In 1997, a struggling Internet
company called Amazon was losing money hand over fist. Many people weren’t ready
to purchase books over the Internet. Many didn’t even know there was such a
company.
In an effort to get readers to visit
the website, Amazon invited noted author John Updike to begin and end a mystery
story. He submitted the opening to a novel he’d begun in 1960 and never
finished, about a magazine editor named Miss Tasso Polk. For each of the next 45
days, the public was invited to submit the story’s next paragraph. Thousands
entered every day, and each day’s winner won a thousand dollars. The next day’s
contestants returned daily for the next month and a half to see what strange
new direction the story had taken and how they might respond. Often the story
seemed to pin prospective writers into a corner, even reaching a dead end. “Now
you get out of this mess,” each author seemed to say.
With 45 different authors’ new
paragraphs pieced together, the story took many twists and turns. “The
strangest twist,” Updike remembered, “was when Miss Polk gets into a taxi and
is driven, in short order, to an estate with a cobbled driveway and a grove of
boxwoods and elms. Elms! In Manhattan!”
But eventually the story was
finished, the mystery was solved, and thanks to the ending written by Updike,
all was well!1
Written into a corner
Now think about the book of Genesis.
By the 12th chapter of that biblical book, history has been written
into a corner. The several human actors who wrote their own parts of the saga
through their free will had created so many twists and turns that God’s story
seemed to have been written into a dead end!
Despite God’s creation of a stable
and reliable universe, disobedience had forced humanity out of the Garden of
Eden. One brother killed another, and evil spread. Genesis 6:5 says, “The LORD
saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, a
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