By Bill Collier, Publisher
“Your testimonies are wonderful; therefore my soul keeps them. The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple. I open my mouth and pant, because I long for your commandments.
“Turn to me and be gracious to me, as is your way with those who love your name. Keep steady my steps according to your promise, and let no iniquity get dominion over me. Redeem me from man’s oppression, that I may keep your precepts. Make your face shine upon your servant, and teach me your statutes. My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep your law.” – Psalm 119:129-136
What follows is a discourse that will mostly center around seeking to reconcile scriptures accounting of Adam and Eve with our material understanding of the world.
The purpose is not to convince you how to interpret Adam and Eve in scripture. Rather, it is to illustrate the salient point I want to make, how to seek to reconcile our understanding of God through scripture with our understanding of him through other sources, like science and logic, or material understanding.
For our non-Christian readers, this discourse also demonstrates how to reconcile Rule of Law understanding, in general, with material understanding.
Reconciling constitutional standards with material reality would look like the process I engage in here to understand the real. Though the constitution is not God-breathed, it is the bedrock of the American republic. Without it, there is no justification for the republic itself. Its “truth” creates the boundaries of our shared union, what makes us a community, a nation, a people.
The “truth” of America begins and ends in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but in the material, we see the fruit of Americanism and the threats to it, and using logic, reason, science, constrained by our Americanism, our “Rule of Law,” our “sacred script,” we can advance Americanism in our lives, our homes, our communities, and our nation.
Scripture is GOD BREATHED and PERFECT entirely. Our UNDERSTANDING of it, and specific translations, may contain errors, but the SOURCE is perfect.
I believe the unfolding of our understanding of God’s eternal and unchangeable truth is an ongoing process. We must weigh everything, from Scripture to science, history, logic, and experience, to even begin to understand God’s Creation. But the final authority is the Bible, in all things, according to my faith, which I hold without wavering.
There are things I understand now, convictions I have held, that have changed as I’ve gained understanding of the Bible and of science, logic, and history, as well as my own experiences. My understanding of our Regency in Christ, for instance, has changed in different ways over the years as I’ve tested my understanding against all these things, with Scripture as the final authority.
We have tens of thousands of manuscripts for both the Jewish canon and the Christian New Testament canon.
If we don’t seek truth in scripture, then it is our own fault for walking away from it. To say we did not understand God’s laws and His truth when all of Scripture is preserved intact is indefensible: we are without excuse.
Scripture, unlike any inspired writing, is GOD-BREATHED.
Moses wasn’t perfect, his understanding of the very things God wrote through him was never perfect or complete, but God was the author of what was said, and scribes in a continuous line perfectly preserved the writings for hundreds of years, without any substantive error.
I will NOT entertain any notion that the Bible I hold in my hands, the received Scriptures, is not the perfect and entire WORD OF GOD. Period. No debate. For me, after many years of study and weighing every theory, I have settled this matter once and for all, it needs no revisit.
My understanding of many things has changed and will change as I weigh all the sources of truth against the ultimate authority, the Bible. My understanding of the meaning of certain things in the Bible has grown as I’ve learned cultural and language contexts, historical information, scientific information, and more.
I do not believe in a literal 6-day Creation because of the science, and as such I understand that the language here is symbolic of a deep truth which perhaps was not known even to Moses, who wrote Genesis.
I am not certain Adam and Eve are meant to be seen as the first homo sapiens because of the scientific evidence, but I am certain that they were created in perfection and that Adam and Eve’s original sin brought sin and death to a world that had not known sin before. Through this, Adam condemned humanity, as per the Bible.
I could be wrong, but the more essential belief is in the truth of God’s Word, even if I do not understand the process by which it is being worked out or had been worked out: namely the creation of humanity as destined to reign with Jesus Christ and subdue the earth and multiply.
The debates about symbolic versus literal will continue but as we see more evidence from science, we will necessarily see some cases where something we thought was symbolic is literal and where something we thought was literal is symbolic. We will die being wrong about something we thought the Bible said.
But the Bible says to “hold fast the head, which is Christ.”
The essentials of the faith are not up for debate, and my willingness to believe, submit to, and emulate those essentials is the most important thing for salvation, not the debate about who Adam and Eve were or if they were literally the first and only homogeneous sapiens extant at the time of their creation.
Could I find evidence that every human being is genetically descended from Adam and Eve? Perhaps. But what is essential is that Adam and Eve were real, they were created as perfect beings, their fall resulted in humanity being trapped in a sinful nature, and that through Jesus Christ, the second Adam, all of humanity can be saved and restored to Paradise.
Estimates are that 6,000 years ago some 5 million people existed on the whole planet. 20,000 years ago, there were perhaps 1.5 million. This is assumed fact according to current scientific proofs.
If Adam and Eve were created some 6,000 years ago, and I’m not sure about that myself, then there had to have been other humans, who had naturally evolved; yet God created two perfect humans, not through evolution, and placed them in Eden, which we call a garden, but was more like a whole mini world.
How then did all humans become slaves to sin and subject to spiritual death because of Adam and Eve?
This is difficult to understand in temporal terms. We start looking up DNA to find where this man lived and when he was created. We assume that the linear path of succession, from Adam to us all, has to be genetic or has to mean he appears before any homo sapiens appeared in order for him to be counted the first man.
But Adam and Eve were the first humans in God’s Creation, regardless of when they appeared in our temporal existence.
We cannot base our understanding of anything on the purely temporal reality we are restricted to, e.g. the time-space continuum. But we can use science, logic, our experience, and history to understand events and processes that may be symbolically described in Scripture. Indeed, I believe we should do so.
I am not a direct descended of Jesus or even of the Jews, God’s chosen destined to be united with their G-d in true faith as they see their Messiah.
But Abraham is also my ancestor by adoption through Jesus Christ, regardless of my genetics. I may not be genetically related to Adam and Eve, and yet I inherited my sin nature from them and in his sin, I became a born sinner.
If the inheritance of Christ’s nature was not genetic, we should not be surprised that the inheritance of Adam’s sinful nature was not genetic. Even people alive when Jesus walked this earth after the resurrection could all be His heirs without being related to Him genetically.
So, what happened?
My theory, and I could be completely wrong, is that before Creation, Adam and Eve were, in the heavenlies, the first humans. However, their appointed time was not before, but after what appears to have been a process of evolved creation.
Adam and Eve did not evolve, they were created as perfect beings set in a paradise to be inhabited by themselves and their offspring, unlike the rest of the humans who were created in an evolved process.
Adam and Eve were to subdue the earth and bring order, and this would mean that if it was 6,000 years ago, they and their offspring, who would not die physically IF they ate of the tree of life, would eventually have to bring order, and blessings, to all the other humans who would inherit perfection from Adam and Eve.
ALL of humanity was represented in Adam and Eve, and we failed. I like to say, “if ANY human being was in the same position, we would all have made the same rotten choice.”
This begs the question, why did God create humans whom He knew would sin? How is that just?
It is just because this is what God did and what He does is just because HE IS THE STANDARD. We cannot do what God does, that is a grave sin to even try. But He can do anything, beyond our understanding of space and time itself.
Here we continue to wrestle with God, for seeking greater understanding of His way is never a sin, but seeking your own resolution before that understanding comes is what happened in the book of Job with Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar
For me, I rest in my limitation and assume:
Adam was intended to bring righteousness to all humanity, but when he failed, humanity, as it became aware of God, like Adam, failed as well.
When Cain goes off to a distant people, he takes with him sinful knowing, not righteous knowing, and his kin will do worse than him. Remember, he killed his own brother merely because God showed him favor.
Humanity inherited the sin of Adam by the failure of Adam to bring righteousness to them through his demonstrated righteous life.
Even when God created PERFECT humans in a paradise and gave them the tree of life to eat from so they would not die spiritually or even physically, humans yet wanted MORE.
It is not necessary for us to be blood-related to Adam and Eve to inherit their sin nature, nor to be related to the second Adam, Jesus Christ, to inherit His nature.
The essentials are that in Adam all sinned and humanity becomes sinful beings in need of a Savior, the second Adam. Jesus came as a man in the flesh, perfect spiritually.
God’s eternal purposes are vast and span ETERNITY.
Homo Sapiens have only been in the temporal universe for a tiny fraction of the time. Science assumes, at present, that time began with the big bang. But we were created, in the Divine order, well before we appeared, well before the first hominids showed up in the temporal timeline.
All things that have ever been or will be were created from before the first light appears in the universe. God rested and saw that “it was good.”
He created everything in that instant, but the linear process of time-space is measured in billions of years.
This is how I use Scripture, matching the plain truth and essentials with the known temporal universe, knowing that to try and understand God with temporal eyes alone is pure folly.
My current understanding could shift, because of a new understanding of scripture, or a new understanding of science, but my core understanding of my relationship to the triune God will not.
We are all descendants of Adam and HIS BIRTHRIGHT, which humanity lost. That birthright is being restored to us all through the second Adam, Jesus Christ. This was established before one lone atom ever appeared in the universe.
This wasn’t the plan for the future; this was declared complete and in this brief temporal time, which is but 13.8 billion bits of time against ageless eternity that has no beginning or end, the process continues until the coming of Christ when, after the millennial reign, the temporal burns away into the eternal.
The Bible guides me. It is the final authority.
Every Bible that is a faithful translation (and there are as many as there are languages) is sacred and Holy. This doesn’t mean we worship our Bibles, but it does mean they are THE VERY LIVING WORD OF GOD.
The availability now of many historical documents preserved, of tools that allow anyone to access these sources, and direct-from-the-original translations makes our understanding greater than ever.
To me the Bible has become more fascinating, relevant, and alive thanks to the growth of our understanding of science, nature, and history, including the evolved creation process which, while completed already, appears to still be happening in the temporal.
This greatly fascinates me and strengthens my faith and my adoration of the Living Word of God.
For our Christian readers, I hope this helps you in your own meditating on the Word. For or other readers, I hope this helps you understand how to navigate our material reality with our constitutional ideals as articulated primarily in the Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights.
