Get Your Own Dirt! God our Creator and Redeemer, 5 Sunday, March 30, 2014. Genesis 2:4-25

- One day a group of scientists got together and decided that humanity had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell God that they were done with Him.

- The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."

- God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist had finished speaking, God said, "Very well, how about this, let's say we have a man making contest."

- To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!" But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam."

- The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.

- God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You get your own dirt!"

- Genesis is the book of beginnings. The first chapter describes in detail how God created the heavens and the earth.

- The second chapter, some have taken to be "a second, complete and independent history of creation" which contradicts the first account, but is this true? (Keil and Delitzsch, vol. 1, 47).

- No, Genesis 2 describes the beginning of the history of humanity from the point of view of Adam.

- The Bible tells us that in the Garden of Eden there were no bushes or plants of the field because God had not yet sent rain, and there was no man to work the ground.

- Genesis 2 is not talking about the creation of plants on the whole earth, but of the planting of a garden in a specific place.

- "And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed." Gen 2:8 (ESV)

- Eden was a place for cultivation, a place for humanity to keep fruit trees and seed producing plants.

- Twice in our passage this morning, first, in verse five and again in verse 15, the Bible mentions work. (4 times in the chapter, verses 2 & 3)

- Eden was to be a place of fruitful, productive work. Work is not part of the curse, but part of God's plan from the beginning.

- Only after the fall do we read that the ground is cursed and the working of it difficult.

- Humanity, as created in God's image, was created for work; as, the fourth commandment implies, "Six days you shall labor and do all your work, But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God... For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." Ex 20:9-11, (ESV)

- Before Adam there was no man to work the ground. None of the creatures God made before could do what God had in mind.

1. God Made Humans to Work.

- Every other creature God made received their food because their Creator provided it for them, not so with Adam.

- Adam was to work the land for his food. "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." (Genesis 2:15, ESV)

- The Hebrew for work or till means to serve and the Hebrew for keep means to guard or observe.

- Each of these words is used frequently throughout the Old Testament and always imply "paying attention to the task at hand" (Morris, Beginnings, 161).

- Work is a good thing; it's a key part of what makes us human. God made humans to work; and God made humans human from the beginning.

- Let's focus in on the creation of man and woman.

- God made Adam, the man, first.

- "Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." Genesis 2:7, ESV

- The other creatures, God spoke into being , but man received special attention, formed by God from the finest dust of the earth and God breathed into him the breath of life.

- After placing the man in the garden and explaining to him which one tree not to eat from, God went through an important exercise with Adam to show him that it was not good for the man to be alone and that he needed a helper fit for him.

- Although God made birds and beasts earlier, he went through the exercise again to give Adam visual aid to show him how unlike the other living creatures the man was.

- God brought every living creature in Eden to Adam for him to name. After naming all of them, a fitting helper could not be found.

- Adam needed to be shown by God that he was unique among all the creatures God made.

- No other creature reflected the image of the Creator as Adam did.

- The very idea that human beings evolved from some apelike creature is contrary to the testimony of the word of God.

- We are unique among God's creatures. We alone bear the image of God embedded throughout our being.

- God himself proved to Adam that he was completely unlike any other creature that God made.

- God made humans human from the beginning.

- Having proved to Adam that he needed a helper and companion that was equal and complementary to himself, God moved to stage two in the creation of humanity, "male and female he created them." (1:27)

- ²⁰ The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.²¹ So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.²² And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. ²³ Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman,
    because she was taken out of Man.”

²⁴ Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. ²⁵ And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

2. God Made Humans Complementary, Male and Female.

- The man, without his complementary partner, was an unfinished creation. As God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone."

- Upon seeing the woman God made, Adam exclaimed, "At last!"

- Adam had to learn that nothing he had seen and named before was anything like the image of God until finally he saw the woman God made.

- Jesus spoke of the importance of this passage.

- ² And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” ³ He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” ⁴ They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” ⁵ And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. ⁶ But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, ⁸ and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. ⁹ What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

- God made humans complementary, male and female.

- Because of sin, our society's strong tendency has been to ignore, deny, and explain away the Bible's definition of marriage and the Bible's declaration of the image of God reflected in the sexual union of husband and wife

3. God Made Humans Above the Animals.

- Evolutionary theory also attempts to undermine and obliterate the biblical teaching that humanity is unique and created in the image of God by teaching that we are either no more than higher order animals or no better than animals.

- Such thinking, when taken to the nth degree, goes so far as to place a higher value on animals, and even plants, than on human beings or leads people to commit unspeakable acts against fellow human beings.

- Such was the case with Jeffrey Dahmer, who said: "If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I have since come to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is truly God. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing…’(Jeffrey Dahmer, in an interview with Stone Phillips, Dateline NBC, Nov. 29, 1994.)

- A less extreme example also spurred by evolutionary thinking, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals promote animal rights and suggest our world would be better off with much fewer people.

- But God made humans above the animals.

- "The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him." (Gen 2:20, ESV)

- Reasoning like Jeffrey Dahmer or PETA only works if God did not make humans human from the beginning above the animals and if there is no God who will hold us accountable.

- This kind of thinking encourages us to spend more money on our pets than we do relief and development.

- It encourages us to think more of ourselves than of giving alms to the poor, but Jesus said:

- ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ Matthew 25:45

- We are to value human life because God made humans above the animals.

- God made humans human from the beginning.

- According to the word of God, humans are neither descended from lower life forms, nor have we grown characteristics mirrored in the lifestyles of lower animals.

- In other words, we are neither descended from apes nor do we act like apes

- God made humans to work.

- God made humans complementary, male and female.

- God made humans above the animals.

- God made humans human from the beginning.