The Seed of Adam and the Egg of Eve
Are you a 'scalar' creature? Have you ever thought of yourself as a 'scale bound' being? I suppose not using those very words. But what should you call the phenomena of big things seeming hard to move and small things seeming to be frustrating to work with? From the time you are a child you come to realize that Dad is a pretty immovable object when you're wrestling him, but your little brother is easy to throw around. It's about mass and scale. And it's hard to tie those little laces on your shoe, and harder yet to thread a needle like you see your Mother doing. It's about scale and depth perception. Little things are hard to work with. Big things are hard to move. It's a concept we learn early and don't question much.
Here is a question: Which is more difficult - building an atom, or positioning a planet in orbit? Which takes longer? Though we can do neither, we would suppose, in a certain way, that putting those great big planets and stars in place throughout those vast distances would take more energy than building the little atoms (though the atoms would be slow frustrating work no doubt.)
Some people have opined that the size of the cosmos is one reason that it's hard to believe in the creation story of Genesis. Could all of that out there just be window dressing for us to look at. Or could it be just mass moving and positioned in such a way as to maintain balance in our own world and it's planetary system. Or is it just out there for 'signs and wonders'? It's so 'big' out there that it strikes them as silly that it would be just a decorative foot note to mankind's existence.
It's actually relative, though. It's pretty 'far' to the farthest star system thus far found (around 1.5 x 10 to the 26th power meters.) And an electron is pretty small. (around 3 x 10 to the minus 15th power meters.) And a tall man about 6 feet 4 inches tall is about 2 x 10 to the 0 power meters in height. The center point between the star and the electron is a distance of about 38 miles. That's 60,800 meters, roughly. Just 6.08 x 10 to the 4th meters. A man is about 4 or 5 'powers of 10' from being in the center of creation's scalar distances. And we don't know if the smallest thing or the furthest thing will change as science makes new discoveries. .
The point is, if the vastness of space makes the creation story sound silly, then the smallness of the atom should too. But how silly! We can't move the planets and we can't form the atoms. Both should prove our complete dependence on some intelligence far more capable than ourselves.
So, here is another question. If all of matter and all of energy obey your every word, which is harder: positioning a planet or fashioning an atom? I think it's a misapplied question. If all things obey your commands, isn't scale unimportant? The atoms will take their forms and the planets will rush to their places - or something like that. Let's face it - God is not challenged or limited by scale - not in time, distance, mass, or energy. And where God is concerned, big things can come from little things.
There were two people made in the beginning: Adam and Eve. But Eve can't brag, because actually there was only Adam in the very beginning. Eve was formed from Adam's rib. But Adam can't brag either, because he was made from the dust of the Earth, with the breath of God added. And he couldn't personally make much of anything from a rib, so far as we know. And as for the dirt? Well, dirt doesn't brag. It's quiet stuff. So, who gets the credit for our existence? God, of course, with Jesus beside him, and the Holy Spirit there with Them.
But to sort of keep it on the physical plane, we came from Adam. After all, even Eve came from Adam. But without Eve and her eggs, there would have been no progeny. So we might say that not until Eve came was there hope for reproduction. So, OK, let's give them equal billing, and say that all humans are from Adam and Eve.
Who knows what they looked like? What color was their hair, or their complexion? We don't know that they were our size. Maybe they were larger, because they lived so long. So if growth 'rates' were the same but growth 'periods' were commensurately longer in keeping with human life span (Adam lived over 900 years) then these may have been large, tall people. But it doesn't matter if they - the fountainheads of human life - weighed a combined 350 lbs or a combined 1000 lbs. Technically, their children came from itty-bitty little seeds and eggs.
We can guess that Eve's egg was smaller in size than a period at the end of a sentence. Women's eggs today are that size. They are the largest type of human 'cell'. And Adam's seed was all but invisible, no doubt. They happen to be the smallest type of human 'cell'. So let's just say we came from Eve's fertilized egg. At least they are visible with the naked eye.
So if I consider myself, I am a grown man, and I weigh about 250 lbs. According to a figure I've heard for an adult human male I'm supposedly composed of about 60 trillion cells, though who came up with that estimate and what math they used I don't know. Even those numbers can be seen as a remarkably thing compared to the size of the fertilized egg from which I sprang. But is it not an entirely remarkable deed of God that about 6000 years ago perhaps about 56 of Eve's eggs combined with about 56 of Adam's seeds to form all of humanity? (Some old sources say Adam and Eve had 23 daughters and 33 sons in total. I wonder if the 23 daughters have anything to do with the 23 chromosomes that each parent provides during fertilization?)
Was it long ago in ancient times? Not so far! If a generation is 20 years, consider this: 230 generations will reach back to the time of the flood about 4350 years ago, plus include the 10 generations from Noah to Adam.
Or, if I took my whole family tree to the football field, which is 100 yards long, I could start by standing on one goal line and facing towards the other, 100 yards away. In front of me, 1.5 feet from the center of my feet to the center of his, my father could stand. 1.5 feet in front of him, my grandfather could stand, and 1.5 feet in front of him, my great grand father. So you get the picture, right. Every yard is 40 years time and two people, in this example. So 50 yards ahead of me, in the line, is somebody who lived in Jesus's time. I could step up and walk forward, and in about 45 seconds I'd be in Jesus's era - when the Lord walked the Earth!! The end of Luke chapter 3 names the 77 generations from Jesus to Adam. So, I'll just keep putting two people in line for every three feet. At two people every yard I'd only have to walk 38.5 yards past Jesus's era to see Adam and Eve. In this illustration, all of Biblical humanity easily fits inside of 88 yards on a football field. Can't some NFL quarterbacks throw that far? A football legend says Jim Plunkett once threw a football 100 yards in college. Humanity is not so ancient.
Everyone that I have ever known in my life came from those supposed 56 eggs of Eve; and every man or woman that I have ever read about. And all of the men and women I never heard of or met. And all of the people still to be born. The entire striving, failing mass of flawed yet beautiful humanity came from a small clutch of Eve's fertilized eggs, she coming from Adam and he coming from dust and the breath of God. Every human hair color and face shape and size and ability. The whole group of eggs was so very small that all of them would sit in the bottom of a teaspoon and be lots smaller than a single grain of rice. A human egg measures about 1/10th of a millimeter in diameter. 25 eggs in a line would be about 1/10th of an inch.
The great cities, the high towers, the giant ships and the massive dams on the rivers were all conceived, designed, and built by a workforce which lay there latent but ready for their moment in the sun, there among Eve's few dozen fertilized eggs. Do you enjoy the arts? Name a painter - any painter. He or she was there in that little clutch, hidden in a fold or a wrinkle or a twist in a gene in one egg or another, or scattered piecemeal among the many in a way that only God could have done it. All your favorite actors were there. No writer was absent.
Do you despise the murderous dictators of the ages, slaughtering their fellow human for the sake of their power-crazed egos? In their minds lay the same plan: I will conform the Earth to my image! I will be remembered forever! They lurked there, waiting among those eggs, but so did those who would stop them.
Athletes, politicians, aunts and uncles and hobos - there they were, one and all. And every person that wondered at it all and sought their creator was in the mix, as well. Do you enjoy family reunions? The greatest and best of them all was there in that imaginary teaspoon which held Eve's eggs. None among them was a failure yet, though Mom and Dad had already made some mistakes. Only there were we all together. True, we will all be there for the judgement, but there will be 'much weeping and gnashing of teeth' there. In Heaven, if we ourselves are allowed there, we can know that some others won't be. And there is no hope for those in Hell, but luckily not all will be sent there.
Some very pleasant people will be in Hell, however. Some of the nicest people of all will be there; people that were well appreciated by all around them. I'm talking about affable people, happy and companionable, good social skills, and all of that. Yet having given no particular care or thought to why God created them, and what they might do to please the one who brought them into being for a reason, they will none the less not be entering God's Kingdom. The scriptures are awfully clear about that, and repeat the concept numerous times.
Jesus said only His people will enter Heaven. He said that unless we are baptized in His name in water and the Spirit we can't see the Kingdom of God. Mark 16:16, John 3:3, and John 3:5, and other passages say this or something equivalent. Was He being serious? In all of the scriptures there is not one instance of Jesus telling a joke that I can perceive. So the safer bet is to believe Him.
Look at how we are, for example, in a somewhat similar situation. Some people love to hunt with dogs. They like to go out with bird dogs and spend a day trying to bag their limit. People like that usually have only one or two dogs, but some have six or seven. Concerning those dogs, there is bound to be one dog that the other six or seven think of as the best friend another dog can have. Dogs surely must have qualities that they do and don't appreciate in their fellow dog. And in any group of seven dogs, one of them must have the most good qualities so far as the other dogs would judge the matter.
But if the hunter's wife tells him she is tired of having so many stinky barking dogs and all but two must go, you know that he is not going to be taking a poll among the dogs. He has dogs for a reason, and if he can only keep two, he will keep the dogs that have the qualities he - the owner - most appreciates. Will they listen? Are they trainable? Will they retrieve for him? Are they so rough with their mouths that they tear up the birds he sends them after? These two dogs he keeps must be worthy by his standards. It doesn't matter to him if the other dogs like their manners or not.
If even humans think like this, keeping only what we choose to keep - and no human really knows the first thing about creating a dog from a bit of dirt - then how can we question God? Can’t He call whatever He chooses ‘good’, and get rid of whatever does not please Him, and all done with justice and righteousness? After all, can't he make billions of people from a small bit of dust and His breath? Can't he people a planet with a small clutch of eggs, smaller than a grain of rice? Such things are nothing, really, among the many remarkable deeds of God.
If there had been a small enough camera, someone could perhaps have stacked those 56 eggs of Eve's, and we could have all swam forward inside them and pressed our face against the membrane for just one small dear picture of the whole family. There would have been one picture with everyone there, before any one of us had been delivered up to be sorted and weighed by the fruit of our free will choices. (Well, O.K. There are some technical problems with doing that photo concept.) But the time is past for that family photo anyway. And the next time we're all together will be a sad occasion for many of us. So let's all try very hard to choose wisely now while we have time. When will our lives end? We've no idea.
The good Hunter is calling. He seeks to bag His limit of the souls of men. He needs to choose His best retrievers. The other dogs can't help you when He chooses. Will you meet His standards, or try to please the other dogs? Will you listen or ignore?
The Good Shepherd is calling. He knows that His sheep will hear His voice and come, and it's those sheep only that He will take away with Him. All who choose can be in that lucky herd. Forgiveness exists for the willing, the humble, the repentant. Will your pride prevent you? Many kings have knelt before this King. Will your ambition prevent you? Many of the greatest and most accomplished names in human history have acknowledged Jesus as Lord, without hesitation or apology. Will the ridicule or skepticism of your peers stop you? You will see them trembling on the day of judgement, like you. Decide with your own personal discernment, because it's your own personal eternity that is at stake. Mankind is a 'scalar' creature, so forever is a long, long time.