CHAPTER II
Jehovistic Account of
Creation
Gen. 2:4-34
Agnes M. Lawson
Hints
to Bible Study
The Colorado College of Divine
Science
Denver, 1920.
There is a
wealth of spiritual teaching regarding
God and Man in this primitive account of
creation. As soon as the principle of
Omnipresence is definitely stated, as it
must be, every student wants to know:
“If God be all, how can evil,
sickness and death be? Where do they come
from?” The Oriental answers
questions in narrative form, and the
following two chapters contain a
penetrating insight into the cause of
evil. Adam is the representative of the
human race. He is the prodigal leaving
the Father’s house for an adventure
he himself demands. He wants to know, he
wants to experience. His first
experiments are those of ignorance. It
thus comes to have a universal
significance and shows us each as in a
mirror his own experience.
There is
something in Adam that refuses to remain
in abject obedience. Something more has
been given him than the animals have
received. Man does not refuse obedience,
but he must know why he is to be
obedient. This is the faculty that
distinguishes him from the animals
beneath him. Freedom of choice is his and
however dangerous the faculty, and
whatever we have suffered from it, none
of us would eschew it. We give obedience
when taken into the confidence of God,
and our education consists in learning
that none of God’s
“commands” are arbitrary but
that they are “The Way, the Truth
and the Life.” On one hand man is
related to the animals and of this he is
conscious, on the other he is related to
God who has breathed the breath of His
own life into him, therefore man must
understand God’s laws in order that
he may consciously and intelligently
co-operate with Him.
Two gifts
that are new in creation are
man’s--freedom of choice and
intercourse with God, we do not need to
go astray. However, when we do not come
to Wisdom in making a decision, we
“fall.” This story is not of
mere historic interest. The choice of
right or wrong judgment confronts each of
us every hour; and every time our
judgment is wrong we fall and out of Eden
we must go.
In this
account the Creator is not called God
(Elohim) but “The Lord God”
(Jehovah Elohim). This has given the
Jehovistic to the primitive document, of
which this passage forms the
commencement. Where Lord is thus printed
in the English Bible it stands for the
Hebrew JHVH, the sacred name which was
probably pronounced “Yahveh.”
In later times the name was considered
too sacred to be uttered; the title
Adonai (i.e. My Lord) was substituted.
Hebrew was originally written without
vowel sounds and when these were added
the artificial form was produced. The
meaning is, “The Self
Existent.” Yahveh was the proper
name of the God of Israel rather than a
title, and as such He was known by the
other nations, who regarded Jehovah as
the tribal God of the Hebrews.
The center
of interest in this chapter is man on
earth. God breathes into him a living
soul. There was no tense system in
ancient Hebrew, hence this passage reads:
“The Lord God forms man out of the
dust of the ground; and breathing into
his nostrils the breath of life, man is
becoming a living soul.” The
continuous unity of God and man is thus
established. All truth is paradoxical.
Man, an ideal of Infinite Mind is
eternally a “Living Soul.”
When it is actual to his consciousness,
he expresses it.
"Never the Spirit was born, the Spirit
shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not, end and
beginning are dreams;
Birthless, and deathless, and
changeless, remaineth the Spirit
forever.
Death cannot touch it at all, dead
though the house of it
seem.”
.....
It is
God’s continuous
“breathing” (this word in
Hebrew means Breath, Wind and Spirit)
that makes of man a living soul,
i.e., a conscious one. We appropriate
God’s consciousness of man and come
to see ourselves as He sees us. It is
this that gives man dominion, it is this
process of becoming conscious that seems
to be evolution. There is no evolution so
far as God is concerned. His creation is
finished, He is resting and pronouncing
it “Good and very good.” Man
never can be anything that he is
not in this creation, but he must become
aware of what he is here.
Man is
placed in a garden of infinite
possibilities for growth and advancement.
Eden means “Delight.” As the
water is the native element of the fish,
as the air is that of the bird, so this
garden is the native element of man, a
“Living Soul.” Every tree
that is pleasant for sight and good for
food is in this garden. The beautiful is
just as necessary to us as supply of our
physical needs. One feeds our spiritual
nature as the other feeds our physical
nature. Trees give man shelter, shade and
food; they are also a symbol of
immortality. They are continuous food
producers, and annually their youth is
renewed. In the midst of this garden is
the tree of life, and the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. Of all the
trees in the garden man may freely eat,
save alone that of the tree of knowledge
of good and evil, “for in the day
that thou eatest of it thou shalt surely
die.” Duality is unknown to God and
we go away from God when we think that we
know something that He does not know. God
is life; to go away from life is death.
Good and evil are opposites, and they can
never meet. Good is always good,
absolute, positive; evil is negation. One
is, the other is not; one is real, the
other so unreal that God has never seen
it.
The
knowledge of evil brings death, evil is
negation, so death is merely negation. It
is the natural consequence of believing
in another power than life. Man has not
been asked to plant anything in this
garden; all that is beautiful, all that
is needful, is already there. He is only
asked “to dress and keep it.”
Man is endowed with all of his faculties,
both physical and spiritual. His work is
to KEEP THEM IN HIS CONSCIOUSNESS. He
does not have to create or develop them;
he has to know that he has them, and he
has.
The animals
are all brought before man to be named.
“And whatsoever Adam called every
living creature, that was the name
thereof.” Whatever we name animal,
man or circumstance, that it is to us. To
see good in anyone or anything is to make
it our debtor, and it is compelled by the
laws of the universe to be that to us. To
pronounce people or conditions evil is to
place them in such a position that there
is no line whereby good can reach us from
them; we have broken the line of
communication. If we strike a chord in
music, music is compelled to respond; if
we strike discord, discord is the sound
we hear. The universe is like a vast
organ that is responsive to one who knows
the keys. To strike this instrument
harshly or mar it anywhere is to produce
discord instead of music.
The Lord God
finds no helpmeet for man among the
animals, so He causes a deep sleep to
fall upon Adam. We have here three states
of consciousness, the simple
consciousness of the animal, the
self-consciousness of man (reason), and
the intuitional. The reasoning mind is
objective; “a deep sleep” is
upon it when we rise into the spiritual
mind. Tuition is to be taught from the
outside, intuition is to be taught
within. Out of the side of man woman is
taken, reason is of the head, intuition
is of the heart.
And Adam
said: “This is now bone of my
bones, and flesh of my flesh.”
Someone has said that the intuitional
mind is to the reasoning mind what
algebra is to arithmetic. A
long-drawn-out process is completed in a
few strokes, bones reduced to bone. The
sexes are compliments of each other;
reason is the stronger in the man, while
intuition is the stronger in the woman.
Each, however, possesses both faculties,
for each is complete, the image and
likeness of the infinite whole; reason is
the first faculty of which we are
conscious, hence in this chapter man is
created before the woman, for it is the
order of our unfoldment.
The
similarity of the English words
“man,” “woman”
(wife man), is also found in the Hebrew
Ish, Ishshah. The ideal of one man and
one woman is the perfect state and the
eternal purpose of God in life. Because
of man’s “hardness of
heart” he has not risen into this
perfect concept of marriage. Man and
woman are one, and together they
constitute humanity. “And they were
both naked, the man and his wife, and
were not ashamed.” This is the
state of unconscious innocence waiting to
be clothed upon with the infinite wisdom
of God.
Man receives
everything that he is, everything that he
has, direct from Infinity. To be
“naked and not ashamed” is
the meekness that inherits the earth. It
is to be divested of self-righteousness
and mortal thought. It is to be open for
the Divine Mind and its ideas. It is to
stand reflecting as in a mirror the glory
of the Lord.
* * * * *
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