God and Primordial People: The Rise and Fall of Man and Our Rescue through Christ

God and Primordial People

The Rise and Fall of Man and Our Rescue through Christ

Paul Poulton

God and Primordial People

The Rise and Fall of Man and Our Rescue through Christ

Copyright ©

2018

Paul Poulton. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-4023-0

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-4024-7

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-4025-4

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Unless otherwise stated, scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®,

NIV

® Copyright ©

1973

,

1978

,

1984

,

2011

by Biblica, Inc.®

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1: Divine Sculpting

Chapter 2: Migrants

Chapter 3: Simplicity Itself

Chapter 4: Sex-Driving Lessons

Chapter 5: God Said to Them

Chapter 6: The Great Awakening

Chapter 7: Dawn of Humanity

Chapter 8: Art for Art’s Sake

Chapter 9: Dead and Buried

Chapter 10: Run Baby Run

Chapter 11: The Fall of Man

Chapter 12: The Competition

Chapter 13: Creation Groans

Chapter 14: The Center of Civilization

Chapter 15: Train Up a Child

Chapter 16: The Long-Livers

Chapter 17: Producing Fruit

Chapter 18: Educating Adam

Chapter 19: Made in the Image of God

Chapter 20: Forefathers

Chapter 21: Appointed to Die

Chapter 22: Faith

Chapter 23: Bad from Birth

Chapter 24: Bone and Flesh

Chapter 25: The Work of Our Hands

Chapter 26: A Clean Heart

Appendix A

Bibliography

Dedicated to The Lowe Family: David, Jeannie, and Jan

God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. Hebrews

6

:

10

Chapter 1

Divine Sculpting

Michelangelo said, Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. A human sculptor who slowly and skillfully chips away at a block of stone is similar to the sculpting of life by God who deftly worked away at the clay of the earth until it reached a state where he considered it good. God, the sculptor, found the image of a human being in earth’s clay and turned that human frame into a being made in his image.

The modern world is in a position to view the divine sculptor’s work as no other generation has. Throughout previous generations many people believed that God created life, but preceding generations were not privy to the method and manner in which he worked—his modus operandi. We are now in that position, thanks to the fine work of archaeologists, geologists, paleontologists, and scientists, some of whom have faith in God: the Big Bang theory itself was first proposed by a Christian priest who was also a scientist.

Georges Lemaître proposed that the universe had a beginning—an observation he made from reading the Bible and working as an astronomer and professor of physics. Lemaître described his thoughts on the universe as the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation. Some people were not too happy with this theory. British astronomer Fred Hoyle, taking part in a BBC radio broadcast made a disparaging remark about the exploding universe, calling it the Big Bang theory. The name stuck. Albert Einstein was also slow to accept Lemaître’s expanding universe but when Edwin Hubble published his findings on objects observed in deep space, Einstein was quick to accept Lemaître’s view.

Lemaître said, Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes . . . The doctrine of the Trinity is much more abstruse than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics; but, being necessary for salvation, the doctrine is stated in the Bible. If the theory of relativity had also been necessary for salvation, it would have been revealed to Saint Paul or to Moses.¹

Lemaître makes a valid point. The Bible is concerned with humankind’s salvation and not science, but the perceptive reader of the scriptures will garner enough information to acknowledge that the Bible and science can comfortably coexist. The precise wording of the book of Genesis and the meticulous work of scientists, each in their own way, offer insights into the creation of man. Scripture and science are far from being opponents and serve the common purpose of informing us of issues pertaining to their individual fields. We also see that the fields of scripture and science periodically overlap.

Genesis 1:24–28 announces the arrival of human beings. God called humankind Adam, reminding them that they originally came from the land, the same as all the other creatures. Adam is mentioned for the first time in the Bible in Genesis 1:26. English Bibles translate the word as man, mankind, or human beings but the Hebrew word is Adam. Adam, in the context of Genesis chapter 1, is a collective group. Adamah is Hebrew for ground, so there is some wordplay involved—man named the animals but God named man (2:19; 1:26–27). The word human is in the same category as the word Adam and therefore reminds us of the ground. We see that the word human extrapolates its earthy meaning into other words too. Humus is dark, organic material that forms in soil. Humility means down-to-earth. Exhume means to dig something out of the earth. God has given us a permanent reminder of our humble beginnings in our name as Adam or Human.

In the early Proto-Indo-European language the word ghomon means earthling or earthly being. This is helpful because if we look at the word ghomon we can see human in there, as well as homo. Latin uses Homo from where we get hominis or man. We see it in homicide, meaning to kill a human. In French man is homme and in Spanish it’s hombre.

We are from the genus Homo. The word kind is the biblical term for genus. Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind (Gen 1:24). We are Homo sapiens. Homo reminding us of the ground or earth, and sapien, meaning sapient or wise. Genesis concurs, informing us that there came a point when the creatures from the ground became Homo sapient—from the ground yet with the image of God upon us (27).

In his acclaimed book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari writes, What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know.² When we humans struggle to comprehend, even with our massive brain, Genesis is happy to enlighten us.

Genesis 1:24 informs us that living creatures came from the ground: And God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures.’ God doesn’t say, Let the land produce a second time when man is made in his image, because he said that right at the beginning of the process—man comes at the tail-end of the procedure, which is what scientists tell us and Genesis confirms. God then says, Let us make man in our image, not referring to the land producing at all (26).

We read, And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so (24 kjv). Notice the order: cattle, creeping thing, and beast. The root of the Hebrew word beast is chay, which means living, and is sometimes used to describe God himself as the living God. Included in beast were early pre-humans. There came a point when God saw that the condition of some of the beasts had developed to a level where he could endow his image on them. Note that God doesn’t say, Let the land produce again when man is made in his image, God now says, Let us make man in our image.

We can’t help but notice that beast is missing when God gives his reasons for making man in his image. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth (26 kjv). The fish and fowl are there (God made them on his fifth day of creation). Cattle are there, and so are the creeping things, but no mention of beast. Science informs us that beast had developed (in its highest form) into man, and Genesis concurs. We do not expect the book of Genesis to highlight every stage of evolution, God has given that job to scientists, but the omission of the word beast, and the introduction of the word man, informs us that the book of Genesis is still leading the way. Science will always trail behind scripture. When we begin to think that science has highlighted some new universal truth we have to stop in our tracks and admit that the Bible got there first. Science informs us that beasts developed into man and Genesis (with a smile on its face) makes provision for that transition.

If we think about God saying, Let us make man in our image, the choice of words suggests that man is already there. If man were not already there God could have said, Let us make man and let us make him in our image. But God didn’t say that. The main point being made here is not the making of man, but the making of man in God’s image. It is the image of God that is the focus of the sentence when God says, Let us make man in our image. This statement seems to presuppose that the basic man is already there but that God is going to add one important final ingredient, which is spirit. A car manufacturer may make a stylish car, with an engine that runs nicely and an interior that is plush and ergonomic, but until a human being sits behind the wheel and drives the vehicle, the car does not reach the potential for which the manufacturer made it. The human spirit is the driver within each man and woman that enables us to reach the potential for which we were made.

Let’s look at this scenario another way. Imagine a pool table on a ship with the natural lurching of the ship making the pool balls move and collide in an indiscriminate manner. The clashing of the balls would not seriously gain anyone’s interest. But if we place a human pool player at the table hitting the balls skillfully with a pool cue we find that the interest of onlookers is awakened. The spirit that God placed within human beings is the skillful player at the pool table able to pocket the electrons within the human brain with consummate ease. The human spirit separates us from the animals whose instinct serves them well but it’s nowhere near human beings’ creative thought. To be human is far more than a biological machine. There is a driver in this hominid vehicle, there is a player at this anthropological pool table, there is a ghost in this biological machine.

Confusion arises in some people’s minds when they read Genesis chapter 2 because biblical Hebrew doesn’t have a pluperfect tense—a fact important for the Bible student to remember. Critics say that Genesis chapter 1 has the animals created before humans but chapter 2 has a human created before the animals; however, that objection disappears once we take into account the absence of pluperfect tense in Hebrew. Early Hebrew states the completion of an event but leaves the time of the event to be inferred by the context. Context is king is a saying that some Bible translators like to use; they say it because it’s true. Hebrew tenses do not convey the time but simply the state of an action.

Genesis 2:7 (kjv) says, And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. This means, The Lord God, who had previously formed man of the dust . . .  which is exactly the same as Genesis 2:19 that says, And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them. The meaning being that the Lord God had previously formed the beasts that we read about in Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis chapter 2 naturally follows chapter 1 chronologically, and once we grasp that, then the events described in Genesis fall into place historically, scientifically, geographically, and theologically.

There is also another important aspect to the man Adam (in Genesis 2) being formed of the dust of the ground that will become apparent as we move forward.

1. Vecchierello, Einstein and Relativity,

24

.

2. Harari, Sapiens,

9

.

Chapter 2

Migrants

The massive human brain may not be quite the trustworthy indicator of our ability to stand out in the league of life as we may think. We now know that the human brain is not, in fact, that massive. There are beasts that have bigger brains, and living creatures that have a better brain-size to body-weight ratio, and animals that have a similar number of neurons, or far more: there are 86 billion neurons in a human brain and 257 billion in an African Elephant’s brain. For some years the frontal lobes of the human brain were thought to be larger and therefore, perhaps, the feature that singled human beings out as being special among biological creatures, but that has now been called into question. An article called Gorillas Agree: Human Frontal Cortex is Nothing Special, in Scientific American says, The size of our frontal lobes, including specific frontal regions such as the prefrontal cortex, is nothing special.³

We learn from the scriptures that each human being has something further attaching itself to their being, something that a mere biological creature does not possess—a spiritual appendage to the organic apparatus known as our physical body. The human spirit was designed with the express intention of enabling its creator to relate to its owner—God could now talk to men and men could talk back.

Now, with the gates of communication open, we read in Genesis chapter 1 that God spoke to the people he had made, telling them to Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground (28).

Archaeologists, paleontologists, and geneticists have been informing us for decades that modern humans migrated throughout the earth from a local base. Genesis has been pointing us to the same scenario for far longer than decades: millennia ago man was told to fill the earth.

The early chapters of Genesis sit well with science and archaeology. Genesis chapter 1 informs us that humans were hunter-gatherers (the Paleolithic Period), who followed the animals and ate from what naturally grew in the ground or from trees. They were under an edict from God to fill the earth, and subdue it, which they did because we can see the evidence they left behind. Genesis chapter 2 informs us about humans settling down and learning how to cultivate crops (the Neolithic Period). The area where much of this agriculture took place is called the Fertile Crescent. The Lord God helped with some of the planting: in southern Mesopotamia he planted a garden.

Long before the garden was planted, humans lived a simple life. There were no agricultural mechanisms in place that helped sustain human life. God oversaw the sculpting of the planet we live on and the life that lived upon its surface and we note that he took exquisite care. The simplicity of each organism’s ability to stay alive and pass on its genes to the next generation is a wonder at which we still marvel. How do insects survive the harsh winters? Their frames are a relatively tiny group of cells, yet somehow each summer there they are, and often out in force. It’s amazing! Simplicity has coupled itself to complexity, and those tiny bunches of cells we call insects have continued to survive for millennia, dwelling tidily in the ecology of planet earth while they live out their brief lives.

Animals seem to fit snugly here on earth, able to sleep in their own skin. My dog is always ready to rush out the door at the mention of the W word. I am always careful not to mention the word walk until I’ve got myself completely ready. Because if I mention the word too early she will run around, jump up, howl, bark, and generally exhibit an unbridled enthusiasm to head out the door. The difference between my dog and me is remarkable. I need my proper walking shoes, the correct clothing for the time of year, the lead for the dog’s collar, a hat or perhaps an umbrella. My dog needs nothing.

Dogs are equipped for whatever life may throw at them, so too are most animals. But we humans concoct all sorts of conventions that need to be adhered to before almost any undertaking we