The Blue Parakeet, 2nd Read online

  Then the Bible informs us (in Genesis 2) that God chose to “split The Adam” into two, into an Ish (man) and into an Ishah (woman). Thus, Genesis 2:23 reads:

  She shall be called Ishah, for she was taken out of Ish.

  The choice to make The Adam as an Eikon and to split The Adam into two, male and female, is profoundly important for understanding the story of the Bible.

  The Trinitarian

  In brief, the point of Genesis 1–2 is this: God wanted The Adam to enjoy what the Trinity had eternally enjoyed and what the Trinity continues to enjoy: perfect communion and mutuality with an equal. The Adam was in union with God and itself and Eden. But in another sense, The Adam stood alone in Genesis 2. As The Adam sorts through all the animals, The Adam was without communion with an equal. So to make the need for communion and love abundantly clear, God openly reveals that this aloneness is not what God wants for The Adam. God wants The Adam to be two in order to experience the glories of communion of love and mutuality.

  Several elements in the creation story make the communion-intent of splitting The Adam of God clear. Unfortunately, since we’ve been fighting about creation and evolution for so long, we miss this stuff. One of the most important themes of Genesis 1–2 is God’s creation of Adam and Eve to enjoy loving mutuality and communion. Others include God designing the entire cosmos as a temple, and our responsibility to worship God and to govern this world on God’s behalf. But our love for one another is also important to Genesis 1–2. Notice these elements illustrating that God made Adam and Eve so they could enjoy one another in glorious, loving communion.

  • God creates the Ishah from the man’s rib, from his side, a symbol of companionship and mutuality rather than subordination.

  • The Ishah, the woman, is called an ezer kenegdo, a companion, in Genesis 2:18: “I will make a helper [companion] suitable for him.”

  • After splitting The Adam into Ish and Ishah, God brings them back together to become “one flesh.” Marriage symbolizes the union of oneness in love. Marriage completes creation. Marriage restores The Adam and reveals mutuality. Marriage unleashes procreation to multiply more and more Ishes and Ishahs in God’s good world.

  The creation story is a story of what we were made to be and do:

  God is a Trinity, three equal persons in one(ness).

  God designs Eikons for oneness in love.

  God makes The Adam, who isn’t one with an equal.

  So,

  God splits The Adam into two so Adam and Eve can enjoy oneness.

  The relationship of Adam to Eve is like the relation of Father, Son, and Spirit. That is why the Bible says they are “one flesh.” This word “one” is the same word used in Israel’s famous daily confession, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4, emphasis added). As God is “one,” so Adam and Eve are “one.” If you get anything out of Genesis 1–2 this is it:

  The loving oneness of God finds earthly expression in the loving oneness of Adam and Eve.

  When Eikons are at one with God, self, others, and the world, the glory of the One God illuminates all of life.

  Nothing in the Bible makes sense if one does not begin with the garden of Eden as a life of oneness—human beings in union with God and in communion with the self, with one another, and with the world around them. The King and His Kingdom Story redeems us into “oneness”—oneness with God, with ourselves, with others, and with the world. When this oneness is lived out, God is glorified and humans delight in that glory. When we keep focused on the end of the Story—the new heaven and the new earth—we see that the Ish and the Ishah were created for the kind of life seen in the new heaven and the new earth. That was their purpose and that is their destiny. This is our Creator’s intent, but oneness was about to take a hit in the second element of the Story.

  CRACKED EIKONS : Distorting Oneness, Creating Otherness

  Mr. and Mrs. Eikon, Adam and Eve, in these first two chapters of our Bible are in four oneness relationships: with God, with the self, with one another, and with Eden, the ducky little garden given to them to enjoy. But in Genesis 3, Eve, with her husband clearly in tow, chooses to do what God said not to do. As a result, they “crack the Eikon” and jeopardize oneness. Again, if we sit down with Genesis 1–3 and forget about evolution, creation, and scientific origins and just read this text for what it says, we learn something profound about who we are and what we are designed to do. What we learn in Genesis 3 is that sin distorts oneness because the Eikon is now cracked. What we learn is profoundly common to all human experience: humans do bad things to one another because humans are curved in on themselves instead of curved toward God.

  The first impact of rebelling against God according to the Bible is experienced within the self, in Adam and Eve’s self-consciousness. The Bible says they were ashamed of themselves because of their nakedness (Gen 3:7; cf. esp. 2:25, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame”).

  The text in Genesis then continues this march of distorting oneness in that Adam and Eve hid from God (3:8–9). Mark Twain describes their moral relation to God: “It is very difficult to look as if you have not been doing anything when the facts are the other way.”7

  Third, their oneness with each other shows the impact of sin, and they begin to blame others for their decision: Adam blames Eve (and God?), and Eve blames the serpent (3:11–13).

  Fourth, to complete the march toward madness, God must open the gates into the real world and send the two cracked Eikons east of Eden (3:21–24). The fourfold relationship of oneness, previously enjoyed in the glorious oneness of love, was now completely cracked: they were at odds with God, with self, with one another, and with the world. Oneness had become otherness. Instead of dwelling in Eden, they dwelled in exile from Eden.

  Instead of experiencing one another in oneness, they began to experience one another as “others.” In fact, Genesis 3 predicts something that tells the story of human relationships: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (3:16). This is not a curse as if this must happen forever and always. Instead, the desire to rule rises in the human heart because oneness is cracked. Instead of loving one another as they love themselves, they will now desire to climb over the other and on top of the other in order to control and dominate. This fallen story of otherness leads to death.

  But the good story of oneness leads to life. The entire rest of the Bible, aiming as it will toward Jesus Christ because he is its King, is about turning Eikons bent on otherness to Eikons basking in oneness with God, with self, with others, and with the world. The benefit of the King’s redemption is a life of being restored, as it were, to Eden. Better yet, it is a life of being prepared for the final Eden, the new heaven and the new earth, the Kingdom of God.

  The problem that the fall creates can be called “sin,” though that word is not used in Genesis 3. Sin is a cracked relationship of otherness with God, with self, with others, and with the world. The redemptive plan of the Bible is to restore humans into a oneness relationship with God, self, others, and the world. This otherness problem is what the gospel “ fixes,” and the story of the Bible is the story of God’s people struggling with otherness and searching for oneness.

  COVENANT COMMUNITY: The Struggle for Oneness

  Here too many Bible readers lose their way and jump ahead because they’ve limited the otherness problem to God and self, not to mention they lose contact with the King and His Kingdom Story. Many Christians want to skip from Genesis 3 to the Gospels or Romans 3. Let’s remind ourselves of how many of us read the Bible: our plot is creation, fall, and redemption. So now that we’ve got the fall, let’s get to redemption.

  I like this creation-fall-redemption plot, but there’s something missing. (Like 1,033 pages!) It is right to see the plot move from creation and fall to redemption, but how God chooses to redeem is a giant (three-hundred pound!) blue parakeet in the Bible for many readers. The story of the Bible is
creation, fall, and then covenant community—page after page of community—as the context in which our wonderful redemption takes place. That redemptive story about the covenant community gains its shape from the King and His Kingdom Story: our focus is to be on God, who at this point in the Story is the sole King (Theocracy). This King designs immediately a way for cracked Eikons to experience communion with the King and with others in the covenant community called Israel, called “the kingdom” often enough in the Bible.8

  Reading the Bible as Story teaches us one thing—that it is the otherness with others that most concerns God. Otherness of the self and God is the assumption, but otherness with others is the focus of the Story. We in the Western world are obsessed with our individual relationship with God, which leads us to read the Bible as morsels of blessings and promises and as Rorschach inkblots. But reading the Bible as Story opens up a need so deep we sometimes aren’t aware we need it: oneness with others under the King who rules his Kingdom.

  Not so fast, God must be saying to the many individualistic Bible readers who want to shake the fall loose by making a beeline to the cross and resurrection. That’s not the way God wants us to read the Bible. What does God do after the fall in the Story? God lets his cracked Eikons foolishly fiddle around for a few chapters. At the end of this time, God does a do-over with Noah and the flood. Then—and I can’t emphasize this enough—God forms a covenanted community—a community in which they are to find oneness with God, with self, with others, and with the world. Here we discover God as King over God’s people, the kingdom of his people.

  This covenanted community, which focuses on oneness with others, will shape the rest of the Bible. God’s idea of redemption is community-shaped. Oneness cannot be achieved just between God and self; rather, oneness involves God, self, and others, and the world around us. There are pages and pages about this stuff. If we don’t care about how Israel is faring, about how Judah is faring, about kings and prophets and worship centers, or about how Israel longed for the Messiah when oppressed by Rome, we will find the Bible boring indeed. Only after this lengthy set of stories about Israel do we arrive at the New Testament.

  Then, in the New Testament, we get the same emphasis as in the Old Testament because we now read about how God’s Spirit invaded that little messianic community and drove it out into the Roman Empire—and we are asked to care about how these local communities (i.e., churches) did in the Roman Empire.

  Just pick up your Bible and start in Genesis 12 and skim through Esther, some 450 pages in my Bible, and you will observe the story of God’s people in the realities of otherness with others and oneness with others. God cares deeply about this—for pages, for centuries. Creation, fall, redemption—yes. But, and here’s what so many miss, the way God works redemption in this world is through his covenanted community—first Israel, then the church. The redemptive benefit of the King and His Kingdom finds concrete embodiment in the covenant community, the people of the kingdom.

  Otherness Gets the Last Word

  But there is a massive problem staring at us as we read this Story: God’s people don’t get the job done. I don’t know if this strikes you, but I believe it should: something is terribly wrong with God’s covenant people. While there are some high points, like the exodus from Egypt and the return from exile, the people never truly achieve the design God has for them. Here are just a few of the lowlights:

  • Only Noah and his family survive the flood and then the man messes things up immediately.

  • Abraham is God’s chosen father of his people and he lies about his wife.

  • Moses murders, rescues Israel at the exodus, gives them the Torah and a worship center, and then sins in the desert.

  • Israel gets into the promised land, but they can’t shake off idolatries.

  • David is the king, and he can’t control himself.

  • David’s son builds a great temple, but he can’t control himself either, so within a generation the “oneness” nation becomes a “twoness” nation.

  • One of those nations gets deported to Assyria while the other, Judah, hangs on longer but finds itself eventually in Babylon.

  • Then God, in his rich mercy, ends the exile and leads Judah back to the promised land and they rebuild the temple and . . . the whole thing starts all over again. Otherness seemingly gets the last word.

  Woven into this story is a deep thread of failure that creates otherness. How to resolve the deep thread of failure drives the story onward. Deep within the fabric of this story is that Israel won’t get the job done until the job is done for them. That job won’t get done until Jesus, Israel’s long-awaited Messiah, comes. The King will bring oneness in His Kingdom.

  CHRIST, THE PERFECT EIKON : Oneness Restored

  The Bible’s story has a plot headed in the direction of a person. And that same story is headed in the direction of a community “in” that person. This is a way of repeating that in the story there is a redemptive benefit—salvation—but the focus of that redemptive benefit is the King himself.

  Everything God designed for Eikons is actually lived out by Jesus. Everything Eikons are to do comes by being “in Christ” or by becoming “one” with Jesus Christ.

  The good gospel things of becoming one with God, self, others, and the world happen to us only when we are united to Christ, when we become “one” in Christ. Let me say this succinctly: The story of the Bible then aims at Galatians 3:28:

  There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

  The story of the Bible takes the otherness of cracked Eikons and directs us toward Jesus Christ, in whom alone we find oneness.

  God accomplishes four things in Christ, each of which contributes to the restoration of oneness. These four moments do the job, end the otherness, and create the oneness that the story of the Bible has been yearning for. We need each other; without that, otherness continues to reign; but when the strength of each is tapped into, oneness can be found.

  Incarnation of the King

  In his incarnate life, when he becomes one with us, King Jesus recapitulates, or relives, Israel’s (our) history. He becomes one of us. In fact, he becomes all of us in one divine-human being. Jesus is all Adam and Eve were designed to be and more; he loves the Father absolutely and he loves himself absolutely and he loves others absolutely and he loves the world absolutely. The King in the Kingdom Story is the Oneness Story in one person.

  Death of the King

  Humans are guilty before God according to Genesis 3; the punishment for that guilt is death. Notice how Eve tells the serpent what God had said to her: “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die” (v. 3; emphasis added). Otherness leads to death; the problem to resolve is death. Thus, because God’s intent is to make the Eikons what he designed them to be, God takes on our death—our punishment for sin—so that we don’t have to die eternally.

  God did push Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden lest they should “live forever” in their “otherness condition.” That act of God was an act of mercy—an act that ultimately anticipates the cross of Christ. Jesus’s act of dying our death forgives us of our complicity in Adam and Eve’s sin by assuming what we deserved: death. Three prepositions tell the Story of Jesus’s death:

  • Jesus dies with us—he dies our death and we die with him. He becomes one with our death and we become one with his death.

  • Jesus dies instead of us—that final death is taken on board by him and we don’t have to die that final death.

  • Jesus dies for us—by assuming our death, we are forgiven of our sin.

  But forgiveness is only the beginning of restoring us to oneness.

  Resurrection and Ascension of the King

  Eikons, forgiven as they are, are now only in neutral. They are no longer dead. That’s not enough. What do humans need? Life. Jesus is raised for us. I w
ish more of us would see how significant the resurrection is for God’s redemptive plan, for the story that unfolds in the Bible. By becoming one with the Resurrected One through faith, we are raised to new life. Why? So that we might stand up and walk again as Eikons are designed to live—with God, with self, with others, and with the world. The resurrection creates dead Eikons walking again.

  Above I sketched briefly what the Bible means by “gospel”; in these points now I am rehearsing the gospel itself. We are telling the story of Jesus as the King and His Kingdom Story that brings redemptive benefits: the King became one of us, the King died for us, and the King was raised for us. Entering into that King’s story brings us into the Kingdom and all its benefits.

  Pentecost of the King and the Spirit

  And now the only need left is the power to create oneness, which is precisely what Pentecost is all about. God sends the promised Spirit of the new covenant so that the covenant community can be empowered to be glowing Eikons, people who are restored to oneness with God, self, others, and the world. The most decisive impact of Pentecost, where the gift of the Spirit is made clear, is not speaking in tongues but community formation (oneness). Read Acts 2. Here you can glimpse a view of the new heaven and the new earth, the kingdom of God taking shape in the world among God’s people, and you can see that the King and His Kingdom bring redemption and empowerment to be what God wanted Adam and Eve to be in Eden.

  It is no surprise, then, that Luke’s account of Pentecost returns to this theme of oneness. Acts 2:42–47 focuses on the oneness that was achieved now that God’s work was finished. “All the believers were together and had everything in common” (2:44). Acts 4:32 says this: “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had” (emphasis added in both passages). This is the story the whole Bible was designed to tell: otherness overturned and oneness restored. It happens in the covenant community that is “one” in Christ. The King and His Kingdom bring a redemption called “oneness.”