A Story that Needs Reframing

Where did we come from?

Why do we exist?

How do we understand the stories that claim to explain our origins?

The fact that you exist is a complex, beautiful, mystifying reality. And what we believe about why we exist has a tremendous impact on how we experience our lives.

Christians turn to the Bible to make sense of these questions, but I would propose that most of them turn to the wrong place to begin their journey. They turn to what they believe is the beginning, which, usually, would be a great place to start! However, the Bible wasn’t written chronologically. For example, the book of Job, which you can find in the middle of the typical Bible, if placed in chronological sequence, would likely land around the 10th or 11th chapters of Genesis. This brings us to where most people begin the story, and end up telling a slightly different story than Scripture actually offers.

The typical story, the one you likely hear growing up in Sunday school, generally goes something like this: God has always existed, and God was lonely, so God created the universe and humans within it, for companionship and glory. God placed the humans in a garden, and they walked together and enjoyed each other. God placed a certain tree in the middle of the garden called “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” to test the humans and see if they would be faithful. But they were tempted by a serpent and ate from the tree (which we call sin) and because God is a holy God and can’t be in the presence of sin, had to punish the humans and remove them from the garden. The humans tried and tried to get back to God, but they needed forgiveness, and someone needed to pay the penalty that the humans couldn’t pay. So eventually God became a human, and his name was Jesus, and he died on a cross so that humans could be forgiven and once again come into God’s presence. Then they could live happily ever after in heaven.

Does that story sound familiar?

What if I told you that there were actually a few other places in Scripture that reveal to us what was going on before Genesis, that set us up with an even more beautiful story, and consequently, a more beautiful understanding of God and of us?