Commentary on Genesis, Vol. 1 · Martin Luther
PART I. GOD'S REST, SANCTIFICATION OF THE SABBATH AND CREATION OF ADAM.
As God therefore thus giveth us the Word, as he thus commands the preaching and exercising of the Word, as he thus commands the sanctifying of the Sabbath in the worship of himself, all these things prove that there remaineth another life after this life, and that man is created not to a corporeal life only, as the beasts are, but to a life eternal, even as God, who commands and institutes these things, is himself eternal. But here another inquiry may arise concerning the fall of Adam itself, upon which indeed we have already touched: On what day Adam fell, whether on the seventh or on some other day? Although nothing indeed can be said as certain on this matter, my free and full opinion is that his fall was on the seventh day. It was on the sixth day that he was created. And Eve was created about the evening or close of the sixth day, while Adam was asleep. On the seventh day, which by the Lord had been sanctified, God talks with Adam, gives him commandment concerning his worship, and forbids him to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For this indeed was the appropriate work or duty of the seventh day: the preaching and the hearing of the Word of God. Hence both from the Scriptures and from universal practice, hath remained the custom of appointing the morning as the time for prayer and sermons; as we have it also in the Psalms: "In the morning will I stand before Thee, and will look up," Ps. 5:3.
On the seventh day therefore, in the morning, Adam appears to have heard the Lord giving commandment concerning his domestic and national duty, the private and public worship of God, together with the prohibition concerning the fruit of the tree. Satan therefore unable to endure this most beautiful creation of man and this holy appointment of the Sabbath, and envying him so much felicity, and moreover seeing all things so abundantly provided for him on earth, and finding him in the possession of the hope of enjoying, after so happy a corporeal life, an eternal life, which he himself had lost, Satan seeing all this about the twelfth hour, perhaps after God's sermon to Adam and Eve, himself preaches to Eve. Just as he has always done to this day. Wherever the Word of God is, there he attempts also to sow lies and heresies. For it agonizes him that we by the Word become as Adam did in paradise, citizens of heaven. So Satan on this occasion tempts Eve to sin, and gains the victory over her. The sacred text before us moreover declares that when the heat of the day had subsided, the Lord came into the garden and condemned Adam with all his posterity to death. I am myself quite persuaded that all these things took place on the very day of the Sabbath, which one day only, and that not for the whole day, Adam lived in paradise, and enjoyed himself in eating its fruits.
By sin therefore did man lose all this felicity. Nor would Adam, had he remained in paradise in all his original innocence, have lived a life of idleness. He would have taught his children on the Sabbath day, he would have magnified God with worthy high-praises by public preaching, and he would have stirred up himself and others to offerings of thanks, by a contemplation of God's great and glorious works. On all other days he would have worked by tilling his ground and attending to his beasts, etc. But in a manner and from motives now wholly unknown to man. For all our labor is annoyance, but all Adam's labor was the highest pleasure, a pleasure far exceeding all the ease that is now known. Hence as all the other calamities of life remind us of sin and the wrath of God, so our labor and all our difficulty in procuring food ought to remind us of sin also and to drive us to repentance. Moses now proceeds to describe man more particularly, repeating first of all what he had said concerning his creation in the first chapter. And though the recapitulations may seem superfluous, yet as the divine historian wishes to maintain a continuation of his history, with all due convenience and order, the repetition is by no means useless.
V. 4, 5a. _These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that Jehovah God made earth and heaven. And no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up._ "In the day" is here to be taken for an indefinite time, as if Moses had said, At that time the state of all things was most beautiful; but now I must describe a condition of things far different. We need not here inquire however in a superstitious manner, why Moses chose to use these rustic forms of expression concerning "the plants of the field" and "herbs of the field." For his object now is to describe the creation of man in its more circumstantial particulars. V. 5b, 6. _For Jehovah God had not caused it to rain upon the earth: and there was not a man to till the ground; but there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground._ There was not as yet any rain, Moses says, to water the earth; but a certain mist went up and watered the whole face of the earth, to cause it to bring forth more abundantly afterwards. Now these things belong properly to the third day.
III. V. 7. _And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul._ Moses here returns to the work of the sixth day and shows whence this cultivator of the earth came; namely, that God formed him out of the ground, as the potter forms in his hand the vessel out of clay. Hence Moses does not represent Jehovah God as saying in this case as in that of all the other creatures, "Let the earth bring forth man;" but "Let Us make man." He describes God as thus speaking in this case in order that he might set forth the excellency of the human race, and that he might make manifest that peculiar counsel to which God had recourse in creating or making man. However after his creation man grew and multiplied as all the other animals and beasts of the earth multiply. For the seed of all animals coagulates in the womb and is formed in the same manner in them all. In this case of generation there is no difference between the foetus formed in the cow and that formed in the woman. But with reference to their first creation Moses testifies that there was the greatest possible difference. For he shows in this divine record that the human nature was created by a peculiarity of divine counsel and wisdom, and formed by the very finger of God.
This difference, which God made in the original creation of man and of cattle, likewise manifests forth the immortality of the soul, of which we spoke above. And though all the other works of God are full of wonder and admiration and truly magnificent, yet that man is the most excellent and glorious creature of all is evident from the fact that God in creating him had recourse to deep counsel and to a mode entirely different from that which he adopted in creating all the other creatures. For God does not leave it to the earth, to form or bring forth man, as it brought forth beasts and trees. But God forms man himself, "in the image" of himself, as a participator of the divine nature and as one designed to enjoy the rest of God. Hence Adam before he is formed by Jehovah, is a mere lifeless lump of earth, lying on the ground. God takes that lump of earth into his hand and forms out of it a most beautiful creature, a partaker of immortality.
Now if Aristotle were to hear these things he would burst out into a loud laugh and would say, that the whole matter was a fable; a very pleasant one indeed but a very absurd one; that man, who was a lump of earth as to his original, is so formed by divine wisdom to be capable of immortality. For those ancient philosophers, as Socrates and others, who taught the immortality of the soul, were laughed at and almost cast out by all their fellows. But is it not the very extremity of folly for reason to take this great offense, when it beholds the generation of man to this very day full of greatest wonder! For who would not judge it an absurdity to suppose that man, who is designed to live eternally, should be born from one single drop as it were of seed from the loins of the father? There is even a greater apparent absurdity in this than in Moses saying, that man was formed from a lump of earth by the finger of God. But by all this folly reason plainly shows that she understands nothing of God, who, by the efficacy of a single thought, thus makes out of a lump of earth not only the seed of man, but man himself; and makes also, as Moses afterwards says, the woman out of a single rib of the man. This then is the origin of man!
Man therefore having been thus created, male and female, from their blood under the divine blessing is generated the whole human race. And although this generation is common to man and beasts, that similarity by no means detracts from the glory of our original formation; that we are vessels of God, fashioned by his own hand; that he is our potter and we his clay; as Isaiah speaks in his 64th chapter. Nor does this solemn state of things pertain to our original only, but pervades our whole life, and even unto death and in the tomb we are still the clay of this Potter! From this same creation of man also we may learn, what the real power of free will is, of which our adversaries boast so much. We have indeed in a certain sense a free will, in those things which are put under us. For we are by the command of God appointed lords of the fishes of the sea, of the fowls of heaven and of the beasts of the field. These we kill when we please. We enjoy the food, and other blessings they supply. But in the things pertaining unto God, which are above us and not put under us, man has no free-will at all. But he is in reality as clay in the hand of the potter. He is placed under the mere power of God, passively and not actively. In this our real position we choose nothing, we do nothing. On the contrary we are chosen, we are prepared, we are regenerated; we receive only; as the prophet Isaiah saith, "Thou art our potter; we are thy clay," Is. 64:8.
But here a lawful and holy inquiry of a new description may be made. As Moses speaks of the creation of man here in a new phraseology, "And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground;" and as he did not use the same form of expression above, when the other living creatures were created, so he here mentions a further distinction in man which is not said of any other animate creature: "And God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." This Moses does not say in reference to any of the beasts, though all beasts, as well as man, have the breath of life in their nostrils. We may here therefore sacredly inquire first, why it is that Moses is here led to speak thus. And secondly, why it is recorded in this place concerning man only, that God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul," when all animals throughout the whole Scripture are called "living creatures." The divine expressions recorded by Moses above are, "Let the earth bring forth every living creature after his kind." But here the phraseology is altogether changed, "And man became a living soul." These were the things that, doubtless, moved the patriarchs, the holy fathers and prophets of old, to examine diligently passages of this description in order to discover what these singular forms of speech might signify, being assured that the sacred historian intended by them something peculiar and great and especially worthy of knowledge.
For if you look at the mere animal life of which Moses is here speaking, there is no difference between the man and the ass. For the animal life in both stands in need of meat and drink. It needs sleep and rest. The bodies of both grow and are fattened alike by meat and drink. And from the want of meat and drink both waste and perish alike. In both the stomach receives the food and transmits it when digested to the belly, which generates the blood, by which all the members are refreshed and restored. When we consider these things in themselves, I say, there is no difference between the man and the beast. But Moses in this place so exalts the life of man that he says of him alone of all animals, that he "became a living soul;" not a living creature or a living thing like all the beasts of the earth, but in a more exalted sense "a living soul;" and that, because he was created "in the image of God," which image there can be no doubt whatever, shone with a peculiar brightness in the countenances of Adam and Eve, while yet in their state of innocence. Hence it is that even after the sin and fall, the heathen poets, etc., concluded from the position of his body, from his upright carriage and from the elevation of his eyes to heaven, that man was a creature far more excellent than any other creature in existence.
It is to this surpassing excellency that St. Paul refers when he recites the passage before us in 1 Cor. 15:45. It is there written, "The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit." By a living soul in this passage the apostle means the animal life, which consists in eating, drinking, growing, sleeping, generating, etc.; all which are found also in brutes. But by an antithesis he says that "the last Adam was made a life-giving spirit." This is a life which needs not, and knows not, the conditions of the animal life. Paul moreover here teaches us that Adam, even if he had not sinned, would yet have lived a corporeal life; a life which would have needed meat, drink and rest; a life which would have grown, increased and generated, etc., until God should have translated him to that spiritual life, in which he would have lived without natural animality, if I may so express it; namely, a life from within, derived from God alone; and not a life from without as before, sustained by herbs and fruits. And yet he would have been a man with body and bones, etc., and not a pure spirit, as angels are.
My reply therefore to the new inquiry, above admitted, is this: God by the mouth of Moses speaking in the passage before us designed to set forth the hope of that future and eternal life which Adam, if he had continued in his innocency, would have enjoyed after this present animal life. As if Moses had said, Man became a living soul; not merely in the sense of that life which beasts live, but in the sense of that life which God afterwards designed Adam to live, even without any animal life at all. And this same hope of immortality or an immortal life, we now have through Christ. Although on account of sin we are subject to death and all kinds of calamity. But Adam's natural life, when he became a living soul, was designed to be far exalted above that which we now live since the fall. He would have lived on earth sweetly, happily and with the highest pleasure; and then would have been translated at the time determined in the mind of God, out of the animal life into the spiritual and eternal life; and that translation would have been attended with no pain or trouble whatever. Whereas we are not translated out of this animal life into the life spiritual and eternal, but by death; and that, after an infinity of evils, perils and crosses.
It was after this manner that we ought, like the holy prophets, diligently to look into all these expressions of Moses, and to inquire why it is that, with such depth of purpose and design, he speaks concerning man in terms so different from those he used when speaking of all other living creatures. The design evidently was that our faith and hope of immortality might be confirmed, and that we might be assured that although the life of man as to his animal life is like that of all other living creatures, even of brutes, yet that he possesses a hope of immortality unpossessed by, and wholly unknown to, any other living creature; that he possesses and bears the image and similitude of God, with no particle of which any other animal is dignified or favored. And thus by a most beautiful allegory, or rather by a most excellent figure, Moses here intimates, though obscurely, that God would become incarnate. For with reference to man's differing in no respect from a sheep, as to his animal life, though created in the image and after the similitude of God; that assertion is in fact, a kind of statement by contraries, as they term it in the schools; or, according to another term of theirs, an addition by opposition. And yet as man was created in the image of the invisible God, by this sublime fact is signified in obscure figure, as we shall hereafter hear from Moses, that God would reveal himself in this world in the _Man_, _Christ_. These seeds as it were of the greatest and most marvelous things, did the prophets diligently search out and gather from the divine historian Moses.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.