After my return from Colorado, I read Genesis over and over, searching the book of beginnings for some clue into what God had in mind for this world. Even after that first landmark rebellion against him, God did not cast off his creation. Genesis tells amazing stories of his continuing personal encounters with humanity.
If I had to reduce the "plot" of Genesis to one sentence, it would be something like this: God learns how to be a parent.* The disruption in Eden changed the world forever, destroying the intimacy Adam and Eve had known with God. In a kind of warmup to history, God and human beings had to get used to each other. The humans set the pace by breaking all the rules, and God responded with individualized punishments. What did it feel like to be God? What does it feel like to be the parent of a two-year-old?
No one could accuse God of being shy to intervene in the early days. He seemed a close, even hovering parent. When Adam sinned, God met with him in person, explaining that all creation would have to adjust to the choice he, Adam, had made. Just one generation later a new kind of horror - murder - appeared on earth. "What have you done?" God demanded of Cain. "Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground." Once again God met with the culprit and custom-designed a punishment.
The state of the earth and, indeed, the entire human race continued to deteriorate toward a point of crisis which the Bible sums up in the most poignant sentence ever written: "The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain." Behind that one statement stands all the shock and grief God felt as a parent.
What human parent has not experienced at least a pang of such remorse? A teenage son tears away in a fit of rebellion. "I hate you!" he cries, fumbling for words that will cause the most pain. He seems bent on twisting a knife in the belly of his parents. That rejection is what God experienced not just from one child, but from the entire human race. As a result, what God had created, God destroyed. All the joy of Genesis 1 vanished under the churning waters of the Flood.
But there was Noah, that one man of faith who "walked with God." After the remorse expressed in Genesis 3 through 7, you can almost hear God sigh with relief as Noah, in his first act back on land, worships the God who had saved him. At last, someone to build on. (Years later, in a message to Ezekiel, God would mention Noah as one of his three most righteous followers.) With the whole planet freshly scrubbed and sprouting life anew, God agreed to a covenant or contract that bound him not just to Noah but to every living creature. It promised one thing only: that God would never again destroy all creation.
You could view the covenant with Noah as the barest minimum of a relationship: one party agrees not to obliterate the other. And yet even in that promise God limited himself. He, the sworn enemy of all evil in the universe, pledged to endure wickedness on this planet for a time - or, rather, to solve it through some means other than annihilation. Like the parent of a runaway teenager, he forced himself into the role of The Waiting Father (as Jesus' story of the Prodigal Son expresses so eloquently). Before long another mass rebellion, at a place called Babel, tested God's resolve, and he kept his promise not to destroy.
In earliest history, then, God acted so plainly that no one could grouse about his hiddenness or silence. Yet those early interventions shared one important feature: each was a punishment, a response to human rebellion. If it was God's intention to have a mature relationship with free human beings, he certainly met with a series of rude setbacks. How could he ever relate to his creation as adults when they kept behaving like children?
* A phrase like "God learns" may seem strange because we normally think of learning as a mental process, moving in sequence from a state of not-knowing to a state of knowing. God, of course, is not bound by time or ignorance. He "learns" in the sense of taking on new experiences, such as the creation of free human beings. Using the word in a similar sense, Hebrews says that Jesus "learned obedience from what he suffered."
