I met a new friend in church yesterday whose name in French means “marvelous.” Having attended the birth of two of our three children, I think I know what her parents meant when they chose her name. The experience of seeing a brand-new child is “marvelous” indeed.
My brother Dan and his wife endured a series of miscarriages before their first-born Amanda came into the world. Tallowood ministered to their family those many years ago. Dan told me he would call me when she was born. In my exuberance, I said, “Call me in the middle of the night. I want to know.” Sure enough he called me at 2 A. M. to let me know she had been born. He said, “She was born at 8 P. M. But you said to call you in the middle of the night.” To this day, my parents’ first grandchild is a marvel to all of us.
In an amplification of the first account of creation, the writer tells us here how God made the first person. I was college freshman years old when I first heard someone speak of this as a different account of creation. Scholars, applying scientific analysis, have cried “foul” over the order of creation in chapters 1 and 2. Did the vegetation or the person come first? Famous European scholars demanded to know. This thinking pervades the skeptics’ conversations to this day. A fellow passenger on a plane, who saw me reading Genesis rolled his eyes as he decried how many contradictions there are in this narrative. He and the scholars miss the point.
When God inspired the Torah, he was not somehow confused about the order of creation. For centuries of worship, the Jewish people saw these two accounts of creation side by side and praised their Creator. From chapter one, we know that the Elohim, God, created humankind in his own image, male and female and called creation very good. In chapter two, we see the word Yahweh for the first time. Yahweh Elohim, the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Even before creation of human life, God had a purpose for the ones made in his image. Someone would need to be the gardener of this beautiful land.
In chapter 2, we learn that God made humans from the dust. Later in Genesis, as Abraham pleads with the messengers to save his nephew Lot, he describes himself as mere dust and ashes. (Genesis 18:27). The Psalmist says, the Lord “knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). A story is told of a scientist who challenged God, saying, “I can make a person better than you can.” The Lord accepted the challenge and even offered for the scientist to go first. The scientist gathered some dirt, but the Lord stopped him and said, “Wait. You have to find your own dirt.”
After God formed the person in his image, then he breathed life into him. We sometimes sing, “It’s your breath, in our lungs, so we pour out our praise. All the earth will shout your praise, our hearts will cry, these bones will sing, ‘Great are you, Lord.’” God must look down at his creation lifting praise to him and say what my new friend’s parents said at her birth, “Marvelous!”
