the same from page 1 onwards.

6. More than a menu:

Isaiah 65:25 as you never saw it.

7. Creation was not Utopia:

Things get a lot simpler.

8. The Post Fall Picture:

Not driven out but re-settled.

9. The Trees, Sin, and God:

A reality check and a revelation.

10. Adam lied to Eve:

An insight into God’s grace before the only rule was broken.

11. About the snake:

What we always knew, but did Adam make it to heaven?

12. The Curses:

Something you did not notice with a twist you will love.

13. Rules and Assumptions:

What I did and what I found – a summary. The story has not changed but we need a new rule.

14. Leave room for God:

How to handle challenges to supernatural events in the Bible.

15. Reviewing Genesis 9:3:

A first time permission to eat or a restoration?

16. The Trees in Heaven:

The Trees of Life in Heaven are not about mortality but joy inconceivable.

17. About Punishment:

God’s view and use of punishment from Genesis to Revelation.

18. A Parting Gift:

Prompted by the loss of a mentor and champion of the Classic view of Genesis.

19. Rules of Paradise

Just two rules and no angry God in sight.

Follow-up

Version history

Preface

The From me to you series of books are a compilation of articles that I initially published on my personal website, GeckoFocus.com. All the articles in this book, Images from Genesis can be found on the site in the Game Start section. The other books in this series are:

• GeckoFocus: The Way Back; and

• GeckoFocus: Shakeup.

Though the primary revelation of the Game Start articles became Page 1: God’s Timetable, there were many other articles that in hindsight, seemed to reveal a new Image of God as well as the events in Genesis. These have been gather here in the Images from Genesis. To save you having to get each series, links to articles in the other books are often made directly to the copy at the GeckoFocus website.

I don’t know how long I will be able to maintain the GeckoFocus website, so I wanted to preserve these articles here. Please feel free to read them at no cost at GeckoFocus.com. However, it is often nicer to read in an eBook format.

These articles are not cosy little stories that you can snuggle up with. All the articles provide challenging insights and questions. They will stretch your image of God and reveal a more intimate picture God in Genesis than you have ever seen before.

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1. Created Mortal

Several divisive issues in Genesis can be traced back to one question. Was Adam created mortal or immortal? The answer has significant consequences in your downstream theology.

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Was Adam created mortal or immortal?

This simple question encapsulates two opposing viewpoints that have occupied my attention in many articles. Perhaps I will review these other articles and replace discussions there with a link here. To imply that one is wrong and the other right raises barriers between believers who already see Adam as created 6,000 years ago and who have already captured the significance of this foundation to the Bible. My other articles are probably a little blunter, implying one is wrong, but I would like you to consider the alternatives here.

There are reasons to support both alternatives. The question is not so much about proving that one is wrong but in seeing the side-effects of which you chose. Also, this issue underlies a lot of opinions that are formed about the early Genesis chapters yet even I had not seen this specific issue as the key point. Maybe that is why I had responded to these other issues with perhaps a little too much zeal and insufficient grace. So, if you see other articles I created before 2009/10/20 that discusses the side-issues of this question, maybe you will need to recall this article to get a better balance.

Death came through sin

• The wages of sin are death. (Romans 6:23)

• Death came into this world through one man... (Romans 5:12-15)

These and other references underlie a fundamental Christian principle also called Original Sin. The unavoidable conclusion is that there was no death before Adam sinned. I agree with this totally but let’s start looking at downstream assumptions that get made...

If there was no death before Adam sinned then man and animals lived forever and so must have been created immortal. Then Adam sinned and death (mortality) entered the scene.

But here is the other viewpoint...

Adam, the first man, was created mortal and because of his sin he lost access to the Tree of Life by which he could have lived forever. Hence man no longer lives forever.

Two opinions – one sees an immortal life cursed with mortality – the other sees a mortal life denied immortality. Both are as a result of sin. Both explain how death came through sin.

Now before I get into debates about which is better pictured in scripture, I want to point out that this is a passion point to me. It is not just about which interpretation is better represented by scripture; it is simply that I hate seeing God pictured as cursing man and bringing death to mankind. I’m passionate about this because He is a loving, gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and who has been drawing man back to Himself all through the rest of the Bible. I cannot stand the picture that He is the one who brought death by cursing an immortal life.

The key scripture

In Genesis 3:22, God clearly says that Adam needed to eat from the Tree of Life to live forever. I can find no other interpretation than that Adam was created mortal but God withheld nothing from Adam, giving him the potential to live forever via the Tree of Life.

I have heard it suggested that Adam was created immortal and then cursed with death and then God had to take away the Tree of Life to prevent Adam regaining immortality. Frankly, this is getting a bit bizarre. If Adam was created immortal there was no need for the Tree of Life. Why would God create a tree that was unnecessary knowing that He would then have to take it away? I know that this seems strange and that is why I mention it in support of my argument for Adam being created mortal. But recall that the Tree(s) of Life reappear in Heaven (Revelation 22:2). There are some interesting twists as you consider this and you might want to follow it up in The Trees in Heaven.

Those who insist that Adam was immortal and re-interpret his obvious need for the fruit from the Tree of Life tend to forget two obvious things...

• The blinding simplicity of the fact that God took the Tree away and Adam died. But not right away – 900 odd years later, according to his mortal life span.

• If, as some argue, he could live forever (immortal) without eating from the Tree of Life, then did he have knowledge of good and evil without eating from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil? The fact that eating that fruit had direct and immediate consequence means that eating from the Tree of Life was similarly essential to living forever.

A historical perspective

I was reading chapter 6 from Refuting Compromise by Jonathan Sarfati. This supports the immortal created state. It refers to some big name theologians and teachers going back hundreds of years and seems like an excellent overview. All these men are worthy of your respect, but as I read I was struck that all their arguments tended to make an assertion of perfection at creation, but this was no more than their opinion. All these men passionately adhere to what I would call the plain reading of Genesis, yet at the declaration of very good (1:31); at the allocation of plant food sources (1:29-30); and at the dust to dust verse (3:19); they all insisted that the only option was the created immortal option and seemed never to see that the created mortal option was a simple and clear alternative requiring no twisting of the plain text.

But then I noticed something that is probably very significant. In many of the quotes and in Refuting Compromise as well, the arguments presented for perfection were to counter false teachings that were prevalent in their respective times. The false teaching today is that there are long ages before Adam so man must have died earlier. Another false teaching suggested something like, the creation account was actually a re creation, a clean-up, from an earlier fallen state. It seemed to me that these false teachings seized on the declaration of very good as not perfect to justify the existence of evil in the form of death before Adam sinned.

So naturally, the simple defence was to insist that very good really did mean perfect. With the greatest respect to saints that have defended the Word of God, this was going beyond what scripture says (1 Corinthians 4:6). But in some way we all do this, and perhaps you will find places where you could point the finger at me. But I warn you up front to check out my suggestions and see if the Bible does say what I suggest.

But the issue here is that you don’t need to invoke perfection and immortality to counter the false teachings. In my opinion, as a result of invoking perfection they then were forced to read into the curses more than was there. So they were then forced to interpret the dust to dust scripture as cursing an immortal life with mortality. However, I read it plainly as saying that a mortal life was being denied immortality. The following sections will deal with this in more detail.

No evil

In the above Historical Perspective, the assertion of perfection was primarily used to deny the possibility of evil at the end of day 6. Note that it was only these false teachings that suggested evil was present when God said it was very good – there is nothing in the word of God. I agree that if God said it was very good then there was no evil because God could not call evil good. So the arguments really did not need to invoke perfection. The declaration of good itself denied evil and denied the false teachings. But then things get murky and you have to define evil and that becomes a further interpretation that leads away from the plain text.

I offer this definition of sin...

Sin is doing what God has made clear you must not do.

So what rules were laid down at the end of day 6 that could be broken and so sin could have existed? None unless you count the, don’t eat from the tree of knowledge. That rule was certainly not broken at the end of day 6. With no declared rules to break there was no possibility of sin. It is my opinion that only by the spirit can you know God’s will and only by disobeying God’s will can you sin. So there was no evil at the end of day 6. All that God created (fish, birds, animals), did what God created them to do. And if He created them as carnivores, then they did no evil when they killed for food. So it was only Adam who could have sinned.

In fact, because I see Adam created on day 8 then there was no chance at all at the end of day 6. But if Adam was created on day 8 then there was also day-6 man. Could day-6 man have sinned before the end of day-6? Still no rules to break and no spirit given by which day-6 man could have known God’s will.

Though I have defined sin, I have not defined evil. Evil has many emotive connotations and I am not aware of any clear definition in the Bible though the concept of evil abounds in the Bible. The best I have heard is that evil is the lack of good. Well, nothing was lacking at the end of day 6. In fact the subsequent verse (Genesis 2:1) talks of everything being complete. There was certainly no sin at the end of day 6 even if you think that the initial created state was mortal and included carnivores. Certainly God declares that evil abounded by Genesis 6. But by then they had the knowledge of good and evil and so knew what God wanted. So the possibility of sin had grown. This is exactly what happened when the law was later given (Romans 7:11).

To close off this section... It was very good at the end of day 6. There was no sin because no rules were broken. The created state was exactly what God created it to be. Don’t interpret what God saw as very good through your personal emotive idea of evil. Don’t invoke perfection because this is not what Scripture declares and equally poor as a filter for your perceptions of the created state. Don’t get mixed up in arguments about what is evil or not. God made it clear that it was about sin. The only sin was clearly defined – don’t eat of the tree of knowledge. After Adam was created, sin could only come by one decision – to eat from the tree of knowledge. The decision to be like God through knowledge was really the same as our decision today. Choosing knowledge was a rejection of God as their father, wanting to be like or equal to God and not under God’s rule – it was a rejection of God.

All men today are descended from Adam through Noah. All have a spirit. The Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin (John 16:8), because they do not believe in Jesus. But those who do believe in Jesus are not convicted of sin, not because they do no evil, but because Jesus paid the price of all sin, except the rejection of Jesus. Today all sin comes down to one decision –