Many years ago when I was a Pastor, a very troubled teen in our youth group asked me whether a Christian could believe in evolution. Steve had experienced a number of crises of faith, including condemnation by a former minister for his views on evolution. These things had contributed to several suicide attempts, including shooting himself. I promised Steve that I would preach a sermon about evolution, and this is what I came up with. Eventually he went off to college and engaged in graduate work in biology.
Creation and Evolution
First Story
1:26 Then ’Elohim [God] said, “Let us make humanity (’adam) in Our image (betzalmenu) after Our likeness (kedimenu). They shall have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the entire earth, and over all the creatures that creep upon the earth.” 27 So ’Elohim created (wa-yibra’) humanity (’adam) in His image (betzalmo), in the image (betzelem) of ‘Elohim He created (bara’) it; male (zakhar) and female (nekebah) He created (bara’) them. 28 ’Elohim blessed them, and ’Elohim said to them, “Be fertile and increase, and fill the earth and master it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over all the living creatures that creep upon the earth.” 29 ’Elohim said, “See, I have given you [plural] every seed-bearing plant that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food. 30 And to all the animals on the earth, to all the birds of the sky, and to all the creatures that creep upon the earth, every living creature (nephesh hayyah), I give all the green plants for food.” And it was so. 31 And ’Elohim saw everything that He had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.
Second Story
2:7 Then Yahweh [the LORD] ’Elohim [God] formed (way-yitzer) humanity (’adam) from the dust of the ground (’adamah), and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life (nishmat hayyim), and humanity (’adam) became a living creature (nephesh hayyah). . . . 15 Yahweh ’Elohim took the human creature (’adam) and placed it in the garden of Eden, to till (literally, “to serve”) it and to keep (literally, “to guard”) it. . . . 18 Then Yahweh ’Elohim said, “It is not good for the human creature (’adam) to be alone. I will make (’e‘eseh-lo) for it a suitable counterpart (‘ezer kenegddo).” 19 So Yahweh ’Elohim formed (way-yitzer) out of the ground (’adamah) all the wild animals of the field and all the birds of the sky, and brought them to the human creature (’adam) to see what it would call them. And whatever the human creature (’adam) called each living creature (nephesh hayyah), that would be its name. 20 And the human creature (’adam) gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky, and to all the wild animals of the field; but for the human creature (’adam) itself, no suitable counterpart (’ezer kenegddo) was found. 21 So Yahweh ’Elohim cast a deep sleep (tarddemah) upon the human creature, and it slept; then He took one of its ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot. 22 And Yahweh ’Elohim formed (way-yiben) into a woman (’ishshah) the rib that He had taken from the human creature (’adam) and He brought her to the (hu)man (’adam). 23 Then the (hu)man (’adam) said,
“This one at last
is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh.
This one shall be called “woman” (’ishshah),
For from a “man” (’ish) this one was taken.”
We have just read from parts of the two creation stories in the early chapters of Genesis. In both accounts we get the immediate impression that everything in creation is secondary to humanity. In Genesis everything that is said about plants and animals, sun and moon, etc., is only prologue or introduction. The curtain does not rise on the story until human beings enter and begin to play their role as the crown of God’s creation. In chapter 1 the plants and animals are created first, and the human creature is created last, both male and female at the same time, as the crown of God’s creation.
In chapter 2 a human creature is created first, but God concludes that it is not good for the human creature to be alone, so God creates all of the lesser creatures. These still do not satisfy the human creature’s need, so God creates a companion almost exactly like the first one. And it is only when the female companion is taken from the human creature’s rib that humanity is differentiated into male and female.
Now just who is this human creature? What is its role in the Genesis stories? The creature’s Hebrew name is’adam, a word translated in the rest of the Bible as “humanity,” “human-kind,” or “man,” in a generic rather than a sexual sense. As I read further in the story I read about talking snakes, about fruit trees, not called apple or cherry trees, but rather, “the Tree-of-the-knowledge-of-good-and-evil,” and “the Tree-of-Life.” The man's wife's eventually receives the name “Eve,” (Hebrew: hawwah) the common Hebrew word that is elsewhere always translated “Life” or “Living.”
Immediately we remember stories like the Pilgrim's Progress. There a character named “Christian” meets the tests of life on his way to the “City of God,” He passes along the way such places as the “Slough of Despond,” the “Vanity Fair,” the “Interpreter's House,” etc., and he meets persons with names like “True-Heart” and “Faithful.”
Now all of this is the language of symbolism, of allegory, and of parable. I may not be required to take it all literally as history, but I am certainly meant to take it at least as seriously as one of the parables of Jesus, or the parable the prophet Nathan once told to King David. You will recall that in Nathan's story, David asked Nathan just who the chief villain was, and Nathan replied, “You are the man!” Well, the Jewish Rabbis of the time of Jesus had a saying about the creation stories: “Every person has been the ’adam of his own soul.”
The Rabbis recognized what we too ought to recognize in Genesis—that you and I are ’adam (and Noah, and Cain and Abel, and the builders of the Tower of Bab-El)! This is our story. These first 11 chapters of Genesis are a mirror held up to our life. Read them and point to yourself, saying, “You are the man [or woman]!” and they will be an even greater blessing to you.
Well then, what is the role that the human beings play in the stories we read in Genesis 1 and 2? If you go to a movie and are at all interested in it you will probably find out beforehand who the stars of the movie are, who the director or producer or writer is. You may also try to learn something about the plot. But few people really take time to ask about the drama of their own lives. “Just what is really being played out here? What is the script about?” But everything depends on knowing these things, and Genesis gives us that script. Just what is the meaning of our life? Is it just a journey into the wild blue yonder that never gets anywhere?
Some people find the script in humanity’s animal origins and get hung up on evolutionary theories, the survival of the fittest, and so forth. They would say that a human being is just another animal, fulfilling the role of any other animal—struggling to survive, to reproduce himself, and eventually to die. Other people tell us that the stars determine the script of a person’s life. And they give us all kinds of horoscopes to determine the future and the present for us.
But the Bible defines a person’s role in life by setting that person in relationship to God. The thing that strikes us from the beginning here in Genesis is that, despite his kinship with the plants and the animals and nature, humanity still remains remarkably unique in the world. Elsewhere God speaks about the things He created, “Let there be . . . .” And thus they have their existence.
But humans are different, and they are created in a different way. God addresses human beings as “You.” To a human being God says, “You shall” and “You shall not.” This is precisely what constitutes the uniqueness of human beings as opposed to the rest of the animal world and all other created things. Human beings can have fellowship with God and a relationship with Him.
Something else can be said. The egg of a chicken will always become a chicken; the embryo of a dog will always become a dog. The process cannot go wrong. But what about a human embryo? An animal cannot fail to fulfil its destiny. But what about human beings? The human being is a kind of risk of God. A human child can grow up to be human or inhuman. He or she can grow up and make the wrong choices time after time, sabotage the plans of God for his or her life, waste his or her talents, and throw away his or her destiny, until all finally ends up in the pigpen with the prodigal son.
All too often that happens. We can come onto the stage of God’s world, just as ’Adam did, and play the wrong role. And at our final judgment we may find written in red ink on the margin of the script of our life, the conclusion: “You missed the point!” It’s a terrifying possibility, but it’s a part of the dignity and the freedom of being human. We can have direct contact with God, and if we fall away from God we can’t blame our stars or our environment or our heredity, because we are directly responsible to our Creator for what we have done with our freedom.
But there is another truth in Genesis that is echoed through the rest of the Bible: namely, that because God created us, we belong to Him. And even when we fall away from Him, He faithfully remembers us and wants to draw us back. Even when we stand in our presumption beside some Tree-of-the-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil or at the top of some Tower of Bab-El trying to storm Heaven to become equal with God, we belong to Him. Even when we slink away into some pig sty in a far country, or when we just let ourselves become indifferent to God, God still wants us back, and calls to us as to ’Adam, “’Adam, where are you?”
Now I have a footnote in closing. Some of you may be thinking, “All of that sounds well and good. But is it true? Can you really take those old-fashioned stories from the Book of Genesis so seriously without doing violence to my intelligence? After all, the Bible says I was made from a clod of earth, but my science courses tell me that the human race developed biologically from lower animal forms over millions of years. Doesn’t evolution disprove the Bible, with its interesting little parables about the creation and “fall” of human beings?
But if you ask the question that way, I think it is the wrong question. You see, I can ask about the biological origins of human beings and receive the answer from science that human beings descended in some way from “lower” animal forms over millions of years. Or I can ask, “Why is humankind here in the first place? What is the human’s role in the scheme of things? What is the destiny of humanity? What is God’s intention for an individual human being?” and the answer I get from the Bible is that every human being was designed to be one of God’s children, that each one was intended for fellowship with God in Jesus Christ. I must not get the two questions mixed up.
I don’t sin against faith if I accept the verdict of science (which, hopefully will continue to be open to new evidence) that tells us that humans developed from the animal kingdom over a period of several million years. One truth cannot contradict another truth, whether they be scientific or religious truths.
But I sin against faith if I assert that I derive the essence of human existence and human destiny, and the very meaning of human life from those pre-human biological origins. If I do that, then the answer I get is that a human being is just another animal that must live by the instinct to devour, to breed, and to plunder. Then human history would be just another chapter in a textbook on general biology.
But the Biblical faith is something more than that. We need not deny that human beings are “animals” from a biological point of view, regardless of what we believe about evolution. But that is true only from a biological point of view. In his essential being a human being is something else. This is because at some point in time, whether at the moment of an instantaneous creation, or at some point in those millions of years of evolutionary development, God called men and women by their names. God summoned them before His presence, and bestowed on them the dignity of human person-hood that God never gave to any other animal.
It is of this one point that the Bible speaks when we read that “The LORD God breathed into the human creature’s nostrils the breath of life and the human creature became a living being.” At this point God caused human beings to rise above the ranks of other creatures, whatever they might have been before, and made them something special. This is the decisive point of our becoming human in relationship to God.
You can understand humanity only if you put human beings in relationship to the One Who gives them their life, the One Who calls them by name, the One Who sacrifices His most beloved for them on Calvary, and the One Who never rests until He has brought humanity out of the pigsty in the far country and returned them home to the peace of the Father’s house. It is a person’s relationship to the One Who does those things that determines the real meaning of his or her existence.
This sermon has been adapted from, and is heavily dependent upon, a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Helmut Thielicke of Hamburg, “Creation and Evolution, Faith and Science,” in his book, How the World Began: Man in the First Chapters of the Bible (Philadelphia, Fortress Press: 1961; trans. by John W. Doberstein from the German edition, Wie die Welt began. Der Mensch in die Urgeschichte der Bibel, Stuttgart, Germany: Quell Verlag, 1960. The translations are my own, based on translations of Dr. Carol Meyers of Duke University and that of Tanakh, the New Jewish Publication Society version (1985).
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