The Bible opens with two creation stories, and I think most of us were handed the wrong one as our biography.
Genesis 1 is spare and confident. God makes humans in God’s own image, blesses them, looks over the whole project and calls it very good. Then Genesis 2 starts over. A mist rises from the ground, a man gets shaped out of dust, and within a page there’s a talking snake and an eviction notice.
Mary Baker Eddy points out in Science and Health that scholars saw two distinct documents stitched together at the start of Genesis. Her read is bold. The first account is the truth about us. The second is what error looks like when it grabs the pen. She calls it the “Adam-dream.”
My favorite detail in the second story is the blame. God asks, “Where are you?” Great question, honestly, the kind a good friend asks. Adam’s answer manages to blame his wife and God in one breath: the woman whom you gave to be with me. Eve hands it to the snake. Most of us could medal in this event.
That chain of excuses only holds up if you believe you’re the dust guy, running on a body that breaks and always one bad choice from exile. If that’s who you are, of course you’re defensive. The garden is never safe.
Eddy flips it hard: “Mortals are not fallen children of God.” She goes further and says that mortal version never had a perfect state to lose in the first place. Which means the dusty, defensive you was never the real one. The real one, the Genesis 1 one, never left.
That changes healing completely. If you’re fallen, healing is a repair job with a long wait for parts. If you never fell, healing looks a lot more like waking up.
Jesus treats it exactly that way in Luke 8. Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter has died, and the house is full of mourners. Jesus tells them she’s sleeping. They laugh at him. Fair, I probably would have too. He takes her hand and says, “Child, get up!” And she does.
Eddy says man is, present tense, perfect and immortal. So what do you do with that on a random Tuesday? Catch the blame chain when it starts. Catch the dust story when it’s narrating, the one that says you’re too far gone. Then ask the better question God asked Adam. Forget your zip code and your last test result. Where are you as God’s idea? Upright, Eddy says. “Upright and Godlike.”
Isaiah has a line in this week’s lesson I keep coming back to: “Shake yourself from the dust.” Dust is something you shake off. It was never something you were.
The Golden Text says your light is come. Already arrived. Get up.
