The Blame Game Series

It started out innocently enough, but then again it usually does. They were the first couple and they had everything they could ever want. They lived in a beautiful garden in fellowship with their creator. We don’t know exactly where the Garden of Eden is or was Although some have tried to guess, first of all the Garden was situated in an area called Eden, so the Garden was not all of Eden, just a part of Eden. The garden we are told was filled with tress and not just any trees we are told they were beautiful and they produced delicious fruit, which tells us that God wasn’t just concerned with the practical but also with beauty. And if we pull down a map here, we are also told that the Garden was watered by a river that eventually became four rivers, today we know about the Pishon and the Tigris and the Euphrates, we don’t know where the Gihon may have flowed but with the other three we can guess that Eden may have been about here. However with the changes that would have happened to the geography after the great flood we really don’t know. We’re not even a hundred percent sure what the climate was like, but considering we are told in Gen 2:25 Now, although Adam and his wife were both naked, neither of them felt any shame. We have to assume that it wasn’t Nova Scotia weather.

And after God had created them he had given them pretty explicit instructions of what he wanted them to do he said in Genesis 1:28 we read God blessed them and told them, “Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. . .” Which considering they were running around the Garden naked probably wasn’t that much of a stretch.

And God also told them what they weren’t supposed to do Genesis 2:16-17

But the LORD God gave him this warning: “You may freely eat any fruit in the garden except fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat of its fruit, you will surely die.” So they are supposed to make babies and fill the earth but they aren’t supposed to eat the fruit from just one tree out of all the trees in the garden. Good work if you can find it. I mean that seems like a pretty good gig to me.

But you know what happens then, yeah the devil crashes the party. Adam and Eve are in the process of doing what they supposed to do and not doing what they weren’t supposed to do. And Satan arrives and says “Yo kids, what’s happening?” And they say “Not much we’re just hanging around the garden working at making babies and not eating from that tree.” And Satan says “Excuse me if I’m being nosy but how come you aren’t eating from that tree? That’s a great tree as a matter of fact it’s probably got the best fruit of any tree in the garden.”

“Well” says Eve “God told us not to eat from that tree because he said we would die if we did.” “That’s a crock” replies Satan, “The only reason He won’t let you eat from it is because it’s the best fruit in the garden and he knows that if you eat from it you’ll be just like him. Besides a loving God wouldn’t let you die just because you ate one little tiny piece of fruit, go ahead, Bon Appetit.”

You know the story, Eve took the fruit took a big bite and said “This is delicious Adam, you should really try it.” And he did. And those two bites signalled the end of the world as they knew it. Their innocence was shattered and mankind was steered unto the path of sin. I read once that the trouble wasn’t the apple in the tree it was the pair on the ground. And yes I know that it doesn’t say apple anywhere and the climate probably wasn’t cold enough to grow apples, enough already.

The story of the first man and woman and how they disobeyed God and set the stage for their descendants is found in the book of Genesis the first book in the bible. Tradition attributes the authorship of Genesis to a man named Moses, who we discover more about in the book of Exodus. The book was written around 1500 years before the birth of Christ and since Moses wasn’t a direct witness to the events that he records he was either relying on direct revelation from God or was going back to earlier written or oral records.

Why was it written? The book of Genesis reveals how creation came about, and allows us to see and understand that the God we worship isn’t simply the God of the little nation of Israel but indeed is the creator of all that is. Genesis provides the framework and sets the stage for the rest of the Bible. The characters and stories that are first introduced in this book will appear again and again throughout the Old and New Testaments. While the remaining books of the bible provide us with relatively brief synopsis of human history, sometimes a book records only a few days or years and sometimes it’s as high as several generations of history, the book of Genesis literally spans thousands of years of human existence, from the creation of Adam and Eve to the enslavement of the descendants of Jacob in Egypt. And so while we don’t have a date for creation historically we place Joseph’s life in Egypt around 1800 BC