Questions raised during the session, with answers drawn from the teaching.
Q: Why does the creation order in Genesis 2 seem to contradict Genesis 1? In chapter 1, plants come before man; in chapter 2, God forms man and then makes the garden grow.
The two accounts are not contradicting each other — they are telling the same story from different angles and at different levels of zoom. Genesis 1 gives the broad sequence of what was created and when. Genesis 2 zooms in on the specific scene of Eden, without implying that nothing existed outside it yet.
The seeds and raw material of creation were already in place. The sun, the soil, the water were all there — the conditions for growth were present. The garden grows up around the man, not in a world with no vegetation yet. It is the difference between describing a stage being built and then describing in detail what happens on it.
Q: Why did God put both trees in the garden? If the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was going to cause problems, why include it?
Because without it, there is no genuine choice — and without genuine choice, there is no genuine love or relationship. A garden with only one tree is not a test; it is a container. The tree had to be there for the decision to be real.
What the tree actually represented goes deeper than knowledge in the abstract. It represented the capacity to define good and evil for yourself, independent of God — to become your own moral authority. To eat of it was not simply to acquire information; it was to usurp God’s position as the one who determines what is good. This is what the serpent meant when he said “you will be like God.” The full implications of that choice are taken up in the next session.
Q: Is God male or female?
God is neither, in the human biological sense. He is the Creator of both male and female, which means both must in some sense be derived from him. Male and female are subsets of what God is — we are not on his level, and he cannot be reduced to ours.
At the same time, God’s consistent self-description using masculine language — Father, Son, King — is intentional, not incidental. Father is a position of authority and relationship, not a biological designation. Jesus also had to be born as a man for specific reasons the study will address when it covers the legal framework of atonement. The broader principle is this: trying to fit God into human gender categories, in either direction, is a form of the same error that runs through so many theological mistakes — domesticating the Creator with the categories of the creature. He is above them.
An audience member noted that the Greek writers of the New Testament used a neuter pronoun when referring to the Holy Spirit, indicating that even in the earliest church there was an awareness that the Spirit could not accurately be assigned a gender. This reflects the same instinct: God exceeds our categories.
Q: Was there suffering before the Fall? If not, does that mean suffering is evil?
Suffering and death were not part of the original design. They are consequences of rebellion — first in the spiritual realm, and then, in Genesis 3, in the human one. In that sense, suffering is not what God intended for his creation.
But there is an important distinction between something not being God’s original design and something being irredeemably evil. God does not merely permit suffering; he redeems it and works through it. Two of the fastest-growing Christian populations in the world right now are in China and Iran — communities forged under intense persecution. What looks like catastrophe from the outside can be, from a wider view, the very condition producing the deepest spiritual fruit.
The central example is Jesus himself. If suffering were simply evil, God would not have sent his Son into it. Suffering is not the plan — it is what the enemy injected into the plan. But God has not abandoned the plan; he has woven a path of redemption through the very thing that was meant to derail it.
Q: What does “the Word” mean in John 1? Is it pointing to truth, or creative power, or something else?
Truth is part of it, but it doesn’t fully capture the weight of the term. The Greek word Logos carries both meaning and creative power — and John is deliberately playing on the creation account in Genesis 1, where God spoke the universe into existence. God didn’t manufacture the world with his hands; he spoke it. The Word was the agent of that speaking. “Truth” alone suggests content without force; Logos suggests both the content and the power that brings it into being.
An audience member added that truth also implies cutting through — through the lies, confusion, and misinterpretation that accumulate when the source of truth is absent. That’s a real dimension of it. In fact, everything on the negative side of human experience is essentially the absence of God. Love has no real opposite — there is love, and there is the vacuum where love is not. Satan doesn’t create anything; he corrupts and opposes. The Word, by contrast, is the source and sustainer of everything that is real and good.
Q (Observation): Doesn’t John 1 intentionally echo Genesis 1 by starting “In the beginning”?
Entirely deliberate. John is a careful writer. By opening his Gospel with the same three words that open Genesis, he is signaling — particularly to Jewish readers — that he is about to tell the creation story again, from a new angle. This time, the identity of the Creator is going to be made explicit. The Word who was present in Genesis 1, through whom all things were made, is the one who became flesh and dwelt among us. John is connecting the first page of the story to the man his Gospel is about.
The audience member also noted that when Genesis says “God said, ‘Let there be light,’” God didn’t manufacture the light — he spoke it into existence. John picks this up directly: the Word was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness. The imagery runs in a continuous line from Genesis 1 to John 1.
Q: I always thought the Old Testament was about God the Father and the New Testament was about Jesus. Are they really the same?
This is one of the most common misreadings of the Bible — and one of the most consequential, because it makes the God of the two Testaments seem inconsistent, even contradictory. Some of the most destructive theological ideas in church history have grown from that split.
The answer is categorical: yes, they are the same. The God acting in the Old Testament — creating, speaking, appearing, judging, delivering — is the same God who shows up in Galilee in the first century. The agent of those Old Testament acts is Jesus, the pre-incarnate Word, making the Father known before the Incarnation the same way he would do it after. John 1:18 makes this explicit: no one has seen the Father, but the Son has revealed him — throughout all of history, not just since Bethlehem.
One of the aims of this study is precisely to produce a unified view of God across both Testaments, so that his character comes into consistent focus rather than appearing to shift between the two halves of the Bible.
These questions were raised during the session and are preserved here as a record of what came up in the room. They are a companion to, not a replacement for, the main chapter notes.