Tim Mackie: Patterns in the book of Genesis, & Where Discernment Begins
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In this Theology Lab conversation, Tim Mackie of The BibleProject (the Bible Project) explores one of humanity's oldest questions: Where does evil come from? Drawing from Genesis 1–11, Tim Mackie unpacks the Bible's foundational stories of good, evil, sin, suffering, violence, and human nature, showing how these themes shape the entire biblical narrative and ultimately point to Jesus. This is the first of a two-part conversation with Tim.
Description
In this Theology Lab conversation, Tim Mackie of The BibleProject (the Bible Project) explores one of humanity's oldest questions: Where does evil come from? Drawing from Genesis 1–11, Tim Mackie unpacks the Bible's foundational stories of good, evil, sin, suffering, violence, and human nature, showing how these themes shape the entire biblical narrative and ultimately point to Jesus. The interivew looks at stories Adam and Eve, Genesis 1-3, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and then moving on in Genesus, Cain and Abel, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, tracing how human choices, disordered desires, and mistrust of God lead to the spread of violence and brokenness throughout the world. Tim also explains why the Bible presents goodness—not evil—as the most fundamental reality, and why evil is best understood as a distortion of God's good creation. This conversation explores key Christian theological ideas as well, including the problem of evil, freedom, biblical theology, wisdom, and the role Jesus plays in the vocation of humanity in the eyes of God. Theology Lab is about encouraging curiosity and courage for an everyday faith. The follow up episode will look at a topic related to our Beyond Simpe Answer series which focuses on pursuing a theological vision when simple answers aren't enough.
Resources
📚 Learn more about the BibleProject at www.bibleproject.com
Generated Transcript
speaker-0 (00:00.35)
Evil is a parasite reality. It's the degradation of good. It's saying evil's real, but it also isn't the most real thing. God is the most real thing, and therefore goodness is the most real thing.
Okay.
speaker-2 (00:27.662)
Hey, it's Scott here. In this Theology Lab, we're joined by the Bible Project's Tim Mackey. This is the first of a two-part episode, and here in part one, Tim discusses how the Bible describes what evil is, specifically in contrast to what God calls good. And it all leads up to this key question. If we're prone to see reality in a distorted way, how do we begin to learn to discern good and evil?
In the follow-up episode to this, we'll talk to Tim about how to read the Bible when we come up against challenging stories of destruction and violence. If you enjoy Theology Lab videos, subscribe to the channel below and like the video if you would. Here's our conversation with Tim Mackey. Tim, thanks so much for joining us at Theology Lab.
speaker-0 (01:12.012)
Mm-hmm. Yes, absolutely. Hey everybody. Glad to c My thoughts though can not really do justice to the depth and importance of this topic, but I'll give it my best.
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contribute.
speaker-1 (01:28.248)
Great. It is a big topic, but you're known as the Bible Project guy, lately so. And so we thought we might kick it off with a question around how should Christians maybe, or why should Christians look at the Bible when they're looking to make sense, some sense of evil, sin, suffering, violence? Why the Bible specifically versus tradition, teaching? There's a lot of talk out there around these topics, but specifically what does the Bible say, if anything, on these subjects?
speaker-0 (01:59.33)
Yeah, there's a lot a lot of ways you could go at at that question. So here's this will just reveal my fundamentals, kind of convictions about l reality, and so you can take it for for what it is. The reason I read the Bible is because I'm a disciple of Jesus, who I confess is God and human, revealing
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kind of ang-
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That's
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of
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God to us in in the person of Jesus. And if I understand what Jesus said and did, at least semi correctly, what he came to do and be for us and with us has everything to do with
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wow what
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The whole universe exists for human who what humans are and what we're here for in the world, what he came to be and do has everything to do with what's wrong with the world, and to provide a solution, like a way forward out of it. So Jesus also constantly made reference to a collection of scriptures, the texts that he said and that he appealed to. They were just in his
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and what we are.
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and
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In his life that he used to describe himself, his identity, what he was about, what he cared about, what led up to him, what was gonna happen after him. That all was centered on the scriptures. And so and then he commissioned, you know, his closest followers, the apostles, to go represent him as to share the news about what he accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection. And that's the writings of the apostles that we call the New Testament. So
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he-
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The reason I read the Bible at all is actually because I follow Jesus, both to understand the story that he, you know, fits within, but then also to see how I f fit within that story too. So th that's just kind of my quick way of talking about why I care about these texts at all. But also the way that these texts tell a story that leads to Jesus and that flows out from him, you know, into our reality and into our future.
speaker-1 (04:18.354)
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is everything to do with what's wrong with the world and really understanding having a a wise sense of what really is wrong with us and with the world is a hu huge part, I think, of what it means to become a follower of Jesus. because he presented himself as a solution to what's wrong with us in the world. So evil is one word we could use to describe with what's wrong with the world. S suffering
has to do with our experience, the way it affects us personally, right? Of what's wrong with the world. Sin is a way of talking about our contributions to what's wrong. So I don't know where else to go for ultimate reality about what's wrong with the world. You and I think reason and life experience and church tradition are also really important, obviously, sources of truth. But I also
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world.
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it.
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believe that humans can so easily live in a deluded reality and reinforce a delusion around us communally that I I think there's good reason to distrust those sources in and of themselves.
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And that's why...
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Jesus and the scriptures for me are kind of a a bedrock for how I approach reality. That's obviously not a widely shared conviction, you know, in every subculture where we live in America or around the world, but that's an enduring conviction of followers of Jesus throughout time and place. And I'm among their number
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in our,
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I think when looking at different areas of the Bible, we c we could go to so many different places. One of the most relevant ones, the one that I see you go to very often, right, in the Bible project, is the kind of beginning view chapters of the book of Genesis. And there was a series that you did at the Bible Project a couple of years ago. I think it was the one on cities. but you kind of went through early chat the first couple chapters of Genesis to the flood story, so kind of up to chapters eight and nine.
And you looked at patterns and themes that occur there where violence continues to kind of spiral and get bigger and bigger. so maybe looking at those first few chapters, what do you see there that might tell us about the origins and the origins of evil and violence and where the Bible says that these kinds of kinds of things originate from?
speaker-0 (06:51.02)
Hmm. Yes. Wow. Okay. How long do we have? maybe for me, in approaching that question, which is super important, and I'll I'll give my re reflections. But I don't think it's adequate to sit just give an account of evil or violence or sin without seeing what it's a negation of or what it's the opposite of, which is how the story actually begins. So it begins with two.
narratives, they're set right alongside each other about the origins of our world. There's a seven-day creation story that goes through chapter two, verse three. And then there is the Garden of Eden story that begins in Genesis chapter two, verse four. And that runs through the end of chapter three. And those two stories are each giving an account, first of all, of what's right with the creation and what is what is good and true and beautiful.
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about
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And the basic claim is that God is an infinite source of life, of generative love, of generosity, of creativity, and as he brings and beauty out of the chaotic nothingness that is n you know, nothing.
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order.
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There's a line that keeps repeating as God s you know separates, you know, day from night and waters from waters and dry land from water, is that God sees that it's good. And that's fundamental to I think a a Christian view of reality is that creation is good and it is its o origin is in God's goodness, and that what is good about creation is a reflection of God, and God's so generous He would like donate.
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his own infinite existence to things that were not, but now they are. They share in that goodness just as a a gift of God and are sustained by it. And so good is fundamental to that is you could even just because God is fundamental reality, 'cause nothing exists apart from God sustaining, you know, intimate care, the goodness is what is fundamental to God therefore to whatever.
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And then.
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and there's
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God makes and sustains. And so that line, God saw that it was good, gets repeated seven times. But the seven day creation story.
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throughout the
So that's really important.
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God installs a creature as a partner in overseeing the goodness of creation, that's human images of God. And in the seven day narrative, they're just called to have take responsibility for it's the it's the royal language of rulings. So the man and the woman are depicted as a king and a queen. Be fruitful, multiply. Take responsibility. Like let's take this thing somewhere together. So that's the beautiful vision.
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in the seven-day narrative. The Eden narrative gives us this another take, as it were. The what's important about that other take is that God creates the humans out of the the dust, which is kind of an equivalent of not nothingness. We think of dust as something, and in one sense it is, but in another sense it is nothing unless it's given life, and so God breathes into the and forms the human. And then
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and
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the dirt.
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The way God enlists the human as a partner is to put the human in a really sweet setup full of goodness, tr full of all these fruit trees. And God says, first of all, enjoy all the goodness, just enjoy what is good. But then he identifies, man, there is one thing that is not good, and that would be for you at this stage of your development.
speaker-1 (10:30.658)
you
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That's my interpretive move there, but I think that's what is what's going on. At this stage in your development, taking the knowledge of good and bad, or evil is what's used in our English translations. I hope this is okay. But this is this I think this is how you understand what the word evil means in the Bible. So it's the word that is the f the polar opposite of goodness. So goodness is the word Hebrew word tov. The opposite of tove is the Hebrew word ra.
speaker-1 (10:46.062)
that.
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to have.
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likes think of, I don't know, what a what a bad guy does when he yells or something. Ra, you know.
So Ra is just essentially the opposite of
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of.
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I think bad's probably a b a better English rendering. Evil kind of gets us into conceptual territory that would come, I think, later in the history of Greek philosophy and Christian thought. Bad in scriptures essentially is referring not necessarily to something's essence, but to something that produces non-Tove outcomes and experiences in the world. Anything that undoes.
What God has made for Tove is raw. And so God just says, Man, hands off the knowing between good and bad.
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now.
speaker-0 (12:06.358)
Because it'll kill you. That's actually the warning, is it gonna kill you? So this is really odd because these are the people that we know they're destined to take responsibility over everything in a partnership with God. And it really seems like if you're gonna have responsibility for something, you need to be able to know the difference between good and bad. So you can make decisions like should we do this or should we do that? Well, that would be bad. This would be good, so let's do this.
speaker-1 (12:18.711)
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But
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That's the fundamental decision in front of the humans is a posture of of trust. The analogy that I have used has become helpful to me from a eighties movie when I was a kid. So this is gonna date me and but if anybody out there is familiar with the karate kid storyline.
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and
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It's a-
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That's okay.
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The the first one, yeah. Okay.
speaker-1 (12:59.928)
the
speaker-0 (13:00.972)
Yeah. Exactly right. Yes, the first one. So it's a kid who's like struggling teenager, gets beat up all the time, coming of age story. he wants to learn karate to defeat the like the bullies. And he goes to the sage guru master, Mr. Miyagi.
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And he wants to learn.
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karate karate. And what Mr. Miyagi does first says is like, I've got this car out in the driveway. I just want you to go wax it and like do one side with your right, other side with your left. And so he waxes his car. Next, I want you to go paint fence, you know, and he's like painting the fence. so it's kind of a classic scene of like the person in need goes to the one who has what they need and they don't give them what they think they need.
speaker-1 (13:36.846)
I said.
and I'll
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But the brilliant thing Mr. Miyagi's doing is training Daniel's like muscle memory for how to make certain moves that are like the fundamental basics of karate. And that's what makes, you know, that whole part of the story so awesome. So the reason why this is important is that in not taking taking from the tree of knowing good and bad, the humans are being given their first lesson in knowing but the difference between good and bad. And it's
speaker-1 (14:17.934)
Hmm.
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The first lesson is don't trust what your eyes see, 'cause the trees, we're told, are beautiful to see, they're delight to the eyes for eating. If you if you go about discerning good and bad, fundamentally based on what you see with your eyes, what your appetites tell you, it will kill you. That's essentially the warning. That's like the first lesson God is teaching them.
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And they're good
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They don't even make it past lesson number one. And so the the idea work there in that story then is the humans eat from the tree. And then God is like, okay, mm, humans who are gonna define good and bad based on what they s their senses tell them or what their appetite desires tell them. That kind of creature plus eternal life, like bad news. Bad news for them. So he exiles them.
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from
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From the garden. But that's a f that's a fundamental portrait of good and of bad. It's the first appearance of the word evil or bad in the Bible. And so C. S. Lewis truly put it best in his works on the problem of pain and mere Christianity, that evil is kind of like a non-entity because it doesn't really have its own existence. Evil is a parasite reality. It's the degradation of good.
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it
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the taking from or distorting what is good and putting it towards a purpose that doesn't lead towards good.
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and
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That that's a I mean, in my mind, that's really in line with with what's happening here. So the Eden narrative is telling us that you can have something that is a good object in God's good world, like fruit or knowing good and bad, but you can take even what is good, and when that's combined with disordered desires, put good things towards.
speaker-1 (16:01.205)
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or we
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ends and goals connected to desires that actually are not fundamentally good. They're maybe good for us, for me as an individual or my crew, at the expense of someone else's good. Like that's more more it's a more nuanced portrait of of evil. It it's saying evil's real, but it also isn't the most real thing. God is the most real thing and therefore goodness is the most real thing.
And so once humans, you know, buy into this lie of the snake about God's character and they don't trust God, then they take God's good gifts to them and bend them towards a purpose that leads to their own death. So that's the that's the picture of Adam and Eve. And then you're you're right, Scott. The narrative of Genesis, then three, four, on through the early chapters is just showing different variations of how both human individuals and then human communities
Scale those disordered desires that lead to even distortion of goodness. So you get a a brother who is jealous that God is favoring his brother's offering, Cain and Abel. And what God says to him is, like, man, you've got a choice here. If you do good, that's what God says to Cain, if you do good here.
speaker-1 (17:19.797)
more
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Won't there be exaltation for you as well? So Cain's got this like scarcity mentality. Is there gonna be any goodness for me? And he's got this choice. Like God's doing good to another. I don't feel like God's doing good to me right now. It doesn't feel good. God says there will be goodness for me in the future, but I need to do good in order to be patient to experience that good. And he doesn't, you know, and he famously murders his brother, and then he builds a city.
speaker-1 (17:58.223)
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For self-protection, and then that becomes like a den, as Obi-Wan Kenobi said of the Tatooine Cantina, den of scum and villainy. We must be cautious. So the city that Cain builds seven generations down his line becomes a place where you have a guy who takes two wives instead of one, so all of a sudden we have this commodification of the female body.
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of
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Like accumulating like property. And then he's just this arrogant, violent warrior dude who's chopping off heads for people insulting his honor.
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And then that.
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is directly connected to the generation of the flood in the days of Noah, that we're told that the land is just getting soaked with innocent blood and outbreak of violence. And then that's directly connected to the story about the building of the Tower of Babylon, which is very much about it's an like an aggrandized human project to reunite heaven and earth or human space and God's space. Get get the divine good life, but on human terms.
speaker-1 (19:13.687)
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And so we have this portrait of like organized economic and technological unity to make a name for ourselves up into the skies. So it's sort of like a scale. It works on an individual couple, but then it works on the scale of family, like parents and children and and siblings. But then it works on the level of a neighbor what we might call a neighborhood or a community.
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and assess.
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and
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Then it works on the level of a whole culture and civilization and then of like an al an empire type of portrait with Babylon of like scaling out with economic and
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political.
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Power. So that's the biblical's origin story. And I think to me, what's just so important is that what is most fundamental to reality, I'm circling back around, is good. What is good. But humans can take God's good gifts when we put those good gifts to purposes that are defined by my senses or my desires, that can sometimes lead to good ends.
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And when.
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If you have a wise human who's truly learned God's wisdom for how to discern between good and bad. And until we gain that wisdom, we make some pretty poor choices of what good gifts God has given us. And this is why the story of Solomon is such an important kind of hyperlink back to and reflection on the Eden pattern, because when he becomes king, the first thing he does is tell God.
speaker-1 (20:47.938)
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Could you give me the knowledge of good and bad? Because I'm just a kid. I don't know like what to do, you know, with this people and all this, you know, r wealth and resources. And he says, I actually don't even want wealth. I just want to know the difference between good and bad. Will you give it to me instead of take I'll instead of me taking it, will you give it to me? And God's so stoked, He's like, Yeah, I'll give you the wisdom. and I'll give you all the stuff you didn't ask for. So it's truly Solomon, at least for a minute, is like a reversal of Adam and Eve's grab.
for the knowing. So apparently lesson number one in knowing good and bad is learning not to trust the voices in your head or your appetites, but learning to trust the word of God.
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and
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Whatever evil is, we can talk about the snake, the all spiritual beings and all of that. But that story about the tree really is, I think, the most important insight that the biblical story is is trying to give us.
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and
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Tim, let me put just one follow-up here. You've talked about the kind of the most virtue of of going acknowledging before God in these with these in early chapters of Genesis with Solomon that one does not fully grasp but good and evil are. And that's like a virtuous thing to be able to bring that to God and ask for God's guidance. How far out do you see that going within the biblical story? Do you think that's like a
important thread that runs through the gospels into the letters. Where does it go?
speaker-1 (22:33.006)
Mm.
speaker-0 (22:33.218)
Mm-hmm. Yes, I think the entire Old Testament takes that basic theme, not just for granted, but is built on it and it keeps bringing it up. Except learning that the fear of the Lord, which Adam and Eve did too late, they feared God after they violated what God said. Had they f feared God as it were.
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before, you know, they blew it.
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I think, you know, history would have looked very different. So Proverbs is just all about that. And it's also has to be why the book of Proverbs opens in one through nine with two kind of iconic characters. One is the guy called the wicked man.
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But
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and.
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who's like a you know, an Adam figure, but then you have Lady Wisdom, who's like a redeemed Eve figure. And when a gullible human, a son of Solomon, follows and and joins himself, literally gets married to, it's the language of the man and his wife like would cling to each other in the garden. That's what you're supposed to do to wis wisdom in Proverbs one through nine.
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And.
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then you get humans who can rule in the wisdom and fear of the Lord. So that's a good example where Proverbs is actually just this creative shuffling of the key of the key themes of the Garden of Eden story. So that's fundamental to the Hebrew Bible. The gospel authors are presenting Jesus as a new Adam.
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of the
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and a
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to Israel because the whole role of Israel was to live out, as it were, the ideal vocation of Adam and Eve that they failed to do and that they would do on humanity's behalf. And then of course they fail also. And so Jesus comes to, as it were, truly fulfill Israel's vocation. And in doing that, it's the key like to be the the truly human
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one.
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So the gospel authors, I mean, the reason Jesus is in the wilderness and he has these three tests and the reason why he's in the garden, you know, at the other end of the story of the Garden of Gethsemane, you know, the night before he he gets arrested. And he's praying and it's all about aligning a human will and desire with with God's desire.
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and
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And Jesus is portrayed as the first actually real human, whoever truly lives the f the full human destiny of what God has in store for us all. So there's lots of echoes of Eden all over the gospel narrative. And it it depends on where you go in Paul, because you know, in Paul's letters, for example, he's putting out fires. So he's always putting his theology that he's got all in his head, but he only brings it out when he's trying to address it to it.
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The specific need. And so he never wrote a discipleship one on one or systematic theology, but we can kind of piece it together. So man, Romans r tells us he's really thought a lot about the early chapters of Genesis, because he's constantly quoting from it. And Corinthians, he mentions the snake and Eve in his letters to the Corinthians. Timothy. So yeah, yes, actually.
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and
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I could just say yes. the Adam and Eve story and then Genesis one to eleven is just fundamental to understanding just the the coherence of a Christian worldview, truly. I think a Christian view of reality. You can make sense of Jesus and the apostles apart from really any of that. But I think it'll leave some big questions hanging. Yeah. At least it did for me for a long time. And over the last probably seven years.
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and
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Genesis one through eleven has become like this generative like fountain that keeps giving me new perspective on like every everything else.
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That's the end of part one, and in part two of our conversation with Tim, we'll continue to look at the Bible and what to do when we come up against challenging stories of destruction and violence. Thanks for watching.
