humanity on Adam and Eve

Pastor: In the beginning God created all things People: and God saw that they were good. Pastor: God created Adam and Eve in His image, to be in relationship with Him. When confronte...

Contrast the creation of the first man according to Genesis 2 with the creation of the first human beings according to Mesopotamian tradition. Both start with dust or clay, but then the accounts vary....

After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.”  With its Latin roots, “across” and ...

A Christian counselor once commented on people hiding from God. “Think about it. The very first people in the history of the world, Adam and Eve, hid from God when they realized their nakedness after ...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? How did we get here? When relationships disintegrate and fall apart it is a fair question to ask. The question may come on the brink of...

Lent 2021: A 40-day Heart Restoration Destruction No More Bonus Content: Video prep session with Scott Bullock on Genesis 9:8-17 . Password: fHUk*p2* AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What can we ...

Kindness flows from you, Lord, pure and continual. You had cast us off, as was only just, but mercifully you forgave us; you hated us and you were reconciled to us, you cursed us and you blessed us; y...

How does the theme of glory that predominates in Epiphany fit with the large amount of space devoted to the Sermon on the Mount during the season? It all depends on what one means by glory. The “g...

In this beautiful poem by the English Divine John Donne, our nature as both redeemed and still sinful is eloquently described: We think that Paradise and Calvary, Christ’s Cross and Adam’s Tree, ...

Pastor: O Lord, we are in over our heads. So many are the sins that we’ve committed this past week, and they condemn us in your presence. Only because you love us with a never-ending, unbreaking, alwa...

I am convinced that the scourge of our scientific and technological age is depersonalization. There is a heartbeat pulsating at the center of the universe, giving life and meaning to everything, but o...

The anthropologist Desmond Morris has written: ‘Human beings are animals. They are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent, but always animals.’ That statement is correct as far as it goes. We are c...

Nahum Sarna writes in Understanding Genesis: Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between the mythological and the Israelite conceptions more striking and more illuminating than in their respective descr...

We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.

Is God stingy? Mark D. Roberts observes that many writers and preachers focus on the prohibition of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instead of Genesis 2:16: "You may freely eat of each...

Have you ever been told that you’re like someone else, someone you admire and respect, someone you’d love to be like? I had that experience many times while growing up. My family and I were members of...

God created man for nothing else but happiness.

God created [mankind] and therefore only God can reveal to us our identity and function. Without this biblical revelation, we are lost in a maze of confusion.

God’s first promise was for the man of heaven to descend and save us. Humanity’s plan is to ascend to heaven and “make a name for ourselves.

God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply ply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, ...

Our Father, Lord, when the world was without form and void did you roll the clay into shapes of life? Did you sing on that far distant Friday, when you fashioned the caterpillar, and the cobra? And Je...

Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught up in my failures, in all the ways I am not like you, that I neglect the deeper truth, the earlier truth of Genesis 1. You have made me, as a human being, in you...

The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lor...

Our lives are meant to inspire with (or inhale) the breath of God, the glory of his presence, the brilliance and beauty of his creation, and to expire (or exhale) an echo of wonder—an “amen.” It shoul...

Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cru...

You have wonderfully created us, O God, and yet more wonderfully restored the dignity of human nature. Allow us to share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesu...

The fact [is] that original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in history it is a thing rooted in the origins. Whatever else men have believed, they have all believed that there is som...

Christ, because He was the only Man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only Man who knows to the full what temptation means.

It could not have been done unless man paid what was owing to God for sin. But the debt was so great that, while man alone owed it, only God could pay it, so that the same person must be both man and ...

The only reason God would have had for creating us was not to get the cosmic love and joy of relationship (because he already had that) but to share it.