Downloadable version of the genesis creation story

The second account of creation Genesis b—25 describes how God created man, created the Garden of Eden, then made Adam a female companion. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.

The fall of Adam and Eve is a continuation of the anthropocentric account of creation in Genesis Chapter 2. This story raises a few questions. She, of course, chooses to eat the fruit and then offers it to Adam, who also partakes. Instead, they hide in fear after realizing they are naked — so their rebellion was futile. Also, if Adam and Eve could gain knowledge of good and evil, this presupposes that evil — or at least the potential for evil — already existed in the world.

It must already exist if knowledge of it exists. Regardless, the end result is God kicking Adam and Eve out of the Garden, thus punishing them for their transgressions. Biblical scholars often associate these two creation stories to different time frames. The first, presumed to be written by priestly caste of ancient Israel after their Babylonian captivity, is often compared with the ancient Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish.

Usually, chaos gods are defeated by younger gods and in the process, humanity is created out of their drama. The Enuma Elish is the oldest of these myths. Both are associated with water: Apsu representing waters lying under the earth and Tiamat representing the seas lying above. God bless you!

My husband and I serve smaller churches so I really appreciate these treasures that I can print for free! Thank God I saw this. Big help like us here from Philippines. Be blessed continually. Thanks so much for making it easy for us to minister to our children.

The Creation story is so important for them to know. God bless you greatly. We can overcome anything through the Word of God. May God bless your work!! Hello man of God thanks a lot for this great and noble work. We need this in our churches for many have forgotten the children ministry. I am ready to work with you from Kisii Kenya Africa.

God bless and keep you. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Let There Be Light. As any great story must, the history has villains and it has heroes. The writer believed that his story would not be complete without an explanation of how things--the sun, the earth, the seas—and life--plants, animals, and humans--came to be.

For good measure, the writer decided to include two such explanations. He did so even though the two stories contradicted each other on several points. The priest opened his history with a creation story that might be his own, or one of his priestly contemporaries. The Creator in this story is impersonal, almost force-like. The pre-creation setting is a watery chaos. Creation takes place over six days.

He begins by creating the heaven and the earth. The creation of living things occupies parts of the next three days. Curiously, the sun, moon, and stars come into existence the day after the plant kingdom is created. Immediately after the first creation account, the priest inserted a second story, a version of the ancient tale that was first told centuries earlier around desert campfires.

The deity in this second story is a personal god with human-like emotions, the Lord of the Plantation. This God takes a paternalistic interest in the first human, his very special creation.

Proclaiming, "It is not good for the man to be alone. Adam and Eve anger God by eating a forbidden fruit, but they are nonetheless permitted to have sex and reproduce. From this first union of man and woman, the writer explained, have come all of us.

Before the time of Moses, most cultures and religions showed relatively little interest in explaining the origins of the cosmos and life on earth. We are conditioned to assume anything that is, once was not—but that assumption was not generally shared in the ancient world. A brief survey of major cultures and religions reveals the paradigm-shattering nature of Yahweh.

The early Chinese, for example, seem never to have given the question of creation serious attention at all. Hindus pondered creation, but for them creation seemed less a riddle to be explained than it was a cause for awe. The Vedas, sacred hymns in Sanskrit written between and B. Hindus thus reverse western notions of creation: nothingness is not transformed into everything; everything has emerged from a Oneness that was there at the beginning.

For the Buddha, too, the question of creation was one without answers. The epics begin with a world populated by fully mature gods and goddesses.

While Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians look primarily inward for the meaning of life, the Creator-God of Moses invites speculation as to the nature of man, salvation, and the beginning and end of time. It is especially in the theology that owes its existence to Moses that the theory of evolution presents serious threat. The most defining belief of the Christian West until the early twentieth century was that of a God who created the earth and humans, and who guided the course of history.

Does that God die, or does He retreat to the gaps of still-unanswered questions? Prior to the time of Moses, most people thought of themselves as instruments or playthings of gods. Moses—himself a kind of creator—helped changed this arguably pathetic conception people had of their role in the world.

Indeed, he identified it as the source of the scientific theories and hypotheses that would one day come to threaten the very religious concepts he fathered. Without Moses, in other words, Darwin would never have been possible. Lynn Margulis thinks humans are, essentially, a colony of closely associated bacteria. The human story, as Margulis first saw it, began about 3. Confined within the large cells, the bacteria transformed into swarming elliptical membrane-filled bodies called mitochondria.

With the formation of mitochondria began the flow of a river of DNA that sweeps through three billion years to include us all. In a manner similar to the use of special words, Genesis —a begins the biblical precedent for special numbers. The seven days set a pattern for a complete week—God finished his work and rested. Thus, in the biblical writings, seven often signifies completion or perfection. In the following chapters of Genesis other numbers become special, such as three, ten, twelve, and forty.

The special numbers become part of the fabric of classic biblical style. The use of special numbers invites readers to reflect on the later events in relation to earlier ones. The forty years that Israel was wandering in the wilderness, for example, encourages the reader to compare it to the forty days of rain in the flood narrative. The use of special words and numbers are among the many distinctive characteristics of biblical narrative that begin in Genesis 1.

The narrative style—somewhere between prose and poetry—displays:. The literary features effectively create a narrative almost poetic with its intertwined realistic and surreal qualities so familiar to biblical readers. The creating days themselves demonstrate the significance of the entire story. Above all else, the reader is confronted by God the Creator.

What does it mean to create? Whatever it means to form and to fill is synonymous with creating in the context of Genesis 1. To understand the Creator, therefore, one must comprehend what it means to form and to fill. In the first three creating days God formed the realms for existence in this world—light and darkness, skies and seas, land and vegetation. During the next three creating days God filled these realms successively with celestial lights, birds and marine life, and the land animals and humankind.

The first three creation days expose the difference between unformed and formed, chaos and order. The difference is separation. To create, in these cases, is to separate. The light was separated from the darkness, the skies from waters, and the land from the seas.

Without grasping the essence of order as separation, the call to be holy, to be separate toward God, in Leviticus will not be rightly appreciated. The holiness required of worshipers is the basic characteristic for relating to the Creator. The fourth, fifth, and sixth creation days likewise display the difference between unfilled and filled. The difference, in large part, is life. To grant life, or to fill realms with life, is, in these instances, what it means to create.

The realm of illumination was filled with life-sustaining cosmic lights these lights also function as time separators; thus the fourth day is transitional , the skies with flying beings, the waters with aquatic creatures, and the land with terrestrial beings. The Creator is the life-giver. By conceiving of creation as forming and filling, separating and life-giving, the tools are in hand for uncovering the meaning of judgment.

To be specific, to die is at once separation and life-losing. Death is the effect of the anti-creational acts of sin.