With our recent celebration of the Lord’s incarnation and our passage into a new year, it is fitting to reflect on God who delights to work the impossible. The Virgin Mary’s conceiving of our Lord is of a piece with a whole series of God’s doing what humans deem impossible. It begins with God’s creation of the heavens and earth from nothing and of the first man from the dust of the ground and then climaxing in Christ’s being made flesh, dying, and being raised bodily, as the beginning of God’s New Creation which comes in reverse order, the formation of Christ in God’s New Covenant people and then the redemption of all creation. If we fail to believe correctly concerning God’s creative activity “in the beginning,” we will advance erroneous beliefs concerning the consummation of God’s creation.
Christian belief acknowledges that we all, including unbelievers, imitate God either for good or for evil because, in our most basic constitution, we all are God’s earthly analogs. This is true because when God formed Adam and gave him life, he established that all his descendants should bear the Creator’s likeness. We all resemble our Creator with qualities and attributes that he bequeathed to us. Because God creates, we create. Musicians compose melodic scores. Poets write lyrical lines. Bards craft dramas. Novelists narrate episodes. Metalsmiths, woodcrafters, dressmakers, bakers, cooks, and all kinds of crafters imitate God either by repurposing existing pieces or by forming raw materials into something new. We “create” new things from existing things.
It is impossible for us to create something new from nothing despite the idiomatic expression, “to make something out of nothing.” People who “make something out of nothing” are either crafty or captious carpers, nitpickers. As with all idiomatic expressions, it is not to be taken verbatim. Whether used affirmatively or derogatorily, the idiom entails purposeful hyperbole. The exaggeration underscores (1) the crafter’s resourcefulness to create useful items from raw materials, and (2) the nitpicker’s inventive capacity to magnify microscopic imperfections as immense and ruinous.
Not so with God! He does whatever he pleases. He does what is impossible for humans. God created the heavens and the earth from nothing and continues to do what humans deem impossible. This theme concerning God’s creative acts that exceed all human comprehension, presented in the first words of Genesis 1:1, repeatedly emerges throughout the Bible’s narrative. The theme, woven into the entire biblical storyline from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21 sustains the truth that God alone can create something from nothing and bring forth life from death. This persistent theme in Scripture calls for trust in the Lord God who delights to announce his covenant promises in the bleakest situations and to follow through on his oaths when all hope seems utterly futile and lost to his people.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” so the Bible begins. From nothing, the Creator spoke the heavens and earth into existence. Thus, God obligates us to believe what no human inquiry, no matter how scientifically sophisticated or rigorous, can reproduce or explain. Belief in God who spoke the universe into existence ex nihilo does not reason that the Creator’s reported activities on the five subsequent days of creation were too many or too great to be accomplished within the span of five twenty-four-hour periods. Belief embraces the account as the truth and does not cringe at its trustworthiness, as if it were too fantastic that it must entail myth. Belief rejects the notion that this is a humanly conceived literary and symbolic representation of the origin of humans who evolved from a large population of pre-human creatures. To suppose that the Creator who brought forth the vast universe from nothing at all was hard-pressed to be able to squeeze all his creative work into the span of six twenty-four-hour cycles is the kernel of unbelief, inciting reluctance concerning the remainder of the Bible’s storyline.
Likewise, when God’s Word presents the account of the Creator’s forming of the first man on the sixth day from the dust of the ground (existing material)—“then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7)—belief accepts the account concerning the first man as factually and historically truthful. Belief accepts Scripture’s testimony that God’s forming of Adam’s body from the dust of the ground, with the first mention of “dust,” refers to the material from which humanity derives, not from nothing nor from any other life form but from “the dust of the ground.” Also, apprehended within Scripture’s unfolding drama of God’s dominion, God’s forming of Adam from the dust of the ground foreshadows the Creator’s raising us from the dead as a consummating act of the New Creation, a matter to which I shall return.
Belief rejects John Walton’s anti-intuitive, ahistorical, and atypical interpretation of the biblical text, when he wonders, “Is this intended to be a statement about the material origins of the first human being?” He refuses to accept the universal-traditional understanding of the text as depicting both Adam’s genetic and archetypical continuity with all his descendants. Walton’s interest is to render it acceptable for Evangelicals to believe that the first humans were created mortal and were derived from a previous form of life entailing some version of evolution. Thus, concerning God’s forming Adam’s body “from the dust of the ground,” Walton asserts, “Traditionally, it has been common to think about this statement as describing a material process of special creation characterized by discontinuity with any previously existing creature” (“A Historical Adam: Archetypal Creation View,” in Four Views on the Historical Adam, 92; emphasis added). What does Walton do with the traditional understanding that acknowledges that the first man formed from the dust of the earth functions as both the material (genetic) and the archetypical (representative) head of the entire human race? He separates what Scripture holds together, the material and archetypical headship of Adam. He rejects “dust of the ground” as the material the Creator used to form the first man which links Adam and all his descendants to the earth—“as was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust” (1 Corinthians 15:48).
Because he splits apart what Scripture distinguishes without separating, Walton claims concerning “Genesis 2, we can reasonably deduce from the passage itself that dust carries an archetypal rather than a material significance” (p. 93). He insists that dust has no reference to the earthly substance but only to mortality. Again, because he is committed to rendering acceptable the belief that the first humans derived from a prior form of life, he rejects the traditional understanding of God’s words to Adam and Eve—“Dust you are and to dust, you will return” (Genesis 3:19). Now, given the curse of death following Adam’s disobedience, dust (the material origin of the human body) also becomes the body’s destiny until the resurrection. Indeed, the addition of God’s chilling words spoken to Adam and Eve, “Dust you are and to dust, you will return,” emphatically announces the curse of human mortality invoked by Adam’s disobedience, the mortality of which the Creator warned Adam (Genesis 2:17; cf. Ecclesiastes 3:20), a condition reversible only by God’s act of raising the dead. Thus, Scripture’s unfolding drama of God’s dominion entails the Creator’s forming Adam from the dust of the ground that foreshadows his raising us from the dead as a consummating act of the New Creation. Hence, the Apostle Paul fittingly cites Genesis 2:7—“the first man was of the dust of the earth”—to speak of the First Adam who “became a living being” in contrast to the Second Adam as “a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45-49).
Watch for Part 2.