By Dennis F. Kinlaw, FAS co-founder
Recently, I sensed an inner voice telling me that I needed to look carefully again at the opening three chapters of Genesis. My first thought was that I have been reading these chapters for the better part of eight decades. What more do I have to learn there? But my respect for the inner voice is great enough that I started. I am glad I did.
The first thought that slowly got my attention was the fact that the Bible begins its message to us by telling us the way things are supposed to be, not the way things are. What did God have in mind when he created all this world? I listen to the daily news and think, ”What a jungle!” In Genesis, I learned that this is not the way he made it. He made a garden, a paradise that we call the Garden of Eden. God did not put his children in a mess for them to straighten out. His intent was that we should live in a garden where our work would be a joy. That was a bit of a shock, and I was a little slow absorbing it. Then I noticed something else that was hard for me to absorb. In the first two chapters of Genesis, there is a lot written about work. The Garden of Eden was not like a place where you retire to play golf. The story found in those first two chapters is all about work. The surprise to me though was that it is not about Adam working. This story is not like the other creation stories of the world. The worker in these first two chapters is God himself, and he is working for man, not demanding that man work for him. Apparently, God likes to work. The Bible seems to tell us this, and Jesus, his Son, told the disciples that his Father works (John 5:18–21). In fact, Moses seems to think that God has a regular work schedule.
In the Garden, the servant is not Adam. It is God figuring out what more his creature would need and might enjoy. When he forms Eve out of Adam himself and gives her to Adam, Adam is clearly quite delighted. As I read it this time, I remembered my own wedding. It was a bit of a surprise to me to notice that my father-in-law seemed almost more proud of what was happening than I was as he watched me steal his precious daughter from him. I wonder if God was not thinking joyously of the possibility now for Bethlehem and the New Jerusalem. That may be supposition on my part, but the first chapter is clear that God was pleased with what he had done in that first week of work. Right before he formed Adam out of the dust of the earth, God looked at everything he had made and said: “Good!” He then formed Adam from the very dirt of the earth. (The Hebrew name Adam is taken from the Hebrew word ‘adamah, which is the term for the dirt of the earth.) He then spoke a second time: “Very good!” I wondered if Michelangelo felt like that when he finished his David or his Pieta.
Thinking about the Garden took me back a number of decades. I remembered what it was like growing up during the depression. My father came home one day and told my mother that the bank in which our family kept its savings had gone bankrupt, and we had lost all that they had carefully saved. He changed his clothes. He got his hoe. He headed off for his garden, singing. I think it was “How fi rm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word!… Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed, For I am thy God and will still give thee aid.” The family had to be fed, and the means was a garden. So for the next decade, we extracted most of the food on which we lived from a big vegetable garden. My father worked it early every morning and after work every evening. I have a strange memory. I do not remember my father being sad when he came home from his law office and changed his clothes as he prepared to go work in the dirt of the garden. It was almost as if he had endured his work day to get to his garden.
There was another garden in my life, though. It was my mother’s! It was a flower garden. It was not quite as big as the vegetable garden, but it was as big as the lot on which our house sat. It was the joy of my mother’s life. My mother was not strong. I would watch her as she worked around the house to care for the family and how she would tire. It was obvious. In the afternoons, she would slip out into her garden. There she worked among her dahlias, her tulips, and her roses. When she came back in, there was a new look on her face. The lines had changed. The sparkle in her eyes had returned, and she was ready to fi x supper. And in her hands she always brought a handful of flowers that she had cut so that she could bring something of the beauty of the garden into our home for her loved ones.
As I thought about the contrast between the picture of man and his world that the first two chapters of Genesis give us and the picture of what human life was like when man found himself outside the garden, some unexpected questions began to grip me. One had to do with a biblical understanding of work. The other had to do with the nature of joy. There is nothing in those fi rst two chapters of Genesis that seems to imply that work ought to be onerous, something from which one should want to escape. We, in our ignorance, may think that a paradise— and that is what we have thought the Garden of Eden actually was—would be a place of joy where others might work, but we would not have to work. Funny, the third chapter of Genesis tells us how work became something that a normal person would want to escape. We call it the curse, which comes because of sin. It is there we cease to enjoy the world in which we live. The world that once was a garden is now more jungle, and we have to extract from it—onerously—enough for life. What caused the change?
A superficial reading of chapter three has caused many of us to find the cause of the tragic change to be produced by the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from which Eve ate when God told her not to. As I read this time, I realized that the big change is shown in the difference between Genesis 1–2 and Genesis 3. In Genesis 1 and 2, the work is for someone other than oneself. However, the work at the end of chapter 3 is contaminated by the self-centeredness that Adam and Eve had chosen. Could that self-centeredness be what turns joy into onerous duty? I think it may be.
I hope you have someone in your life for whom it is a joy to spend yourself. If so, I think you are among those the Bible would call rich.
[This article was originally published in The High Calling, January/February 2015.]