We’ve Missed the Point of the Creation Story
So many Christians choose to die on the hill of defending a literal 7-day creation story in Genesis 1. And maybe that’s true, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Maybe it was a literal 7 days or maybe the 7 symbolizes perfection and completion (as common in Jewish writing). But I don’t think that’s the point of the story.
I know that even talking about this is causing some of your blood pressure to rise. The Bible is true! And I agree the Bible is true, but that doesn’t mean every passage is literal. Before you close the tab, hear me out.
Check out: Everything in the Bible is True… BUT
I’m not trying to convince you that Genesis 1 isn’t to be read literally. Frankly, I don’t care if you believe in a literal 7-day creation story or not. That’s not the point. Rather I want to focus on the bigger picture of what is happening in this story. A picture we often miss in pursuit of literal or not.
We’ve Focused on the Wrong Thing
In the pursuit to defend a literal 7-day creation the church has lost sight of the depth of the story found in Genesis 1-2. We can argue all day on the details of how the world came to be. But the bottom line is we don’t know. God didn’t give us the nitty-gritty. To think that the Creation story is the end all be all of how the world and humankind came to be is foolish.
Thanks to huge advances in science we now know some of the complexity that exists in the world around us. Take the human cell for example. The amount of design and complexity that went into that single cell is astonishing. What’s even more wild is that the average human body has over 37 TRILLION cells. That’s crazy!
Yet despite the crucial role cells play in our bodies, Genesis leaves them out. Not only that but atoms, molecules, gravity, and how the stars and planets are held in place are left out of the creation story. We know they exist, but the details are left unknown. Left for us to discover. Why?
The beauty of the story is not found in the details, rather the overarching story.
We get so bogged down that God had to create the universe in 7 days that we miss the story and what it’s trying to communicate. The 7 days was never the central point of the story. God was not concerned with communicating the details of how the creation came to be. If he wanted us to know that the narration of this story would look very different. There’s something else going on here.
Let’s look at another possibility for the point of the creation story.
When Genesis Was Written and Who Was It Written To
While Genesis is the first book in the Bible it’s far from the first book written. It’s tough to nail down a date of a piece of literature written thousands of years ago. However traditionally, Christian and Jewish scholars attribute Moses as the author of Genesis and date the writing somewhere around 1440 B.C. This isn’t an exact science, some will disagree with the dating, and they might be right. However it is an acceptable option among many circles of people much smarter than me. Going forward we will continue with the assumption that Genesis was penned around 1440 B.C.
You might be thinking who cares about the date it was written… Well you should. Here’s why… If Genesis was written around 1400 B.C. that is the same time the nation of Israel was wandering around the desert waiting to enter into the Promise Land. Is it a coincidence that the creation story was penned during that time? Doubtful.
The Israelites were in a fragile spot. They had just spend 400+ years in slavery. Generation after generation grew up only knowing the life of being told what to do. Their identity was that of a captive people. That’s all they knew.
Once they were free we see this mindset played out over and over. For the first time in many generations they were free, but they continually complained and wanted to go back. They don’t understand freedom, and they don’t know their true identity. All they know was living in captivity. So they acted like captives.
This is why Moses receiving the 10 Commandments was such a big deal. When they left Egypt they lost their sense of purpose and direction. For years it had been, do what you’re told. With their new found freedom they had no guiding principles. Their whole life shifted, they had a completely new normal, and they had no idea how to live. The 10 Commandments gave them that framework.
This is important because this is the context in which Genesis is written. These are the people who it was first written to, a nation of former slaves now wandering through the desert. Not really sure of who they are and still learning to trust God.
The next question we should ask, is why this story told to these people?
The Significance of the Story of Israel
The Israelites needed a hard reset of their mentality. That’s what the wandering was doing. That time allowed them to reset their thinking, their actions, and their trust in God. They had to get used to a totally new normal, and they need time to do so.
Think of a person that was kidnapped and lived in captivity for many years. They aren’t going to be able to go back to their normal life in a few days. They need time for their mind to reset back to what is normal. The Israelites had NO concept of freedom. For generations all they had known was captivity. They couldn’t simply go back to life as they knew it… That had been long forgotten about. They needed time to reset their thinking and be taught who they were.
Throughout the story of creation God was reminding them of their identity. 400 years is a long time to be in captivity. Long enough for them to forget who they were and where they came from. So God starts at the beginning.
The beauty of the creation story for the Israelites wasn’t found in the details of how things came to be. They didn’t give a rip about that. What mattered deeply to them was their identity that stemmed from the story.
Where one comes from can give a deep sense of purpose and belonging. Your family line in ancient times was a deep source of identity. It could bring a great sense of pride or a great deal of shame. God was rewriting their family line. They thought their identity stemmed from being a slave. God said, no no no. Your identity stems from the beginning of time. Your identity is the centerpiece of my creation. You were created for a reason and with a purpose.
God rewrote their family line from the very beginning. He reminded them that they all came to be by his design. That they had significance and a purpose. It took them years of wandering and many painful reminders. But their hard reset eventually took place and they settled into their new identity. Only to lose it again in a few generations. But that’s human story, isn’t it? Creation, Fall, Redemption. We live it out over and over again.
The Implications of the Story for Us
In many ways we are no different than the Israelites. Sure there are differences in how our lives look. We aren’t in physical bondage, at least in most countries. But we are still slaves. Slaves to our desires and our sins. We’ve forgotten who were are and whose we are. We’ve forgotten where we came from and what purpose we have. In many ways we are in the same identity crisis that the nation of Israel faced in the desert 3400 years ago.
We love to sit around and debate whether Genesis 1 is literal or not. And I get that, it’s interesting to talk about. But we can totally miss the point when that’s all we focus on. We were created for a reason and with a purpose. Our identity is wrapped up in that story.
The Israelites needed a reminder of who they were. They had this warped view of their purpose. God told them this story to remind them. And I think that’s a reminder that we need to hear today. That’s the beauty in this story. It’s a reminder that God created humankind with a purpose in mind. We are the center of his creation, his prize possession. That’s our identity.
It doesn’t matter if the creation story is a literal 7 days or if the 7 symbolizes perfection and completion. The beauty is in the story either way. Stop trying to figure out how God created the world and reflect on the implications for your identity that stem from this story.
Some of what I said is up for debate, I can’t totally prove my point. The creation story in Genesis 1 might have been written several generations after the Israelites were in the Promise Land. Frankly, we just don’t know (although I’d bet Moses wrote it in the desert). But the creation story is still pointing us towards our identity. That’s the purpose of the story.
I’d love to hear from you! Drop a comment below and let me know what you think!
Hello, this was a great reading and recently I have been on a journey to discover the true meaning of what the BIBLE is saying. Now I can’t prove this by any means, and the source that I got this thesis from may not be the holiest person, but no one is holy besides Jesus Christ. There was a comedy show that I watched that mentioned the forbidden fruit in genesis through the story of Adam and Eve not actually being a fruit, but a sexual object. Now after my brief chuckle and stuff, I began to wonder; what if this man is actually right? I talked with my dad before because he is a minister and he said the fruit is from a tree, but it just didn’t sit right. I then opened up and read Isaiah 56:3-5 through many different versions and translations and came up with the thesis that maybe this comedian is actually right. If you or anyone for that matter sees this comment, I would like to know your viewpoint on it and what you think about what I am saying.
Amazing how 99% of the people miss that it is a re-creation and not the original one. Sin existed before this re-creation and this one gets replaced with the 3rd and final one, with the light of the Lamb to light it. There will be no nighttime, no death, misery, and sorrow, and there is no such thing as time. I wish I could fix all of your mistakes concerning this topic but it would take way too long.
Sir, God certainly did not believe they needed time to reset. They were to go immediately into the promised land upon leaving Egypt. The reason they did not is that they had no faith in God’s word and so there carcases fell in the desert. Paul tells us the takeaway from the 40 wilderness wandering. BE NOT LIKE THEM. I Corinthians 10
I need to understand what exactly we have missed from creation story?
people forget a day is one revolution of the world, if I was creating the world the world (and GOD is much wiser than I am ) I wouldn’t put spin on until I had put the big stuff in place, mountains continents etc because of momentum, you start moving continents around and you need a lot of angels to stop them. or you could use your GOD like powers to abolish momentum or not create momentum until you had done the big bits. when to put the spin on that’s the first day even if it took you a billion years. on the third day god created spin.
That is only one type of day. There is the day of the lord which is not 24hrs long, there are the last days which are not 24hrs long in total, Adam died the very moment ( for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.), but lived over 500 years. You need to study and replace your current sources or you will wander aimlessly and never get it right.
This point is absolutely valid amongst Christians. In other words, it’s absolutely valid after we agree that the creation story is true. On the other hand, non believers are largely influenced by science pointing at all these technicalities, which ultimately undermines their ability or desire to believe in God. And that, we should be concerned about. We have to understand that these issues are pushing people further from God.
Thank you for sharing this.
God Bless.
Citizen X
I”m going to say it isn’t to be taken literally, and a person in those times might also not be able to comprehend or even know what a billion is yet. We see what we see with the telescopes and the time before nothing (big bang which was God!) is around 13.8 billion years ago so one day to us for creation could be about 2.3 billion years, We were created in the garden of Eden somewhere at the very end of the last 2.3 billion years. It isn’t like God did not have plenty of what did not exist yet to us which is time. As we read God did not come into existence. He has always been in existence. The Bible says that He has always existed: ” . . . even from everlasting to everlasting.
Was just a thought , I was doing a little rethinking myself.
I am going back to You Tube and subscribe to you. I like that your very educated on the word and still open minded enough to rethink the bible. I most likly am overthinking but I just wanted to share this thought with you.
I love ice-cream to.
You will never understand the Bible as long as you relegate everything you don’t understand to allegory. You insult God instead of obeying his instructions, 2nd Timothy 2:15 literally in a King James version.
Indeed. God is outside of time. I personally couldn’t care less whether the Almighty created the world in a literal 7 days or not. He is completely capable of it but the argument of how long it took Him to create doesn’t take from the fact that He did
Like this point: “What mattered deeply to them was their identity that stemmed from the story. “
There was one other reason God gave young Israel this story, and why it is pertinent to us today. Israel was coming out of a 400-year association with a culture that accepted a multitude of deities, and they had compromised their One God belief, as was made clear with the golden calf. We are in the same situation today, and I hear it in many churches: Krishna is okay, Buddha is okay, the Great Spirit is okay, whatever you believe is okay, it will all be sorted out in the end, just live a good life, they are just different names / views of God. God had to remind them that He is the one and only God, there are no others, never were, never will be…we need that same reminder.
Good stuff Jeffrey. You did make me rethink, and I am always glad when a post does that. I have a different perspective on the significance of the book of Genesis now, as you introduced the thought of a mind reset for the Israelites.
400 years in captivity would rob any nation of it’s identity. 40 years wandering in the desert would show them what real freedom is like – self reliance would be at a pinnacle. But even more so, reliance on a God who will meet them in that wilderness would be crucial. Getting a view of their history and why God loves them is such a big deal. I had never thought about it like that.
Thanks for the eye-opening post. Be blessed
Thank you for your approach to this beautiful story. Interestingly I’ve started my blog with posts about the creation story. Just linked your post to mine on http://www.facingthebigquestions.wordpress.com as I find it complementary. Thank you so much, really appreciate your blog.
I’m sure you are getting lots of negative comments, but this is not one. There are millions of perceptions on Genesis. However we must know in our hearts it is not literal. The bible goes on to conclude that “a day is a thousand years and a thousand years is a day” to the Lord. But in order to really complete our study and convince anyone that what we believe is credible we must remember to research the history of writing and the findings in science. Even doing that there will still be controversy due to hard line stances which defy including the entire bible as reference to each book. I totally agree that it is most likely that the number 7 symbolizes completion, as does the numbers 3 and 12 throughout the bible. Ancient writings date back to 3,000 BC. We are told Genesis was written in 1400 BC and the author was Moses which is exactly what you site in your post. There is a gap between chapter 1 vs 1 and 2 in Genesis. This gap is believed to be by many biblical scholars to be a time before creation when the war started between God and Satan. Chapter 1 also includes a major feature in Hebrew poetry “parallelism.” So I find no fault in your analysis. The story of Genesis was Harmony, Balance and Perfection before Satan brought sin into the world through the ignorance of newly created beings Adam and Eve. Today the battle continues from Satan’s perspective, but we are given One who has defeated Him on the cross.
Jeffery, I appreciate your style and approach on this. And while I do disagree with you on the length of the creation week, I do agree that Genesis 1 was not written to teach us that God created in 6 days. I affirm with you that Genesis 1 was meant to teach about the glory of a God who could speak the creation into being…oh, and by the way, when he did it, he did it across 6 days — yes, it could have been instantaneous, but he wanted to teach us a pattern of work, rest, and worship. Blessings as you continue your MA and as you continue to write. — In Christ, win
You seem to overlook the fact that God made them wander in the desert for forty years to kill off a generation who would not trust Him to enter the promised land. If they had chosen to enter, there would not have been forty years of wandering to teach them their identity as you suppose.
Or did God know it was going to happen and already knew they would not trust?
Like I said it’s a possibility for the purpose of Genesis(not exodus). The wandering doesn’t negate the purpose of the creation story.
If you disregard the historical genre of Genesis, you can open the door to all kinds of heresies and questionable conclusions:
1. If Genesis 1&2, though seen by most biblical scholars as written to convey historical narrative to its audience, is re-interpreted as poetic, when does the “real” history begin? What other parts of scripture can we re-interpret as poetic to accommodate modern paradigms? Can we also change the other parts of scripture that malign the approved minority groups?
2. Did the sin of mankind bring death into the world, or has death been a part of God’s GOOD creation for billions of years? If death is not a result of the sin of mankind, why did Jesus have to die an excruciating physical death?
3. Why disregard the other passages of scripture, which view Genesis as historical (Ex 20:11, Ex 31:17, Ps 104, Isa 54:9, Matt 23:35, Matt 24:38, John 5:46, Acts 17:26, Romans 5, Romans 8, I Pet 3:18-22, 2 Pet 3:6). Proper exegesis uses scripture to interpret scripture. If there are questions about what is meant by day, we check the rest of scripture for the meaning. Clearly, the rest of scripture points to historic narrative.
4. Paul warns the Corinthian church not to be led astray like Eve. How was Eve led astray? “Did God REALLY say…?” Questioning God’s revealed Word to put your own views into the text ends badly.
5. Jesus said, “At the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.” Why do you want to quarrel with Jesus over the “details”?
Can someone come to faith in Jesus without believing all of scripture? Of Course. But a maturing disciple fervently studies the scriptures to know God and his revelation more deeply. So knowing and interpreting the scriptures helps to answer the worldview questions that the world asks.
Should the details of scripture be disregarded to reduce God’s revelation to a bumper sticker (as is implied in this article) ? No.
Excellent post! I enjoyed reading your blog. By the way, thanks for following me back. Hope you will enjoy my blog as well.
Great post! I think this points to the larger issue – often Christians get caught up in debating things that don’t really matter all that much. And for what? To be right? Jesus didn’t say come to me when you have things figured out. People can spend tons of time arguing about if the creation story is literal, if Adam and Eve is literal, if the flood story is literal, if Moses wrote the first fire books, if Daniel was written at the time of Babylon exile, etc. But, as you so clearly say, it is missing the point. The bible is a book of stories that express God’s relationship with all of creation, including us, of us breaking that relationship, and God coming to us over and over again and righting the relationship.
Thank you for your big picture view of the creation story. I used to get caught up in unimportant details and juggling literal interpretations with scientific discoveries, but then I read a book that helped integrate it all and dismiss the artificial contradictions. I wrote about it a few years ago here…
https://dbsuch.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/on-the-elasticity-of-time-and-genesis-chapter-one/
Interesting approach, and I do not disagree. Of course there are other important points to identify, such as the teaching that God created a perfect world and sin entered apart from his perfect plan and death through sin–leading to the cross and resurrection, the victory over sin and death.
I have said before that I accept the young earth view because it matches what I read in the Bible. If, on the Last Day, Jesus tells me that I misread the account and the universe is far older than I understood, then he and I will have a good laugh over my mistake and will enjoy life in his eternal Kingdom. Meanwhile, those who were right but rejected Christ over the question will not be laughing on that Day. For that reason, I appreciate your point that the debate over literal or figurative seven-day creation is more harmful than beneficial. J.
You are right. I lean towards a more figurative reading of Genesis 1-3. However I still think Genesis clearly points towards God creating a perfect world, sin bringing destruction, and then God redeeming. As you said that’s the more important piece.
I suspect we will all have many things in our beliefs and understanding wrong when we meet Jesus. The point isn’t to have everything right, rather to follow Jesus as best as we can.
Yes! We have been doing an in-depth study at church on just the first two verses in Genesis. There. is. so. much. there! Last night we talked about how God (Elohim) “created” and then later on how He “made”. So interesting!
You are right! There is so much that we miss. Not just in this story, but most stories in the Bible. When we dig a little we can learn a lot!
Good, good thoughts…
I’m a young-earther for such reasons as “We don’t need to make things more complicated than the Bible says it is” and “if evolution really happened, then death and sin happened before the fall, negating the whole First and Second Adam concept in Hebrews.” But, your points are so good! I never really think about the context of the writing of Genesis, so that’s just really cool.
Glad you have a few things to think about! Young/Old earth doesn’t change the point of the story. We just get caught up in the wrong thing.
You encourage lazy studying and you insult God. You would be better off studying the rest of what God wrote and use a King James version only. If you don’t understand why that is required you should start there and then proceed. Many of the comments on this post are alarming and a clear indication that you are not ready for the meat of scripture.
Many oftentimes take the details more literal or to heart than the message or lesson. They end up using the Bible as a “prophecy” [according to man’s idea of prophecy] of what will happen to them exactly. The way man taught me used to make me think the same. Then God called me to leave everything and become unlearned so he could teach me. The purpose and point of all of the scriptures are to teach us to know, trust, and believe that man can not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. We try to predict the future through the scriptures. But the future is already so because of the plans God had for us and has for us…life through Jesus. Life the way Jesus lived…obedient to his Father, not man. Loving others the way Father loved him [us] not man. Thank you for the lesson.
Agreed.
2 Peter 3:8 New King James Version (NKJV)
8 But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.