Week 6 Garden of Eden

Small Group Week 6

Adam is created in a special relationship to God.  He is created in God’s image and given authority over God’s creation.

Man as God’s image and authority are related concepts.  It is because man is the image of God that he has authority to rule.  You can see the relationship in Genesis 1:26-28 the  clauses of these verse alternate in an interlocking parallelism that emphasizes this relationship:

Image: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. 

Authority: And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Image: So God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them.

Authority: 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 heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

God is ruling all of creation, but he is doing so through a mediator.  Man is given delegated authority.  

Q.  What does this arrangement sound like?

We have a suzerain-vassal arrangement with God as the suzerain and Adam as the vassal.  

This relationship implies a covenant and in fact traditional covenant theology calls this the Adamic covenant or the Covenant of Works.  The problem is no where is the word covenant used in this text. 

Q.  Is it legitimate to call this a covenant?

1.  Covenant does not have to present in the text for there to be a covenant, e.g.

2 Samuel 7 is later in scripture referred to as the Davidic covenant but the word covenant is not used in the text.

2.  Hosea 6:7 “But like Adam, they (Israel) transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me.”

3.  Romans 5 draws a parallel between Adam and Israel and says that Adam like Israel has committed transgression.  The word transgression is a technical word used in almost case to describe Israel’s failure to keep the Mosaic covenant.  

So if we are right that there is a covenant between God and Adam even though the word covenant is not used, what are the elements of this covenant:

Stipulations: 

1. Be fruitful and multiple  - fill the earth with other images of God

2. Have dominion over the earth  

3. Not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

4. Tend and guard the garden - phrase used to describe the activity of the Levitical priests in their duty of preventing unclean or unholy things from entering the temple.

5. Name the animals - an exercise of dominion

Next week we discuss what fulfilling these stipulations would have looked like.  We will also discuss the sanctions of the covenant represented by the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the tree of life, and the goal of man's project symbolized by the Sabbath.