Week 2 - Day 3 Friday Genesis 2 1:9

Friday, September 23, 2022

7:58 AM

This is the story of the heavens and the earth at their creation. When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens—there was no field shrub on earth and no grass of the field had sprouted, for the LORD God had sent no rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the ground, but a stream* was welling up out of the earth and watering all the surface of the ground—then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

God formed the man out of dust… 

This reading calls me closer to the Celtic understanding of the origin of humans, we were fashioned out of clay, which is, of course, nothing more than dust moistened enough to be formed. God blew air into the nostrils of the man and man came to life. What happened next? By Celtic tradition, the clay figures danced and became living beings.

As this second creation story continued, God created all living things and brought them to the man to name. This shines a brilliant light of illumination on a particularly important, critical, in fact, the concept of what it means to name something, it makes the first difference between knowing
and unknowing. It is a basic of human emotion and being that we fear what we do not know. We can't accurately predict if something is dangerous or safe, if it is poisonous or nurturing if we don't know what it is. When we gain enough to name something, we begin to know it, to fathom purpose and intent and, finally, the ability to accept, reject, protect or destroy what we have named. The last step is once we name something, we can control it, tame it, use it and have dominion over it.

This is why God refused to allow the first humans to give him a name. He could not allow us to begin the inexorable process of naming, knowing and controlling until his plan for us was fully revealed to us when we heard the WORD spoken by his son. We know enough now to understand we will never fully know God in a way that might give us dominion. It is a relief to lay down the burden of being driven to know, name and have dominion over God, who is and always will be a mystery to us.