“The Lord God took the man [adam] and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” (v 15)

The Hebrew word adam means ‘man’ or ‘human’ and is not a first name in the sense we would understand. So adam in the story is representative of ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity.’ God loves this adam, creating for him a beautiful garden, animal companions, and then another companion, called ‘woman.’ The story emphasises how close God is to adam and woman, talking and walking with them in the garden; how much this is a relationship of love. Tragically, as we all know, it becomes a sad story of deceit and disobedience. In this way, the story tries to untangle and understand the reasons why humanity often seems so far from God, both in how we act and how we feel. But the good news is that the rest of the Bible is a story of how God is always seeking to be close to and to walk with us again - something which he does definitively in the person of Jesus.

Rev Richard