Bugs in a Jar
January 4 (Genesis 5-6)
The opening chapters of the Bible cover so much ground but give so little detail as to how everything went down. Creating a universe from nothing. God walking with man. A serpent deceiving. One tree giving life and another taking it away. A world populated from two people. People living to be hundreds of years old.
Instead of a complete jigsaw picture with every piece in its place, what we find instead seems like someone dropped the box and lost a lot of pieces. This leads to a lot of fodder for the skeptics, of course. Rather than haggling about the lack of information, let’s consider what the message is in the information we do have in front of us.
What we see is that Adam and Eve had it great in the beginning. They could communicate with God personally. They had relatively few needs. All this changed when they made the decision of their will to disobey God. Their fellowship with him was broken and they were separated from their source of life, both spiritually and physically.
And we see the downward spiral in the moral behavior of Adam and Eve’s descendants. It’s as if God wanted to show humanity what life would be like if he took his hands away from humans and allowed them to live like they wanted. And they lived like they wanted, for the most part.
There were some people who would look upward, some who the Bible says, “began to call upon the name of the Lord.” That in itself is evidence that even in our most fallen state we still bear God’s image, which allows us to recognize the reality of a higher being. As Romans 1:20 says, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” But the world in its infancy rejected that, and became so corrupted that God made a decision to take what he had created and destroy everything in a great flood.
Some mistake God’s “sorrow” for thinking God made a mistake. That doesn’t sound like the God of the Bible to me. I am more inclined to believe that the flood was God’s way of saying, “You guys wanted this, and see where it got you! Now we’ll do it again MY way.”
After the flood, people were just as messed up as they were before, but we see God stepping into the fray more often, intervening, putting his hand in more situations, and setting in motion the plan that would result in the birth of the nation through whom the Savior would come.
Bugs in a jar have no chance of escape, unless someone is kind enough to lower a stick into the jar. God knew that humans needed his touch, and so he personally touched the human situation, gradually bringing life back to mankind which was lost in Eden.
“He has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” -Ecclesiastes 3:11
