How to Make a Name That Will Last: The Engineers and The Listener (Gen 11 and 12)

The MP3 of this talk can be found here.

The two most polarizing contemporary comedians right now are Louie CK and Dane Cook. You are not allowed to like both these guys. You are either a CK person or a Dane Cook Person.[1] But they both have bits about naming kids:

Dane Cook – “I want to a bunch of (my kids) after transformers…That would be great just to say Optimous Prime, come hear, you sit next to Megatron, we are going to have a little chit chat.”[2]

Louie CK – “You can name your kid anything you want. There are no laws…there should be a couple of laws.”[3]

And this makes sense because naming kids is way too big a responsibility for most of us to execute appropriately. But, it turns out that in some countries there are laws. Recently Sweden rejected the following names.

Metallica, 4Real, Lego, Google
(pronounced ‘Albin’)

It turns out that Denmark rejects 20% of all names. Sadly, because my name has been in my family for like 8 generations ‘stanford’ would not have been rejected even if it peaked in popularity in 1910 and fell to <1 in one million babies a decade before I was born. [4]


The reason that there is so much pressure in naming a kid is that that name will last a long time. But, will it really. I mean a lifetime is too long to be named ‘Google’ but even these memorable names will be forgotten pretty quickly.

The truth is, that names are exceedingly forgettable. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/brain

No one remembers my great grandparents. No one. When my dad died…they passed from history as if they never existed.

This is part of what makes cemeteries compelling and a little creepy. They are a collection of names without narratives. The names are preserved…but the stories are lost…they are quixotic monuments to our fundamental forgettabilty. Disembodied names floating in granite…futile attempts to be remembered.

http://youtu.be/0X6q7nt15uk




We are haunted by the idea that our names will someday pass into the abyss of obscurity. That no one will remember who we are. [5][6]

Why do you and the people around you work so hard? For some, it is the fear of failure, or the desire to achieve a modicum of comfort or security or power[7] but for some, it is the existential dread that no one will remember my name…that your existence will be unremarkable and that your name will be lost in the relentless march of time…relegated to the abyss of history’s ruthless forgetfulness. So you study calc and write papers and mess around with your organic chemisty playset in the hope that you can do something that will make you memorable. But you won’t.[8]

Genesis 11 and 12 contrasts two possible paths to for a memorable name…two visions to forge a name that will outlast your heartbeat…a you that will last longer than your little carbon collection:

I. A Critical Contrast

The main thing I want to bring out in this text is that Babel and the Call of Abraham demonstrate two approaches to ‘making a name’…two contrasting approaches on how to matter.

Genesis 11:4Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

Genesis 12:2And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.


Babel is the last Scene of Act 2 and Abraham’s call is the first scene of Act 3. It is a contrast that straddles the transition from back story to story.[9]


You see Act 2 usually ends really poorly and Act 3 usually provides a glimmer of hope for the final solution. Consider the final moments of the most famous Act 2…the protagonist just had his paw hacked off by his conservatively dressed daddy who he just learned annihilates innocent planets for fun.[10] The story of the Bible really starts with chapter 12 because the rest of the story is about how God brings blessing to all people everywhere for all time all starts with this promise he makes through Abraham.[11]

Four insights emerge from this contrast

1. Choose Venture over Huddling
(What kind of Community?)[12]

So why did the men of Babel really take on this project? They wanted their names to ring out…yes…they wanted to be rememberd…yes…so you could say it was motivated by pride. But look beyond the bravado, and you find something surprising:

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

They were afraid. And so they looked to technology to give them the means to huddle together with those like them. Look at how this contrasts with God’s promise to renew the world through Abraham.

[13]
You see, the problem here is not urbanization…the Bible is decidedly pro-city. Cities tend to be metropolitan mixtures, hotspots of diversity and because of this the gospel tends to thrive in cities. The Babel project was the opposite, it was an experiment in homogeneity.[14] It was an attempt to undo the fall through technology and social planning. And we still do this. We look for security in technology or visions for social transformation coming from the either the political left or the political right. But God’s plan to restore and renew the fractured social fabric is not in huddling with those like you and trying to implement a technologically or politically driven utopia.[15] It is in trusting him in his risky ventures. It is in a willingness to be dispersed for the good of others and do life with people very different than you.[16]

Application: Be willing to Venture. For some of you, you are still coming to terms with the fact that God has dispersed you to UC Davis…others of you have gotten comfortable here and are looking with nervousness to your next dispersal.

Now it is time for the segment of my talk called:

Stuff Adam Darbonne Says:

But this week it is different – This week we here from ‘serious Adam’ rather than silly Adam.

(I miss) being near family. And being near good friends, and the familiarity of the place I grew up, of the restaurants, and roads, and the culture… its having more than 4 months out of the year where I where I see the sun and its swimming in outdoor pools…being around people I’ve known for more than 3 months and who have known me for more than 3 months…I miss home. But God has been really clear that he has called me to Wisconsin right now and I have no promise that he will bring me back any time soon and so I have to be willing to give all that up. I have to be willing…to love Jesus more than California

Davis and CL can become really comfortable places…but God will send you somewhere[17]…and you best go.[18]

Grad school aps due in January – Missions agency apps due soon

2. Build Alters instead of Ziggurats

(What kind of Religion/Monument?)

The second big contrast between these passages is the kind of religious structures that the men of Babel and Abraham build.

Genesis 11:4 “Come let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves…” -Charis – ‘touch the sky’ (NIV)

Genesis 12:7-8 “So he built an alter to Yahweh, who had appeared to him…and there he built an alter to Yahweh and called upon the name of Yahweh.”

Most commentators believe that the tower is a Ziggurat which means that it was an elaborate temple that invited god to come and live in the city. Meanwhile, Abraham just piles up a few rocks a couple times. Surely the men of Babel are more religious.

But the contrast between Babel’s impressive ziggurat and Abraham’s modest alters is the contrast between respectable religion and walking with God in faith.

[19][20]

The men of Babel have a closed conversation (‘let us’) and take on their project…and they include a really impressive and prominent feature of their project for God. They figure, if build a sufficient religious infrastructure, God will have to get involved in our project. And this is what religion is all about. It is the idea that if I do enough for God it will put him in our debt and force him to sign off on our personal projects. But here is the thing…Yahweh does not play that game. Throughout the Bible he rejects that kind of religion. He will not be managed as a part of your life or won over by impressive religion. He wants you to listen. And that is why the little alters are more satisfying than the impressive zigeraut…because they are monuments to listening…they are monuments to one who seeks God’s guidance instead of trying to bribe or appease him.[21]

The first alter was a monument of thankfulness that Yahweh had invited him into relationship:

“So he built an alter to Yahweh, who had appeared to him.” 12:7

And the second was a monument of his dependence on his new God for guidance[22]:

“And there he built an alter to Yahweh and called upon the name of Yahweh.” 12:8

The alters are monuments of dependence and a willingness to walk with God in his project of cultural transformation. They are monuments of relationship…like the ring Brant just gave Anda (which incidentally he made…himself…which is pretty great). Brant didn’t give Anda a ring so that she would marry him, but as a recognition of the bond that had grown between them and that was growing deeper.[23] That is the difference between religion and faith.

One of the most important themes of the Bible is that God cannot be impressed. Religion is an attempt to domesticate God…I’ll build him an impressive tower, but he has to stay in it. Yahweh wants us to enter into a loving relationship of worship and listening where everything is on the table.[24][25][26][27][28]

Application: Build alters not ziggurats. God doesn’t need you to build him an impressive religion. He wants you to listen, to engage in relationship with him.[29]

3. Transform from Blessing Consumers to of Blessing Transmitters[30]
(To What End?)

The great irony of this passage is that Abraham’s name does ‘ring out’. He becomes one of the most famous men in history. And the men of Babel are never named. Their names are lost on the scrap heap of history. And that is because making your name is an issue of ‘First and second things.’ The question ‘How do I make my name’ is the wrong question



Why does God say he will make Abraham’s name great?

12:2 “I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing…and in you all the families of earth shall be blessed.”

God’s care and interest never stop with you. We were not designed to consume blessing…we were designed to transit it. Bronwyn: You are not the final person in God’s receiving line.

“Whenever someone sees God for who he is they loose their consumer mentality…God is a spiritual tornado, he will never bless you except to be a blessing.” -Keller

Consider how similar this is to the passage I taught out of 2 Cor last year:

2 Cor 5:15 “And Jesus died for all, so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”

Application: Leayah is going to talk more about this next quarter, but you have to take note that listening to Yahweh and receiving his blessing ALWAYS leads to passing that on.

4. Consider generational timescales
(What kind of Timetable?)[31]

Notice one final contrast:

Babel Abraham
“our names”. “to your offspring”.

The men of Babel wanted to make their names great. It was all about them and their generation. But one of the themes of Genesis is that God’s plans unfold on multigenerational times scales. Abraham will never get to see most of God’s promises.

12:7 – “to your offspring” – God builds things on generational time scales – you may never see his promises – you are building something bigger than yourselves.

Change your time scale. We want to see all of God’s promises right now. But you might be a mess. I am. Your parents might have really messed you up…because theirs did…because theirs did. And so God’s promises to you might be that he will walk with you through the painful process of redeeming the sin bucket your parents handed you so that your kids and their kids their kids don’t have to deal with that crap and will have more freedom to be conduits of Yahweh’s blessing.

It is not about you…It is about your grandkids.[32] This is hugely counter-cultural. It is why many of you are like I was at your age…unable to even understand why anyone would consider having kids. But God sees your story as a chapter in a story of generations. It is not your story – your actions affect your children and are affected by your parents.[33]

Application: Set yourself up to raise children who are listening venturers. That means you need to marry one. More on that in January.

II. A Confusing Complication
(A Confusing anti-Climax)

So we see in the contrast between Genesis 11 and 12 two paths to an unforgettable name. And it could seem like the point is “Don’t be like the men of Babel, be like Abraham.” It might seem like I am saying “Abraham is the hero of this story, be like him.” And that would make sense, if what came next wasn’t totally deplorable.

You see God’s road to a great name starts out hard and badly – the opening story of Abraham’s new life of purpose is both difficult and tragic. It is a story of hardship and failure. It is our story.

So in the opening verses of chapter 12 God initiates his program of species redemption…his great act of undoing the fall and reclaiming us. And what happens next? Abraham has been God’s point man in his cosmic plan for precisely nine verses, before it gets REALLY hard:

10Now there was a famine in the land.

Really? This is how God rewards Abraham’s venture of faith? Really? This is God’s idea of blessing? Famine? I thought of this a couple weeks ago when Lindsey was sharing her testimony and talked about how her life got really difficult about the time God was calling her to follow him in his project of redemption.

“A loving God would not put this much on the new person.” –Lindsey Valdalez

But apparently when God says he will bless us to be a blessing he does not mean that your life is going to be easy. So then we get the story of how Abraham totally gets it and handles this new challenge really well.

Except we don’t…he handles it terrible. In 9 verses Abraham’s remarkable courage evaporates into a puddle of cowardice and fear. So many people read this opening story of God’s brand new plan of redemption and say…What?!? This is the best God can do?!? This guy horrible! He is pimping out his wife like a high end hooker!! [34]

What happened to the courage we saw 8 verses ago.[35]

But here is what you HAVE TO understand about Abraham if you are going to understand the spiritual life. God may have made Abraham’s name great – but it isn’t because Abraham is great.

This guy is mentioned like 70 times[36] in the NT but within X words of meeting him he is pimping out his wife. If you are going to read Genesis without getting yourself totally confused, you have to come to terms with the idea that these guys are not heroes…they are horrible…just like you and just like me. The Bible only has room for one hero…his name is Jesus.

“The Bible is not about good people and bad people…it is about bad people and Jesus.”

But that is the amazing thing about the Abraham path to greatness…you don’t have to be great. You can be a total shmuck…in fact, failure is required…But God responds to you not in accordance with what your actions deserve…but in accordance with his promise and his purpose.

Illustration
Armegeddon is a horrible movie with one great scene - Armegedon – “And they don’t want to pay taxes…ever.”[37] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0vy33Br_3s




The opening story of Abraham is supposed to serve the same narrative function as this scene in Armegeddon. We are supposed to say ‘the fate of the species is in the hands of these guys? Really? I mean, can’t we do better than that?’

If you look at Abraham and say ‘this is the best God’s got’ – that is exactly the way you are supposed to feel. This is not the story of a string of heroes who each advance God’s purpose. This is a story of God’s cosmic rescue plan in Jesus that he enacts through broken people…but who negotiate that brokenness in relationship with him. Abraham is not a righteous man…he is a man of faith.

You see, the Abraham story is littered with errors and brokenness…but the rest of the Bible still points to him as someone of note…why?

Well it is not because he was righteous. It was because despite his great moments and his deplorable lows, he always came back to a lively attentive trust in Yahweh. He wasn’t a good guy…he was a believer. At the center of Pauline theology is the idea from the Prophets that

“Abraham believed and it was credited to him as righteousness.”

And that's what made Abraham special. Despite the famine, he still believed God. Despite his deplorable actions, he still believed God.

Abraham is nothing special. But Abraham+Jesus is something God could utilize to initiate his story of human redemption.

And likewise, you are nothing special. But You+Jesus is something God can utilize to write the next chapter in his story of human redemption.

The contrast here is not between the bad people of Babel and the righteousness of Abraham. It is between a life of self reliance and a life of faith. It is trusting Jesus that will allow you to be a venture, to build alters instead of ziggerauts, and becoming conduits rather than consumers of blessing.

If you are trying to make your name like the men of Babel…if you are trying to work hard enough to matter…you need to know that you won’t. Give up the tower…build alters. Come into a listening, trusting relationship with God through Jesus. And if you are already trying to be an alter builder but are just sick and tired of the hardship and failure…recognize that God’s promises are stronger than your failures. Trust Jesus again. Build another alter tonight. Call upon the name of Yahweh, re-engage him in relationship, and get back in on being the next flawed but meaningful chapter in the story God started in Genesis 12.



____________________________________

[1] For the record…I am with CK. I love the insight, the honesty, the humility, the real attempt to get into the perspective of people he should hate and humanize them and, frankly, the despair.
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98vZuid_744
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNSf-KQORRk
[4] I thought about expanding my mockery of my name here and do my ‘The Rule of Stan’ bit: You see I have this theory about my name. It is not a very cool name. In fact – it is anti-cool. So, if you are writing a story or script and need a character who is a geek, a nerd, or a tool, don’t have the narrative space or motivation to develop the character, you just name him Stan and the audience will tap into an unspoken cultural expectation that ‘this guy has some glaring personality flaw.’ I have collected evidence for this theory from sources as diverse as Harry Potter, Three’s Company, Sex in the City and Second Hand Lions. But when it came to Gibson boy names…I actually came out the winner. My brother and I were both named after our Grandfathers…I was named after grandpa Stanford…my brother was named after the Italian grandfather…Nicola
[5] Cut a Wire Illustration here: “People do crazy stuff to make their name memorable…for just a little longer. Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell. The compelling antagonists of the first couple seasons of The Wire…They are the perfect team…the business man and the gangster. But then they start to grow apart…Stringer wants to leave the heroin game and make piles of cash in Baltamore real estate…”we could run this town” he tells his friend. But Avon isn’t satisfied being silently wealthy and powerful…he wants a memorable name. Stringer wants to silently control Baltimore…but Avon is content to rule a piece of it, as long as everyone knows whose it is…as stiringer puts it…he wants his name to ‘ring out on some ghetto corners. From Avon’s perspective, his name is going to be lost to the scrap heap of history…at least it is going to ring out now. Russell 'Stringer' Bell: You know, Avon, you gotta think about what we got in this game for, man. Huh? Was it the rep? Was it so our names could ring out on some…ghetto streetcorner, man? Naw, man. There's games beyond the…game.
Avon: Maybe I’m just a dumb gangster…but I want my corners
One of the greatest scenes…If I could only use it…as they reminisce they are planning how they will betray each other: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91CpbRq9Tiw I need to stop wishing I could play wire clips…since it is likely the highest rate of cussing per minute of any show I can think of in recent history.
[6] Unusable clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDMoKfvPe70 Then comes marlo…the coldest, most emotionless villain you will meet…he looses his cool exactly once…when his name is disrespected leading to the chilling ‘my name is my name clip.’
[7] Some of us are like stringer..we want to matter. Others are like Avon…we want people to know we mattered.
[8] “And you are slowly realizing that. And we are very, very pissed off.”
[9] It is the last in the sequence of offense narratives…and shifts into covenant narratives -Walton
[10] Language credit to Klosterman SD&CP
[11] The fall does not culminate in the flood…the pre-flood world is not as bad as things get…Babel is the climax of the fall narrative…Humans seeking greatness through self effort and self made religion is as bad as we get…the desire to create the ideal society has resulted in more human violence against other humans than any other motivation.
[12] Become a venture instead of a huddler.
[13] Jerome – Their scattering is for their own welfare[13] to protect them from their escalating idolatry. Sin has a positive feedback
Both Babel and Abraham are stories of dispersals motivated by grace – The men of Babel are dispersed by grace of protection/preservation from their escalating idolatry and Abram is dispersed by grace of promise/purpose
[14] You could say that Babel was the first suburb…if you wanted to be cheeky.
[15] Attempts a cultural solution to the sin problem – we will build and organize our way out of the brokenness – we will even plan god’s role – optimism of the 1800’s – but it turns out that technology just amplifies our beauty and our brokenness
[16] Bruggerman – Abraham’s multicultural purpose is the immediate response to Babel’s experiment in homogeneous community
[17] 12:1 – Go from your country – for some of you – you are still coming to terms with the terrifying reality that God has scattered you here – others of you are looking forward to another scattering – your 20’s are a gift – you should either put yourself in a position to be a pillar of a church and family – or you should try something crazy –
[18] Walton – be careful of focusing too much on the leaving – “We need to examine the God side of the equation more than the Abram side of the equation.”
[19] Interesting but ambiguous implications wrt technology – hey, the way you are making houses is crazy…lets try this new fired brick thing…then we can finally have some security…we can build a wall to keep our enemies out and build a tower to let the gods in
[20] 11:29 – Family with tragedy – “Haran died in the presence of his Father Terah”
11:30 – Sarah was barren – (with Haran dead and Sarah baren, it seems to a casual reader that this will be a story of Nahor)

[21] “When we treat God as a child to be cajoled or a tyrant to be appeased the Babel syndrome is surging in our veins…it is ‘God abuse’…Needy Gods can only be oppressive Gods.” -Walton
[22] Goldengay – God speaks to Abram about every 25 years – I haven’t even been serving God 25 years – I’m roughly on pace and I’m not even a mystic - ‘God is indeed economic with interventions.’ – says the guy who’s wife has been unable to communicate with him and required constant care for years – God is not chatty – because of the compressed narratives we get the idea that the patriarchs were just chatting it up with God – but only Adam and Eve had that kind of access
[23] I feel like there is a Beyonce joke here about God wanting you to ‘put a ring on it’ -
[24] If we do all this for god he will come down and bless our project. If we build a temple as part of our city, he will be in our debt become part of what we are doing. This is the heart of religion. I am going to live my life with my agenda, but I am going to do these things for God so he owes me and blesses my project…I’ll build him an impressive tower, but he has to stay in it.
[25] If your religious system somehow limits God’s claim on you by compartmentalizing him…it doesn’t matter how elaborate it is…it is offensive to him.
[26] –Walton – Up to chapter 11 humans are morally corrupt – they are violent towards each other and forgetful of God. But now, they have done something new. They have begun to re-create God in their own image. We have the beginnings of idolatry and human effort to ‘achieve’ god’s favor, to domesticate god and put him into our debt. The ziggurat of Babel stand in for all our attempts to domesticate god by instinutionaliszing him and putting him in our debt by rendering impressive acts of self selected devotion.
[27] And here is the thing, the men of Babel were way more impressive than Abraham. They were an impressive team of planners and engineers and God really should have been impressed. I mean they built an enormous ziggurat in the middle of their city so that he would get involved. They made sure god’s part was the most impressive part of their project…surely they deserved his involvement (or at least his disinterest) in their project to make their names great.
[28] They were engineers (which we all know is super impressive)…Abraham was a wandering Mesopotamian herdsman. But one of the most important themes of the Bible is that God cannot be impressed. You cannot earn his favor. You cannot put him in your debt through your efforts. Abraham’s alters were the better monuments because they were monuments to listening. They recognized that God takes the initiative in our relationship with him.
[29] The irony is that the men of Babel thought their god required maintenance and care…The revolutionary idea in this passage is that the true God does not require maintenance, care or appeasement…the true God provides care but requires open listeners. Do your gods require maintenance and care? Consider trading them in for one who will care for you.
[30] Make Others the Focus of Your Quest
[31] I might save this material for the relationship talk
[32] Lilies – Updike’s 4 generations remind me of Genesis
[33] The only story we get about Isacc is that he repeated the habitual sin of his father.
[34] Love the Kidner insight that we think it is weird that Sarah would be so old yet considered hot…but that we are far too preoccupied with the idea that beauty is co-equal with youth while ancient cultures may have been able to see a striking beauty in the stark wisdom and poise of a seasoned matriarch.
[35] I love this clip as an illustration (or attention re-set) for what is going on with Abraham and Pharoh…but I don’t think it has broad enough appeal to warrant the time. Thoughts?
http://a.espnradio.com/espnvideo/maynestreet/com_091102mayneSt_kimmel_revised.mp4
She felt like the only grown up in the room.
[36] I found numbers between 68 and 72
[37] I also like the Decemberist’s Castaways and Cuttouts as a picture of God’s call to unremarkable ‘heroes’ but think I will leave it on the table: “We're calling all bed wetters/And ambulance chasers/We're lining up the light-loafered/And the bored bench warmers/Castaways and cutouts,

‘But it’s the Other Way’: How Things go Wrong, Why Thing Suck and A Foreshadowed Rescue (Gen 3)

art from here

Talk MP3

Note: The talk I ended up giving differed significantly from this manuscript, to the point that the title changed. But I am posting this because I think there is some valuable stuff in here that got cut.

There are a number of things that make me odd…but one of them is that I love to fly. I had to travel a lot for work this summer, and found the days I spent on the plane to be among the summers most relaxing, productive and restful. So a good chunk of this talk was written on planes while I flew over the random rectangular states. I spent so much time thinking about this passage in my little window seat with my little tray table that I thought about calling tonight’s talk “Snakes on a Plane.” I was excited about the tag line:

“There are bleeping snakes on the bleeping campus”

But I actually knew what my title for this talk would be before I had written a word. There was a show several years ago called ‘The Wire[1]’ which was about the Baltimore Heroin scene. I am going to show you a clip. In this clip, Marlo Stanfield the newly undisputed king of the corners and just about the coldest dude you could imagine. Now Marlo just got taken by a smooth old dude in a high stakes poker game. He ends up in a convenient store to buy a bottle of water, and decides to exert a little power to remind himself that he is still the king:





In the next scene Marlo’s muscle disposes of the security guard’s body.

I remember seeing this and thinking, “That is the story of Genesis 3.” Marlo just explained Act 2 of the gospel narrative as well as I have heard it explained.

“You want it to be one way…but it’s the other way.”

Marlo’s assessment of reality resonates with our own empirical assessment. For some reason, we feel like the world should be one way…but it’s the other way. We desperately want to live in a world where children aren’t orphaned by AIDS and the mentally ill don’t sleep under bridges and a few self interested institutions can’t topple the world’s economic system and come out of it rich…but it’s the other way.

And even in our little worlds, we want to live in a world where upper level mathematics is tractable, and parents are still deeply in love[2] and boyfriends don’t cheat and there are plenty of good jobs when you graduate and professors use just, non-arbitrary criteria to evaluate you and, I don’t know, maybe just once a College Life speaker would go short…but it’s the other way.[3] Marlo’s right. The question is why.

Genesis 3 claims to answer this question.

But, the interesting thing about Genesis 3 is that it actually addresses this question in several ways. There are at least three ways the church has historically interpreted this text. First have looked to it as essentially a manual to understand and survive temptation – to personally negotiate the brokenness in our world. Second, we have read it as the Act 2 in the cosmic narrative of creation-fall-redemption; the big answer to the question ‘why isn’t anything the way it is supposed to be’. And finally, we have seen in it the foreshadowing of God’s solution to the problem the passage itself explains. You see, Genesis 3 is a multi-scale story. It has personal, cosmic and temporal scales which tell us (respectively): How things go wrong, Why things suck, and a foreshadowed rescue. So let’s take those in order:

1. Personal Scale: How things go wrong.

The first answer to the question of why things are not the way they are supposed to be is you…and me. We are supposed to see ourselves in this story. The story of how Adam and Eve fall is the story of how we fall.

“Genesis is not a story of what happened, it is a story of what always happens.” Mark Driscoll

“When we read Genesis 3 we find the same dynamics of temptation and disobedience as we ourselves experience.” John Goldengay

And so, this passage has historically been read as a temptation survival guide.

Now, survival guides have been pretty popular recently.



This one for example, includes such useful tips as: I am trying to get a hold of the zombie survival guide and glean a couple fun tips from it.



But the first fourteen verses of Genesis 3 is a survival guide you can actually use against an enemy that actually exists and regularly kicks the crap out of you like the second grade bully who waited for me every day at my locker. So let’s briefly look at 5 insights for surviving temptation from the first thirteen verses.

A Temptation Survival Guide

1. Don’t Underestimate Your Enemy: “the serpent was more crafty”

The passage starts out by introducing us to a cryptic enemy[4] and does not linger to identify it. But in the first 6 words we learn 4 important things. 1) God has enemies. 2) Their aggression against God is waged through people. 3) They are not in God’s league. 4) We are not in their league.

By depicting God’s enemy as a serpent, the most earthly[5] of his motile creatures, the passage is intentionally opposing dualism, the idea that we are in a situation where good and evil are embattled and have roughly equal power. God’s enemy is just another created thing…and has to resort to guerilla warfare against the other things God made in order to do any damage. God’s enemies are not in his league. But by saying that ‘the serpent was more crafty’ it suggests that we are not in its league. God’s enemy is terrified of God, but is clever enough that we must not underestimate it.

So, my job often takes me places where my employer feels there is a kidnapping risk. In the last few years I have been to Kabul, Kenya, Paraguay and Guyana. And before each trip, I have to take “kidnapping training.” Now ‘kidnapping training’ is not nearly as cool as it sounds. It is not training on how to kidnap people or training on how to rescue people who have been kidnapped….it is training on how to survive being kidnapped. The training starts with the assumption that you have a bag over your head.

Anyway, what I have always found most interesting about this training is the part about being interrogated. They tell us that the interrogator has every advantage. He is eating well, getting sleep, is not fearful for his safety and generally has a lot of experience interrogating. He is likely really, really good at his job. What they tell you is to not to try to outsmart him. You won’t win. It is just stacked against you. We were told ‘Interrogation is not a battle of wits…it is a battle of wills.’ Don’t underestimate your enemy…and don’t get pulled into his games. But have a plan in place to resist him.

And I thought of this as I read in the first words of this chapter how clever God’s enemy is. Don’t underestimate the enemy, don’t get pulled into its games and have a resistance plan in place.

But, the serpent is an intentionally ambiguous figure.[6] Historically the church has believed that it was the devil, but by using this cryptic creature as the tempter it could stand in for any of God’s enemies, either the chief cosmic tempter, subordinate cosmic tempters, or anyone really who set themselves against God…including us.

The identity of the tempter is left a little ambiguous so we could see in its place any voice that asks us ‘Did God Really Say?’ Because some temptation is cosmic and some is very earthy. The serpent can stand in for anyone who asks you ‘did God really say?’ Anyone who says ‘come on, you don’t really believe that? ‘That’s just goofy.’ ‘Surely you won’t die.’ ‘Surely God wants you to be happy and successful, so he can’t be serious about all those restrictions.’ Which leads me to the second page of the temptation survival guide:

2. Temptation is fundamentally an assault on God’s truthfulness and generosity
“Did God actually say?”

Genesis 3 rests on the command in Genesis 2 where God said “You may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” And the tempter uses a two pronged offensive against this command…first he questions its veracity…temptation calls God’s truthfulness into question:

“Did God really say?”
And this should sound familiar to you…because every day on this campus, there are voices saying to you “did God really say?” But this was just the first step in a two stage assault. The tempter followed up questioning God’s truthfulness by questioning his generosity.

Now, the most obvious thing that emerges from a casual acquaintance of the command is that there is a dramatic asymmetry between God’s permission and prohibition. There is WAY more permission than prohibition. If you look at this command and find it somehow ungenerous, it says more about you than it does about God.

But the genius of the tempter is to convince the humans that God hid all the best stuff[7] is not in the plentiful permissions but in the single prohibition.[8] Questioning God’s truthfulness laid the groundwork…but the real temptation emerged from getting the humans to question God’s generosity.

But then something really interesting happens. Eve plays along. In verse 1 the serpent makes God more restrictive than he actually is. And then in verse 3 Eve does the same, relating God’s restriction with an additional limitation. This is the first recorded act of ‘legalism’ – which is adding arbitrary human rules to God’s protective boundaries. But here is the thing we see. Legalism is complicit with temptation…because it aids and abeds the lie that God is not generous.[9] (This is one of my favorite ideas of the talk – it used to be its own point - but I could cut it if it is a distraction)

But as I said a couple weeks ago…it turns out that God’s prohibitions are as generous as God’s permissions. God wants us to know the difference between good and evil without having to experience the evil. By trusting that God is truthful and his generous we gut temptation of its power.

You see, the serpent told a kind of half truth – their eyes were opened…their eyes were open to horrible horrible things.

Every once in a while a clip shows up on Youtube. It is a famous cartoon that is designed to get parents to show the clip to their kids while they do dishes or pay a couple bills. The cartoon plays for a little while, but then, a few minutes in, it suddenly switches to a grotesque and terrifying scene from a horror film. It moves without warning from elmo to chuckie. Sin’s promise of meaning or adventure carries a payload of fear and shame.

This was what Adam and Eve experienced. One commentator called their experience ‘a grotesque anticlimax to the dream of enlightenment.’ They got the sophistication they craved, but it came with a payload of fear and shame. Which leads to the third insight…

3. Temptation Specializes in False Advertizing 10-11

Plantinga “People do sometimes rebel literally for the hell of it, but this is rare. Usually they are after peace of mind, security, pleasure…freedom, excitement. Evil wants good…” 90

Walton – “Adam and Eve accept something illicit because they have been persuaded that it is for their own good…Temptation is most effective when it dangles something before us that can be easily interpreted as good.” 213

Temptation specializes in false advertising. Most people want the true the good and the beautiful. We are wired to long for these things and rarely, initially chase evil or self destruction for its own sake.

The serpent promised wisdom, insight and sophistication.[10] And what was it that finally drew the humans in? It was the commoditization of insight. “she saw that..the tree was desired to make one wise.” Now, we know Wisdom is valuable, how could this be a corrupt motivation. But she didn’t want wisdom…she wanted to be wise. That is a huge difference. We do a lot of crap to e perceived as smart. A lot of people reject the faith because they don’t think they can love Jesus and be perceived as intelligent. Jesus following is insufficiently sophisticated.

The fall out was fear[11], shame, and a loss of spiritual intimacy and it still is. Their rebellion turned them on God and each other…it made them see God and their lovers as the enemies[12]. The worst that sin does is not making people bad but making God distant and fragments relationships.[13]

While fear and shame are devastating payloads that sin sneaks into our lives attached to something we thought would be good…by far the most devastating impact of sin is diminishing intimacy with God. Adam and Eve shrink from his presence[14]…and we have been that way ever since.

So your temptation survival guide has to include the recognition that sin specializes in false advertising. And that is a truly counter-cultural assertion. We have been led to believe that the good is safe but dull while rebellion is risky, but stimulating, engaging and fun. But temptations great lie is that the good is boring and evil is exciting.

“Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil.[15] This is the truth about authentic good and evil…With fictional good and evil it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive profound, and full of charm.” - Simone Weil On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God

4 Keep Repentance Drawn and Blame Holstered[16]

Both the man and woman blame shift when God comes on the scene. One of the central ideas in the Christian theology of human falleness is that, not only do we tend to act in self interested, God dishonoring ways…we tend to convince ourselves that we are not culpable. No one sees their own sin clearly.

“Clashing perspectives give rise to a glaring incongruity: in a world so manifestly drenched with evil everybody is innocent in their own eyes…Yet all know and agree that somebody must be guilty; somebody’s eyes must be deceiving them badly. But whose eyes?” (79) Volf EAE

The Genesis 3 answer is yes. Your eyes are deceiving you and my eyes are deceiving me. The world is this way because we are this way.

GK Chesteton is said to have written a letter[17] wrote a letter to the editor to a periodical that ran an article titled “what is wrotng with the world”. He letter was brief:

“Dear Sirs,
Regarding your article ‘What is wrong with the world?’
I am.
Yours Truly, GK Chesterton”

I thought of this idea when this image showed up on my facebook feed[18] last week:

The Christian story, including Genesis 3, includes the unsettling but deeply helpful insight that the problem with the world isn’t ‘out there’…it is ‘in here’. The Christian call to make repentance rather than blame our first impulse is based on the radical insight that it our eyes that deceive us badly.

Just like our spiritual parents, we are self justifying creatures and generally bear more fault than we own.

And so, one of the insights in the ‘Temptation Survival Guide’ is to “Keep Repentance Drawn and Blame Holstered.”

Make a parallel between an asset and a liability in fighting zombies. Something like, Repentance is your sawed off and blame is human attachment. That doesn’t work, but you get the idea. Maybe just a pic of a famous zombie hunter with a sawed off brandished (labeled repentance) and a holstered side arm (labeled blame).




5 God is Still There to Walk You Through the Mess[19]

So shame and fear work their way into this beautiful picture of human flourishing…and it is ruined. And Adam and Eve try to deal. They try to patch up the mess. They make themselves these pathetic little cloths out of the biggest leaves[20] they could find. And then God shows up. And he asks a couple questions, drawing them out of their hiding. But there is no going back.[21]

Miroslov Volf argues that one of the horrors of our condition (and one of the reasons that the gospel is the best paradigm for negotiating it) is that so many of our actions are tragically permanent. It is impossible to undo so many of our simple acts of destruction.

God looks at their sad little attempts to mitigate the situation…and he loves them.[22] He knows the difficulty of the harsh reality that they unleashed upon themselves and knows that their sad little coverings will not cut it. They knew that they needed cover…but God knew their solution was absurdly thin. They had lost innocence but had not become wise enough to actually survive.
And so he makes them cloths to cover their shame and protect them in their stark, terrifying new reality. They have staged a rebellion. And God responds with care.[23] God is still there to walk them through the mess. God is already providing comfort even as he is handing them over to the consequences of their rebellion – it is a picture of grace and care and a foreshadowing that this is not the end of the story.

And so on the personal scale, we can mine this story for a survival guide for dealing with temptation. But there is a bigger scale with which Christians have historically read this passage. It answers the bigger question:

2. Cosmic Scale – Why Things Suck – verses 14-24

The story of Adam and Eve teaches more than how to negotiate our own psychological and spiritual conflict with temptation. The story upscales…it also tells how your struggle exists within the context of the cosmic story of salvation history. You see our spiritual parents bought a very simple lie: You don’t need a god…you can be god. And this has been the fundamental problem ever since. Every violence, every injustice, every indignity that one person has done to another or to the world God has made is a microcosm of this big lie…that we can come up with a better way to do this thing. This deception propagates from generation to generation leaving us in this new broken reality. (yes, I am totally dodging the theological question of imputed tendency vs imputed guilt. Call me a chicken, but I don’t have the time…and I go back and forth on it myself.) It is the reason why, Marlo could glower at that security guard and tell him…’it’s the other way.’ Because things are not the way they are supposed to be.

In verses 14-24, God reads humans into the new reality. We often call this ‘the curse’ but humans are not actually cursed in this passage. God is simply letting us know how things go when we assert our autonomy from our creator. Genesis 3 begins the second act of a 3 act play of creation-fall-redemption

It is the story of a cosmic rift in our relatedness with God and each other that echoes through each generation, into ours, and will echo into our children’s generation.

Both our work[24] and our closest relationships (romantic and parental[25]) get difficult and complicated – not because God has ‘cursed’ us but because we have lost the capacity for contentment in the vortex of our self centerdness – by supplanting God as the ultimate end we have evacuated our relationships and work of their meaning. Work becomes toilsome, raising children becomes heart breaking[26] and relationships accrue a dark degrading shadow.

There is a lot we could draw out of this passage…but let’s look at just one really tragic verse. God says to the woman “Towards your man will be your desire, but he – he is to rule over you.” John Goldengay says “These are some of the most poignant, sad words in Scripture.”[27] [28]Romantic relationships are scarred – in these few sentences we see that this cosmic tear allowed the exertion of power and unrequited longing to enter into our romantic relationships – which is at the root of most of our relational brokenness. God is not ‘cursing’ them. He is laying out the implications of their new mode of self reliant existence.

And most of our attempts to fix it have just made it worse because they are just advanced forms of the same error of self reliance, self rule and self worship:
http://xkcd.com/592/
Xkcd comic (not sure if a funny turn works here – and I am at a all time high for editing expletives in this talk already – but it would be an easy edit)

Our experience is marred by cosmic disappointment. The girl you want doesn’t want you…or maybe she does, and it turns out that you just weren’t that into her. The guy you hoped was the one treated you like crap. A relationship that was promising turned degrading.

This is why the most important thing you can look for in someone to date and marry is someone accomplished at ‘repenting’ and ‘forgiving’ because those are the currency of our relatedness. Whoever you connect with will eventually hurt you and you will hurt them. That is our state. We can only mitigate it with repentance and forgiveness. And the church has historically pointed to these events, which we have called the fall, and which echo throughout every succedding generation, and held them up as the answer to the question ‘why things suck.’ This is why ‘it’s the other way.’[29]

“Human nature, indeed, was created at first faultless and sinless; but that human nature in which every one is born from Adam, now needs the physician, because it is not sound. All good qualities, no doubt, which it still possesses in its constitution, life, senses, and intellect, it has from the Most High God, its Creator and Maker. But the flaw…darkens and weakens all those natural goods, so that (we have) need of illumination and healing…” Augustine – On the Nature of Grace

Total depravity does not mean that we are as bad as we could be – that is, obviously, empirically false.
The ‘Total’ in the phrase total depravity is not a word of intensity but of scope. We are not as bad as we could be…but everything aspect of our being that was created good in God’s image, is tainted. Our capacity for beauty justice and truth all still exist…but they are all distorted…so we can be easily deceived into thinking that something degrading is actually beautiful or that something oppressive is actually just or that something deceptive is actually true.

So if all of our capacities are distorted, if self destructive self centeredness and self reliance are our inheritance from our spiritual parents…how do we negotiate it?

Well, as always…grace breaks in.

Genesis 3, the beginning of Act 2 of the creation-fall-redemption story includes an epic foreshadowing of Act 3, of God’s story. Which leads us to:

3. Temporal Scale (Conclusion) – Foreshadowing the Solution (The Christological Turn) - v 3:15

You see here is the thing…even in the statement of the problem, Got plants the seeds of the story of redemption. Act 1 foreshadowed Act 2 (with the mention of the trees) – and with a brief mention of the defeat of God’s enemy, Act 2[30] foreshadows Act 3.[31]

When God turns to the serpent in verse 15 he says

15”I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel."

He foreshadowed the solution before he is even done describing the problem. Historically, Christians have seen in this verse, the seeds of the entire story…an epic foreshadowing of the entire narrative. Humans would live at odds with each other and a malevolent cosmic force until a special human child will take it on and bring down this enemy at huge personal cost. “He will crush your head and you will strike his heal…hope breaking through the despair. And this verse always reminds me…of course…of the Honey Badger…

At over 19 millions views you have probably seen the Honey Badger clip. I know some of you have (water polo pic). If not, well, you might just have an actual life. But if you have seen this you both know why I have to narrate it myself and why it will be a disappointing substitute for the skilled narration of the actual clip.






That’s right, in this illustration, the Honey Badger is Jesus. The story of the cross and the empty tomb is that a cosmic champion in mortal personhood plays out this script from Genesis 3:15. Jesus takes down the serpent but is mortally wounded in the process. He wounds its head but it wounds his heal.

The days that passed between the cross and the resurrection are like the moments in the video where our hero, the Honey Badger, is overcome by the snake bite. In those seeming interminable clicks of the YouTube clock, his bravery looks like foolishness. We don’t have the data to do the toxicology in our heads but we know that the King Cobra is mythically deadly. Surely the Honey Badger could not survive that. The first time I watched this clip, I mourned the protagonist in those moments, sure he was dead. But he knows something about being a Honey Badger that we don’t. He is actually far more bad ass than we ever guessed.

The Honey Badger’s fearlessness (he really doesn’t give a bleep) is motivated by appropriate confidence that the serpent mortal bite can only inflict a fleeting death…that he will emerge the victor and that the cost is worth the prize.

And that is the story of the gospel. Jesus lets the serpent bite him instead of us…he takes on the penalty of Adam and Eve’s rebellion and ours…because he can take it. He can emerge on the other side of death and wrap up his victory over the decimated serpent.

Even while the first humans stared into the dark, degrading consequences of their rebellion, God was telling them, I will send a champion, who will undo the irreversible.[32] I will win you back.

Col 2:15 – “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in the cross.”

Rom 16:20 – “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.”[33]

So Genesis 3 tells us how things go wrong, and why things suck, but more importantly it also forshadows a rescue from the predicament. The victory Jesus brings over God’s enemy and our brokenness will be finally experienced in the next age, but at the heart of the gospel is the idea that you can switch teams now, from the serpent to the badger. From the enemy to the champion. And when God wins the final victory over his enemies, even though you and I are among them, he finds us on the Jesus team.

_______________
[1] A show I cannot remotely endorse from the pulpit…but happens to be the best television content in the history of the medium.
[2] Or Don’t fight or are still together
[3] A couple decades ago Cornelius Planting wrote what has become the most famous contemporary work on ‘sin’ – which he titled “Not the Way its Supposed to Be.”
[4] Walton – “The text brings the serpent on the scene with little introduction and no strategic identification.”
[5] There is nothing supernatural in appearance or approach about the tempter – it is totally mundane…apart from the fact that the snake is chatty (which hasn’t been my experience with reptiles), the tempter is totally unremarkable. Goldengay: “Genesis emphasizes the nonsupernatural, earthly character of the tempter, one of the wild creatures that God made.” Though it is worth noting that: “Throughout the ancient world, [the serpent] was endowed with divine or semi divine qualities; it was venerated as an emblem of health, fertility, immortality, occult wisdom, and chaotic evil; and it was often worshiped. The serpent played a significant role in the mythology, religious symbolism, and the cults of the ancient near east.” Walton 203
[6] Genesis 3 is about as interested in telling us where evil came from as Genesis 1 is interested in telling us where DNA came from. They are Acts 1 and 2 in the Jesus story.
[7] “the woman saw” she reinterprets the visual evidence in light of the serpent’s suggestion that God is neither trustworthy or generous - Note: the tree is useful and beautiful…just like the other trees that God generously provided in 1:9 (the same phrase is used)
[8] Goldengay: “In its shrewdness, the snake begins by making God much more restrictive and much less generous than God was. The story has emphasized the plentiful nature of God’s provision and the single constraint. The snake makes it all constraint….The snake comes back immediately for round two, questioning God’s goodwill and generosity in a more radical fashion…(suggesting that) it was jealousy that made God deny people access to the good-and-bad-knowledge tree.”
[9] There is a religious impulse that some thinkers call the principle of ‘magnification.’ The idea is that if one rule is good two are better. Because his prohibitions are generous protections, and not the rules of a game in which we gain brownie points for a final count up to see if we earn his love… that’s not the way God’s law works - if one rule is good one rule is good.
[10] Kidner – “The man and the woman have been sold a false idea of evil, as something beyond good; of wisdom, as sophistication; and now of greatnesses, as greed.” – Eve despises her innocence and wants to trade it for grown up sophistication – but it turns out that ‘grown up sophistication’ is just the façade of despair erected over the loss of innocence.
[11] Goldengay “But we were never supposed to be afraid of the one who wants to go for a walk with us.”
[12] Kidner “To be as God, and to achieve it by outwitting him, is an intoxicating program. God will henceforth be regarded, consciously or not, as a rival and enemy”
[13] We tend to think of sin psychologically – how it affects us…the Israelite perspective is how sin affects God – it defiles his presence and prevents us from access to him – it does not change him, but dishonors him - Walton
[14] Dan and I see it all the time, CL leaders get entangled in sin, and it diminishes their productivity
[15] Walton – “Any independence we experience is fleeting as old dependencies are simply replaced with new ones.” – Genesis 3 is the story of the search for independence from the creator of 1 and 2 - The failure of autonomy to deliver has led to the cultural shift to postmodernism and the re-comttment to community
[16] “Keep your trigger finger on repentance and the safety lock on blame.”
Our Fist Impulse is Blame Instead of Repentance
[17] There is no citation of this, though it has been widely circulate…but it has not been debunked as urban legand.
[18] Incidentally, ‘Ride a Bike Around’ is another indispensible piece of advice from the Zombie Survival Guide which the characters in John Green’s ‘Zombiecorns’ seem to think is silly.
[19] Temptation’s Fallout is Characterized by Permanence AND Grace
Sin Has Consequences, But God Cares for us Through Them
Even when we push God away, he isn’t going anywhere
[20] “The fig leaves were pathetic enough, as human expedients tend to be, but the instinct was sound and God confirmed it, for sin’s proper fruit is shame.” Kidner
[21] There was a scene in the last season of Mad Men where Peggy and another creative are sequestered to a hotel room to come up with an idea for an account. The dude talks about how all our social equiptment to make us feel shame about being naked is just BS and we should all be freer and more comforatable with our body. Peggy calls his bluff. Nakedness is never innocent in sexualized adults. No matter how many people assert that the shame surrounding nakedness is a social construct that we should transcend…there is no going back.
[22] It’s cool, we got this…um, no you don’t.
[23] v22 – having fallen, God restricts the availability of eternal life because it is no longer a gift…but a curse. It becomes available again after we can handle it. (Rev)
[24] The same anxiety and frustration you have with your studies will eventually come from your work and, even more so, from your children.
[25] This is why, when we start the winter quarter out with a relationship series, we are going to do 3 parts: Friendships, Family and Romance…because the scars of our brokenness go deep into what makes each of these complicated.
[26] The commentators have a TON to say about this. It is all very compelling…but just not the best conent for a community of college students. Here are a few thoughts on it anyway:
Pain in childbirth – agony, wory, nuisance, anxiety all have the same root – not typically used for physical pain but mental and psychological anguish – and the reference is not to delivery but conception- Walton 227 – sex is complicated, but for many, so is getting pregnant – same word used for the toilsome nature of work
The ‘pain of bearing children’ – not just the physical pain of the act but the turmoil of raising children that reflect your broken image – we distort the image of God in us, and they reflect that distorted image
Same word ‘toil/sorrow/travail’ used for the woman and the man for his work and her labor
-“conception anxiety” – it creates an image that we will see again and again in Genesis – of a couple who wants children but cannot have them…but I suspect on this campus “conception anxiety” means something entirely different (could use a condom advert)
-family relationships will be complicated, painful and anxiety riddled from conception to adulthood
[27] ‘desire will be for your husband’ – the principle of lesser interest – “In a relationship involving two partners, the one with the greater need of the other is more vulnerable, while the one with the lesser interest in the relationship is in the position of dominance.” – Walton 228 – note male domination is default in the cosmic violence to the good that emerges from self worship
[28] I kind of want to do something like, “a lot of the things you learned in Women’s Studies are true…and God knows and cares.”
[29] Walton – “The purpose of this section of the text is to explain how humanity, corporately and individually, came to be outsiders and lost access to God’s presence. Israelites understood that it was not supposed to be that way.” 232
[30] I feel like there has to be a scene in Empire Strikes Back, a fundamentally depressing movie, that indicates that victory will be attained – something like “he’s our only hope. No there is another.” But better.
[31] The next few chapters – a total s&$# storm – narrative exposition on how this plays out – But then Act 3 begins with Abraham
[32] In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Aslan emerges from death, he says:
“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward."
[33] ‘take and eat’ – echoed in the Lord’s supper – kidner, I never saw that ‘take and eat become verbs of salvation’

“Packing the Parthenon with Powder”: Doing College in the Image of God

A couple years ago Cracked.com ran an article they called: The 6 Stupidest Things Ever Done with Historic Treasures. It was predictably hilarious and depressing. Apparently, a guy named Chester Arthur was the twenty-first president. Yeah, I didn’t know we had a president Chester either. Anyway President Chester fancied himself a fashionable guy and when he moved into the Whitehouse he found the furnishings and contents insufficiently fashionable. So he had…I kid you not…a garage sale. Now, just to be clear, this wasn’t a high end art auction it was a full on, garage sale. Countless priceless historical artifacts were sold for pennies to make room for the hottest fashions of 1880s. But I mean, to be fair, who can really resist those frilly frock coats thingys, the reverse goatee, and those dresses designed to make butts enormous.[1]

And the list goes on. It seems that, part of Stonehenge was ground up by some overzealous engineer and used to pave roads and some rich dude in California took priceless medieval art and ancient manuscripts, stretched them out and stitched them together to make… lampshades.

But the most devastating story is also the most well known. The Ottomans (who controlled Athens in the 17th century) found themselves at war with the Venetians in 1697 and thought that the Parthenon which, at the time was 2,000 years old and nearly intact, would make a good place to store gunpowder. Apparently, this went poorly. You’ll never guess what happened. The Venetians lobbed a few torches into it and it blew it up. I bet you didn’t see that coming. This great historic structure[2] is now a tattered shell of what it could have been.


The reasons these stories make us recoil is the thing they all have in common. They are stories of mis-assessed value. They are stories of someone taking something with enormous intrinsic value and damaging it by using it for something it was never intended for. In most cases they used these things for pragmatic purposes that ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ because they underestimated the value of the object and misunderstood its purpose.

But here is the thing. You are in the position to make a very similar decision. How you experience the years that you spend in this place depends on the assessment you make of your value and your purpose. If you make an accurate assessment of your value and purpose, these could be really fun and ennobling years that effectively set a wise and ennobling course f or the rest of your life…because we all want to look back on college and be happy about the way we did it. But if you mis-assess what you are worth and why you exist for, they could be frustrating and even degrading years.

So let me start out with a simple question: ‘Who do you think you are?’ It is a question usually reserved for angry moms, spurned lovers and mediocre Spice Girl lyrics, but it is a question you need to answer early in your college experience.

In fact Immanuel Kant one of the most important post enlightenment philosophers, thought the ultimate question of human thought is ‘Who am I?’

More recently, Mumford and Sons[3] got to the same idea:

Because I need freedom now
And I need to know how
To live my life as it's meant to be

Who you think you are and why you think you exist (whether you actively decide what you believe about these things or just absorb a default cultural narrative) will determine how you live…especially in college.

And that is what Genesis 1 and 2 are about. They are not scientific documents intended to walk us through the details of the physical origins of the universe, biodiversity and physical anthropology. These narratives were written to tell us who we are, to help us accurately assess our value and purpose. And answering the question ‘who am I’ is the first step in answering the question ‘how was life meant to be lived?’

The opening pages of the Hebrew Scriptures offer an answer to the question ‘who am I?’ They tell us that we are unique creatures fashioned ‘in the Image of God.’ I mean, it is easy to believe that humans were made in the image of God when you look at certain specimens (Dieter and Ryan - really really rediculously good looking) but others make it a little more difficult (stanford and Dan).


But the passage here is not talking about the fact that we are bipedal hominids with opposable thumbs regardless of our relative handsomeness. It is talking about how we are what Dan called, half way creatures that inhabit empirical and spiritual reality. How we are ‘dirtlings’ but with a special quality that reflects God in a way the other metazoan don’t.[4]

Now, much is made of the two creation accounts, and if you want to hear me talk about the technical details of that, you will have to come to the seminar tomorrow. But functionally, Genesis chapter 2 is like the zoom function on google earth. Gen 1 is cosmic – it is earth centered, but then Gen 2 zooms in on the human story and tells a story that expands and illustrates what it means that we were made in the image of God.

If you accept this answer to the question ‘Who am I?’…if you answer Kant’s question with ‘I am a creature made by God in his image,’ it will dramatically change your college experience. …and I’ll argue, for the better. Tonight we are going to look at Genesis 2 which make the case that recognizing that you bear the image of God will make two big differences that will dramatically change your experience of these years.

Recognizing that you were created in the image of God, will affect the way you think about your Purpose and your Dignity.

I. Purpose

The first thing we see about being created in the image of God is that it is on purpose. I’ll talk tomorrow about what the first two chapters of Genesis do and do not assert, but regardless of how you read them, they offer a definitive ‘no’ to the prevailing university narrative that we are trying to scrape together the illusion of a purposeful existence from an accidental and purposeless origin. The simple assertion that we were made on purpose means we were made with purpose. There are a lot of things I could talk about here, but let’s stick with the text and look at three aspects to the intended human purpose from these early chapters of Genesis. We were made for work, worship and community.

a. Work

The first really counter-cultural thing that this passage teaches is that work is good. We were made to participate in useful and ennobling labor. Look with me at v 15:

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

To briefly use theological language, this story clearly shows that work is what we call a ‘pre-fall ordinance.’ Before things go horribly wrong in chapter 3, in the ultimate setting of human flourishing, humans are working.

All around us we are bombarded with this idea that work is bad and leisure is good and the goal of life is to gradually do less of the former and more of the latter.[5] We generally try to order our lives so we can work less and play more. Maybe this idea has even influenced some of you in the selection of your majors. But in the garden, where things conformed ideally to God’s plan for human flourishing, people worked. We were made to work. Now work is not our only purpose, and next week Liz will talk about how God commanded us to intentionally punctuate our work with rest to protect ourselves from it.

But we see in this narrative that Work is not just the absence of leisure, it is worshipful and purposeful activity. Being made in the image of God means that you have been made to be a maker.[6] You have been created to create. We will see in 2 weeks, the fall did not make work, it made work toilsome. Being made in the image of God means that part of our purpose is to create and to care for what he created.

This insight can breathe vitality into your studies. Christians have a mandate to curiosity. People like to say that I have a school addiction or that I collect degrees. During welcome week I was often introduced as the guy with X degrees, where X was an integer between 5 and 95. And the mockery is deserved…I am, in fact, strange. But I would argue that insatiable curiosity is a simple byproduct of Jesus following…well that and I’m a little strange.

Richard Dawkins, one of our faith’s most virulent modern detractors argues that “I am against religion because us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” This is mistaken theologically and empirically. The premise that God made the world and can be seen in it makes both curiosity[7] and creativity a Christian mandates. The academic disciplines at their best are simply careful observation and reflection on the reality God has fashioned and the creative response to these observations. But it also means that your studies are an arena of worship

You see, the Hebrew word used for work in verse 15 is often used in the context of worship. It is used most often in the Scriptures to describe priests as they care for the temple.[8] This is a cool idea because it gives real dignity to caring for the earth and people. But it also means that whatever aspect of God’s world your work brings you to, your work is an opportunity to worship. When you look at a blank word document that has to become a paper on (specific absurd example) or sit down to do a problem set to re-derive principles of calculus discovered centuries ago, you get to reflect the activity of your creator by bringing order out of chaos. And that is an opportunity for worship. Which brings us to the second purpose we see in this passage:

b. Worship

You see, work can and should be worshipful, but we were for times set aside for undistracted worship. The picture painted in these first few chapters of Genesis of a world of ideal human flourishing is one where God and the humans he has made talk frequently, take walks together, enjoy being together. This picture is actually painted most vividly in the beginning of the next chapter.

3:8 “And they heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.”

Life and work were intended to be done in the presence of God. If you ignore this in college, you miss the point. If you want to do college ‘in the image of God’ order your days around a regular times of worship. Now, since the events of Genesis 3, worship is simply harder than it was in this text. But we have pretty good tools at our disposal in the form of prayer, reflective Scripture reading and joining a Jesus community that worships together. Which leads me to the third purpose:

c. Community

In verse 18 God says, ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’ which is a really stark statement, because until now everything he has made has he has declared good without qualification. The goodness of everything God made was not only the theme of Genesis 1, but it was a repeated refrain. But in chapter 2 God looks and sees solitary humanness…he sees loneliness…and he says, ‘This is not OK.’

Now this is a famous verse, and we know what comes next. You see, I know that some of you hear ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’ and immediately go to work on how you can turn that into a pickup line:

“You know, God said it’s not good for me to be alone…want to go for a walk in the arboretum.”

We immediately vest that verse with romantic implications. And we will get there…but not just yet. You see there is a more fundamental principle here. Christians believe in a Trinitarian God, a God who is one but is also intrinsically a community from eternity past. If that kind of God makes you in his image, he made you to be in the lives of other people who are also pursuing the presence of God

It is not good to be alone.

If you hang around this community long enough, you will hear me say ‘If you spend these years on the margins of Christian community, you are ripping yourself off – you are missing out on one of the great experiences your brief life offers.’ So let me formally invite you to do life with us. But if not with us, find a place in one of the several great Christian communities on campus here like InterVarsity, Crew or AIA.

But let me say, I really love this community. What you see here is a group of remarkable individuals who are passionately doing college and worship together. The up side of that is that it is a fantastic thing to be part of. The downside is that sometimes it can be difficult to break into particularly because it is so big.

Now I was talking to my friend Adam Darbone about this talk. Adam graduated last year and was part of the teaching team. And when we got to this part of the talk he said, ‘You should totally compare it to something that is hard to break into because it is so big but once you do, it’s awesome…like the Death Star.



So let me offer you this deal. We will work hard to make space in our lives and community for you, but you are going to have to make an effort to get to know us. The best way to move from the margins to the center of a community like this are to join a growth group and to go on retreat. If you only come on Tuesdays…particularly if you only come sporadically, you will join a club but you will not experience community.

OK, so the first thing we see in this text is being made in the image of God gives us purpose. It calls us to a life of work, worship and community. And if you take these mandates seriously, it will improve your college experience. But there is a second major implication of being made in the image of God. If it is true that we were made in God’s image then that means you have an enormous intrinsic dignity…and as with the dudes who made roads out of Stonehenge or blew up the Parthenon, you can do damage if you mis-asses your intrinsic value.

II. Dignity

Remember Dan’s story about Marduk last week on e of the alternative creation stories to Genesis. In this story our world was the result of sex and violence. And the sex was not the caring self giving of two kind and self respecting deities in the Plaza after a great meal magical evening of spiritual connection. This was a lewd skinemax encounter in one of those trashy west sac motels that charge by the hour and don't change the sheets."

The author was subverting the basic idea that our existence and consciousness were the result of violence, rape or seduction. But the contemporary naturalistic creation story essentially asserts the same thing. You and I exist because our ancestors were the winners…the managed to get genetic material into future generations by power and seduction.

The Genesis account of Yahweh’s making stands in contrast to this. We were not a cosmic accident or the product of lewd or violent means. It is a story about our dignity as the loving making of a good, kind and wise artist. It is a deconstruction of the ancient and contemporary stories of power and seduction. And it continues to deconstruct prevailing world views.

This informs the way we live on this campus, because you do not have to spend more than a few days on this campus to realize that many people negotiate this place either by power or seduction (which, are also the primeval forces behind the materialist creation story). Genesis 1 offered them and offers us a better way. By asserting your dignity and the dignity of others, it argues that you can do these years well in the space of self-giving creativity. You can reject the programs of power and seduction and go for beauty and the mandate to find order in chaos. You can be a gatherer rather than a scatterer.

The first implication of -If we recognize that humans are all made in God’s image, each one immediately takes on infinite value. It makes us a people who love justice.

a. Justice (social and environmental)

You see, if we take seriously that humans were made in God’s image and are not just gene propagation machines each involved in a subversive struggle to get more of their genes into future generations, it allows us to use words like “justice” with intellectual honesty and personal consistency. If you are a materialist, you have to do some philosophical gymnastics to get to a place where you can assert what we all fundamentally know, that people matter. And that is why Jesus and the NT spend a lot of time calling us to be a people of justice. (something about Kingdom projects?)

But one of the really interesting things about this passage is that it is not just people who matter. The rest of the world that God made matters. You see, there is a common misconception about this passage, that it tells a story about how God made the world for humans. But if you look carefully, it is pretty clear ‘creation was not made for us’, it was made for God. It’s not our house; we just get to care for it. We are not the king of this castle, we are the butler. (CLer as buttler and king)

Check out the really interesting comment in verse 9.

“God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.”

Genesis 2 argues that the natural world has functional as well as intrinsic value. It turns out that biodiversity is ennobling to humans – and our first two jobs were to worshipfully care for creation and to catalogue biodiversity. (maybe a riff on how we are not ‘sell outs’ – that taking the bible seriously sometimes leads us into what the rest of the community believes. In fact, Christians should care more about the environment and justice than their non-Christian counterparts, not less.)[9]

b. Boundaries

So social and environmental justice are themes from this passage that play well on a University. And that is cool because it means that we could potentially partner with people in the larger UCD community to work for these things. But the next implication of being made with dignity is less popular. Because, this passage teaches that God protects our dignity, he safeguard his image in us by giving us boundaries: he gives permissions and prohibitions. Look with me at verses 16 and 17:

16And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

You need to recognize that God commands stuff. What I want you to see from these verses is that being made in the image of God means that you have too much value and dignity to waste it experimenting with things that God can already tell you will diminish you. He protects your dignity with generous boundaries. And the point of the story is that God’s prohibitions are always for our good. Boundaries are an affectionate act of love, not a capricious act of restriction.

Like God, we were meant to know the difference between good and evil without having to experience both.

God’s prohibitions are simply an extension of his generosity – they are guardrails for our dignity
-and ignoring prohibitions can leave spiritual wreckage…like blowing up the Parthenon or selling priceless, irreplaceable insights into our country’s history at a garage sale.

But, I want you to notice that there is an asymmetry to the permissions and prohibitions. There is way more permission than prohibition. Is God not generous, because he kept one tree from them for their own good? If you read these verses and come away with a picture of a God who is not generous, it says more about you than him. But that is precisely the way most people read this passage and it is precisely what you will find here at UCD.

God is extremely generous with you here with the things he permits. There are piles of joy available to you in friendship, academic discovery, artistic expression, and athletic enjoyment both on the field and in the stands just for starters. But when he asks you to trust him and live in counter cultural ways wrt substances, value structures and sexuality…that is also part of his generosity.

Which leads us to the final topic that the passage deals with regarding dignity and being made in the image of God…which is nakedness

Yup, it’s my first talk of the year, and I’m already talking about Nakedness. (Krage) But because it is only my first talk of the year, I’ll spare you the other picture where he uses a fluids text as a fig leaf.

c. Nakedness

You see Genesis 2 suggests that the dignity that comes to you by being an image bearer of God extends to the questions of when, where, how and with whom you take your cloths off.

One of the things I love about the middle part of chapter 2 Adam is in the same position many of you find yourself find yourself in. He is doing his work with God, looking for a companion, and not finding one. Ladies?? He is unsuccessfully seeking romantic companionship. Can anyone here identify with that? The story turns into a flat out comedy. Adam does a bunch of biological field work. He explores and classifies the biodiversity of this highly productive patch of the Mesopotamian floodplain that God has selected for his home. I can imagine him alive with the sense of discovery and wonder. But there is a longing that all the science in the world cannot satisfy. So Adam essentially says, “Um, the Mesopotamian gerbil is adorable, but it isn’t exactly what I am looking for.” I kind of like bigger boned woman. [10]

But then he sees the naked woman and literally breaks out into song like he’s the straight dude from glee. I mean, this is pretty funny – and honestly kind of sweet.

The whole passage is something of a sexy romantic comedy. If this were a movie it would be rated R and not because of the F-bombs…it unashamedly celebrates sexuality…but bounds it with a protective prohibition. Look at verses 24 and 25 with me:

24“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his WIFE, and they shall become one flesh. 25And the man and his WIFE were both naked and were not ashamed.”[11]

You see, Genesis 2 gives us a lot of clues about things that are intrinsic to our humanness: curiosity, creativity, productivity, justice, and, it turns out…monogamy.

If you are going to do romance in accordance with the image of God - before you get to see her naked, you leave your immaturity and childhood behind, man up and pledge to her in front of God and your community that she will always and forever be the only one. Genesis 2 argues that marriage is not an arbitrarily social convention, it is intrinsic to who were made to be. It is fundamental to our dignity and purpose and it is part of God’s generosity towards us.[12] And to play at nakedness, to experiment with sexuality as if it were some sort of simple pleasure inducing drug …well that is like packing the Parthenon with gun powder. It demonstrates a misunderstanding of the intrinsic value of what you are dealing with[13], and it is going to do damage.

You will have many opportunities to get naked in college. Now, admittedly, some of you will have more opportunities than others. In college, I liked to think that the ladies general indifference towards me was God’s special grace protecting me from temptation…but maybe it was just the mullet. In my defense, I grew up 20 miles from Canada where the mullet is still cool.



But campus life is sexually supercharged. If you accept the proposition that you were created in the image of God it will affect the way you negotiate that

There is a reason that the passage moves from God commanding permissions and prohibitions and setting boundaries to talking about nakedness, shame and sexuality. It is because God’s commands about sexuality are counter-intuitive. Especially on a college campus, God’s commands about sexuality don’t make a lot of sense to those of us raised on sit coms, pop songs and romantic comedies until after experimentation has done its damage.

Most of the best secular artists have the same basic approach to reality: Try to sustain a credible illusion of belonging, dignity and purpose on the ontological backdrop of total cosmic indifference. The opening notes of the Christian lyric offer something better. They suggest that we have this intrinsic hunger for belonging, dignity and purpose because we were made for these things.



The Christological Turn: So in Genesis 2 we see a picture of the purpose and dignity that God meant for us when he made us ‘in his image.’ But this is the end of the first act of a three act story of Creation-Fall-Redemption. This picture of Purpose and Dignity was the original design. But as we will see two weeks when we talk about Genesis 3, our current existence is just a pale reflection of the original intent. When we really try to live a life in accordance with our created dignity and purpose it turns out to be waaayy harder than it seems like it should be. So where does this leave us? Well this is where we have to use a name we have not used a lot yet. This is where we need to talk about Jesus.

You see, the image of God in us has been so badly damaged by our misuse of God’s generosity and our indifference to his boundaries, that we can no longer ‘just do it.’ The new testament teaches that we still bear the image of God but that it is distorted in us. But there is somewhere we can look to see God’s undistorted image…Jesus

Colossians 1:15
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

The image of God is corrupted on this canvas, but we can look to Jesus to see it. But the gospel takes one additional step. Not only can we look to Jesus to see God’s original intent, the prototype of intended humanness, but through the cosmic victory of the cross and resurrection, we can invite Jesus to undertake a program of re-creation in us, patiently restoring God’s image in us.

2 Cor 5 – new creation – The Biblical narrative of creation-fall-redemption means that our legacy of the first creation was squandered, but Jesus came to restore it.

It points to a second creation. A personal re-creation. God made us in his image, and we have lost it, but Jesus came to rehabilitate that image in us. Paul uses ‘new-creation’ language to describe coming into relationship with him. The key to maximizing purpose and dignity in college, despite all of the inertia built up against it in our culture and in our hearts, is to do college with and for Jesus.

My favorite illustration of this comes from a really old book, called “The Incarnation of the Son of God”[14] written by a man named Athanasius in the fourth (?) century. He describes us as a damaged self portrait which the painter goes to work restoring.

You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes obliterated through external stains. The artist does' not throw away the panel, but the subject of the portrait has to come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material. Even so was it with the All-holy Son of God. He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself – Incarnation of the Son of God - 14

This is an amazing picture of how this all points to Jesus. Imagine that there is this sublime painting that all the scholars agree is the greatest work of all time. And it turns out that if you look really carefully, it is a self portrait of the great artist. But there is a fire or a flood in the gallery, or the Visigoths come through and just tear the thing up…leaving the painting violated and the image of the artist unrecognizable. Scholars and artists get together to try to restore it, but it is too deeply damaged. They can patch it up but they can’t recover the image of the artist that made the painting so special. So finally the artist comes back. He looks at his damaged masterpiece. And what does he do. Does he shrug and move on? Does he decide it would be easier to just repaint it on a new canvas? No. He goes to work on the damaged masterpiece, painstakingly restoring it so it imperfectly but undeniably reflects his image. This is what the Jesus story is all about. God who created space and time, entered it to restore us to his image.

Jesus and the Spirit are the restorers who carefully rediscover the unrecognizable visage of the creator. They can take the rubble of a glorious creation, devastated by misuse, and restore it to its original dignity and purpose.

And that is what we are about here. We are broken people in a broken world who are doing life together with and for Jesus as he patiently rehabilitates God’s image on our scarred canvas. So I’d encourage you to dive in to one of the great Christian communities on this campus. And I’d like to personally invite you to join this one. And stand with us as Jesus re-teaches us our intended purpose and dignity and works on us individually and collectively to God’s image in us.

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[1] Sight Gag: President Chester with bubble “I like big butts and I cannot lie”
[2] Interesting, unrelated story. My parent’s first kiss was on the acropolis of the Parthenon. My Dad had waaaayy more game than my brother or I ever did.

[3] That’s right, I listen to music that is less than 10 years old, though you wouldn’t know it by my ‘worst of the 80’s and 90’s references so far in the intro.
[4] Adam: “And for evidence of that, I’d like to direct your attention to Kiho Song.” You could also use Ryan B., Peter, or a number of other guys I’d throw a good picture up of someone too.
[5] There are several historical reasons we believe this but you can trace this distortion back to our intellectual roots in ancient Greece and our cultural roots in the 1920s. And some have argued that the monastic movement and the advent of vocational ministry ‘Christianized’ this idea that spiritual activities (especially prayer and reflection) are good and the business of other activities are bad. This idea is absent from the pre-fall paradise. We were made to work.
[6] Sayers Quote
[7] and this isn’t a post scientific reconstruction…many historians credit this perspective with the very birth of science in the Western world
[8] In his commentary on Genesis John Walton unpacks this a little: “The verbs abed (‘serve’) and smr (‘keep’) do not indicate what people are to do to provide for themselves but what they are to do for God…Adam’s duty in the garden was to maintain sacred space…The significant thing about these words is that they describe actions undertaken not primarily for the sake of the doer, but for the sake of the object of the action.” 185
[9] UCD has one of the two largest biological sciences departments in the world. There might be a tie in here.
[10] Zach, “…What I need is someone to cook that gerbil for me!”
[11] “May we unfashionably suggest/the unmarried not undress.” – (mewithoutyou - Bullet to Binary pt 2)
[12] Louie CK consistently amazes me with his honest and insightful analysis of our nature and our time.
[13] You miss the intrinsic value of both you and her.
[14] Visual gag: “I like ancient texts and I cannot lie.”