Paul Poulton considers God's interactions with earth

Paul Poulton

There are many people who think that civilisation started about 6,000 years ago. All sorts of people think this, including those who believe in God and those who don't. We also know where abouts this civility took place; we have a name for it called 'The Cradle of Civilisation'. It is situated between two long rivers called the Tigris and Euphrates, what used to be known as Mesopotamia. Both rivers start their journey in Turkey then travel through Syria and Iraq and join up to flow into the Persian Gulf. The area is featured in the early chapters of Genesis; the two rivers ran through the Garden of Eden. There were two other rivers mentioned, but they no longer exist, probably because landscapes can change over time. We know that four rivers joined up round about where the Garden was and dry wadis known as fossil rivers are said to be seen from satellite imaging. This area also forms a part of the 'The Fertile Crescent'. I guess if you are going to plant a nice garden then the Fertile Crescent sounds like a good location.

The picture presented to us in Genesis is that God planted a garden close to the rivers. Just how God did the planting is left to our imagination, but it does suggest some sort of anthropomorphic representation of God rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck into some satisfying gardening. Of course it may not have been that way but there are stories where it seems that God walked around the Fertile Crescent. The technical word for these appearances of God is called theophanies.

While Abraham was sitting at the entrance of his tent in Mamre Israel he saw three men standing nearby. He seemed to recognise at least one of them and asked them to stay for lunch. Abraham stood under a tree while they ate. As the story progresses we become aware that one of the men is God. (There is a tree called the great Oak of Mamre, the tree is thought to be over 4000 years old so could have been the same tree that Abraham stood under while the Lord and the angels ate.) After they had eaten and continued their journey Abraham walked along with them and had a debate with the Lord. Maybe Abraham recognised God because he'd met him before. We read that some years before, God went down to look at a tower in East Mesopotamia and we know that Abraham came from that region too. He lived in a city called Ur. It just so happens that Ur has a tower; you can still see the remains of it on Google maps, 10 miles South West of Nasiriyah in Iraq. Today we call the tower a ziggurat and they were popular pieces of construction in Mesopotamia. Archaeologists aren't quite sure why the ziggurats were built but the Bible tells us that God had issued a directive to the people living in those days to spread out and fill the earth, but they chose to stay in Mesopotamia and build towers they could go to the top of, perhaps in case the area got flooded again.

Ur used to lie on the banks of the river Euphrates but the river has changed course over time and Ur became less populated. But we know that the people of Ur some 4000 years ago were intelligent designers, craftsmen and creative artists. We know this partly because the British Museum has a room with quite amazing artefacts from Ur. In fact, the famous crime novelist Agatha Christie played a small part in helping to unearth these treasures back in 1928. She met her future husband in Ur. She was also inspired to write some of her books based on her time there. The Bible tells us that God appeared to Abraham in Ur and told him to leave the city and go to another land. 'The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building' is how the Bible puts it. It was handy that the river was so close because they used pitch for mortar which can be obtained from the slimy banks of the river. And they used muddy clay for sun-dried bricks, of which there was no shortage. How long the Lord walked around the city we don't know. It was a large city with thousands of inhabitants, maybe it was around that time he met Abraham and told him to leave the city.

There are stories of angels who appear as men in the Bible and many myths of a similar nature where gods visit earth. Manoah was told by his wife that she'd met a man who she thought was an angel. Some time later she met him again and ran off to find her husband. When the sceptical Manoah met the man himself he said "Are you the one who talked to my wife?" It wasn't until later that day that the angel did something that humans can't do that Manoah realised it was an angel. This tells us that angels have the ability to take a step down and appear in a corporeal form. I guess it's the opposite of when a human being dies and we cast off our mortal frame but our spirit remains. What we garner from these stories is that angels are spirits, pure life, without material restrictions, who can dip into the material universe and appear, as they wish, as men. God too is spirit and also appears to have taken the form of a man and walked around and spoken to earth-bound men.

So where does Jesus fit into all this? If God can just materialise as a man why was Jesus born from a human woman? Part of the answer is that when God or angels appeared as men, it wasn't a human man. It was a man with all the abilities that men have, even the ability to reproduce, hence the stories of the Nephilim, but it wasn't a part of the human race. To save the human race God had to become a part of it; it had to be cleansed from the inside. So Jesus was born of Mary. Emmanuel - God with us. And he is not ashamed to call us brothers.