ALLEGORY AND TRUTH--2
If allegory is not the right word, what would be?

  The passage in the Bible which is most often called an allegory is Genesis 3, the first sin, the first meal.  What is so rare about Genesis 3 is that we are fallen people reading about a drama of unfallen souls. We will not experience the Fall ourselves, except to acknowledge that it has happened and we are the result of it.  So how could the Fall ever be described in our lapsed language?

  What was it like to be the first Adam?  What was it like to feel the breath of God in your chest, to exhale the spiritual breath of the God who moved over the face of the waters before any world was?  What was it like to feel God's smile on your eyelids, to open them to a blue world above like a girl's eyes and a voice like many rushing waters say, In our image...?  Could anything we might imagine be as pure as golden air or sparkling wind or the feel of your own skin curl into the first fingerprint?  Or to see the first soft fluttering rise of geese from a pond, or the bright standing of a tree leaning over a bank?

  We'll never experience what Adam and Eve did.  But we have been given these few, rare words of Genesis.  How can we read them if we can in a sense never know them?  We can look to other passages in the Bible which may enable us to see sunlight among the trees.

  In Genesis 28 Jacob is sent away from his father.  He comes to what the Hebrew text calls, the place.  That night he puts his head on a stone, laying down to a night's sleep and dream.  The dream is of a ladder to heaven, with angels going up and coming down upon it, from heaven to him.  At the top of the ladder the Lord stood, saying--I am the Lord...  Not only is this the rare time and place before Moses when the Lord says, I am, who He is but this dream reveals to us something out of heaven.  It opens up out of the small, specific place where Jacob slept all of heaven and God's throne and God Himself.  It is the drama of Genesis 3.

  This tells us certain passages in the Bible extend from earth to the glory of heaven.  The words are a spiritual drama unlike human dramas.  The tragedies of the Greeks bring the audience deeper into the character onstage, to reveal something disturbing about the audience.  However, the spiritual dramas of the Bible don't work like that.  They do not open a character, they open the curtain of heaven so that we may see God above in our life below.

  We can remember Genesis 16, with Hagar and Ishmael.  Sarah casts Hagar out of the camp because Ishmael was born before Isaac.  Hagar runs to Shur.  There an angel comes down upon her, saying Ishmael will be blessed of the Lord, that she should return to Sarah.  Hagar then realizes she has seen the Lord--Have I remained alive here after seeing Him?  The drama is not that Shur exists but that there Hagar saw the Lord.  The drama of that encounter, like that in Genesis 3, rises to prophecy, blessing, destiny.  This is the spiritual drama of the Bible.  The words are not allegory, they are spiritual drama.

  The tabernacle in Exodus 25..8,9 puts it in tangible language.  First, the Lord comes down.  He says to Moses--let them construct a sanctuary for Me, that I may dwell among them.  He doesn't just come to be with Moses and the priest, but among all the people.  Then the Lord says--According to all that I am going to show you...The tabernacle will resemble heaven.  The Lord came down so that the tabernacle would 'look up.'  Genesis 25.30 says--You shall set the bread of the Presence on the table before Me at all times.  The word for presence is 'face.'  As Adam took his first breath before the face of God, so in the tabernacle the bread of His presence is before His face.

  This is the God who embraces.  And this is the spiritual drama of so many passages.  They are not only real times and places and things but their inscape, their meaning comes down from God in heaven so that we through them might ascend to His glory.

  So, coming back to Genesis 3 we can say these words are a spiritual drama--not untrue but words which give us the manner in which God has chosen to reveal Himself and His creation in which we belong.  These words have an ascension upon them which we can receive by faith.  As the tabernacle looked up to God and forward to salvation, the words of Genesis 1-3 look up to the Creator who will be our Redeemer.  Revelation 19.9 says--These are true words of God.

  The words of Genesis 3 are not just true, but livid.