Very Good Garden Living



I have recently fallen in love all over again with the story of creation in Genesis. It appeals to my inner optimist on such a primal level and I can feel the joy as God brought his beautiful creation into being. I can almost see his eyes twinkle as he fashioned creature after creature, plant after plant, wove the seasons into being and established circadian rhythms into time and declared them all "good". When God made us though he declared we were "very good" and of course this was true because he made us in his image and he is, of course, VERY good.

"Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “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.... God saw all that He had made and it was very good”
Genesis 1:26‭-‬28, 30 NIV"

Note here that men and women were created to jointly rule in the earth. Adam was shown the garden and told to tend to it. God then said it was not good that Adam do this alone. Remember here that God IS good. If God wanted Adam to be 'good' alone then he would have made it so after all, he IS God. He didn't make Adam complete until Eve was made... they are two sides of the same coin. God is omniscient, both Adam and Eve were already made but for the sake of us understanding the intention of the pairing, we got a story we could understand. Humanity is not 'good' alone. Humanity is complete when all of humanity is represented. God created Eve as a helper, or as an 'Ezer', a word used to describe the way God 'helped' multiple times in the old testament. Eve was not an afterthought to fulfil the 'needs' of Adam. She was an equal part of 'very good', made in the image of God in equal measure to Adam in order to fulfil God's plan of ruling and bring fruitful in the earth.

With this in mind, it is frustrating that that somewhere along the line, the brokenness we are left with after the fall has become the blueprint for the way men and women are viewed and their relationship and interaction understood. The fall set the sexes against one another in that each would seek to dominate the other in direct opposition to the original Eden plan of joint rule. We aren't meant to aspire to this. We were meant to aspire to the garden.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day Three 16 days - Exploited

Exploitation: "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work" The exploitation of women and girls represents the ultimate outcome of multiple layers of inequality. Women and girls are more likely to be in poverty, less likely to have an education, more likely to have suffered abuse at the hands of family members. Girls who have no access to school but need to work end up with no autonomy over workplace so are more vulnerable to being exploited by 'recruiters'. They are therefore disproportionately represented in modern slavery - 99% of victims of sexual exploitation are women and girls. One of the reasons modern slavery continues to proliferate is the gendered power imbalance which is upheld by patriarchal structures globally. Culture, some religious beliefs, laws, societal norms and gender roles all contribute to this power imbalance and this is clearly demonstrated in human trafficking where women are dehumanised to the extent t...
Read more

Thoughts on Elders - pronouns and tradition

Let me first start by saying that the only skin I have in this particular game is that I love to pick away at threads where I feel that patriarchal systems have sought to supress and 'keep women in their place' through an interpretation of the scriptures. I don't personally want to be an elder, nor do I think I necessarily fulfil all the requirements regardless. I do however believe that the church family and wider church is poorer for this prohibition and that is my motivation for this whole blog really.  That off my chest, for this post I wanted to put down in writing some of my thoughts on this so far. Also, they are just that, my thoughts so far and for this post I've landed on 'pronouns' and 'tradition'. I've come on a journey from a complementarian stance to a mutualist/egalitarian stance and I hope I am still learning and developing all the time. I've talked to MANY people about this and funnily enough it was a recent discussion about the ...
Read more

Thoughts on Elders - "For Adam was formed first, then Eve"

I'm back with more (personal!) thoughts on Elders. This time about 1 Tim 2:13 "For Adam was formed first, then Eve". See my previous post here focusing on 'Pronouns and Traditions'  based on 1 Tim 3:1-12. I think for some who have a complementarian stance, the linguistics of the passage in 1 Tim 3:1-12 are not so relevant an argument, it's more about what they see as the original principles of male headship, ergo male only elders. So if you truly believe that male headship is correct, then of course the linguistics of chapter 3 are irrelevant because you'd only see the explicit language as confirming the male bias. So headship. First up two things, I think it's interesting that male headship is not mentioned until Ephesians 5:23 (when Paul first used the term 'kephale'). I also think it's interesting that Jesus didn't mention headship at all and when he did talk about marriage, he said it in the context of the Eden blueprint of a husban...
Read more