The basic guidelines for interpreting Genesis 1–3 derive from Scripture itself. If we follow the guide of Scripture, we will read Genesis 1–3 with understanding. We will not have all our questions answered, because Genesis 1–3 does not say everything that could be said about the details of how God did things. Much remains mysterious.

ABSTRACT: The beginning of the book of Genesis is not, as some claim, a mythical or poetic account of creation. It is historical narrative, telling the same story that unfolds in the patriarchs, the exodus, and the establishment of Israel. And, being from God, it speaks truly. Modern readers may not learn everything they would like to know about creation from Genesis 1–3, but they will find everything they most need to know. They also will find an account of creation unlike anything outside the Bible. Compared to the creation myths of Israel’s neighbors, Genesis stands majestically alone.
How do we interpret Genesis 1–3 in a sound way? It is not so easy to find out just by listening to and reading modern interpreters. There are many voices, and they disagree with one another.
I have only one main piece of advice. We learn how to read Genesis 1–3 wisely in the same way that we learn to read the rest of the Bible wisely. And how is that? By taking to heart what the Bible itself says. Several aspects of biblical teaching need to be taken into account.
Let us begin with a foundational issue: the nature of God.
Who God Is

Does God exist? And what kind of God is he? Is he a God who can create the world, in the way that Genesis 1 describes? Is he the kind of God who could fashion the first woman from the rib of Adam, as Genesis 2:21–22 describes? Is he the kind of God who can speak in an audible voice from the top of Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:9–20:22; Deuteronomy 5:2–22)? Is he the kind of God who can multiple five loaves and two fish, so that they feed five thousand men (John 6)?
Most of elite culture in the modern Western world does not believe in a God like that. Rather, the culture is deeply influenced by philosophical materialism, which says that matter is the ultimate constituent of the world. If some kind of a god exists, he is not involved in the world in the way that the Bible describes. He is not a God who speaks or who works miracles.
In addition, some people are influenced by New Age mysticism. They believe in various kinds of spiritual influence. But their “god,” if they call it that, is an aspect of nature.
The issue of God is monumentally important. If God is not a God such as the Bible describes, then either the Bible is a lie or it has to be radically reinterpreted. And that is what people do. Much of the academic study of the Bible at major universities of the world takes place under the assumption that the way we read the Bible must harmonize with modern ideas about the world. Hence, this academic study corrupts the Bible. And then this corruption travels out into general culture.
But in fact, God exists — the same God that the Bible describes. Therefore, the elite people in Western culture are walking in the dark about God. It is the culture, not the Bible, that has to be radically reinterpreted. Genesis 1–3 is one text — a crucial text — that shows the massive difference between the Bible’s view of God and common modern Western views.
The first point, then, is that when we read the Bible, we need to reckon with who God is.
The Divine Authorship of the Bible

A second issue concerns the nature of the Bible. It is the word of God. It is what God says.
One principal reason for the diversity of readings of Genesis 1–3 is an underlying diversity of opinion about what kind of text the Bible is. Much of the academic study of Genesis takes place with the assumption that God is not the author of Genesis. In effect, academics deny the divine inspiration of the Bible. This denial follows directly from the prior assumption that God does not speak. According to modern Western thinking, either God does not exist, or he was not involved in the writing of Genesis in a special way. Or, if he was involved somehow, he deferred pretty much to the human author or authors. One way or another, these people discount divine meaning and search only for human meaning.
Clearly, the issue of divine authorship makes a difference in what meanings come out at the end, because a misjudgment about who the author is leads to a misjudgment about what he means. Or, according to some postmodern interpretive approaches, verbal texts and the readers who interact with texts float in a sea of meanings, more or less independent of either God or human authors. But this kind of multiplication of meanings is a mistake, because it discounts the unique authority of God to say what he means and to do so with unique authority.
So it is worthwhile asking whether the Bible teaches divine authorship. It does, in any number of places. Second Peter 1:21 says, “No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” This verse affirms a role for human authors: “men spoke . . .” But it emphasizes that the more ultimate and decisive author is God: “men spoke from God”; and “they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Jesus himself affirms the divine authority of the Old Testament in a number of places and a number of ways (Matthew 5:17–20; 19:4–5; 26:54; John 10:35). Interested readers can consult any number of books by evangelical authors, showing how the Bible affirms its own divine authorship and authority (2 Timothy 3:16).
Since God is a God of truth (John 3:33), his word is truth (John 17:17). He can be trusted. The Bible can be trusted, because it is his word. That must be our attitude as we read Genesis 1–3 — and every other passage in the Bible.
So here, in the fact of divine authorship, we have a second central principle in interpreting the Bible. We read and study it with respect and trust, rather than distrust. Just as we must reinterpret modern Western culture in its view of God, so, for the same reason, we must avoid imitating the distrust that the culture has toward the Bible. We avoid also the human temptation to pick and choose the meanings that please our prior preferences, or picking and choosing to believe only those parts of the Bible that line up with our preferences. That picking and choosing makes sense only for people who have already rejected God.
The Genre of Genesis

Next, let us ask what kind of a book Genesis is. In accord with the richness of who God is, what God says in the Bible includes a variety of forms or genres of literature. God chooses a variety of ways of communicating, in order that we may absorb what he says and grow in communion with him in a variety of complementary ways. The book of Psalms, for example, is a collection of poetic songs and prayers. In the Gospels, we find sermons of Jesus (such as the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5–7), parables, records of miracles, records of healings, and the record of the crucifixion. The Bible has prophetic books like Isaiah that contain exhortations, recollections of God’s past dealings, and predictions about the future. There are historical books, such as 1–2 Kings, that have a record of past events in the history of Israel.
Each literary section of the Bible was crafted by God, as well as by the human author (2 Peter 1:21). It is exactly what God designed to say, not only in its contents, but also in all its details, including the features of genre. If we respect God, then we should take into account how he chooses to communicate. It would be a mistake, for example, if an interpreter were to treat Jesus’s parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3–7) as if it were a prosaic nonfictional account that is merely about one shepherd and one sheep. It is a fictional story with a spiritual point. The point is indicated at the end: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). Jesus also indicates near the beginning of the parable that it is hypothetical, rather than an actual case in real life: “. . . if he [the shepherd] has lost one of them [the sheep], . . .” (Luke 15:4).
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In the midst of the worst of this, I don’t think I doubted the truth of the scriptures, either. That was part of the problem: scary passages felt like chains binding me, guns pointed at my head. But it meant also that I could hang on to the passages of unequivocal grace. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” “The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.” There is nothing original that I can offer here: these are uncompromising promises about God’s trustworthiness in his character and in his love of each of us, and of those we love. I held on to these white-knuckled. And then, gradually, you realize that you don’t need to hold on that tightly, because you yourself are held.

I love being a Christian.
I mean, I love Jesus too. But I also love all the rest of it: Brunch after church with friends, hylomorphism, late-night Eucharist on Christmas Eve, and carols and stollen and roast beef and friends’ children whom I have known and loved since they were born, dressed in deeply miscellaneous animal and animal-adjacent costumes for the pageant. C.S. Lewis and John Donne and Charles De Koninck, Durham Cathedral and St. Cuthbert’s tomb, tucked away absentmindedly behind the high altar, the Aksum Empire and the Holy Roman Empire and all the little communes of monks and anabaptists, who read Acts 2 and 4 and decided to just go ahead and do it; stoles and copes and incense and candles; neoplatonism and canon law and postliberalism and hot cross buns.
And knowing that I am called to a high calling, that nothing good will be lost, that there are no ordinary people, that death has been killed, that our God and King has given us his body to eat, his blood to drink. I love it. I love the experience of being a Christian, and I also think it’s true, so there’s that.
But there have been times when I have found belief to be almost unbearable. And I’ve met enough other people who have shared this particular difficulty that I think my story might be worth writing down.
I was sixteen when I was baptized, but it wasn’t until grad school that I started more seriously to try to follow Jesus. In the decade after that grad school conversion, I went through various … well, in retrospect I’d call them attacks, or something. Episodes. Times I couldn’t stop thinking. I would call them, now, ruminations, though I didn’t have that language then. They came in three varieties:
First, an inability to stop thinking about the idea that God might not be good, might not be trustworthy, if Calvinism was right. Second, a sense of “I can’t live in a world where some people may be going to hell.”
Third, I also at various points felt intensely guilty about things which an objective observer would not say that I ought to feel guilty about. Can I spend time doing anything other than evangelism, or serving the poor? Does God want me to enjoy nature and read novels, or are these things worldly, of the flesh? How can I enjoy anything while abortion is an ongoing reality in this world, in my country?
These circling thoughts led to a kind of exhaustion about my own attempts to make sense of everything, and a sort of grief, a nostalgia for a time when I was just a secular person, not needing to worry about any of this stuff. I felt alienated from non-Christians and even from Christians who didn’t share my intensity and anguish.
And maybe a couple of times, at the worst of these moments, I felt like I was presented with a choice: you can cease to believe, or you can pray for faith. And I prayed for faith.
That choice didn’t feel like it would change reality. What it felt like was that I was given the option to become … a non-player character, somehow. Taking the blue pill, and so on: living in the psychological comfort apostasy offered.
Scrupulosity is agonizing. I had the worried-I-was-sinning kind, too, though usually I worried I was sinning by omission. But the ruminations: those are a real bear.
I’m not sure when I first heard that word — scrupulosity. I think at some point I probably googled “religious OCD,” which is more or less what it is, and what I could feel that it was. It’s been a weird blessing in my life that before my adult conversion, I’d experienced what might be called secular OCD: obsessive-compulsive disorder unrelated to Christianity. How OCD works is that it makes what feel like moral threats: your moral safety, or physical safety, is at risk; you are both unsafe and in the wrong, and performing various rituals (handwashing, not stepping on cracks: the disorder is varied in what it comes up with but it does seem to come up with the same things frequently) is what will put you morally and physically right again.
Very frequently what you care about most is what the disorder “chooses” to threaten you about: “wash your hands just right or your child will die and it will be your fault,” that kind of thing. Those with this disorder are not delusional: You always know on some level that the threat isn’t real, it’s irrational, and because of that, the disorder can be profoundly embarrassing. “Don’t mind me, just going to ummm… wash my hands seven times and then turn off the tap with the backs of my hands… for… reasons… you go ahead and start dinner.”
It started when I was around twelve, and I got a diagnosis fairly briskly and ended up at various points doing various kinds of treatments — medication, cognitive behavioral therapy — which all helped enormously. Because I am who I am, I also, in my teens, became deeply emotionally connected to Samuel Johnson, who had it pretty bad: he felt the need to touch each lamp-post as he passed it, walking the streets of London; he feared hell profoundly and often couldn’t find peace about that. I used to imagine inventing a time machine and going back in time to bring Dr. Johnson Prozac-spiked brownies; I figured that would be less likely to cause unfortunate changing-the-timeline butterfly effects than trying to explain enough contemporary neuroscience to him to convince him to take pills. I also didn’t want him to worry about what the implication of the efficacy of meds on this anxiety disorder was for the existence of the soul — he had enough religious ruminations of his own — but I worried about it. (I also, full disclosure, had a pretty intense crush on him).
The solution to that (the worry about the implication of the efficacy of the meds on the existence of the soul, not the crush) at least was to get better theology. If wine can make your heart merry, or doing shots of Jägermeister can disastrously lower your inhibitions, it’s not a problem in theological anthropology that a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) can dial down the anxiety enough to let you make the choice to ignore the OCD-threat.
The way this works, as best we can tell, is that it’s the repeated ignoring of those threats, that disciplined exercise of the will, that ultimately rewires those neural pathways; the meds just make the threats… quieter, the choice to ignore easier to make. That systematic building of good habits, of evaluating your own thoughts and feelings and being able to choose how to respond to them is what cognitive behavioral therapy does. You use your mind, reason, and will to physically reshape your brain.
It’s not actually very different than what a Book-of-Proverbs approach to becoming better at being a human being might be. The whole package of treatment begins to look, in fact, precisely the way one would expect if we were in fact bodysouls, rather than souls inhabiting bodies, and if we were rational creatures with an immaterial intellect which can operate via the will; in other words as if human anthropology and ethics work the way St. Thomas says they do when he talks about virtue. Just to say.
So anyway, post-high school, the OCD was pretty much dealt with. And then, after college, I started going to a Vineyard church (I’m Anglican now, if you couldn’t tell from all the flagrant scholasticism) and started actually spending time with people who believed that Jesus was, for real, not at all dead. And then I found that I really actually believed that too. And the stakes in life suddenly became much higher.
Conversion is always disorienting. But God gave me a time to work through the normal confusions of new Christianity: the sense that there is nothing that one can hold back, the realization that there are no guarantees that God will make ahead of time, for example, that you won’t eventually need to be martyred; all the normal pricks of an awakened conscience; all the joy and amazement of the first Christmas where you find out that the carols you’ve been singing your whole life contain treasures which had somehow been hidden from you, lines that are suddenly alive and blazing with glory: “veiled in flesh the Godhead see/hail th’incarnate Deity/pleased as man with man to dwell/Jesus, our Emmanuel.”
But within the first two years after I converted, I had my first major bout of scrupulosity.
As I’ve said, the feeling of OCD is one of profound danger and also of a bad conscience, in a way. It can overlap with “real conscience,” but it’s distinct enough, if you know it, to recognize. There was something going on here that was not just “what reality is like,” “what being a sinner and having a bad conscience is like,” or “what Christianity is like.”
I’m an extremely curious person and I’m also a nerd, particularly when it comes to history and historical theology. What I found, after I started digging, is that scrupulosity is a known spiritual malady that pastors have been saying “oy, not this again” about for two thousand years. It’s also a neurological OCD-related condition that can be treated on that basis, and confessors and spiritual directors have used cognitive behavioral therapy-like tools for most of the last two millennia to do just that.
The classical Protestant experience of scrupulosity is the lack of “assurance” of salvation which is read as evidence of a lack of election. A more contemporary Protestant experience is the fear that one hasn’t “been saved” properly, that sure, you said the Sinner’s Prayer but it kinda seems like maybe it didn’t … take. It is not, however, the case that Catholic spirituality is without its own specific pitfalls about scrupulosity. A classical Catholic experience is the fear that you didn’t remember everything you needed to confess and that therefore you are not safe in taking the Eucharist; this has kept many people away from the Mass for years.
As I mentioned above, there are two pretty distinct versions of scrupulosity. There’s the one that resembles “secular” OCD and which leads sufferers to either perform repetitive prayers (not as in liturgical prayer, but as in a self-imposed “I have to say exactly these words with exactly the right emphasis and feelings for it to count”) or to confess over and over again (Luther’s poor confessor!) in order to “feel like they’ve gotten it right.” And then there’s the delightful experience of repetitive, racing thoughts, ruminations over theological questions, which one feels like one must resolve in order to be at peace. Neither makes for a particularly good time.
OCD has been called the “doubting disease.” Did I really turn off that gas burner? Did I really lock the door? I think I did, I remember doing it… but if I did, why do I doubt so profoundly that I did, why do I feel in danger? Better check. In other words, subjective uncertainty presents itself as something to pay attention to, something that gives good information. In non-religious OCD, one learns to talk back to one’s mind: “yes, I know you are subjectively uncertain, but that has nothing to do with reality.”
The Puritanism which is so beloved of the New Calvinism has, as one of its signature ideas (although one might, and many have, argued that this is a distortion of the actual teaching) that a subjective assurance of salvation is a necessary mark of true salvation. This idea was carried over into some versions of the revivalism of both Great Awakenings. Anxiety becomes part of the process. One sits on the “anxious bench,” until one receives assurance. Those with an unaddressed anxiety disorder can sit there for a long, long time.
Am I saved? Am I right before God? It is a question that can lead to repentance, to baptism, to a life of discipleship. It can also, in a baptized person with every reason to trust that God’s promises apply to him, now adopted into Christ’s family, be the content of irrational ruminations. But so can “Can God be trusted?” and “Does God want my family to be saved?” And this can get very very refined indeed — as refined as your theology: “is ‘good’ meant equivocally or analogically when we predicate it of God? Are you sure? But are you sure? How about ‘love’? Is monergism true? What can it mean that God desires all men to be saved if monergism is true? How can I trust that he wants me to be? Better think about this for five hours in the middle of the night to try to solve it.”
I suppose most Christians have bouts of something like this at some point; we’re all on something of a spectrum, with many of these kinds of mental distress. Anxious hearts are a common human malady, which God addresses; and of course some anxiety is good, some fears are real. How to distinguish between this and scrupulosity which ought to be treated as such? I can only tell my story. Probably the best thing would be to talk to your pastor; ask him if he even knows the word scrupulosity; that’s a good start. Above all, do not attempt to go it alone.
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According to Paul, all those whom God foreknows, he also predestines.  Predestination refers to the particular end for which his elect are chosen–to be conformed to the image of Christ (as spelled out in the final link in the golden chain, glorification–verse 30).  Those foreknown are predestined, and those predestined are called.  Calling occurs when the gospel is preached, and God’s elect respond to that message with faith.

When Christians speak of the “ordo salutis” we are referring to the “order of salvation.”  While we should qualify any discussion of such an “order” by affirming that an omniscient God does not need to do things in sequential order as we do, nevertheless there is a logical order to the way in which God saves us from sin and its consequences.  Since we are described as “dead in sin” (Ephesians 2:1-5) and unable to do anything to save ourselves from our dire predicament (John 6:44), God must act upon us while we are still “dead” in order to save us from our sins.  The ordo salutis is simply an attempt to understand what actions God takes to save us, and in what logical order he accomplishes them.
This is not an abstract concept because Scripture itself speaks of our salvation as being accomplished for us according to a divinely-ordained progression.  The first of these passages is the so called “golden chain” of salvation found in Romans 8:28-30.  In that passage Paul writes,
and we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.  For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.  And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
The passage has been described as the golden chain because Paul not only speaks of an unbreakable order to the plan by which God saves us (the chain), but the apostle is clear that our salvation from beginning to end is the work of a gracious and sovereign God, who having begun the process of our salvation, sees it through to the end (the gold).  There is no sense that some of those chosen by God are eventually rejected, or that there is something good within the sinner which moves God to have pity on them and then act on their behalf.
Although Paul reminds his reader that God has the power to turn all things to good (v. 28), he quickly goes on to qualify that this applies to only those who are called according to God’s purpose.  Therefore, when the gospel is preached to us, God effectually calls his elect to faith in Jesus Christ.  God’s call involves several important elements (i.e., the ordo salutis).
Paul speaks of those foreknown by God as being predestined.  Some have erroneously taken this to mean that God looks down the corridors of time and then chooses to save those whom he knows in advance will believe the gospel when it is preached to them.
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