Before we launch into the flood story, it’s very important to understand the theology of “Creational intent” aka “God’s original purpose” aka “God’s will.” We’re going to run into people, for the rest of the Bible, doing awful things that don’t represent what God originally wanted for us and usually, nothing is said one way or the other about whether they were right or wrong. That can make Bible study very confusing for kids. Studying creational intent is how we can keep people from feeling like they have to make excuses for what everyone in the Bible was doing—things like slavery which we all know is terribly wrong. By teaching kids to look backward to the Garden where all relationships were once healthy and good, we can give them the critical thinking skills to learn to live lives more reflective of God’s plans in creating us in the first place.
If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.
Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Well kids, we’re going to start talking about the flood pretty soon here and so it is time to talk about theology again. Theology is a word that describes studying about religious questions or questions about God. If you remember our lesson on theological history, you know that writing about history (the things that have happened in the past) in our modern times is very different from how it used to be and what we think should be in a history is very different than what Moses and Abraham would have understood a proper history to be about. Ancient peoples’ stories about things that happened were full of the tales of their gods and goddesses working behind the scenes and the people who wrote the Bible were no different—with one exception—because they only saw one God as being responsible for everything, from the creation of the universe to everything that happened to their people.
Well, this week we are going to talk about a different kind of theology, which I think is way more interesting. This theology is called “creational intent” and when we talk about creational intent, we ask ourselves, by looking in the Bible, what is our world actually like versus how God intended it to be. How are people treating one another compared to how we were supposed to treat one another? How does God feel about human kings and racism and lying and rebellion and things like that? How we answer those questions will have a big effect on how we read the stories that are coming up with Noah and Abraham and Moses and everyone else that gets mentioned in the Bible. In fact, it will be very important to learn to see the Bible this way before we read about the Sons of God and the Nephilim next week. God intended for the world to be a certain way. He intended for people to be a certain way. He intended a lot of things that we have really messed up. But I am going to give you a sneak peak at the end of all of this—the most important sermon in the entire Bible is all about Creational Intent. Telling people how God originally wanted us to be is one of the most important things that Jesus did for us. Jesus is the one who knew that best and so listening to Him is the most important thing we can do to find out. Everyone else, including me, just has a whole lot of opinions.
So, where do we start if we want to find out what God intended at the very beginning? We start at the beginning! In the beginning, God created humans (mankind). In Hebrew, that word is adam—not the name Adam, that comes later, but the word adam which means all human beings. How did He create them? We have no idea because we aren’t smart enough, which is fine. If we were smart enough then we might try it too and things would get really bad really quick. But another way of answering the “how did He create them” question is to respond “in His image.” But what does that even mean? Well, as we’ve talked about, it doesn’t mean that God is a human being, more evolved than we are and created by some other god entirely. The Bible tells us that God is Spirit, which means that He isn’t a man or a woman or even male or female. So, it can’t mean that we physically look like Him. Instead, being in His image has to be about doing things the way He does things—the way He wants things done and would do them if He was a human being here on earth. We have the ability to do that. We can think about things in ways that the animals just can’t. We can care for species other than just our own. We can make smart decisions about how we are going to treat the planet that God created for us to live on. We have that potential to do things God’s way because that is how He created us and it was His intention that we run His planet the way He would run it if He was here living on it.
Our best example of that, of course, isn’t Adam or Noah or Abraham or Moses because they all blew it. Just like we all blow it. We tend to be greedy and selfish and foolish and mean. Humans aren’t inherently good—we have to be taught how to be good. And to be taught how to be good, we have to have some sort of standard to tell us what is good or we are going to make it up as we go along and that just never works out well. The Bible helps us out with that and no one in the Bible was an expert on being good and doing good except for Jesus, God’s one unique Son whom the Bible tells us was there with God in the beginning, creating everything. So, when Jesus came to live with us as a human being, He was the blueprint, the perfect model of how we were supposed to be and what we were supposed to do. Looking at what Jesus said and did will show us the kind of lives that true image-bearers should all live. Jesus made sure that the hungry were fed, the sick were healed, the demon-possessed were freed from their torment, and that the people were taught what God wanted for them and from them. These were people who were Jewish and raised all their lives hearing God’s Word in the synagogues, so they knew what it said but sometimes we human beings want to cut corners and do the bare minimum. Jesus told them that the Torah laws were just the basics and that they needed to go way beyond that in order to be what God originally wanted for us and from us. More about that later.
Sometimes we can learn about Creational Intent by looking at how sin changed things from good to bad. The Garden is an excellent place to start because it went from perfect to not so perfect in the blink of an eye. At first, we had humans created in God’s image, working together and worshiping only God. There were no kings because God was their only King. No bosses because they had one boss—and that was God. No arguing or fighting or violence or death or sickness either. No lying and no divorce. No murder and no stealing. No one thought they were better than anyone else. No poverty. No one telling someone that they couldn’t do this or that because they weren’t attractive or athletic or rich or smart enough. Life in the Garden was perfect. The people worked hard but they worked together and they had everything they needed. They walked with God in the cool of the day and lived wonderful lives, trusting God and obeying Him. Not that there was much to obey because they hadn’t thought of all the terrible things you can do wrong yet.
Of course, after the Serpent came and tricked Eve into not trusting what Adam had told her and then Adam decided that he didn’t trust God either, things changed quickly. All of a sudden, they were very ashamed of being naked. They were so ashamed that they became afraid of being seen and so they hid. They blamed everyone but themselves for their sin against God in taking the only thing He said they couldn’t have. And they weren’t acting even one bit sorry. All of this, this was not God’s intention in creating them. The Serpent had conspired, plotted, against God and had ruined what was perfect. Another way to put that is to say that life in the Garden was corrupted. Whenever you see the word corrupt in Genesis, it’s going to mean that things were ruined and that they were no longer “good” like God had created them to be. Remember that after God created things, He would call them good. That means that they were doing exactly what He wanted them to do, or maybe we could say that everything was working properly—like a well-oiled machine that is doing exactly what it was invented to do. Life in the Garden was ruined but God could still save His Garden so He kicked out the people. God was restoring His creation intentions for His garden as best as He could. He was doing a reset. Like, when you take a computer and you purge all the programming when you get a virus. God took out the virus, humans, and kept the Garden for Himself since the Garden was still good. And He will do that same sort of thing over and over again in the Bible, which is why we are talking about this now and I am taking so much time to explain it.
But being removed from the Garden was just one part of what happened to Adam and Eve. They were told how their lives would be different now from God’s original purposes, which is another way of saying creational intentions. First, Eve was informed that her relationships with her children and her husband would be strained. Although some translations of the Bible make it look like giving birth would be more painful, that’s not what the words mean in Hebrew. But the sense of them is that having children, being a mother, was going to be very painful for her. Well, we know what happened with her sons, so that certainly turned out to be true. Also, she was told that her marriage would be a lot different than it had been, and it wouldn’t be to her liking at all! As the first thing Adam does is to label her in the exact same way that he had previously done with the animals, we can already see the problems. Then, Adam was told how different his life was going to be from what God had wanted for him. Life was going to be a very difficult struggle for food, all of his life—which is probably why he treated Eve differently afterward. But these things weren’t God’s original will for them. He wanted them to live peacefully and lovingly together in the Garden and to have children whose lives weren’t ruined by sin. He wanted them to work hard but not to have to scrape by for the rest of their lives in order to survive! So, when we look at the consequences of sin, we can say, “That wasn’t God’s will in the beginning,” or “that wasn’t God’s purpose for humans,” or “that wasn’t God’s creational intention.” Those are all three ways of saying the same thing—of going back to the beginning to look at when everything was good, and to try to understand what God originally wanted. The Bible tells us the story about God trying to get that back—and at the very end of the Bible, in Revelation, that’s exactly what we see has happened again. God never gives up on His will, His purposes, and His intentions. God isn’t a quitter, which is why He never gives up on us.
Of course, to get His Garden back to being good, God had to remove the humans who were ruining it because they totally weren’t in the mood to apologise. But he didn’t just abandon them; He gave them clothes to cover up their bodies so they would be protected. And they still had God’s good creation outside the Garden to work with and grow food in, so it wasn’t like they had to start from scratch by creating their own planet. As if that was ever going to happen! We humans don’t even know how to make dirt from scratch!
Of course, their family life went terribly wrong when Cain got angry and killed his brother Abel. We still don’t know exactly what went wrong—why Cain’s offering wasn’t what God wanted—but we do know that Cain ruined his family. Cain corrupted his family life by killing his brother and so no one could trust him anymore and there would be terrible anger and sadness. So, just like God made the Garden better by booting out Adam and Eve and all their mess, God sent Cain away from his family. Adam and Eve would never know a family life ever again that wasn’t ruined by Cain murdering Abel. And by ruined, I don’t mean that they could never be happy again but they can never go back to life as it was before that terrible murder. They could never be the same people again, or the same family again. The life they once had was ruined and they had to begin again with a new kind of life that had more sadness in it than probably any of us can possibly even imagine. I sure hope they were happy again but it would never be the same kind of happiness. And of course, God didn’t abandon Cain any more than He had abandoned Cain’s parents. God put a protective mark on Cain somehow so that no one would ever kill him in revenge or because he was a stranger, and God blessed Cain’s kids and grandkids even though Cain himself was cursed from the ground, meaning that the ground refused to grow food for him anymore.
When we talk about Genesis chapter 6, we’re going to see God say over and over again that the earth and everything in it is ruined, corrupted, and no longer doing anything that God wanted it to be doing. Humans, and maybe even angels, have broken the whole system. God is going to talk about how sad He is that they have messed everything up and what He has to do is very drastic—but we’ll get to that in a couple more weeks.
God tried many things to fix the problem of the earth being ruined by humans and their sins, and He will even give a select group of people some laws in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy but even that doesn’t fix the problem because humans like to find loopholes. What is a loophole? A loophole is when someone tells us not to do something that we think we should be able to do and we pick apart what they said to find a way to do exactly what we know we aren’t supposed to do. And people do that with God’s laws in the Bible too. For example, there was a law telling men they couldn’t divorce their wives unless she did something really very disgraceful and sinful. But the law wasn’t specific and so husbands who didn’t want to be married to their wives anymore decided that it was very disgraceful and sinful if a woman burned dinner, or if she was getting older and wasn’t pretty anymore. That’s not just a loophole, that’s a cave big enough to drive a freight train right through! With a Great Humpback Whale tied to the roof. Wearing a ten-gallon hat. And even if that seems silly enough, they thought that would be okay with God just because Moses wasn’t more specific. I am betting your mom or dad or grandparents or teachers or whoever can tell you about times that you have done the same exact thing with their rules. I could sure tell you stories about my twins.
By the time Jesus was born, there were a lot of loopholes. There were even laws saying that it was wrong for a person to sell more than 20% of their possessions to give money to the poor. One of the most important speeches ever given is called the Sermon on the Mount, and the best copy of it is found in Matthew chapters 5-7. Unlike Moses, who gave the children of Israel laws that limited the sins they could commit (and so they found those nasty loopholes), Jesus kept talking about God’s original purposes, His will, His creational intent. The laws in the Torah said things like, “if someone hurts you, then you can only do to them what they did to you and no more.” Jesus said, “if someone hits you, don’t hit them back.” Why did Jesus say that? Because it has never been God’s will for human beings to hurt one another. Jesus was calling people to remember why God created them, and He didn’t create them for violence. This was a way of reminding people that we were created in God’s image and called to be like we were in the very beginning before things went wrong. If we are focused on revenge, we won’t be thinking about God’s purpose, right? We’ll just be thinking about what we can get away with.
The ten commandments tell us not to murder anyone, which is a good commandment, don’t get me wrong. But Jesus goes further. Jesus reminds us that we were also never created to even insult one another or to be angry with each other—after all, the first murder happened because Cain was angry and one thing led to another and his brother ended up dead.
The ten commandments also tell people not to get involved with anyone who isn’t their own husband or wife, but Jesus told people not to even look at anyone else to think about it. People don’t deserve to be looked at and thought about in disrespectful ways. What about the commandment not to lie about other people? Well, Jesus says not to lie to other people either, by saying things in clever ways so that we can get out of telling people the truth. Some religious leaders had created some really crazy rules about how they could make oaths and swear vows that weren’t really true, and not get in trouble for lying, as long as they said them in certain ways. Which, I guess, is great if you know the rules so that you can tell when people are lying to you but not really cool if you think that someone is being genuine and honest. Jesus said that we should just always mean what we say—if we say yes then it has to be an honest answer and if we say no, we can’t be lying. God didn’t create us to play those kinds of games that make it impossible to trust anyone else.
The Torah said that men could divorce their wives if their wives did something terrible. But Jesus reminded them that in the beginning, there was no divorce and God never intended people to betray each other or abandon one another. They wanted to know what they could get away with and Jesus had to tell them what God wanted in the first place, which was for a man and a woman to love and be loyal to one another for ever.
The Torah tells people to love their neighbors as themselves, which is a great commandment but people looking for loopholes came up with two big ones. First, they came up with some creative ways to define who was and was not their neighbor. Not the Samaritans, for sure, and not the gentiles. Not even all of the Jews either, it had to be Jews that they found acceptable. But Jesus made it clear that we were created to be everybody’s neighbor—no exceptions. The second loophole they came up with was to say that, “Well, okay, I have to love my neighbor but that means that I can hate my enemy.” But Jesus said that we have to love and bless and pray for our enemies because, when God created us, He didn’t create us wanting us to hate people, to curse them, and to be cruel to them.
I already told you that people had made laws that it was good to help the poor, like the Torah commands us to do, but in their version you can only help them so much and any more than that is wrong. Jesus once told a rich man to sell absolutely everything he had in the world in order to remind us that we can never give too much to people who are suffering. God didn’t create us so that we could be comfortable and rich, He created us to love one another and to make sure everyone has what they need. Jesus said so many more things and I am sure He even said a lot that no one ever wrote down.
Jesus was showing us that we were asking the wrong questions—it isn’t “what can I get away with doing?” It’s “what did God create me to do?” Eve was wondering what she could get away with when she reached out and took that fruit. When Adam saw she got away with it, then he started wondering what he could get away with. Cain’s bad offering probably happened because he was wondering what he could get away with doing. Lamech took two wives because he wondered what he could get away with. In fact, the Bible is full of terrible stories about what people have done just because they were wondering what they could get away with. A lot of the laws in the Bible were written to try and stop people from trying to get away with things, but when people are really determined, they just find a loophole even though they know darned well that God doesn’t like for us to mess with His love like that.
Talking about His purposes, His will and His creation intentions…He also didn’t intend for us to mess with Him. Just like your caregivers don’t like it when you mess with them. You were created to be better than that—after all, finding loopholes is just another way of lying. When we know what to do and what someone wants us to do, and we use their words against them to find another way to do what we want, we are being incredibly dishonest. Have you ever thought how messed up it is when we mess with God or with the people who love us and need to trust us? Families without trust crumble and fall apart, they get ruined. Just like life in the garden, and just like Adam and Eve’s family, and the earth before the flood. So, when we see a commandment or someone asks us to do or not do something, our response should be a loving one. We need to be honest and say to ourselves, “I know what it says, but what does it mean? What does it mean to love my neighbor? Does it mean to find out who qualifies and then I can do whatever I want to anyone who doesn’t make the list?” Sometimes, the command is very obvious, “Don’t eat that…and so we don’t eat it.” Maybe we’d all be in the Garden right now if people had just followed the 100% absolutely easiest command ever given to anyone in the history of the world.
The truth is that things go wrong and bad things happen and sometimes we are only left with bad choices. We can’t always control that. But we can always choose to try to live the right way. We can do our best. All of our lives are messed up by sin. All we can do is our best and keep moving forward and trying harder.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful time this week studying the Bible together with the people who love you.