Genesis

Why Creation Matters, Part 3: The Flood

March 9, 2026 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: From the Beginning 

As Moses continues his narrative of beginnings, he comes quickly to an account of the Flood, God’s global judgment on human sin. Perhaps you’ve never noticed how thoroughly the flood account is imbued with Creation language.

The account begins with the observation that “man began to multiply on the face of the earth” (Gen 6.1)—which is a direct response to God’s command to multiply in Genesis 1.28. A few verses later (Gen 6.6), Moses states that God “repented” that he had made man on the earth. Thus Moses introduces the Flood as, in effect, God’s reversal of the Creation event: his Uncreation, if you will.

And so begins the account. God describes all the life he created in Genesis 1, using the same language: “man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air” (Gen 6.7)—“all flesh, wherein is the breath of life” (Gen 6.17). God orders Noah to preserve two of each of these life forms (Gen 6.20), specifying “male and female” (Gen 6.19).

As he continues his instructions, he specifies not just two, but fourteen–seven pairs–of the clean animals, again including both male and female (Gen 7.2), and specifying both beasts and fowl (Gen 7.2-3).

Sidebar: Some question why God specified 7 pairs of each clean beast—and some are completely unaware that this specification was even made. Why this command? Well, for starters, we’re told that upon exiting the ark, Noah made a large sacrifice (Gen 8.20), and after going to all that trouble to preserve breeding pairs, you don’t want to kill them. I also note that that dove eventually didn’t return to the ark (Gen 8.12). Further, I speculate that Noah and his family might have eaten some meat on the ark, and further, they may have wanted some breeding insurance for clean animals as the repopulation proceeded.

Back to our account.

As Noah and his family enter the ark, the Creation language is repeated (Gen 7.8-9). And then they wait for seven days until the rain starts (Gen 7.10). Is this intentionally matching the Creation week? Maybe.

Summarizing the entry into the ark, Moses recalls the Creation language of “after its / their kind” (Gen 7.14), “the breath of life” (Gen 7.15), and “male and female” (Gen 7.16). As the water rises and the death begins, Moses repeats the language: “of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man” (Gen 7.21, 23). He speaks further of “the face of the earth” (Gen 1.29) as the now-emptied home of animal life (Gen 7.23).

As the rain continues, “the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth” (Gen 7.18). This too recalls Creation language; in the beginning the Spirit was on the face of the waters (Gen 1.2), and on the 2nd day God separated the land from the water. This gracious provision for life in the Creation week is now reversed; the means for life among land animals is removed, and all flesh “in whom is the breath of life” dies (Gen 7.22).

After the ark lands on dry ground, Noah waits for seven days (there’s that period again) to send out a dove (Gen 8.10), and another seven days (Gen 8.12) to sent it out (successfully) again. Is this an intentional doubling of the Creation week to imply the completeness of God’s restoration of his good Creation? I’m just suggesting this; we don’t have any way of being certain of the significance.

So on “the first day of the first month the waters were dried up from off the earth” (Gen 8.13)—for the second time (Gen 1.9-10). And into this new world “every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” emerge to “be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth” (Gen 8.17-18).

And the account closes by recounting God’s words: “seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Gen 8.22).

Creation order is restored.

So we find that Creation and the Flood are intimately linked in the plan of God. In response to man’s sin, God undoes his miraculous creation—miraculously—and then returns it to its original state, despite the presence of sin. He shows his mercy more spectacularly than he did by creating humans to begin with. And he can do this, obviously, because he was capable of creating the cosmos in the first place.

Creation is the basis for mercy. It matters.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Why Creation Matters, Part 2: From the Beginning

March 5, 2026 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction

Moses himself, the author of the creation account, begins to interpret and apply it almost immediately. He finds his opportunity in two specific events: the initiation of the godly line, and the Great Flood.

After the account of the Fall (Gen 3) and the birth of Cain and Abel and Cain’s murder of Abel (Gen 4), Moses begins to trace the line of “the seed of the woman” (Gen 3.15). That line is clearly not through Abel, since he is dead and without any named offspring, and it’s clearly not Cain, the murderer and outcast (Gen 4.12), as his offspring Lamech demonstrates (Gen 4.23-24). So Eve has a third son, Seth (Gen 4.25), whose name means “to appoint,” implying that he is either “the seed of the woman” or the seed’s progenitor; indeed, shortly later “men began to call upon the name of the Lord” (Gen 4.26).

Moses chooses to begin chapter 5 by announcing a formal genealogy: “This is the book of the generations of Adam” (Gen 5.1). But at the beginning he chooses to spend some column inches on the birth of Seth, more than is usual in a genealogy. He begins by referring back to his creation account—specifically the key fact that Adam and Eve were created “in the likeness of God” (Gen 5.1). Borrowing almost precisely from his earlier language, he emphasizes that both Adam and Eve, both of whom are essential in producing the godly line, are created directly by God and are in his image (Gen 5.2). He even says that God “called their name Adam” (Gen 5.2), which sounds odd to us until we realize that the name “Adam” simply means “person” or “human” (e.g. Gen 2.5).

Now Moses applies that language to the birth of Seth:

And Adam … begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth (Gen 5.3).

Likeness. And image. Just as God, so to speak, created “after his kind” (Gen 1.11), so Adam and Eve did as well. And this language is more specific than “after his kind”; it’s a mirror image in certain ways.

What’s the significance of this? It tells us that the image of God is not a “one-shot deal” effective for just a single generation or birth. It continues; Adam passes that image and likeness on to his offspring, who pass it on to theirs. We’re all, all of us, in that image and likeness.

We find evidences of that in later Scripture. The New Testament repeatedly describes man, or all mankind, as in the image and/or likeness of God (1Co 11.7; 15.49). It describes Christ as particularly in that image (2Co 3.18; 4.4; Co 1.15; He 1.3), and believers, who are “in Christ” (2Co 5.17), as further conformed to that image (Ro 8.29; 1Co 15.49; 2Co 3.18; Co 3.10).

I find it interesting that in the first reference to “image” in the New Testament, Jesus implies something further about its significance. In Matthew 22.20 and its Synoptic parallels (Mk 12.16; Lk 20.24), Jesus points out that since a coin bears the image of Caesar, it must belong to Caesar, and should be paid as a tax. What he does not say, but clearly has in mind, is that whatever bears the image of God—mankind—must then belong to God, and not to the state. We are his by right of creation, and he has marked us with his image—a brand, if you will—as visible evidence of that.

The first significance of creation, then—established from the very beginning—is that God is our Owner and Lord, whether we acknowledge that or not. I suspect that a significant motive in the invention of other creation stories is the desire to circumvent, even to suppress (Ro 1.18), that fundamental fact.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Immanuel, Part 1: Creation

December 5, 2024 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

One of the key pursuits in Biblical Studies is discerning the central theme of the Bible. In Biblical Theology, which is essentially the study of the Bible as literature, this question is the end of the entire discipline, the goal toward which all the other work is pointing. In German scholarship it’s called the Mitte, or center.

Over the years several candidates have been suggested. A popular one is “kingdom”: Thurman Wisdom and Thomas Schreiner have both recently favored this idea in one form or another. Another popular suggestion is “covenant,” suggested influentially a century ago by Walther Eichrodt. And recently Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum have combined the two ideas.

For a time I toyed with the idea of “Messiah” as the central theme. I noted that the Hebrew Canon has three parts—the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings—each of which introduces us to offices (priest, prophet, and king, respectively) that were filled by disappointing people, all anticipating the perfect Prophet, Priest, and King who would lead without disappointment. He was, of course, the Messiah, the Anointed One—and all of these offices typically involved anointing.

I think that’s a defensible suggestion for a central, governing theme; it seems comprehensive, with good explanatory power for all the biblical contents.

But lately I’ve been meditating on another possibility, a theme that has been observed and commented on by a number of other students of the Word.

It’s the idea of God dwelling with, among, his people.

I’d like to spend a few posts tracing that idea through the Scripture.

__________

We begin, of course, in Genesis, in the primeval history. The first thing we learn is that God is the author of creation; he made all things (Ge 1.1). Later in that first chapter we see him creating the first humans and distinguishing them from the other living creatures: they are in the image of God (Ge 1.26-27). In fact, rather than just speaking them into existence, as he had other living things (Ge 1.11-12, 20-21, 24-25), he intervenes personally, seemingly physically, to form Adam from the dust of the ground (Ge 2.7) and then to form Eve from one of Adam’s ribs (Ge 2.21-22). This seems much more intimate, much more personal, than the way he created the animals. Along the way we hear God give Adam and Eve dominion over all the earth (Ge 1.28), intending them to use plant life for their sustenance.

Now, I need to deal with a misconception. I suppose this misconception was most artfully rendered in James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones:

 And God stepped out on space,
 And he looked around and said:
 I’m lonely —
 I’ll make me a world.

Johnson’s work is worthwhile reading by every American for its cultural and historical significance, its lyricism, its artistry. It is a remarkable piece of literature.

But God was not lonely.

God is, and always has been, completely satisfied in himself. There is no lack, no need, no shortcoming in him.

And thus he did not need to make us.

And yet, he wanted to.

Why? If he didn’t need us, why did he make us at all?

We get a tiny, possible hint shortly later in the narrative. Adam and Eve have sinned (Ge 3.6) and then tried to cover their newfound shame (Ge 3.7), and

they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day (Ge 3.8).

Now, we’re not told that this had been a daily practice. Perhaps God, knowing that his creatures have sinned, is coming to announce their judgment (Ge 3.16-19)—and their eventual glorious deliverance (Ge 3.15).

But this does speak of God desiring to be in company with Adam and Eve—perhaps even to walk with them in the beauty of the Garden, to point out its delights, to savor the wonder and joy in their faces as they realize what he has given them.

Of course, sin has changed all that.

But even so the fellowship continues. Just two scant chapters later, we find Enoch “walk[ing] with God” (Ge 5.22), and in the next chapter, Noah doing the same thing (Ge 6.9).

God wants to fellowship with his people, to interact with them in loving and friendly and intimate ways.

From the beginning it has always been so.

And as the story continues, the evidence will continue to accumulate.

Next time, from a family to a nation.

Part 2: Covenant | Part 3: Marriage | Part 4: Turning the Page | Part 5: Forever

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

On Beginning at Moses

October 25, 2018 by Dan Olinger 3 Comments

… with a nod to my former Greek teacher and colleague Dr. Mike Barrett.

One of my favorite experiences is gaining an insight into biblical material that has never occurred to me before.

That happens to me fairly frequently, and yesterday it happened right in the middle of class, thanks to a student question.

We know that the entire Scripture is about Christ. Jesus himself made that point in a conversation he had with two disciples on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection (Lk 24.13ff). (And that passage, Lk 24.27 precisely, is where Dr. Barrett got the title for his book.) Boy do we wish Luke had seen fit to include a transcript of that conversation in his Gospel!

I suspect it was pretty much like Paul’s standard synagogue sermon, recorded in Acts 13.14ff, but with a lot more prophecies included.

Those two disciples said that their hearts burned within them when they heard these things (Lk 24.32). It’s easy to see why. Here they were realizing that the Tanakh (the Old Testament)—a document they had studied all their lives and thought they knew well—was filled with meaning that they had completely missed. It was like the old book had become completely new again; they were starting over as neophytes, going over long-familiar words and seeing completely new things in them.

It’s also easy to see why the early church became really taken with the idea of finding Christ in the Old Testament, looking under every bush—burning or not—to see if he was there. They found a lot of good examples, but sometimes they found things that weren’t even there—for example, when they decided that Solomon’s personification of wisdom in Proverbs 8 was actually talking about Christ. The heretic Arius was able to turn that unfounded interpretation against them by citing Prov 8.22 as proof, then, that Jesus was created by God “in the beginning.”

Oopski.

Mistakes like that have made more recent interpreters, including yours truly, a little wary of suggesting that Christ is somewhere in the OT where he hasn’t been widely recognized before.

So it’s with some trepidation that I share my “insight.”

[Deep breath.] Here goes.

The New Testament tells us repeatedly that Jesus, the Son, is in fact the creator of all things (Jn 1.3; Col 1.16; Heb 1.2). I take that to mean that the Father is the visionary, the designer, in creation, while the Son is the active agent, actually doing the work of creating, while the Spirit hovers over and tends to what is created (Gen 1.2). (So far, that’s a fairly standard, common interpretation.)

And I take that to mean that Elohim (“God”) in Gen 1 and the first paragraph of Gen 2 is actually the person of the Son. (Many others would argue that the name refers to the united Godhead, the essence rather than any one of the persons. That’s not a hill I’m interested in dying on, but bear with me here.)

In Gen 2.4 the name changes from Elohim to Yahweh Elohim (“the LORD God”). Does that indicate a change of person, or is the protagonist still the Son? Well, if “God” created man in Gen 1.27, and in the theological retelling of the story “the LORD God” created man in Gen 2.7, then it seems reasonable to continue to see the Son as the protagonist in the account.

Now, “the LORD God” continues as the main character through the end of Gen 3; Gen 4 begins to use the name Yahweh (“the LORD”). (Eve uses that name in Gen 4.1, and the narrator—Moses—begins using it in Gen 4.3.)

All of this serves as a reasonable basis for seeing Jesus as the one acting in Genesis 3. An additional evidence of that is that “the LORD God” is described as “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen 3.8)—and the Son is the only person of the Godhead described as physically embodied in Scripture. (But is Rev 5.6-7 an exception? Hmm.)

So, finally, here’s the thought I had in class today.

Is it actually Jesus who utters the prophecy of Gen 3.15?

Is it Jesus who, perhaps with an animated glint in his eye, tells the serpent that one day, the seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head?

Wouldn’t that put quite an edge on those words? Wouldn’t it be a lot like the time David gave Goliath a list of all the things he was going to do with Goliath’s various body parts (1Sa 17.45-47), but exponentially more fearsome, and exponentially more consequential?

The Son and the Serpent, standing in the Garden, face to face, making an appointment for a battle to the death, thousands of years into the future?

I’m going to have to think about that.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Billions of Years? Part 3: Genesis Data on the Age of the Earth

September 18, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Part 1 Part 2

Last time we demonstrated that the Creation account in Genesis 1 is Hebrew narrative, which means that we should read it straightforwardly. We then demonstrated that it speaks of a personal agent who created the cosmos from nothing over a period described as 6 “days.” Before we begin to evaluate the claims of the old-earth position, however, we need to answer a second question from the text: how long ago did these 6 “days” occur?

The text reports that on the sixth “day” Elohim created a man, named Adam (“man”) (Gen 1.27; 2.19) and his wife, named Eve (“living”) (Gen 2.22; 3.20). Later in the narrative we’re given the same Adam as the starting point of a genealogy, including lifespans and progeny dates for everyone involved. Genesis 5 gives the data for every generation from Adam to Noah and his sons, and Genesis 11 gives the same data for every generation from Noah’s sons to Abraham. The lifespans and progeny dates from Abraham through David, whose life dates are generally agreed upon, appear throughout the biblical text up to the book of Samuel.

Thus we have numbers that can be manipulated to yield a calendar year, or thereabouts, for the creation of Adam. There are variations in this date for several reasons, including some textual variants in the Hebrew manuscripts and some interpretational questions. (For a detailed analysis of the interpretative history of that question, see the dissertation of my former PhD student Ben Shaw [free registration required].) The most restrictive date would yield a creation somewhere around 4000 BC, as calculated by James Ussher in the 1600s, while textual variants might allow a date 1000 years or so earlier.

Some have noted that it was traditional in ancient genealogies to omit generations that were considered unimportant; some interpreters have suggested, for example, that the genealogy of Jesus Christ in Matthew 1 has omitted some generations in order to yield 3 sets of 14 generations each (Mat 1.17), for easier memorization. It’s true that omitting generations did occur, but you’ll note that the Matthew list does not include the math; on the other hand, the Genesis genealogies include ages and sums that simply do not add up if generations are omitted. The omission suggestion introduces far more difficulties than it solves.

And of course, to get from 4000 or 5000 BC to 4.5 billion BC, you’d be omitting 1 million generations for every generation you mention. Some suggestions are just silly on their face.

So where does the text itself leave us? You have an earth and its contents created intentionally by a personal agent a few thousand years ago.

Given earlier evidence that the Bible exhibits characteristics of extraordinary origin, you’re going to need an extremely high level of proof to set that obvious declaration aside.

Does the old-earth view meet that level of evidence—something more substantial and logically compelling than “but everybody believes this!”?

On to that question next time.

Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Billions of Years? Part 2: Genesis Data on the Creation Event

September 14, 2017 by Dan Olinger 5 Comments

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Part 1

As noted in the last post, I’m starting with the demonstrated premise that the Bible is a supernatural book—the Word of God—and therefore authoritative. Further, it should be interpreted based on genre, like any other literature. In narratives, it should be read at face value unless the text itself give us reason to do otherwise. And once we’ve extracted its meaning, we shouldn’t torque it around unless we have a stronger reason to do so than “a whole bunch of people believe something else, and they’ll make fun of me if I don’t come around.”

It makes sense, then, to start our investigation into the age of the earth by taking a look at what the Bible actually says about the topic.

To begin with, the Creation narrative and the genealogies of the human race are clearly narrative, not poetry, as old-earth proponents used to suggest. The clearest indication of this is the style of the text itself; perhaps the most reliable predictor of Hebrew narrative is the waw consecutive, which is simply the use of and to connect verb clauses in a string. This form dominates Genesis 1; here’s a copy of the text with the waw-consecutive verbs highlighted in red. By contrast, a poetic description of the same Creation event appears in Psalm 104, and there’s hardly any red in it at all.

It’s no surprise, then, that a leading expert on Hebrew literature, Robert Alter, identifies the first poetic passage of the Bible as Adam’s description of his wife all the way at the end of Genesis 2.

Some old-earth proponents, facing this clear evidence that Genesis 1 is not poetry, have suggested that it is “exalted, semi-poetic prose.” I’ll observe that there’s no such genre recognized by Hebrew scholars. This is a whole new level of category error—ascribing a phenomenon to a category that not only is incorrect, but simply does not exist.

So Genesis 1 is narrative, not poetry. That means we’re going to take it straightforwardly, barring evidence in the text itself that the author intends us to read it otherwise. So what does it say?

- There is a Creator, named Elohim, who is the subject of most of the verbs. He speaks throughout the passage, and he thinks through a planned action (Gen 1.26-27). This means that he has intellect and will. And since he evaluates his work throughout the process, calling it “good” repeatedly (e.g. Gen 1.4)., he appears to have emotions as well. He’s a full-orbed person, not merely a natural force of some kind.

- His creative work takes place in stages. He begins by creating the heavens and the earth (Gen 1.1)—or perhaps this is a summary statement that encompasses the description that follows. Then he brings material objects into being by simply speaking, with no source material mentioned. Specifically, he speaks to create light (Gen 1.3); a “firmament” (Gen 1.6-7 KJV), which separates upper waters from surface waters; the sun and the moon (Gen 1.16); and marine and avian life (Gen 1.20).

- He apparently creates some things out of existing material; for example, perhaps land animals come from the dirt (Gen 1.24; note the verb “bring forth” here), and man certainly is fashioned from clay (Gen 2.7), while the woman is fashioned from one of the man’s ribs (Gen 2.22). It appears that the waters already exist in Gen 1.6 (does this mean that Gen 1.1 is not a summary statement after all?) and that dirt exists in Gen 1.9, before it appears after a gathering of the waters.

The periods during which Elohim performs these actions are described as “days,” with “evenings” and “mornings.” This language would lead us to assume diurnal, quotidian days, though we can’t be sure that all 6 creation days were precisely the same length, given that the sun does not exist until day 4. (I note, however, that the text gives no hint of a significant difference in length between day 3 and day 4. It seems obvious that there is a source of light for the first 3 days that would provide a definitional function similar to the sun. Note that the Bible ends with a new creation in which there is no sun, just as was the case in the very beginning. In that half of the inclusio, John reports that “the glory of God” and “the Lamb” are the light [Rev 21.23], and “the Lord God gives them light” [Rev 22.5]).

What we’re left with from a natural reading of the narrative, then, is that a supernatural rational being created the material universe from nothing originally, over a period of 6 days of roughly 24 hours each. Nothing in the text itself leads to any other conclusion. If another narrative requires a very long period of time, then reading that back into this text is going to call for an extraordinary level of evidence.

Before we can begin to evaluate that evidence, however, we need to answer one more question: how long ago did these Creation “days” occur? We’ll consider the evidence for that in the next post.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10