Icons of Desire: Q&A Session
With Tim Mackie, joined by Lucy Peppiatt, Ben Blackwell, and Freddy Hedley
Teaching Day hosted by WTC Theology (2024)
In this extended Q&A from our teaching day Icons of Desire: Meditations on Genesis 1–3 and the Journey of Christian Maturity, Tim responds to audience questions and is joined by members of the WTC Theology faculty for further discussion.
Topics include:
– The tree of the knowledge of good and bad in Genesis 1–3
– The meaning of “tov” (good) in the Hebrew Bible
– Human desire and moral autonomy
– The image of God and Christian maturity
– How Jesus fulfils the human vocation introduced in Genesis
This conversation explores how the themes of Genesis 1–3 echo throughout the Hebrew Bible and into the New Testament, and how the biblical story shapes our understanding of wisdom, integrity, and formation in Christ.
If you’ve watched Sessions 1–3, this Q&A goes deeper into the questions many readers wrestle with when engaging the Garden of Eden narrative and the theme of desire in Scripture.
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Chapters
00:00 – Handling Diversity of Biblical Interpretations
07:55 – Who is the “Us” in Genesis 1:26? (Trinity & Divine Counsel)
18:08 – Day 4: Borrowed Goodness and the Role of Creation as a Sign
20:45 – Stunted Maturity: Is the “Fall” a Story of Lost Opportunity?
23:01 – Why Two Creation Stories? (The Art of Biblical Repetition)
28:00 – Panel Q&A: The Significance of “Not Touching” the Tree
38:40 – Death vs. Desire: Restoring the Image of God through Christ
#TimMackie #BibleProject #Genesis #Genesis1to3 #BiblicalTheology #TreeOfKnowledge #GardenOfEden #ChristianMaturity #BibleTeaching #WTCTheology
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I m a huge fan of timsir…wish to meet..
Let's go!!!!! Thank you WTC!!!
I wanted to know more about what the two tree means
God says be fruitful and multiply. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, eve conceived and bore 2 sons. One was of the devil and the other is of god. So.. the serpent being an upright being and probably can mate with eve and she then mated with Adam and bore 2 children. Then after that they realized they were naked. Does this make sense?
I love Q & A! Especially answered by Tim.
So when God uses Jobs faith as His to deal with satin. We can day it is an Us relationship.
Baby boy can sure teach
Where can I find the Genesis recordings? Is there a section in your website ?
wow! This talk was remarkable.
The "us" I am considering is maybe the redactor combined Elohim of Ge 1 with LORD God of Ge 2 and that they are the "us". This is my latest rabbit hole. Still thinking…
Tim, I appreciate your incisive and critical research and presentations.
One question: Why didn't you reference Genesis 3:22 in answering the second question? That reference to 'us' by Yahweh elohim seems to me to be quite critical.
Or was Adam, the one who actually heard the prohibition on eating the fruit of this tree, perhaps the one who told his girl not to touch the tree?
Thank you very much for this series. Awesome.
Amazing
Respecting creatures is so Biblical and was my first thought when i heard how mad cow disease began. I could not believe that they fed ground up sheep to cows! It just seems such an incredible violation against nature, against how God made life to be… i was stunned, and not surprised how it violated us back.
And yes, Scripture is dimensional… you must dig for the nuggets. . . Like fun gem hunting. I love it!❤
47:30 ish and onwards. Oh Lucy! You have nailed one of my questions! I'm think of 'abortion' as the killing of the seed of Adam/Eve which seems to become more repugnant as gestation approaches birth. I have only come across WTC through following Tim and I'm impressed with you folks. Not that 'my' opinion really means anything 🙂 Keep up the great work folks!!
Thank you very much for this video.
What Mackie (and Irenaeus) conveys: Humanity is the result of an intentional imagination.
The blueprint (Christ in eternity): Before the first letter of Genesis was ever written, the character of the human was already fully realized in the mind of the Author (God). This primal figure is Jesus Christ. He is not merely the "second Adam"; rather, Adam is the "preliminary Jesus."
The copy (Adam): God did not create Adam randomly. Instead, He impressed upon His creature the very form that He Himself intended to inhabit in Christ.
When we imagine God, we are not reaching into a vacuum. We are tapping into the imagination that the Author has hard-coded into our DNA. We conceive of God in human form because God conceived of us as His own form.
❤❤❤
Beautiful fonn & interoeted lovell¥ wjereaziz an baby can comprehend€3 🎊
Adam telling Eve not to touch the tree is perhaps the first instance ever of a Talmudic fence being placed around a command of God. This would also have some bearing on Adam's trust of Eve's ability to obey the command from God that he has relayed to Eve.
Wow. Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
I will propose an interpretation of the phrase that the woman adds to the original command of God: "neither shall ye touch it."
As I understand the tree of knowledge to simply be a description of the human capacity to reason and make decisions, and specifically the capability to choose whom to make the ultimate authority, the addition makes God's command completely unrealistic and impossible to keep, thus, rendering God's command invalid.
As the tree of knowledge is the very means to good (which is God's lifegiving word) as well as the means to rejection of the good, no one can avoid touching it. One cannot avoid using one's mind. One can, however, avoid making it one's ultimate authority.
Thus, it is not a sin to have a will or desire contrary to the will and word of God! Even Jesus did! It becomes a sin only when we reject God's word and make our own mind our "food", instead of every word from God's mouth.
The criteria is not the quality or intention of the idea we subscribe to, but whether it comes from God.
If we hear God and do his will, like Jesus in Gethsemane, then God's life will go through us to build Eden in the world. But if we reject God, we will be stripped naked of God's life-giving mission and become dead conveyors of death in the world (like Cain became, before he chose to look up, admit his guilt/sin, and obey God).
Does this make sense to you? Please click like. If not, please ask!
41:31 I'm lost
I need to know more about that inversion because to me that is critical in my belief
Genesis
Plagiarized from Greek mythology and ather civilizations presented as Old Testament
Old Testament stories people events
Mythological never existed never happened
Fictional my friend