Genesis 2:4-25

Now, notice verse 6, but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.

So, we see here that the earth was here, in existence, before man was placed on it.

What was God doing? He was preparing a home for man and God’s getting ready to move man into the place that He’s prepared for him.

Now, this might be a good time to look at something very important.

In the Word of God, we have these massive events which take place, such as the creation week, the creation of man and woman, the fall of man, the flood, the Exodus of Israel from Egypt and the miraculous events that accompany that, the tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the rapture of the Church, the judgment of God upon the earth and many more.

A common thread runs through these events in that God has given us almost no details of the mechanics of how these great events were made to happen.

There are 2 reasons for this.

The first is that it’s not God’s intention to break down these events into scientific explanations that man can understand. He‘s giving us the story of man’s fall and redemption, not a scientific account.

Even someone with the greatest scientific or biological understanding would not be able to understand the miraculous processes to cause these events. These are processes that took place both within the dimensions that we live in as well as in dimensions outside of our own that we don’t even know to exist. However, that doesn’t stop man from trying to prove or disprove those events in ways that are acceptable to man’s mind.

This is why there are so many absurd manmade explanations that have been touted to both support these events or “disprove” them.

We want a scientific explanation that puts it all into words so that we can understand and then we can believe.

We find it hard to believe because that detail that our minds scream out to know is simply not there.

We simply cannot make these events more acceptable to our minds by trying to explain them in a way that our limited ability can accept. If anything, these manmade attempts to rationalise these great events diminish them, for me anyway.

We must either accept that behind our universe is a God greater and more powerful than man can ever know or reject the God of the Bible entirely.

If we accept the Bible’s words, even though we can’t explain every event, we walk through this life with the assurance that comes from the words of Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Remember that the natural or carnal mind is in opposition to God. It’s hostile to Him,  (Romans 8:7).

The natural man must see to believe but the spiritual man must believe to see.

With that, we come now to the method of man’s creation beginning in verse 7. We’ve seen in chapter one the monumental process of inorganic matter coming into being from nothing. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Then we see the next move when inorganic is made organic or lifeless to living. We saw that in chapter 1 verse 21 where God created great sea creatures and animal life.

Did God create plant life at this time? We can’t be dogmatic about it but from the reading of verse 29, it sounds very much like the plant life or the seeds of the plant life were already there in the ground.

Then we have the next great act of the creation. Man is created!

There’s no long and slow transition here, no evolution from a lesser being to man.

In Genesis 2 verse 7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being, or living soul in many translations.

Now this is the method of the creation of man and as usual, God has given us limited information. Basically, God used the ground, the dust to first form man. I take this to mean the body.

In this form, I would imagine that there would have been every microscopic particle that would be required to make the living man function but it is, as yet lifeless.

It is said that our bodies are made up of about 16 chemical elements and those same elements are in the ground. When our life on earth is finished our body will return to the dust of the ground where it came from. But we are much more than a body of dust. We are a living, breathing spirit being.

How did God make that dust come to life? He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.

What did God breathe into him? The breath of life. Then man became a living soul. God used the dust of the earth to form his body, the physical, but the real man, the living soul, came directly from the very being of God Himself.

Man is now in a miraculous and wonderful relationship with his Creator. He now has the capacity to relate to God which separates man from every other creature in the universe as far as we know.

You do have the angels, however, we know very little about them.

Now many people such as the theistic evolutionist say that man evolved up to this point and then God took over when he had reached this evolutionary stage.

However, evolutionary theory can not account for human speech or human conscience, and certainly not human individuality.

These three things make the evolution theory impossible to follow.

Now you can take a man’s bones and compare them to the bones of some animal, like an ape, probably an ape and there can be resemblances and yet there are huge differences also.

We would expect there to be a certain similarity because these creatures move in the same environment in which we move as human beings—naturally, the chassis would have to have some similarities. but that doesn’t mean they’re the same being.

So much exaggeration has been used in the similarity between man and these other creatures, but man is an entirely different creature. God breathed into his breathing places the breath of life, and man became a living soul. Man is fearfully and wonderfully made, and that is something that we must keep in mind.

How wonderful it is to ponder on this. Here we have what is not much more than a highly intricate clay model.

Then God Himself breathes this unexplainable, miraculous force called life, from His very self into this model. As it courses through the model muscle and artery, bone and flesh become living. Life causes the blood with all it’s mysterious wonders to flow at the same instance the heart takes on life and begins to pump. Eyes that were an instant ago sightless can now see as the countless molecules work instantaneously together and combine with the brain which is also now “alive”. Limbs move in answer to countless messages instantly flashing from the brain and lungs pump perfectly formulated air into the now instantly fully working man.

Not only is every biological machine from the largest to the microscopically small working in perfect unison, but the living, breathing, man can think, feel, understand and make decisions. He is perfectly as one with God.

Then, as if to confound man’s attempts to explain it all even further, all this had to happen at exactly the same instant. No member or fluid, bone or tissue could have come into being first. It must all have happened at the same time. Into the bargain, there’s no amount of time within our known universe that’s small enough to measure the instant that this all came together.

How is it possible for mere man to try and explain this awesome wonder in a scientific terms that he can understand?

Now to Genesis Chapter 2 and verse 8, “The LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed.”

Nobody really knows where the Garden of Eden is.

Many people who’ve studied Bible geography place it somewhere in the Tigris–Euphrates Valley; in fact possibly the entire valley.

Originally, that valley was a very fertile place, and it still is, so I believe. It’s part of what’s known as “the fertile crescent.”

It is said that at one time, the inhabitants of that region didn’t need to plant grain, they simply harvested it. It grew by itself. Many believe that this area will someday become the very centre of the earth again.

In Verse 9 we read , “And out of the ground the LORD God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

These are unusual trees for sure, the “tree of life” and the “tree of knowledge of good and evil.” We know nothing much about them since they’re not around today; they’ve been removed from the scene.

The Lord God made “to grow every tree,” and the trees, you’ll notice, were pleasant to look at and were also good for food.

There was the beauty of them and the practical side to them. They were beautiful trees, but also functional in that they were good for food.

We still see great beauty everywhere on this earth, despite the curse that befell the earth with the fall of man, a curse that bought forth thorns and thistles. We have travelled Australia for over 12 years and we’re still moved by the startling beauty of bays, forests rivers and mountains. Many times as we stand on the edge of a cliff gazing out at the ocean or stand still and silent in a rainforest we are moved to thank God for his beautiful handiwork. What a breathtakingly beautiful place the Garden of Eden must have been!

In Verses 10 to 14 we read, “Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads.

The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are there.

The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush.

The name of the third river is Hiddekel; it is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates.

The Pishon River is probably modern-day north-central Arabia, east of Israel.

Possibly the Gihon is the Nile and the Hiddekel the Tigris.

The land of Cush refers to a land south of Israel and is translated as “Ethiopia” in some Bible versions.

Verse 15, “Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.”

This man had dominion, and the forces of nature responded at his beck and call.

Verse 16,  “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

It was not God’s intention for man to die but man is given a condition by which he must obey to keep all the wonders with which he had been blessed.

Man has a free will, but that privilege always creates a responsibility.

Man is given an option or a test if you like as to whether he’ll choose to obey God or not. The fruit of that tree was probably the best fruit in the garden rather than poisoned as some believe.

The day he disobeyed this one simple command he would die. Now, remember he is a trinity so he’d have to die in a threefold way.

He didn’t die physically for over 900 years so what did God mean when he said, “In the day you eat of the fruit you will surely die”? Well, that death meant separation. He was separated from God spiritually.

Verse 18,  “And the LORD God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.”

There was a purpose for God putting the man there alone. He was to recognise that he had a need for someone to share with.

Verse 19,  “Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name.

Verse 20,  “So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a helper comparable to him. Comparable to him, equal to him.

Verse 21,  “And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place.”

Verse 22,  “Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. “

She’s taken from Adam, from the side of Adam. It is often said that God didn’t take her from his head to be his superior or from his foot to be his inferior, but from his side to be his equal.

She is to be the other half of man but not 50/50 rather 100/100.

So, now she’s Adam’s missing part. Only with her is he complete.

Verse 23,  “And Adam said: “This is now bone of my bones And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”

Verse 24,  “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Notice “one flesh”.  Something unexplainable happens when marriage takes on the form that God intended it to.

The need for a man to act more like the woman and the woman to act more like the man disappears. Both are made complete in the other. The fight for “identity” is non-existent. The two become “one flesh”.

There is an identity between the husband and the wife and God says in Ephesians Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for it.

It’s important to remember that it was God who established marriage. In this day where there’s great pressure between couples and the appalling divorce rates that results, we need to see the purpose of marriage as God intended it, not as this world and its twisted society believe it should be.

Now to Verse 25,  “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” Adam and Eve had no guilt. They hadn’t sinned against God, so there was no reason for any shame. They were perfectly free from the shame of sin. As long as they had no sin, they sensed no need for any covering. There was no judgment or scrutiny for them.

Now we’ve seen in this chapter a wonderful account of the creation of man, where he’s placed, what his occupation is, the conditions he’s placed there under and the responsibility that goes with it. We see his need for a companion and then God created woman.

This is the creation story.