Adam to Abraham

So in reading through the Bible, my first reaction was to be caught up in the scale of this story. I realized that I was in the midst of something not only bigger than myself, but bigger than humanity. All that within a chapter. And then, the story of us begins.


From Adam to Abraham I see a story about how humanity advances in many ways, but continues to fall short in the important ways. I’ve often wondered about the fall. Perhaps it can be as simple as a fruit from a tree, but I find myself creating complexity and trying to understand metaphor in interpreting what happened to us and God so many years ago. I still don’t know. I could ramble on about ideas and theories, but I certainly wouldn’t want any of my thoughts in writing because the fact is that I still don’t know.

But it is clearly something. The evidence is all around us. The longing for meaning, the injustice of the world, my personal failures; something isn’t right, but something is working to make it right. The story of humans as we know them really seems to begin sometime after the garden. We work the soil, care for each other, populate the Earth. It seems that humanity did a pretty good job of it. They built, they created, they procreated, they loved, they laughed, the spread out, they cooperated. But they also destroyed, abused, cursed, and murdered.

They clearly kept a glimpse of God, but they seemed to let themselves get the best of themselves and lose sight of the fact that they were simply the beginning of little story of people fitting into a bigger story of divinity. And then God spoke to Abraham.