First Born of All Creation
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” Colossians 1:15
For those of us who are parents, the first born is a big deal. When they are babies, there are what seem like a million “firsts”; the first diaper change, the first night at home, the first word, the first step; the list goes on and on. As they grow, there are so many seasons of “firsts”. My first born is finishing a big “last”, his senior year in High School. Although this is a “last”, it is also ushering in a whole new batch of “firsts”; first college applications, first time voter, first time going into a doctor’s appointment on his own. As adults his dad and I have gone through these things and our perspective is much broader than his. One truth that we keep bumping up against with him as he goes through this latest batch of “firsts”, you don’t know what you don’t know.
The first day that Adam and Eve stepped out of the Garden of Eden, I would imagine that they faced the most epic case of “you don’t know what you don’t know”
First Born
Have you ever noticed when reading through the Old Testament how vastly different the societal structure is from the society most of us have experienced? Especially in the US where our western culture is vastly different than Middle Eastern culture, the region of the world where the cultures in the Old Testament originated. No matter where you are from, though, the Old Testament is challenging when looking through 21st Century eyes. So many questions have come up for me as I have studied this ancient text. Such as, why is there so much focus on the first-born male? Why is it only the first-born son who gets the biggest inheritance and claim of the family line? Why does it seem like woman are less valuable?
Last week we left off where God had sacrificed His creation to make a way for the potential of a relationship with humanity. The price for sin was death, and God chose the sacrifice of a substitute, an animal, rather than destroying mankind. Adam and Eve did not, and could not, get off scot-free, though. There was still a price to be paid for their choice to sin against their creator. Before Adam and Eve left the Garden, they had to face the consequences for their actions.
God made it clear to Adam and Eve that their choices led to not only spiritual separation, but a tangible price. The consequences were to be felt by them and their offspring for generations and generations. God needed all of humanity to know that the choice to sin against God had eternal implications.
Interestingly, the first thing God did was to curse His physical creation. After it was made clear what Adam and Eve had done and who had led them to do it, God turned to the serpent and cursed it. “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.” (Gen 3:14) But because it was Satan who was the orchestrator of this scheme, he received his first look into his eternal fate, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Gen 3:14) Even within this first part of the judgement being passed down on all that God created, He was still elevating humanity as His priority. Though Satan would be given access to mankind, ultimately through the line of Eve, Satan would be defeated.
In turn God moved on to deal with His image bearers. There is a detail in the passage here that I find interesting. God uses the term “cursed” when He is speaking of the physical creation – the serpent previously and the ground in the passages moving forward – but not when speaking to Eve or Adam. The terms of their judgement feel more like natural consequences. For Eve, her consequence was, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” (Gen. 3:16) And for Adam, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Gen. 3:17-19) God’s judgement was specific to the unique attributes He created within Adam and Eve, prophetically revealing vulnerabilities that men and woman would have to contend with for countless generations to follow. With spiritual connection and trust severed, knowledge of good and evil stolen, and verdict delivered, there was no way Adam and Eve could stay and have access to the Tree of Life in the Garden. With access to that tree they could live forever. God had to cast them out, never to see it again.
Stricken with physically altering and vulnerable consequences, and coupled with spiritual death, Adam and Eve had to figure out how to manage themselves and their soon-to-be family. Adam now had to face physical anguish in staying alive and keeping his family alive while working a cursed land. Eve found herself having to deal with never-before-imagined levels of challenge and pain to bring children into the world. All the while both Adam and Eve were contending with the sin nature born within them that makes them think that they should be the god of themselves and each other.
Imagine with me what it might look like to be a man who now has to toil and struggle to keep not only himself alive but also protect a woman who is struggling to birth and rear his children. In my imagination, I can see a scenario where a man could consider himself stronger and more powerful than a woman in her vulnerable position because of the choice she made to listen to the deceiver, Satan. Furthermore, the daughters who come into the family, who will suffer the same fate as their mother, could also be considered weak and dependent. Sons, however, are to carry on the physical responsibilities of working the land and providing food for his family like his father.
Though Adam and Eve knew the truth of the loving and caring God who spared their lives -yet had to sever connection to preserve His holiness – the overwhelming reality of their consequences and the sin nature within them could easily eclipse the knowledge of their creator. They and all their children, and their children’s children, were on their own to figure out how to be fruitful and multiply.
The acknowledgements of God and the sacrifices needed to stay in connection to Him were a part of the culture in the time between Adam and Abram (later changed by God to Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation), but the distortion was well on its way! Not too many chapters after being cast out of the Garden, God was destroying the whole world because of their godlessness.
Fast forward to the world Abram lived in and what humanity might have looked like in his neighborhood. The concept of men taking care of their families and protecting their vulnerable woman evolved into patriarchal tribal units. These tribes were not all single-family units, though. Sometimes one patriarch of a tribe would decide that he wanted to be in control of another tribe. So, he would conquer that tribe and assimilate it into his own. As tribes grew and power was being challenged, the best way to keep control of who was in control was to concentrate power. If the patriarch divided his tribe up and left pieces to each son, that would make a lot of little tribes. But If the father gave EVEYTHING to the first-born son, the succession of power would stay large and strong. The first-born son was the way the powerful stayed powerful.
Even though the distorted concept of staying in relationship with God was almost all but diluted beyond recognition, the concept of disconnection seemed to inherently remain. By the time God reached out to Abram with the start of the plan to reconcile humanity to their creator, humans had identified that there had to be a god out there that seemed angry and needed to be appeased. The concept of sacrifices needed to appease these gods was a big part of the world that Abram was born into.
It is quite possible that before God appeared to Abram, he might have worshipped the lunar god Nanna (Also known as Sin). Ur, where Abram was from, was the city where the temple to Nanna was located. Where the temple is, the worship is. Part of the way people worshiped Nanna was with sacrifices, both harvest and animal. It seems that humans inherently knew at some level that spiritual disconnection was real, and the only way to repair it was through sacrifice. That brings to mind the story of Abraham and Isaac (Gen. 22). The culture was very familiar with the importance of both the first-born and the need to appease their gods with sacrifice. Being from a culture that survived on the concentrated power of the lineage of the first-born, and the culture of sacrifice to appease their gods, I wonder if maybe when the God who promised him that he would have a son, commanded Abraham to sacrifice that son to Him, the idea wasn’t a total mind-blowing concept. First-born sons were everything to a family. Sacrifices were necessary.
As God began to map out the plan for how he was going to reconcile his image-bearers to Himself, He chose to continue to use the human culture that was established to exemplify that plan. God chose to show that He could redeem the distorted human system to reflect His glory. Though Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, God provided an alternative. This concept is reflected in the redemption story throughout the Old Testament. The first-born sons were spared by the lamb’s blood at the first Passover in Egypt (Lev. 23). When God established the sacrifice system administered by the Levitical priests, where the best and the first-born of the flocks were to be sacrificed, he commanded that the first-born sons of all Israelites should be sacrificed, too! But it was made explicitly clear that the first-born sons were to be bought back and replaced by an alternative sacrifice (Exodus 12:12-13). Even the tribe of Levi, the lineage of Moses and his brother Aaron were to be set apart, essentially living sacrifices, to serve God. Aaron was the first High Priest, and his first-born son was to be the next, and so on throughout all the Old Testament.
The position of first-born son was an intrinsic part of human culture. God would choose to display His glory by redeeming the culture through His Son. Humans inherently knew that a blood sacrifice was needed to restore relationship with God. God would choose to send the ultimate blood sacrifice to completely restore the spiritual relationship with his most loved creation, Humans. The plan was in the works throughout the entire Old Testament and would be fulfilled through the First Born Over All Creation.
*A final thought about the first-born and sacrifice:
The beauty of the Bible is that it’s living and active. Even though you might have read a passage a hundred times, you can still see something new! When God was giving the Israelites the instructions for always remembering the Passover and all that took place for their deliverance from slavery in Egypt, this instruction was given in Exodus 13:14-15, “And when in time to come your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ you shall say to him, ‘By a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery. 15 For when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of animals. Therefore I sacrifice to the Lord all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem.’” The sacrifices that were to be given at the Passover celebration were to memorialize the Egyptian lives that were lost because the of the sinful and hard hearts of their culture. God requires sacrifice, but He does not forget. It is a somber loss that serves as a reminder of the seriousness of what God requires for restored relationship. Sacrifice is serious and necessary. *