While our cultural troubles may be traced to multiple factors, we would be foolish to conclude that a removal of God’s Word from our society’s collective consciousness has not had a profoundly negative impact on how think about morality, ethics, government, and the major questions of life.

The debate among evangelicals over creation, evolution, the historicity of Adam, the age of the earth, and the flood continues to rage, as proponents of the disparate views make their case through a variety of media, including books, articles, lectures, sermons, podcasts, and videos. Resources spanning the spectrum from highly academic to popular-level fill the bookstores and online platforms, with no apparent end in sight.

Despite the complexity of the debate, we can frame it around one basic problem: How are we to interpret Scripture in light of the physical world, and the physical world in light of Scripture? I would venture to say that this is the question that underlies the entire discussion over origins.

We have a biblical text and our interpretations of the physical world: Which source takes hermeneutical priority? Does Scripture interpret the physical world? If so, how? Does what we see in the physical world correct our interpretation of Scripture? If so, when?

The Need for Revelation Before the Fall

Many have attempted to address this question with greater or lesser rigor. This piece is not an attempt to match highly-technical works that address the interface between science and Scripture.  Rather, I want to make a basic exegetical observation from the opening chapters of Genesis that must inform our thinking about the interpretational priority between God’s Word and the physical world. This observation notes the order in which God gives his Word to Adam.

Specifically, we need to see that God gave Adam His Word prior to the fall. While this may appear like a rudimentary fact of the Genesis narrative, this order tells us something vitally important about how God intends us to interpret our physical environment. It was not sin as such that necessitated God’s first words to his human image-bearers.

Taking Genesis 2:1-25 as a detailed description of what occurred on day six in Genesis 1:26-31, we see that God gave Adam a word that related directly to how he was to interpret his physical surroundings.

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
(Genesis 2:16-17)

God did not simply put Adam in the Garden and allow his unaided reason to assess his environment. No, immediately after God placed Adam in the garden, he gave him a divine word that would enable him to safely navigate his new physical world.

Indeed, it was precisely the neglect of this word that disabled Adam’s wife, Eve, from making a right judgment about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. After a barrage of sophisticated questions and outright denials of God’s Word from Satan, Eve finally succumbed to her enemy’s onslaught:

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.
(Genesis 3:6)

Accurate Observations Are Not Enough

What’s astounding about Eve’s assessment of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that she made accurate observations about it.

• It was good for food – That is, the fruit of the tree was not poisonous or rancid; the tree produced fruit that was good for food. This was a correct observation about the physical nature of the tree.

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