It
occurred to me that "it might be good to take a moment to reflect on the
flow of Genesis," so I began by opening the New Testament. Immediately,
the words, "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in
my love" (John 15:9) caught my attention. "I really must look at
Genesis after all," I thought.
The Father loved
the Son, who became the Word, and loves us with that same love. The
"love" that the Son, Jesus, speaks of when He says, "Abide in
my love, " refers to the Holy Spirit sent in Jesus' name. And the
origin of Jesus speaking in this way must be found in Genesis.
With this in mind,
I began reading Genesis, and what immediately caught my eye was the difference
in the terms used to describe God in Genesis chapters 1 and 2. From the
beginning of chapter 1 through verse 3 of chapter 2, the term used is
"God," but from verse 4 of chapter 2 through the end, the term
"the Lord God" is used.
In Chapter 1, the
opening passage states, "In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face
of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And
God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light" (Genesis 1:1–3).
From this passage, we can imagine "God," working within the
relationship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Next, the point at
which the term shifts from "God" to "the Lord God" is found
in Chapter 2: "In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the
heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the
field had yet sprung up -- for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the
earth, and there was no man to till the ground" (Genesis 2:4–5). The
"man to till the ground" was the way of being God had
established for humanity from the beginning, so that the command God gave to
humanity—"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;
and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and
over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Genesis
1:28)—might be fulfilled.
God first desired
that man become one who would serve the earth, which he was to subdue. To this
end, God breathed into man the "breath of life, " so that man might
possess a spirit. This was so that man, created in God’s likeness, might be connected
to the Holy Spirit and placed within a relationship with God. The phrase
"the Lord God" used here is thought to express the relationship
between the Father and the Son.
This state of
relationship between God and humanity closely resembles the state in which we,
together with the Holy Spirit, participate in the Mass before the Blessed
Sacrament. Undoubtedly, Jesus has restored this state to us believers in the
Mass.
Maria K. M.
