Christians don’t understand the Old Testament because many can’t admit that they live in the middle of a messy conflict.

Part of the reason Christians don’t understand the Old Testament is that they can’t admit that they live in the middle of a messy conflict.

That conflict is all around us, but also inside of us.

One moment we might be ready for anything and anyone and another we are overwhelmed by our inadequacy.

One moment we are loving and self-sacrificing, the next we are self-focused and self-indulgent.

One moment we are acting from integrity and truth, then next we are double-minded and deceitful.

We all experience this conflict, and it is this conflict that is at the heart of the Biblical narrative which is really a warts-and-all description of the reality in which we all find ourselves.

The major themes of our conflict are established in the first three chapters of the first of the Bible’s books, Genesis.

In its very first chapter, the Bible claims that human beings are unique.

Unlike everything else in creation, Genesis declares that we human beings (both men and women) were created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).

What it means to be created in the image of an invisible God seems to be made clearer in chapter two which is a second description of the creation process.

In this second creation story, God tenderly crafts the first person from clay and then breathes his own life into his creation.

The Genesis account seems to be saying that it is the “breath of life,”  (The Hebrew word for “breath” also means “spirit”) or the human spirit, that is what separates us from animals and the rest of creation, and enables us to bear the image of God.

This lines up with other parts of the Bible that declare that God has “set eternity in the human heart,” (Ecclesiastes 3:10) or that it isn’t so much our intellect,  “but it is the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding.” (Job 32:8)

As image bearers, God gave people a special task. They were to “work and take care” of God’s creation.  We were to be God’s representatives, bringing his loving order to the world.  This was our vocation. (Hebrew Scholar John Walton has done really helpful work on this over the past decade or so.)

This also lines up with our own experience. We kind of know that there is a part of us that is bigger than time and space. We kind of know that we were created for a purpose.

That sense of a need for a meaning bigger than ourselves is a big part of what it means to be a human being and is true of every person who walks the face of the planet.

Victor Frankl named this reality very helpfully in his book “Man’s search for meaning” I was fascinated to see a talk show host, Jimmy Fallon, talk about his own search for meaning after an accident:

While all of us kind of know we are made for more than ourselves, and all of us long for meaning and purpose, we all know that is not the whole story.

All of us also live in an inner conflict between the “eternity” in our hearts and what feels like basic drives to minimise pain and maximise pleasure. While on one hand, we want to give our lives for some bigger purpose, on the other hand, we also want to be the centre of the universe.

Genesis explains this self-centred part of us in chapter 3. The story shows Adam and Eve rejecting their vocation as God’s representatives and deciding to represent themselves, which results in death.

Genesis chapter 3 makes it clear that the “death” that results from their self-centeredness is bigger than simply what happens when someone stops breathing.  The story outlines a death of the relationship with the God of the universe (verses 8-9), a death of the relationship between people (verse 12), a death of the relationship with our very selves (verse 10) and a death of the relationship with the created order (verses 17-19).

Because people wanted to be self-focused they found that they themselves were broken, that they were in broken relationships, living in a broken world and worst of all, separated from their creator, of whom they were meant to be a reflection.

Whether people call themselves religious or not, the human experience explained by Genesis 1-3 is not an unfamiliar one.

We all know there is part of us that is bigger than time and space, but we all are painfully aware of the small, self-centred part of us that produces pain and brokenness at all the levels Genesis talks about.

We can all identify with the Apostle Paul who confesses to having at least two sides to himself that are constantly pulling in different directions:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. (Romans 7:15)

This experience of conflict is common to everyone, and you won’t understand the scriptures that the church said Jesus was a fulfilment of, unless you allow yourself to admit the conflict you live with every day.

As you allow yourself to acknowledge the conflict, you will find yourself ready for the rest of the story of the Bible, and ultimately for the story of Jesus.