What in the world is God doing? And what does religion have to do with it? I know it may sound a little strange to ask, but asking strange questions is sometimes what teachers do.

Man is very prolific in religion-building. But, very often, his religions have very little to do with what God is doing. So, we’ve been looking around in the Book of Genesis for some clues—as I imagine he runs a little deeper than we may first expect.

First, a question: who is this we’re dealing with? His name is not God, you know. God is what he is, not who he is. The word God has been used so much, made its way into our language in so many different ways, that we have to take care to be sure what we’re talking about. Here, in the beginning of the Bible, what are the names God is called by—and what do they mean to us today?

I have a sense that a lot of us are frightened these days. It isn’t the hair-raising fear that gives us an adrenaline rush. It is the slow dread that creeps up on us in the night and denies sleep. And it really doesn’t help to say, Don’t worry, everything will be all right. I’m not so sure that FDR’s We have nothing to fear except fear itself, would be any help either.

It might help a little if the politicians and the news media would stop trying to scare everyone to death. What the politicians have done is impress upon our minds that the situation is truly beyond their control.

It isn’t merely that they don’t know what to do. There really is nothing they can do to roll back the laws of human nature. If we can believe the news sources available to us (I’ll admit that is a very big if), we are entering a new era in the world.

It must have been terrifying being on Noah’s ark for all those days—closed up inside, unable to see the sky, hearing a pouring torrent beat the roof, and feeling the whole shop rock to and fro with the waves. But, you know, the most terrifying part of this experience must have been knowing that, outside the ark, everyone and everything, was dying. The people who had been cooped up in that boat emerged totally changed.

It’s no wonder that the tradition of the flood is found in nearly every tribe on Earth. After all, every one of us is descended from these eight people. We are all one family. Genesis 11 tells us that the whole earth was of one language and one speech.

That certainly is not the case today. How did that change? What can these few chapters in Genesis tell us about how people in the ancient world dealt with issues we still face in the modern age?

Sometimes the Bible can be very disturbing. One reason is because the Bible presents ideas that upset us when they are not what we want to hear. Most of us have a personal theology and our own unique way of looking at God. We then tend to see everything we read in that light.

But the problem is that sometimes the Bible is so plain we cannot escape what it is saying. We will run into some things that are very troubling—things that don’t fit in with our personal theology. But when we encounter something in the Bible that conflicts with that personal theology, maybe it is time to re-think it.

Let’s take another look, for example, at the Book of Genesis, chapter 6, and the story of the great flood.

People get some really strange ideas about the Bible. There are those who believe, for example, that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was sex or that Cain was the result of some union between Eve and the serpent. They pay no mind to what the Bible says.

There is a law called the Law of Parsimony which says roughly that of two arguments presented the shorter and simpler one is more likely to be true. Why make something complicated out of something simple?

But we can always learn more—even from relatively straightforward stories—and clear up some misconceptions. So let’s take another look at Genesis, chapters four through six, from the lives of Cain and Abel to the calling of Noah.

If there’s one story in the Bible that is familiar to everyone, it’s the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. For one thing, people who start out to read the Bible naturally start at the beginning. A lot of times they make it about to Leviticus 6 and they just get lost or give up. Some time later, they return and they go back to Genesis. There’s no point in going back to Leviticus 6, is there? And they read the story of Adam and Eve all over again.

It would be a rare person who doesn’t know who Adam and Eve were, and that they lived in the Garden of Eden. But this familiarity means that there are hundreds of different theories about Adam and Eve—none of them really compelling. Was the Forbidden Fruit an apple? It is generally taken for that. Or was it sex? Was the Devil a snake?

I’ve advanced a few theories on Genesis, myself. Everyone who believes in God is an implicit theologian. And who’s to say your theories are not as good as anyone else’s? It’s good enough to direct your walk of faith. But you do want your theology to be informed. And you are willing to modify it as you learn, right? Why don’t we take a walk through the Garden of Eden and see if we can develop our own theory of the case. The story in question starts in Genesis 2:7.

Here we are once again in the political silly season. And you know, it’s a hard time for Christians to keep our hats on straight. And there’s no time that’s more important that we do keep our hats on straight because our’s is a government of the people and by the people. And, since we Christians fall in that broad category called the people, we are responsible before God for what this government does.

Now, what do I mean when I say it’s hard for us to keep our hats on straight? Well, there are two broad categories of Christians at large in the world. (Listen to this carefully now.) There are Christians who read the Bible regularly and there are Christians who don’t. Now I can throw the numbers at you, but you know I’m right on that. About a third of Christians read something from the Bible at least once a week. About a third reads something from the Bible once a year or less. The other third, well, they’re somewhere in between.

Now, I don’t’ have any statistics, but my reading suggests that in the eighteenth century those numbers were very different from what they are today. For one thing, in the seventeen hundreds, books were a lot more scarce than they are now. They were expensive. Many families may have only had one book in the house and it was—guess what—the Bible. Many people learned to read from the Bible. Books were expensive; books were rare. And while the founders of our country were careful not to establish any religion for very good reasons, they were all biblically literate and they governed the people who were biblically literate. So when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, he didn’t speak of this or that God; he spoke of the Creator. That was a good thing. What our founders and presidents personally believed was not important. That they publicly acknowledged the Creator as the guarantee of the rights of man, now that was very important. So, where did the idea germinate that this is, or was back then, a Christian nation?

Well, it was because people read the Bible and their lifestyle and their human relations were influenced by the Bible, if not governed by it. Now mind you, I’m not talking about reading the Bible and then trying to preach it to your neighbor. I’m talking about living a life influenced by the Bible which, in turn, influences the people with whom you come into contact. The influence of the Bible on early American society was indirect, but pervasive. And the influence of Christian conduct on society was powerful. Not in any authoritative structure. No Christian wants a theocracy, but in the structure of example, persuasion and influence. Whether we like it or not, the strongest influence on the moral fiber of this young nation was the Bible. Let's look at how Jesus said it in Matthew, chapter 13.

You aren’t under any stress, are you? The funny thing about that question is that most people will answer that question with something like, No. Not really. But, in reality, far too many people are suffering from things like anxiety, high blood pressure, insomnia, depression, chronic fatigue, and an array of stress-related conditions.

How did we get here? Why are we being eating up with these illnesses? The answer could be that we work hard. In fact, the problem is that we think we have to work harder than God.

But God actually gave us a tool to deal with stress. But it is all too often ignored. What is it? Turn to chapter 2 of Genesis and we’ll take a look.

Referenced Works:

• From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity by Samuele Bacchiocchi