I like this metaphor! A garden will do some of the ‘work’ of growing on its own, but even though you know it will keep changing as time goes on, you can still (if you want to) identify a point at which you’ve finished creating it and now you can pause, reflect, and then get down to the real work of cultivating it! 
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Of course it sets the stage … but then you attempt to use it as an excuse why new props and scenery can’t appear every now and then.
I find this pretty ironic considering your position requires that God’s creation include thousands of species that are entombed in rock that as far as anyone can determine - -
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- was never hunted by man,
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- never hunted man,
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- nor even seen by man.
And you think this is a reasonable outcome of God’s work about humankind.
Until you explain a methodology for how you explain Job’s “snow/hail” texts, I have no idea how to proceed.
Why? Because I don’t believe you are using the same expectations or methods for the two different texts.
If you are unable to do it for Job, I think it’s rather ridiculous to think anyone can do it for Genesis.
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My question in this topic has nothing to do with the length of a Genesis 1 “day” or with the meaning of a Genesis 1 “kind.”
Nor does my line of commentary. You say the whole point of the Genesis Creation story is to show that God’s work is finished:
- This is demonstrably false.
- This was not the Hebrew interpretation.
- And this conclusion is inconsistent with all sorts of unfinished “divine arcs” of creation and the stories they tell.
First I am sure you remember that it was Jesus that said the Sabbath was made for man, Mark 2:27.
Are references to God’s arm a lie? When Jesus said he would be seated at the right hand of God is that a lie? How many references to God in the Bible are anthropomorphic? Are they all lies? Are any lies?
Does God need to rest, as in take a break due to exertion? No of course not. Looking at some parallel translations I think a better translation would be to cease his creative actions but that does not include not continuing them at some point. Remember this passage is meant to foreshadow the Sabbath so a reference to a seventh day of rest is to be expected. Does this make it a lie? No it is meant to convey a message. How do you take Genesis 3:8 which says God was walking in the garden? How do you take God asking Adam where he was? Why didn’t God know who had told Adam he was naked? This was all done for the story and not to be a literal history of what was said or done.
There is an interesting textural variation at Genesis 2:2. Some of the texts say “on the sixth day God finished his work” others the seventh. Some say the earliest texts with sixth is correct and it is a copyist error that changed sixth to seventh. Others say to avoid any appearance that God was working on the Sabbath it was changed from seventh to sixth.
I am greatly disturbed by your swift characterization of these verses, if doubted as a literal truth, being “a lie” !!!
I once again must ask you, [edited] to explain how the texts in Job escape such a scurrilous ruling?
Indeed, I insist that you explain yourself. There is nothing true, not even sensible, about God saying he has snow and hail stored in orbit around the Earth. In fact, the text makes little sense to anyone who actually knows how snow is made in “real time”… with little need for “emergency supplies” of the same!
You have blithely suggested that this is God being figurative. But you have also refused to explain how God’s use of storage for natural forms of precipitation is any more figurative than God’s use of the term for days … when Psalms explicitly states that God’s sense of time is different from the mortal sense of time!!!
In fact, the simple rejection of a figurative interpretation of Genesis would appear to call into question your confidence in the message conveyed in Psalms!!!
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I would make a general comment - many discussions on Genesis (from the earliest commentaries a few centuries AD) addressed the act of creation by God. The view has been that when God creates, it is (complete) in toto. Thus comments were made as instantaneous creation, but also one the grew (I think some used analogies such as a seed). Nowadays, we may use phrases such as “creation of time and space, and all unfolding phenomena”.
The Genesis account is than integrated with the opening of the Gospel according to John. God created through the power of His Word, and sustains the creation - these discussions than become more elaborate as theologians try to correctly attribute the act(s) of creation to the God head, while avoiding an analytical rendition of God (ie attribute human qualities).
I am not sure this helps with your discussion, but for what it is worth …
EDIT: the notion of instantaneous creation may be discussed nowadays (in the light of our understanding of time and space) as meaning that act of creation by God includes time - thus we need to imagine such a creative act as not necessarily captured in time that we find ourselves. The point that I wish to make is that whenever we discuss God, we are bound by the doctrine that God transcends time and space. I think once we commence with this belief, any description that we may communicate is either: (a) bound within our limitations and language, or (b) we develop a full theology of what we mean by ‘act of creation by God’ - the usual terms that I am familiar with are primal cause, energies of God, and attributes of God.
I hope this makes the thrust of my comment somewhat comprehensible to @Lynn_Munter
No, I’m not. Rather, I am saying that Genesis 2:1-3 seems to me to be saying, and clearly so, that the creative activity of God described in Genesis 1 was concluded after six days, however long those days were. And I’m thus wrestling with how to reconcile this “doctrine of Genesis 2:1-3,” if you will, with the doctrine of creatio continua.
Yes, I’m with you on that. However, I don’t see how this solves my problem with Genesis 2:1-3.
No, I do not believe such references are lies. On the contrary, they are truths. They indicate that there are points of correspondence between our attributes and God’s. We should expect this because, after all, we were made “in His image.” Therefore, even though God is spirit and we are spirit housed in flesh, God has attributes that correspond with our arms - otherwise the prophets would never have made a reference to “the arm of God.” There is something like “sitting” in the spiritual realm, there is proximity to God (anthropomorphized as “the right hand”), and there is something like a “throne” (and we know that the Scriptures call heaven itself the throne of God). Therefore, while I don’t think such references should be used to “bring God down to our size” I do think they are intended to convey realities about God that such figurative speech is intended to convey.
Here is what I wrote to @Mervin_Bitikofer on this point. It seems to apply here as well.
As what I wrote above would suggest, I don’t see any reason to take any portion of Genesis 2:1-3 anthropomorphically. But even if you did take it anthropomorphically, it would still require God to do something that bore some correspondence to the anthropomorphism. That is, an anthropomorphism has to be describing something about God, and it certainly can’t be describing the opposite of something God was doing. That is, it can’t be describing God as taking a rest if He were doing the very opposite of that. In such a case, it would be a lie.
Only if God didn’t actually do it the way that the text describes. I don’t have any problem with God doing something a certain way in order to provide us with an example to follow. I do have a problem if He says He did something a certain in order to provide us with an example to follow but did not, in fact, do it that way. It would be a lie for God to say He did something that He did not do, and it is impossible for God to lie.
The same way that the hymn writer intended us to take the line “He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way/ He lives! He lives!”
I don’t see the text saying that God did not know the answers to the questions He was asking. Thus I understand the questions to be like that of a parent wanting to make a child think about his actions, as in, “Herman, who took the cookies from the jar?”
I don’t insist that the text must be giving an exact transcript of God’s utterances to Adam. These questions could be paraphases, even summaries, of what God said. Where I can’t go is to say that God never said anything like this to Adam. That would mean a fabricated conversation, which is fine for a parable but not for something presented as actually having occurred.
I am not saying that Genesis 2:1-3 has to be interpreted literally. I’m only saying that it has to be interpreted - that is, it has to mean something. It seems to me to plainly convey something. There are verses in the Bible that are vague or ambiguous. This does not strike me as one of them. However, I am open to a different interpretation than the one I have…and that’s what this discussion topic is focused on.
I do not think that figurative readings are inferior to literal readings. Jesus taught us that figurative readings can be life-giving. I do not for a moment think that John the Baptist was being literal when he said, “Behold, the lamb of God.” Yet foreclosing the literal interpretation is not the end of seeking meaning from the text; rather, it is the beginning. I meditate on what is meant by perceiving Jesus as a lamb - the gentleness implied, the sacrifice implied, the purity implied, and so on. If there is to be a figurative interpretation of Genesis 2:1-3, it must be one that leads to meaning - it must not be the end of meaning for the passage.
I have no argument with this point, but neither do I know how to put it to practical use. That is, I live in time and space and can only speculate - and sometimes I can’t even do that - about life outside of them. When this point is made, I feel like a fish trying to imagine life outside of water.
If I am given to understand that a given written account is a myth or fable, I minimize my expectations for points of correspondence with reality and basically just look for a moral. However, I understand the Bible to eschew myths and fables, while smiling on figurative language including parables, where points of correspondence with reality are an essential feature. Thus while I can be wide open to the use of figurative language in Genesis 1-2, I cannot feel comfortable going so far as to regard it as essentially a myth or fable where points of correspondence with reality are not to be actively sought.
What English words do other translations use? Why not go to the original Hebrew, if this is really important?
I am unsure what you mean by “putting it into practice”. As I understand your question, it would be this: if God finished His creation, and rested, how can we talk of creation continuing?
IF your question is centred on “does God rest, or needs to?” than my point is valid, in that we are using human terms to discuss God - the reason for this is scripture is written for our benefit and instruction, and the lesson is to live our lives as God intends, and He inspired His servant to instruct us to keep the Sabbath, as a day we turn to God, and to find our rest in Him.
If you are (instead) concerned with the writing, and how we would understand the creation account in Genesis, than I would deal with this by considering what the entire Bible has to say about God, and discussions by the Church.
Genesis 2:1-5 (KJV)
Ge 1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,
5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
I can imagine a few points that would cause debate if a person was so inclined - why would God need to rest, if the creation was complete, how come God had not caused rain? Why generations … in the day?
I think we can get into arguments on any point we wish, but this is not because of the bible, but because we are looking for an argument.
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When we read Gen. 2:1, it says the Heavens and the Earth were finished; it doesn’t say that there would be no more versions of all living things:
Genesis 2:1-5 (KJV)
Ge 1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
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This is not a quote from God; it is a 3rd party observation… and so it does not have the same semantic force that the Job’s text does regarding how God prepares for future snow and hail storms.
But aside from that, what are you to do with the plethora of creatures we find in the ground?:
- Were these creatures (many of them dinosaurs) killed by the Flood?
- If not, why do we not find whale bones mixed in with dinosaur bones anywhere on Earth?
- And why do we find a hyper-creation in Australia where marsupials have radiated frim a few common ancestors into ecological niches that are filled with placental mammals everywhere else on Earth?
- Speaking of which, did the surviving creatures of the Ark (including many closely related birds, insects, and the lower primates) experience a period of hyper-creation?
- If not, then how did we end up with the million + species we see in the world today in just 5000 years?
Whether we understand “rest” as a response to weariness or as a cessation of labors for the purpose of enjoyment --either way we (and the Scriptures) anthropomorphize God and I don’t see any convincing (to me) way that this could resolve satisfactorily into an understanding that God literally does this. For you to read this Scripture literally this way forces you to disregard other Scriptural teachings that God is always at work in the world – not just maintenance work but creative work. So you would have to let go of a dearly held preconception or two of your own regarding the Genesis verses before you would be able to embrace other understandings.
Using a parallel assessment of Job’s discussion of God storing up snow and hail… what could you possibly use as the “something” that God is supposedly storing? … Or that God is “doing”?
The Job verses are incorrect in all senses of the words:
A) Are there “treasuries” or “warehouses” of Any kind in orbit around Earth?: No. The one thing we know is that the upper atmosphere or orbital space is the anti-storage system of storage!
B) Does snow, or hail, get stored anywhere in the sky or in orbit?: No. If storage is intended, it would be in glaciers on the ground!
If the text had mentioned only rain, we could have at least argued or construed clouds as “figurative” treasuries. But the intentional exclusion of rain from the Job text under consideration tells us the scribe doesn’t know snow or hail both come from the same atmospheric system from which rain is produced.
C) And yet conversely, you offer the explanation that the Job text is “figuratively” - - when God ironically challenges the ignorance of Job for not knowing where God keeps his (imaginary) supply of snow and hail in reserve for future uses!
This is quite a bit more of “a lie” than anything we find in Genesis.
Hi Mike,
I haven’t responded to many of your posts recently, but I’ve been keeping up with the discussions. It seems to me that you have a very curious combination of ideas of what can be taken figuratively in the Bible and what MUST be taken literally. Is there a particular method you utilize when making this distinction?
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You see what you did there? You have no problem with accepting a parable (which is presented as something that actually occurred) but you accept Genesis 1 as actually happening (when the details clearly show it didn’t happen in the way presented). It is as much a fabricated conversation as the conversation of the Prodigal Son. The only difference being you have Jesus explaining the Prodigal Son.
Side note: Genesis 2:1-3 is actually the conclusion of Genesis 1. So it is really the end of the literal six days of creation story. So you have to ask yourself, did God really create the universe in six days or is there a message here that doesn’t require me to take this literally.
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That passage is perhaps best translated as “I am Groot.”
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