Human

 Several years ago, before I was even thinking about writing a book, I had taken a short stint in poetry.  It was more of a freestyle verse, but I think it still counts.  Anyhow, one of the works I wrote was on our fragile human material -- what we are made of.  The Latin word for land or soil is "humus."  From the beginning of human beings in the Book of Genesis, we are told that God created man from the soil and blew into him the breath of life.  What about that which we need to even make what we might consider to be a molding?  How did God come up with the shape and size and features that He thought we should have or what we would need?  "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."  He took the rich, moist soil and carefully made the first one as if He were looking in a mirror.  That is what we mean by our "being made in his image and likeness."  Ok, maybe it wasn't a mirror image, but the same features were given.  What is really interesting for me to think about is just how God must have created all of our internal organs first and THEN carefully placed it together into what we are now -- every bone in our body, every human heart and brain, and more.  And then He uses the template of the male, but uses one of the male's ribs as the base in creating the female and first true partner of the male.  "Be fruitful and multiply.  Subdue the earth.  See I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food;."

What I find even MORE interesting is that there almost didn't seem to be a plan for children in Eden.  How would they have known HOW to multiply?  While the two humans had their reproductive organs, it's as if they were not even aware of them until AFTER the Fall.

I have thought many times in the past about the implications of how the Creation of Man story plays out.  For instance, why did God even make the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first place?  Why was the fruit on the Tree so enticing?  How did the first humans even know that they were supposed to eat and what hunger was?  God clearly told them that they could eat of ANY tree in the garden except ONE.  Like any child, "don't do that!"  Yeah, right.

Go back in the writing just a little bit further.  God says "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."  This plural reference to God is a highly interesting approach.  It infers that God, while one in being, "us" can only mean more than one.  It's likely even the approach to the Trinity, except the author of Genesis doesn't know exactly what that means.  But who are "us"?

It still comes back to this human material.  From the very beginning of Creation, God made everything including human beings.  From the moment God created the first human, he was fragile.  He COULD die.  It wasn't supposed to be that way, but human beings found out the hard way what that would mean in their disobedience.  Many people think that God did not need to punish those first two.  They want to argue that if God is all-good, then why didn't he just reprimand them one extra time?  But discipline for disobedience was warranted in some form, but did it have to be so harsh?  I mean He just created EVERYTHING to be GOOD.  Yet, God must have noticed that a pattern might develop if he didn't make a statement.  His form of discipline was no different than when our own parents tried to help us understand -- it was not what they wanted to do out of vengeance, but out of love for us to learn the value of obedience, primarily to God.