B. DYBWAD BROCHMANN

THE ART OF READING THE BIBLE

Chapter 8

Creation

Adam, Eve, and Paradise

Let us think about a skeptic: that kind of person who has had a lot of disappointing experiences, has experienced many illusions and fantasies, who has had a break down with himself and others.

Maybe seeing how foolish, superstitious and uncontrolled peoples’ imaginations can be has directly frightened him. Maybe he has heard teachers and pastors talk about unbelievable nonsense and the most commonplace rubbish, so that the terms “spirit and spiritual life” have become the worst things he can imagine.

When people talk about “the only correct faith’, he becomes almost “nauseated”, and will preferably leave those people.

This “Doubting Thomas” type of person only believes what he can understand. He wants to see things as they are, and not as people “believe” them to be, because his experience has shown him, correctly, that there are no limits for what people can “believe”.

A person who thinks like that wants to get a “solid”, “exact”, “scientific” explanation of how everything has developed, starting at the beginning. During his lifetime he might read 100 or 200 large books on “Geology”, “Biology”, “Darwinism”, “Astronomy”, “Physics”, “Chemistry”, etc. With the help of all this imaginative material, he sees, through his spiritual eye, a kind of creation that follows quite a long development.

With the help of straining the boundaries of scientific “fantasy”, which is built on endless “examinations”, he “believes”, for example, that everything comes from “a nebulous mass”. Our good friend, the skeptic, “believes” that he finally begins to glimpse the possibilities for how the earth, and possibly mankind, was created. Another reaction could be that he doesn’t believe anything he reads in these 200 scholarly books, and shaking his critical head says: “I don’t know anything”. “I don’t know enough”.

Can you understand the words of Jesus that say: “Blessed is he who doesn’t see, yet believes”. It’s much easier and simpler for him. Instead of 200 scholarly books, he manages with: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth”. Notice that both types have a faith.

One of them has a fantasy or ability to imagine what he can’t be shown, and must stay on a very long and strenuous path before his thoughts are satisfied with some kind of scientific picture of the world. The other one thinks immediately and simply that there must be a creative being here – some kind of “magician”, an unbelievable, almighty, all-knowing God Who is behind everything.

Then the Savior of the world comes and teaches: “God is Spirit. God is the Spirit in us”. If you have really understood the great, supernatural, almighty creative power that is in the Son of Man, then you have really seen the Father, the Creator or the real “Originator” of everything and everyone. Who has seen “I” – “the self”- Consciousness - he has seen the Father. Before the mountains existed, “the self” existed. If heaven and earth came to an end, the certainty spoken by “the self” would remain. The Spirit is automatically created. The Spirit of God doesn’t need any counselor or guide. He sees everything, knows everything, and influences everything. If you, child of God, have this faith, you can move mountains. With God in you, nothing is impossible.

The skeptic doesn’t see science as anything other than a product of human spirit. If a botanist or a biologist wasn’t conscious, i.e. the capacity to think and form ideas and prototypes, he couldn’t write down what he “sees”, “experiences”, “notices”, in nature.

The animal can’t do that. The animal doesn’t have “scientific” or “simple’ fantasy. The animal only sees with his outer eye and therefore doesn’t have a picture of life. The professor, the doubter, and all kinds of “believers” have another eye to see with – the eye of the spirit, which is a human privilege.

I believe people use the word “fantasy” without thinking over what it means. When we say: “This is only fantasy”, we mean that it doesn’t exist in reality, but only in fantasy, for example, when we dream at night. We wake up in the morning and maybe say: “Luckily it was only fantasy” or “Gee, I wish it had been true, because it was such a nice dream”.

So, what we dreamt doesn’t exist, but the fantasy itself, which we were dreaming about, does exist. We have that fantasy with us ‘round the clock – we use it, for example, when we read about the Americans who are crossing The Rhine River. We don’t see this with our physical eye – we have to use our fantasy to imagine what we read.

We acknowledge then that our spiritual capacities of imagination are a reality. Whether we’re “doubters” or “believers”, “atheists” or “Darwinists”, if we are Moslems or Christians, Germans or Russians, we all have a faith or an imagination. It is this spiritual equipment or this innate capacity to think about what we can’t see, that we can describe as our fantasy. We can also describe this capacity as the divine equipment inside of us, and it only becomes satanic when it’s used for the sake of lying, delusion, superstition, or to try to lead someone astray.

Fantasy offers us unique opportunities, as well as the chance of peril.

For example, it’s a misunderstanding to believe or to think that a kitten playing with a ball of yarn has fantasy. If this were the case, then the kitten would be “disappointed”, just as we would be, and fall into “depression” and be a “pessimist”, “optimist”, etc.

But we see that the cat is playing with the yarn through instinct and certainly doesn’t get “disappointed”, because it has nothing to get “disappointed’ with. It doesn’t have any “illusions”. It doesn’t have the ability to create fantasy and therefore can’t build castles in the air like we can.

Therefore, when The Bible is going to give us a short explanation of how human beings were created, the main emphasis is on telling us the truth about our fantasy life, or it can also be called our reflective life. Our history substantiates what The Bible shows, which is that our fantasy life or reflective life wasn’t completely created immediately either. To awaken the consciousness in the substance would take a long time, because the substance was sluggish. If you have any doubt about that, just look at how you react when you are encouraged to grow in new directions. How much suffering and struggle does it cost a person, for example, to come a few steps further in understanding. Look at yourself and your own life, or look at the history of the world or of religion, etc. Think how difficult it is for a German to “understand” the Norwegian way of thinking. Look at “superstition” and “trustworthiness” in the religious wars, and in the Catholic Church and in the Norwegian Lutheran Church. Look at the political stubbornness and all of the human sluggishness, and you will soon see that “waving a magic wand” didn’t give life to the conscience.

On a few printed pages, The Bible gives a fairly short, child-like, immediate and fantasy-rich conception of how all of creation came to be. The whole story of creation in The Bible is like a very small, yet very inspiring adventure or an allegory that contains unbelievable truths, that I believe both the scientist and the theologian have overlooked. Therefore we need to read some of the story and try to find something that is similar to our period in history and a new understanding about human nature. Since we are only interested in the creation of man, we will only include a section that has to do with our creation.

The following is from Genesis1: 26 – 31:

“Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." ²⁷ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. ²⁸ And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." ²⁹ And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. ³¹ And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day”.

Genesis 2:1 – 4:

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. ² And on the seventh day God finished his work, which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. ³ So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation. ⁴ These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens”.

Genesis 2: 16 – 3: 1 – 24:

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; ¹⁷ but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." ¹⁸ Then the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him." ¹⁹ So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. ²⁰ The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. ²¹ So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; ²²and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. ²³ Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." ²⁴ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. ²⁵ And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed. Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" ² And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; ³ but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" ⁴ But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die. ⁵ For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." ⁶ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. ⁷ Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. ⁸ And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?" ¹⁰ And he said, "I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself." ¹¹ He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" ¹² The man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate." ¹³ Then the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate." ¹⁴ The Lord God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle, and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. ¹⁵ I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." ¹⁶ To the woman he said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you." ¹⁷ And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; ¹⁸ thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. ¹⁹ In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return." ²⁰ The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. ²¹ And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them. ²² Then the Lord God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever" -- ²³ therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. ²⁴ He drove out the man; and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life”. (Copied from the Bible.com Website.)

For the sake of clarity, we’ll first repeat what the scholars are quarreling about. The scholars say:

“The lost paradise must have been geographically located in Asia Minor, somewhere between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers. The tree of knowledge must have been a fruit tree and the Tree of Life probably was too. There were many kinds of fruit trees in the garden. The snake must have been a real historical “snake creature” that could talk. This “creature” survived by eating dust, etc. When Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, they had to leave the garden because of their disobedience, and two cherubs blocked the entrance, each holding a shiny sword. It is hoped that the lost paradise can possibly be found at excavations in the Holy Land, etc.

Another scholar says: “This is a fairy tale. It’s only old myths and tales that the Jews, by the way, stole and loaned from the Babylonians. (Think about “Baby”, as one said). You can’t believe such wild fantasies. By the way, whom should Cain marry? And what about Adam and Eve who weren’t allowed to enter the garden again because two cherubs stood at the entrance, stopping them? The cherubs had to be visible, or else the passage was open, and the last paradise could be recaptured, etc.

The scholarly natural scientists and agriculturalists give us many elaborate “explanations”, that they all mean prove The Bible’s creation story has to depend on very primitive illusions and doesn’t have much to do with reality.

After all of that “wisdom”, we can easily understand why The Bible is both ridiculed and rejected.

In Genesis 1:26: “God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”. Here The Bible is assuming a creative “idea”, an eager and goal-directed consciousness (“Logos”) that speaks and thinks. This point of view is verified and challenged much more in the first chapter of John, which in my eyes is the most complete description of creation you could ask for.

Now we have the possibility of two choices: 1. Either everything has developed “by itself”, the one being an extension of the other with a well hidden original starting point (the point of view of the natural scientists), or 2. There has to be a “Logos” – a creative consciousness behind the whole thing.

We will now examine both of these possibilities.

Think if all the people on the surface of the earth disappeared. In that case, what would be left were only the animals, the plants, and a blind nature. One day a person, like one of us, travels there from another planet. He lands on the earth and goes around and looks at everything there is to see. For example, he comes in a large factory, and there he finds many machines and other “strange” things. Maybe he grabs hold of a switch, and suddenly, like waving a wand, all the machines begin to work. He ponders over this and tries to find the sources of power. He finds some cables and follows them for quite a distance until he comes to a waterfall and finds a “turbine”. He wonders about all the “strange” things he sees on earth and asks himself: “Can all of this have been created by itself? Can, for example, the ore and the iron in the mountain become machines without a ‘Logos’ behind it? Can the waterfall crate a turbine? If not, then how can the turbine, the cables, the switches, and the machines have been created? Yes”, he says to himself, “there must have been a creative fantasy here. There must have been creatures like me who were capable of thinking and imagining things, that didn’t exist yet, for example, like a turbine with various definite functions. The turbine and the generator are too ‘ingenious’ – or simply too brilliant for them to have been made by themselves. This must have been something ‘supernatural’, because blind nature never could have done this alone”.

So the traveler sits down and writes the following report about his “experiences” from planet Earth: “I came to a planet and to my surprise saw that there must have been people here before me. Everything I saw indicated that there were thoughts (Logos) involved in this. Blind nature was also there, but there is no doubt something else was there too that was “guiding” nature. I say this because there was planning, order, a system and thought in everything”.

I don’t believe any of my readers would dispute this traveler’s logic? This is the same logic we find when we read Genesis 1:26, i.e. Logos has never seen a person, but Logos sees the person in his thoughts and says: “I will create consciousness in the material. Let us make creatures that can think and create as we do, so that these higher creatures can rule over the rest of creation”.

This is the logic for one possibility. Consciousness must have always existed, because it is too “distinctive” for the powers of nature to have created consciousness by itself. It is even more unthinkable and illogical for a turbine to have been created by the waterfall or by blind nature.

The defender of the other point of view doesn’t even believe what he says - his own logic. They just dream that they believe in their own science and in what they call “experiences”. As soon as a scientist gets to a desert, or a frigid area, or to an unknown and strange land, he “says”, without a moment’s hesitation, “There must have been people here, here are parts of a knife, I find clear evidence of a thinking being – because here are both equipment, tools and art objects. The nature in the desert or the frigid areas hasn’t made this. People must have been here”. And when the scientist finds old pictures, antiquities, stone tools, etc., he sits down and writes long believable reports of the conditions and ways of life of the people of that time. If he finds their art, ceramics, pictures and writings, then he writes long reports about the early “taste”, “culture”, and “spiritual life”, because he deduces how the people must have looked by looking at the objects they created.

But when the scientist see God’s creation, it’s impossible for him to understand the Logos behind it. He can live and do research in nature from the cradle to the grave without discovering “eternal life”, and he can write thousands of books about human life on earth without finding the image of God, Almighty in Adam and Eve.

“The stone ax, the knife, the ceramics, and the turbine can be made by themselves”, says the scholar, but “the person”, “the artist”, “the god”, “the spirit” that created it, has “done it himself”. We will gladly give this logic to all the opinionated ladies and gentlemen who chose this impossible “possibility”, instead of the inspiring, and only correct and real possibility, found in The Bible.

In Genesis 1:29 it talks about people being created to only need to eat vegetables. I don’t know if that’s true. Children who are “let go” and allowed to do what they want, do eat an unbelievable amount of “raw food”, which could imply that “vegetarianism” has a future. It is true that we were barbarians in the beginning, who both ate raw meat and drank blood.

It is only about 400 years ago (counting back from1945) that people in Europe got potatoes, coffee, and tobacco. What role “nutrition” has played, and still plays in our “formation” and “creation”, specialized researchers in that area will find out.

In our time we know that the entire plant kingdom is made up of “autotrophic components”. It is the job of the plants to take up minerals and basic elements directly and to change these materials into a form that can be available for the “hetrotrophic” beings, both animals and humans; they are dependent on the plant kingdom to change, prepare, and “refine” the basic elements.

The more we study nature’s masterpiece with its wonderful automatic and harmonious interaction, the more we need to integrate into our being what is mentioned in Genesis1: 31: “And the spirit saw everything that had been created – and it was good”. It’s difficult for those who reach the opposite conclusion and who feel inspired to say: “All of creation is unsuccessful and a failure. If we had been “Our Lord” we would surely have done much better”. In this way, we who believe in The Bible’s inspiration are doubters and skeptics, because we have another faith and way of thinking than they do.

It says in Genesis 2:15 that man was designed and created to be God’s assistants, the children of Spirit, God’s children in the big garden. (Compare this with the comparison Christ makes to the vineyard and the lord of the vineyard, who says the same thing about placing us where we belong in existence). The Bible and the Word of God want us to understand that we are not to think of ourselves as slaves and shouldn’t have an “inferiority complex”, as the psychologists would say. We should feel that we are legitimate children of God. We need to feel like we are “the chosen ones”, like heirs. We need to look at the Old and New Testaments as written documentation that we have received “the right” to call ourselves children of God.

There is a lie perpetrated by the Church and science where they malign humanity. They don’t want to give us the right to be the children of God, and to realize that we have some of the divine with us. However, the whole Bible – in both Testaments – assures us that this is the case. Religious disbelief is the most dangerous “assistant in renunciation” that we can see in our history. As for the question about being an heir, please refer to the comparison in Matthew 25:34 where Christ clearly says that we shall inherit the Kingdom, the kingdom of Spirit that has been prepared for us since the world began. (Also, please refer to Paul in Galatians 4, as well as Romans 4: 14 and 8: 17).

As far as our rights and our legal relationship to our origin, please read the parable in Matthew 12:18: “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased: I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall declare judgment to the Gentiles”. (Copied from the Bible.com Website). Sometime the Jews will certainly be the only ones to be the chosen ones of God? With the Creator there is no difference between the races, classes or genders. In the world of reality there is only a difference in spirit. (Please refer to the parable about the good and the bad servants, how they ran their house, etc. and look at the parable about the false judgments (Matthew 25: 32 – 46).

The rights and the Old and New Testaments apply only to those who answer to God’s plan and meaning for us. We shall receive what is ours, as you can read in Luke 18:6 – 8, where it says: “ And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” (The last passage means that when the Son of Man comes in all His glory, hopefully there will be something left of the real faith, after such long and thorough slandering of the divine origin and rights of the Son of Man). In Corinthians 9 Paul speaks a lot about “the law” and rights, and there is much about this in the rest of The Bible as well. In Psalms 17:2 it says: “Let my sentence come forth from thy presence”.

Regarding the questions of having some of the divine in us and the spirit’s demand for perfection - it is sufficient to refer to what we have shown earlier. Implying that our life is accidental, arbitrary, or without regularity, without certain aims and goals, is to be more blind than necessary. This is the type of thinker and seer that Christ discusses when he quotes such a person by saying: “Lord, I knew that you were a strict master – you harvest without planting – you reap what you haven’t sown, therefore I am returning to you the pound you loaned to me”.

The quote above shows us exactly what the result is when man doesn’t see what God has put in us, and what the reason was. We hear about a strict “lord”, who is not a part of reality, and who can harvest without planting, etc. Even “superstition” and faith in “the magician” is apparent in this quote. He also receives an answer: “After your own mouth I am judging you, you bad servants, etc. (Compare to Luke 19:20 –22).

Maybe we now see what wonderful guidance there is in the word of God in Genesis 2:15: “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it”. He created us and considered us His children, heirs, assistants, and manager and owners of all the glory. “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat’”. (Genesis 2:16). The first humans ate fruit. The Bible doesn’t say that they greedily ate, but only that they “ate”. There is no reason to doubt this. It was probably a very long time before humans learned to eat greedily?

“Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you may not eat”.

Don’t we hear an echo from the dawning of consciousness in this familiar quotation? Doesn’t this express, quite well, becoming conscious for the first time? If you could create consciousness, or a kind of consciousness in an animal, wouldn’t it be something similar to when God created the first spark of spirit in us?

The first suspicion or intuition says: “Learning about yourself – gaining knowledge – this is something new. This is both good and bad. It is tempting, but it can also be dangerous”. Bjørn Steiner Bjørnson uses in The Light Cantata expressions like: “To think gave the ability” – “Think light, and there was light”.

We may not think of God in a common way, like an indescribable “strange” man, who creates a garden and some people and tells them they may not have knowledge and light. It is just the opposite, “Our heavenly Father delightfully gave us the Kingdom”, says the Savior. Our beginning consciousness dawns under pressure. Just look at your own children as they grew up. Our first and correct inspiration after we began to think was probably that knowledge could be both good and bad. People who can’t read or write have it much better than we do. It is “risky’ to become conscious. For example, before we didn’t see that we were naked. Small boys and girls still don’t see that. They live in “Paradise”, just like Adam and Eve. But one day they discover sexual differences, and that’s when the fantasies begin. That’s when mama puts “a fig leaf” on them, because they now see that they are naked. Later the same correct inspiration says: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, he bears a likeness to God. They have begun to see the difference between good and evil. They are beginning to have morals. They now have a creative fantasy and can stretch out their creative hands by themselves”. (Please see Genesis 3:22).

Now the way is open for people to also eat of the tree of life; they can eat and live forever. But now we have to temporarily close the Garden of Eden for them, because they need to understand themselves, so they can become familiar with their role as “gods”/having the divine within them. We can put “the state” and “the Church” to guard the entrance to the lost paradise, each with their own sword. When mankind has become so grown up that they no longer need “state” and “Church”, then the way to the lost paradise is open, because then mankind has reached such a level of consciousness that the heirs no longer need to have guardians and superiors. (Compare to Galatians 4).

It surely wasn’t a strict and temperamental Lord coming from outside of the people who chased them out of paradise, and organized murder and stealing, “Church” and “state”. It was probably the people themselves who originally lost Paradise, because they hadn’t yet developed a powerful spiritual life. And it was surely the Spirit of God that had the true holy inspiration about this relationship, which understood the symbolism in Genesis about what happened in reality. This was probably dynamic also. It was surely God who spoke to the prophet here too.

David sings so beautifully about this relationship, when he says: “You have tested my heart, visited my during the night, you have searched me…” etc. God often speaks to us best during the night when the unconscious, listening, spontaneous and real person can be peaceful and free from being logical and censoring, which bother us while we’re awake.

This is exactly how the Lord God speaks to all the prophets in The Bible – to Samuel, to Salomon, and the other prophets. In the same way He spoke to the authors of The Pentateuch when He wrote about “the first people”, about creation, and about the tree of knowledge. Everything the prophets say and write witnesses clearly about these men and the steps in their development, and that God is speaking to them. It is first in Christ’s speeches and testimonies that the human limitations are broken. Therefore, He is the Tree of Life that is mentioned symbolically in The Bible, when Adam and Eve leave Paradise.

Genesis 2:21 talks about when Adam fell into a deep sleep while God created woman from man. I have often wondered why it is that the one who is the most intuitive, emotional, and feminine in the life of spirit is always created first, and why manhood’s consciousness and active consciousness always come last in history. Why do we always begin as girls in the fetus stage? (The penis is always an extension of the clitoris). It really looks like the man is created from the woman, instead of the other way around.

Why do we see so many examples that the woman is quicker to understand and to receive impressions and intuitions than the man? (Look at the wife of Pilate as a classic example). We see this in our own individual spiritual life. The first impression we often receive is from feelings and “intuitions” (the feminine in us); the active consciousness often comes much later. In the world of spirit, it seems that consciousness seems to be an extension of feelings and perceptions.

We see the same thing in the history of the Church where everything begins with the virginal, feminine, and emotional (as for example in the Catholic Church), but it extends into the very potent and masculine Martin Luther. In the spiritual world, it really looks like Adam is “snoring”, while God’s Spirit creates the woman.

The Catholic clergy are infatuated with long dresses, and feminine movements and behavior. Even the Protestant clergy don’t seem to have gotten past the one-sided feminine element in their relationship to God. The long dresses and feminine smile continue to exist anyway. And Adam seems to continue to sleep very well, while the whole world is still governed by emotions.

It’s clear to me that the prophet in The Pentateuch has contemplated deeply before he tells the whole truth about how God created the spiritual person. Therefore I believe I can predict that in time research into spirituality and psychology will teach us much more about exactly this – how God created and still creates human beings.

That woman was made from man, and man made from woman is already obvious since we were created with both sexes in the same component; most plants have male and female on the same plant. We humans were created as “one flesh”. We are two “half cells” that together make “one whole cell”. It’s too bad that “state” and Church” don’t submit to this fact and allow the Creator’s “system” be the way it was supposed to be, namely the foundation for the holy and living creation of society. Instead of looking at it in this way, marriages and divorces are organized, and all kinds of conventions, regulations and decrees are made that divide the two sexes from each other, making them commonplace, questioning them and disdaining them.

As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing in all of our literature that is so real as the story about Adam and Eve who can’t find their way back to their lost paradise. “The Church” and “the state” are still standing there, like two living cherubs with their shiny swords. Paradise isn’t a “place”, but a condition. The Tree of Knowledge is not a palm or an apple tree, but the knowledge about our own life – for good or bad. This natural description done very artistically has probably come about because mankind realized a long time ago, when they started contemplating things, that they had a feeling or intuition that knowledge and consciousness, creativity and fantasy could be and become a double-edged sword. It is both bad and good to acquire knowledge. The animal is much better off than the human who acquires false knowledge, but how improved is our condition when we obtain true knowledge?

The snake that creeps on his opportunistic stomach, and has eaten classic dust in many thousands of years, can be followed in history. This snake is not a nice living reality, that only people knew and that the animals did not need to know. This spiritual snake can use words correctly, and both read, write and speak. This snake has reproduced enormously and is the only dangerous enemy of all public societies.

The dust of classicism covers the world. The opportunist eats this dust and believes that working is a curse. He whispers in our ear: “Has God really said that you shouldn’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge? Is God against you obtaining knowledge about yourself? Don’t be anxious, but eat from the Tree of Knowledge. It’s not dangerous”.

And all the daughters of Eve in the world think that knowledge looks tempting and they send their children to the learned classics before the children can eat or preferably greedily eat knowledge. And most people everywhere in the world overeat and listen to the snake. At the same time Adam is sleeping. Nobody stops to think that this classical dust is death itself. There is a risk with this human – godforsaken – knowledge that our whole world has forgotten to take into consideration.

But “the snake” continues to say: “Has God really said this?”

Think a little more about this, Eve, before you eat more and share with your husband.

As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing in the whole world that is more objective reality than The Bible’s teaching about Adam and Eve. The story is real and the breath of the almighty Spirit has breathed life into it – in spite of what “the author’s” name was,or if he lived in Babylon or in Jerusalem.

There is no type of allegory the contains more in-depth psychology and better descriptions of the unseen reality that we call life, with its conditions, chances, possibilities and risks, than just this large work of poetry. This is not classical dust, but “adventure for children” in the best and richest meaning. Even H. C. Andersen, with all his wonderful writing, can match the plain and simple imagery about our own origin here on earth. Just let the natural researchers continue to dig, analyze and doubt. Just let them continue until they stick their finger into holes left by the nails in the King of Truth, Whom the authorities continue to crucify even today. Just let the geologists work in to the most inner core and layers of the earth. Let them visit stones with and without inscriptions. Everything tells and confirms the same thing. Even the stones will speak. All of earth and heaven shall witness of the Creator’s might and magnitude. The fourth dimension as an image of God is acknowledged, the almighty, self-activating spirit that takes such a long time to become fully developed in us. I’m waiting for a great artist to write a drama entitled “When Adam awakes”.

Maybe Ibsen was thinking about something similar when he wrote: “When the dead awake”.

I’m sure our Savior was thinking that way when He said: “The hour is coming, and is now, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God”. (Please see John 5:25).

The words “is now” often seem to have been forgotten, because of the easily forfeited delusions the pastors have about all the cemeteries and grave-mounds that are supposed to be the correct way or “bridge” that carries us over to the land of new possibilities. I understand when the Savior says “the graves”, He means all the churches, sects and scientific dead ends where the spiritually dead have buried themselves.

When He says: “Let the dead bury the dead”, He surely doesn’t mean that one corpse shall bury another corpse. This is spiritual speech and spiritual language – imagery - He uses. Some were already in “the graves” when they heard the voice of the Son of God. There will be more when they discover that the Son of Man is legitimately born of the Spirit.

If you can hear a little of the voice of the Son of God in this book, then this book wasn’t written in vain.

Finally, we hear in Genesis 3:15, that the Spirit of God will create “hostility” between the offspring of the snake and the offspring of the woman.

Undoubtedly this alludes to the Savior, Who was born of a woman, and Who declared a spiritual war against all the classical misunderstandings and Pharisaical delusions. But it could also pertain to the eternal hostility or opposition that has always existed between the “womanly” inspirations and intuitions in our spiritual life, and the spiritual “spawn of the snake” that we find in all the libraries in the world.

This antagonism is really a war that Paul describes as: “Against the spiritual army of Satan in outer space”. “Outer space” is the usual expression The Bible uses to describe the raised area “over us”, the spiritual life.

The “woman’s offspring” in the spiritual world is the immediate and intuitive recognition that the true prophets have. “The offspring of the snake” is the spiritual offspring of opportunism that always digs up the old dust and drives a senile (creeping) existence, as opposed to the fearless and undaunted speech of the prophets.

The symbolism in The Bible is often so rich that it can contain much more than we are aware of when we first read it. At least it follows along with the times. We should never read The Bible so quickly, that we think we have understood everything, and later realize that we have misunderstood what we read. The Bible is always ahead of us, showing the way with its light; there is nothing that better proves its divine inspiration and origin.

There is much more that could be said about The Bible and creation. We have given some examples here to show how we must read The Bible, if we wish to understand it correctly.

Summary

The lost paradise is the condition where Adam and Eve are still living. The story about Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge takes place everywhere in the world where boys and girls are born. The whole thing is a poetic, very inspired description about how God created and always creates man in His image. The longer science progresses with research, if the spirit of truth is in control, it will always come nearer and nearer the understanding the prophets of The Bible foresee with their visions and “intuitions”.

But, when the snake of opportunism raises its head, and where the spirit of life-long lies will defend itself and its “magnificent work”, the distance to the truth is always greater and more difficult to reconcile.

The rich man and Lazarus each live in their “hereafter” condition. They are so near each other that they can speak together, but still there is an impassable abyss between them, according to The Bible. This abyss came into being along with creative development, where both the spirit of truth and the spirit of the delusions of life were extended. “The abyss” between them is a thing of the past. It cannot be altered. That is why a wise man says:

“Philosophis obiter libata abducit a deo, penitus exhausta rducit ad deum”.

And this means: “Being superficially occupied with philosophy takes you away from God, thorough philosophizing takes you back to God”. (Baco).

Chapter 9