In a TED talk delivered 5 years ago Michael Steger, a professor of psychology in Colorado,

highlighted research showing that older people who have a vitalized sense of purpose and
meaning are 57% less likely to die prematurely than those who don’t have a vitalized sense of
meaning.

Even atheists like Richard Dawkins, who claim that there is no hard-wired meaning or purpose
to life, acknowledge the importance of finding personal purpose.
Yuval Noah Harari, in his recent book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind dedicates quite a
bit time to exploring the importance of purpose. Because Harari, like Richard Dawkins doesn’t
believe there is any ultimate meaning to life, he concludes that we are free to make of life what
we want; we can define our own purpose.

The story of Scripture offers us an entirely different outlook on life’s meaning and purpose. The
opening chapters of the Bible invite us to consider human purpose and destiny by making the
claim that we have been formed by God for a purpose. In fact the Genesis account of human
origins uses a kind of short hand to describe human purpose. At the end of chapter one, when
God makes humankind, God announces, presumably to the angels, that humankind are to be
made in the image of God.

This meaning defining expression, Image of God, isn’t left as an abstract idea to languish in the
final verses of chapter one. Instead the Biblical story immediately explores in greater detail what
it means to be made in the Image of God by zooming in on the story of humankind’s creation.

A Brief Interpretive Caveat

Before we go any further though it may help to say a few words about interpretation of this
passage. An observant reader will notice that the story of man’s creation in chapter two contains
features that seem quite different from the first chapter of Genesis. When the 7 days of creation
are described in chapter 1, God causes plants to grow on the earth first, then fills the sea and sky
with fish and birds, then finally creates land animals before crowning all this with the creation of
humankind. In the second chapter this order is reversed; first God creates man, then goes about
causing plants to grow and making the birds and animals, and finally forms woman from the rib
of the man.

In order to get the most out of this account of creation, we need to read it seriously without
taking it literally. John Collins, a well regarded evangelical Bible scholar, points out that even
though the story represents an historical person, the way the story is told isn’t an historical
reconstruction. What is of most importance in this account of creation is the meaning; and that
meaning comes from the Bible’s portrayal of Adam as the archetype or representative of all
humankind.

Covenant With God

Our purpose as human beings begins in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 through a covenant that God
establishes with Adam. A covenant is a formal agreement that binds two people or groups of
people into a reciprocal relationship. There is an obligation for both people to fulfil something
required by the agreement.

There are several covenants God makes with people throughout the Old and New Testaments.
God makes a covenant with Noah after the flood, with Abraham, with Moses and Israel at Mount
Sinai; with King David and finally Jesus establishes a new covenant with humanity through his
sacrifice on the cross. Covenants are so central to the Bible that it used to be quite common to
refer to the Bible as the Old and New Covenants.
The covenant God makes with Adam here isn’t a formal legal agreement anymore than Adam’s
relationship to Eve is a legal marriage. The word covenant isn’t used; instead it is established
through God’s act of creation.

God is described as a potter who forms man from the earth, literally from the dust of the ground.
It’s not agreement made between two equal partners. God establishes the relationship by
making the man and giving him a job to do.

We notice in Genesis 2 that the world is described as being barren, without rain, and with plants
or herbs. God’s remedy for this is to make a man and then garden. God’s creation project is
portrayed as a garden planted amidst a barren or at least uncultivated world. The Garden is
God’s blueprint; it reminds us that the work the man is called to do is according to God’s design.
The Barren world tells us that there is positive work for the man to do to bring God’s order and
flourishing to the world.

Man is formed for a creative partnership or covenant with God. The partnership needs the
contribution of both God and Adam. God provides the rain which man cannot provide, Man tills
the soil which God does not do.

Of The Ground
Throughout this story we’re also reminded of our connection with the earth. God creates the
man from the dust of the ground. The Hebrew expresses this connection with a play of words,
the ground is adama and the man is adam; literally earthman. The most obvious significance of
this is that we share something in common with all other biological life forms on earth; we’re all
carbon-based life forms. Our existence is intimately connected to the stuff of earth. That is why
we see in chapter 3 human sin staining the earth with a curse. It means that our fall and our
redemption is also the fall and redemption of creation.

God fashions the man like a potter and by breathing into him the breath of life the man becomes
a living soul. For some reason a tradition has become established in Christianity that people have
souls and animals do not. That is, as far as I’m aware, Greek thinking not Hebrew thinking. In
Genesis people do not have souls; we are souls. Body and breath makes a living soul, or a
chayyah nephesh, and far from distinguishing us from the animals, in Genesis this is something
we have in common with the animals who are also described in verse 19 as living souls.

Out of the Dust

There is, however, a difference assigned to humankind in Genesis, though it’s found in an
expression that we’re very likely to misinterpret. God, we are told makes animals from the
ground, but God in verse 7 makes Adam from the dust of the ground.
We’re so familiar with the funeral phrase, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” that speaks of the curse
of Genesis 3 that it’s become pretty instinctual to interpret “dust” as a reference to our mortality
our frailty.

But there are several other passages in the Old Testament where individuals are described as
being “raised from the dust” by God.

When Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, discovers she is pregnant, she sings a song of
celebration in which she declares:

God raises up the poor from the dust...

...to make them sit with princes
and inherit a seat of honour.
1 Samuel 2:8
In another story, found in 1 Kings 16 God warns the corrupt ruler King Baasha with a reminder
that, “I exalted you out of the dust and made you leader”. 1 Kings 16:2

So when we read of God forming Adam from the dust it means that God has raised Adam from a
low place in creation to a high place. God raises Adam (and therefore all humanity) from the dust
to reign as a kings and priests over creation.

But he story also makes it clear that Adam is called to be a servant; he is commanded to “till and
keep the garden”, which can also be translated here as “to serve and preserve” the garden.

Adam is raised from the dust to be a servant king. And in this we are already given a glimpse of
Jesus who was raised from the grave to be the servant king, the second Adam. We’re also given an
insight into our calling as the people of God. Unlike other cultures in the Ancient Near East who
were ruled over by kings who claimed to be the sole descendants of gods, the Jewish and later
Christian view of humanity is that we are all descended from Adam and are therefore called to be
priests and kings or priestesses and queens. It was out this deep awareness of our meaning and
purpose that the Apostle Peter described the Christian community in his first letter as a “royal
priesthood”.

Limits of Vocation
We discover this true vocation only through our relationship with God not in separation from
God or in denial of God.
That is the real significance of the presence of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the
story. This story told through chapters 2-3 of Genesis is the only time the Tree of Knowledge
features in the Bible. The Tree of Life on the other hand features many times. In the midst of a
fractured world it is a constant promise of God’s purpose for us. The Tree of Knowledge is
constantly part of our experience; there is always a temptation for us to find meaning and
purpose on our own terms.

Victor Hamilton in his commentary on the Tree of Knowledge writes “What is forbidden to man
is the power to decide for himself what is in his best interests and what is not.” We have been
given a vast amount of freedom as humankind; perhaps far more than we would really want. But
the power to make of the world and our lives what we want without God’s blessing is a power
that we can only choose at great cost.

This is obviously the biggest difference between people of faith and those who are committed to
interpreting the world from an atheist perspective.

Isaiah 45:9
Woe to you who strive with your Maker,
earthen vessels with the potter!
Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, “What are you making”?

Conclusion
Faith-filled discernment, requires an awareness that, while I have immense freedoms, those
freedoms have there limits. Though I have received a vocation to take part in God’s making of
this world, it is not a vocation I am to try living on my own terms.

The two trees represent the two distinct choices we all have to make; to choose life with God, or
self-knowledge without God.