We are studying an important biblical setting in the Bible.

It's called the Midbar, translated as the wilderness.

The wilderness is a lifeless and dangerous place.

It's a place of fear and death and destruction.

However, there's this whole other set of characters who, when they go into the wilderness, they face a crisis of life and death and destruction. However, there's this whole other set of characters who, when they go into

the wilderness, they face a crisis of life and death, and they meet God and they trust him. And then what

they get in the wilderness is Eden. In today's episode, we are going to look at the creation narratives

in the beginning of the Bible as God creating life out of

the wilderness. God plants a garden in the wilderness, and God takes the dust of the wilderness and

forms humanity. He breathes into humanity, the breath of life. So the origins of everything

is wilderness. The default state within the Eden narrative's way of thinking about it is the wilderness.

We'll consider how life and creation is an oasis in the wilderness.

Everything that sustains my life comes from something that was before me and outside of me.

Adam and Eve are placed in the garden,

and they're invited to enjoy God's life.

But another creature appears to deceive them,

promising that there's more to be found outside of God's life.

When a deceiver shows up into the story,

it's a snake, and the snake crawls in from the wild. So this is a creature

that comes from the chaos realm, and then it spreads chaos. Adam and Eve listen to the voice of chaos.

And so they're banished from the garden into the wilderness. We came out of the wilderness. We go back to the wilderness, from dust to dust.

Today on the podcast, we're going to look at Genesis 1 through 3 as a framework to think

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