Sword & Trowel 2015: Issue 1 THE GARDEN OF EDEN – The Editor –


‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them’ (Genesis 2.1).


I


T IS OFTEN claimed by those cynical toward the Bible that Gen- esis 1 is contradicted by Genesis 2.


Naturally, such claims find their way to the top of the web search engine lists, and if anyone Googles Genesis, or Adam or Eve, or creation, articles come up asserting various discrepan- cies. But it is clear that these articles are not by people who read Genesis with any degree of care, because their claims are so obviously mistaken and easily refuted. Genesis is amazingly precise and consistent as narrative. The writer remembers some fifty


years ago going through the so-called discrepancies in Genesis 1 and 2 with an older teenage Bible class, and here is a recommendation for readers with teen groups and college classes. It is a great theme as long as you do not make it too complicated and it shows how unfair and inaccurate criticisms of the Bible invariably are, indeed, how desperately unreasonable. There were two trees in the midst of the Garden of Eden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or the tree of death. Puritan preachers used to point out that Satan’s preoccupation before the Fall was to persuade our first parents to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so that they would surely die. And ever since, Satan’s


chapter 2 of a forthcoming book on Genesis


chief occupation has been to per- suade people not to eat of the tree of life. We may sum up all satanic activ- ity in that simple picture. With the completion of the sixth


day of creation we read ‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them,’ meaning the stars and planets, plants and animals, or the ‘ornaments’ and ‘furniture’ as some have described them. ‘And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day.’ It is obvious that the creative work actually ended on the sixth day, the seventh being God’s so-called rest. He who does not need to rest, being eternally inexhaustible, rested in the sense that he ended his creation-from-nothing work, having produced a perfect world.


Six literal days It is also clear that the six days of


creation were literal 24-hour days, and seven New Testament texts, one the words of Christ, six the words of the apostle Paul, refer to creation as though accomplished over six literal days. So we are in no doubt, the Bible being its own interpreter, that they were six 24-hour days. But we are moving directly to


Genesis 2.3 – ‘And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because


The Garden of Eden page 35 


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