Have you ever noticed in the creation week account that the seventh day has no evening or morning associated with it? It seems to go on as an endless day. Whether it really did or not is not the point. The point is Christ in all things, especially the Hebrew Bible. Romans 11:36 says that all things are out from Christ, through Christ, and unto Christ just before Paul appeals to Christians to present themselves a living sacrifice…one body in Christ.
Jesus tells us in John 5:39-40 and Luke 24:26-27 that the Hebrew Bible is really about Him and how to come to Jesus for life. Strangely, we do not believe Him! For hundreds of years, we have pigeon-holed the seeing of Christ in the Scriptures to an elective. It is tragic if Jesus is right – that you can find Him for His life on His terms in those stories in the Hebrew Bible.
And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. Genesis 3:8 ESV
Let us look at this verse using Biblehub’s interlinear. I have added some translation footnotes so you can follow along at https://biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/3-8.htm . Here is my translation of it.
‘And they heard (and responded to)’1 the ‘sound and voice’2 ‘of YHVH Elohim ‘steadily proceeding’3 ‘in the garden’4 ‘in the Ruach’5 ‘of the Day’6 ‘and hid themselves’ – man ‘and his wife’ – ‘from the face / surface’7 ‘of YHVH Elohim ‘in the midst of’8 tree(s)9 ‘of the garden’.
1) shama = hearing and responding appropriately with heeding or obedience
2) qol = a sound or voice or both – in context of God it is akin to “hearing His Voice”
3) halak = to proceed along, like how Noah’s ark floated, or the Flood waters steadily went down, or Sarai continuing steadily on as childless.
4) gan = a garden enclosure. Fun fact: search out the traditional Chinese character for garden, yuan. https://answersingenesis.org/genesis/chinese-characters-and-genesis/ The pictograph means what Genesis 2 says.
5) ruach = spirit, breath, wind = the animating force-life of things. Think of how wind blows through trees in a garden, or how breath shows that one is alive. This is the idea behind ruach and why both Hebrew and Greek conflate wind, breath, and spirit into all the same thing.
6) yom = day in all its wide variety of English understanding. The Hebrew and English idea for day is very similar in its broad application.
7) paneh = face or surface, which can apply to one’s presence such as “before one’s face” or surface.
8) tavek = in the middle or midst of, inside, within, or among
9) aets = tree or any stalky wood things or constructed wood thing from scaffolding, a wood club or even a grape vine. If it has bark, or is wood from that, then it is aets, “wood things.” (British: “A wood”)
We live in a great era of Bible study. No generation has had the same kind of access to such a wide variety of free resources right at our finger tips. Word studies are relatively simple. There are hundreds of English translations of the Bible. I have access to quite a few through studybible.info, Biblehub.com, biblegateway.com, esword.net, biblesupport.com, and so on… There is even the Greek LXX translation, which means 70, and is commonly referred to as the Septuagint. The Septuagint translation is usually quite helpful, because Second Temple Period Jews made the translation in the 200s BC. When it came to translating the Hebrew into Greek, they specifically chose the Greek word δειλινόν, deilinon, for Genesis 3:8. It means “at dusk.” However, as you can see, the Hebrew word is ruach.
Clearly, the LXX interpreted, rather than translated in this specific verse. Yet, why no one translates Ruach as Spirit is mystifying. My guess is that the LXX set the pattern and everyone just fell into line like in the old DOS video game “Lemmings” march on and going off a cliff. Nevertheless, God breathes life into clay and makes a living soul. The Eden-garden is a mountaintop location as we learn in Ezekiel 28. It is a place of overlap between heaven and earth where we should expect God’s Spirit to dwell and overlap with the man and the woman.
The man and wife could eat of the fruit of trees in the garden. But there was one tree that they could not eat of, a certain tree that God can just breeze right through like all the others, and does breeze right through in the Spirit of His Day. This might have been part of the temptation. Adam and Eve had tried the fruit all around. When they heard God moving about in the garden, His Spirit like a rushing wind form heaven, the forbidden tree was no different to Him than any other tree. Eating from all the trees would make them like God… except for one critical missing piece of information withheld from them.
We know the story; in the day that they eat, they die. Oh, it was not physical life termination; the death was far worse! Death is a disconnect from the Creator’s Living Estate of having Everything to give to his finite creatures. You see, we are finite creatures like they all are from the most powerful spirit beings to the tiniest living thing in a microscope. All are finite. Scale is irrelevant for anything finite compared to The Infinite. True living expresses the continuity from Creator through those created.
As such, there is a certain type of knowledge that spells death for finite beings created with freewill. It is like a tarpit out from which there is no escape. It is exactly how Genesis says it: good and bad, which internalized is a self-focused reality relative to a finite being. It is quite literally the opposite of the One Who Owns all of Life’s Estate and willingly gives all He has with no holdback, no defense, and no Plan B. People are created in His Image and Likeness to flow by the same trajectory of being as their Creator. Finite beings spiral into the death cycle when they become caught up in the good vs. bad, fair vs. unfair battles for domination that source from that forbidden tree. It is currently the human default to be like a god enforcing one’s delusion of good for all. Finite beings cannot possibly know everything, everywhere, at all times. But the God of the Bible can.
The cross depicted God as a man breezing through a tree in the Spirit of His Day. God took all this venomous poison from the mouth of the serpent, its lies, and made it all immobile in Him on the cross. “In this manner God loved the world…” says John 3:16. In what manner, in John 3:14’s manner of the bronze serpent on a pole from Numbers 21:4-9. Jesus did so much more than forgive us for our sins. He bore them and petrified their poisonous actions in Himself. They tried to make Jesus react or respond like any default human, but He kept pouring out love, care, and forgiveness. As they killed him, He kept giving life. In death, He even poured out the contents of His heart.
Learn the Spirit of His Day. It never changes. He reigns this way in Revelation 5:6 and reigned that way from the foundation of the world. If we “learn” Him as a Person, “what Kind He is,” then He can carry us through the tree that is impossible for us to escape otherwise. As James 1:21 says, receive the implanted Logos-Word with meekness, Him dynamically being able to rescue your souls. Only the Holy Spirit can Way-guide you into the True Spirit of His Day.
Seeing Jesus as The Life of The Bible Stories 