The Bible: A Story That Makes Sense of Life Намуна

Origins and Hope – the Promise of a Snake-Crusher

Our origins story has a simple headline: God made the world good but humans rebelled and things turned bad. This makes sense of day-to-day life: good and evil, pleasure and pain, newborns and bereavements. However, these bi-polar realities will not simply cancel each other out. We are hope-based creatures. We lean forward, anticipating something better. 

After the Fall, subsequent chapters (Genesis 4–11) are like a river that splits into two paths. On the one hand, evil spreads and God acts in judgement. On the other hand, the world is washed clean and a rainbow appears as a promise that good will triumph over evil. 

In Genesis 3, God addresses the serpent who introduced temptation and chaos in the first place. Read the dramatic nature of God’s promise in Genesis 3:15. A woman’s offspring is coming as a heroic serpent-crusher. A new Adam will break the power of evil. However, in the process, He Himself will absorb the deadly poison. This enigmatic hope is without much detail here, but the rest of the Old Testament is pregnant with the promise of His arrival.

In Genesis 6, God sends judgement in an unprecedented deluge. But a greater purpose of restoration was in mind. God called Noah to build an ark to save not only his own family but wildlife too. At the height of the flood, we are told that ‘the waters covered the surface of the earth’. Remember, that’s exactly how the earth looked before God spoke order and beauty into creation. So the flood brings the world back to a new beginning. Back on dry land, Noah steps into a new creation.

God then makes a promise through a rainbow – a symbol of peace and mercy. Despite the spread of evil, God promises to cleanse our world without destroying humanity in the process. Spoiler alert. Turn to the final page of the Bible and you will see that the story loops all the way round to a new beginning: ‘On each side of the river stood the tree of life’ (Revelation 22:2). This iconic symbol from Eden reappears at the end. In fact, you could take the first two chapters of the Bible and the last two and stitch them together. They form brackets around our entire human story and act as a promise: we have come from a good place and we will one day get back there, despite the struggle in between. As we journey through the rest of the Bible story, we already know that good will triumph in the end. Because the snake-crusher took our poison on a Roman cross, we will one day regain access to the tree of life. 

REFLECT: Put a picture of a rainbow on the kitchen fridge or the office wall as a reminder that whatever challenge or chaos we face, with God there is always hope.