Written by Jefferson Bethke, a contemporary author. This is an excerpt from his book “Take Back Your Family.”
He [God] wants to fill the earth with His presence. It’s in His nature — true love by nature creates. It is a cup that spills over… God creates and shapes and molds and spins into existence these beginnings. Of Heaven and earth. And He intentionally only creates a pocket of order, called Eden. Most of the earth at the time of the creation narrative was untamed. Unordered. Not fruitful or multiplying. And, of course, God could have made the entire earth to be so. But He didn’t. Instead, He created a problem and commissioned His human diplomats to continue the work…You have an entire section of the earth untamed and unordered. The problem is that it needs to be so. It is beginning to be brought into the symphony of created order and shalom, but it is not. Yet…His answer was so peculiar, especially given no precedent. Out of the very mind of God the answer was to create two particularly unique image-bearing humans. Divine reflections of Him, similar in image bearing, yet obviously not the same. And then He gave these image-bearers the capacity to multiply themselves and have kids. And in that generational multiplying, the mission remains the same: order, shalom, beauty, fruition. In essence, God’s answer to the first problem in our story was a family…When I say family, I simply mean a “relational home,” as my friend John Mark puts it. A network of committed covenantal relationships and a team that commits to one another and is interconnected through a web of long-standing relationships. It’s layered and complex and older and spans generations. And having that web specifically work together and populate and bring forth his blessing into the world was one of God’s original and ideal ways of being human. And this is good news because you can be a young single adult, you can be divorced, you can be old, you can be married, you can be whatever season you are in and you are a part of some multigenerational story — for good and bad. God wants to work through that and in that and in you.
God created humankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. [Genesis 1:27]
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