Genesis 2

Genesis chapter 2, Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all of the host of them.

And on, verse 2, the seventh day, God ended His work which He had made, and He rested on the seventh day from all of His work which He had made.

And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because that in it He rested from all of His work which God had created and made.

Now in chapter 1 of Genesis, we saw that in six days, God created the heavens and the earth.

And I think it's pretty clear from the Bible that that is exactly what happened, that God created the heavens and the earth.

That He created then man on day six, and whether it be the physical creation, time, space, and matter, that God created it.

And God created light.

He created the light holders.

God created the seas.

And He divided the waters above the earth with the waters below the earth.

God created plant life.

God created animal life.

And He instructed that they would reproduce after their kind.

And then He created man.

And He created man in His image and in His likeness.

And we looked at great detail as to what that meant that God created man in His image and in His likeness.

I don't believe in evolution.

I don't believe it's biblical.

And I don't believe that it is scientific.

I did a little more study just for myself this week, even though we've already gone through chapter 1 on evolution and some of the issues concerning evolution.

And again, just convinced that the probability of a single cell or life coming from non-life is absurdity.

And that from a single cell, that it could mutate and evolve into man.

I mean, I was reading about the eye and all of the facets of the human eye.

And it's interesting that now we know with genetics and our ability to study DNA, that all that information is programmed in those genes.

The idea that a single cell could produce even the human eye is absurdity.

And the need for the eye to have the ear ducts and the eyelash.

All that's involved, as I read about the human eye, it's even mathematically just absurd that it could evolve.

Well, you know, it just needs a lot of time.

That's all.

It just takes a lot of time for that to happen.

I mean, you give it all the time you ever want, and it's not going to happen.

The lack of transitional forms, the second law of thermodynamics, and on and on and on.

What an absolute travesty I didn't mention last week that people actually believe that human beings evolved from a single cell.

Not just apes.

Where'd the ape come from?

You know, it's one thing, oh yeah, our great ancestor, the monkey or the gorilla, and they go to the zoo, you know, and here's your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

Maybe yours, but not mine.

But even going back further to the single cell, and then where matter itself came from.

It's just crazy.

So again, I just refer you to Henry Morris' book, The Genesis Record, and other great books by those members of Creation Research Institute and Ken Ham and so forth.

There's just so much to read that it's good stuff.

And you ought to have some foundations.

There's a great book called It Couldn't Have Just Happened.

It Couldn't Just Happen.

By Richard Lawrence.

It's out of print, but if you can find it, it's marvelous.

And that's a book that argues completely for creation on the aspect of design.

And it talks about the design in creation.

And thus, there must be a designer.

So, we move into chapter 2, and we come to day 7.

So the six days of creation.

Not epics, not geological errors, but I believe the morning and the evening were the first day.

And that in six successive days, God created all things.

And that to me is a wonderful thought.

And then we come to day 7, and it says that the heavens and the earth were finished.

Interesting to find that word finished there or completed.

And just the word reminds us of what Jesus said when He was on the cross when He cried to Telistai.

It is finished.

Or it is completed.

And there is a tie from the New Testament into conversion with creation.

The earth is God's old creation and you and I as Christians are God's new creation.

Even as we are living in darkness and God speaks and says, let there be light, and the Spirit of God comes to convict us and we're brought out of darkness into light.

And we are new creations in Christ.

And that's a marvelous parallel that Paul develops in 2 Corinthians, and we studied that together on Sunday morning.

But what about this Sabbath day or the seventh day?

The word Sabbath is not used here, but we use that word for the seventh day.

In the Hebrew, it's Shabbat, which ties in with the word seven.

And it simply means to rest or to cease from labor.

So there are several Sabbaths in the Bible and they go back to this seventh day.

Now, do not misunderstand and falsely conclude that God was tired and needed to rest.

That God made the heavens and the earth and then went, whew!

I'm tired.

I'm going to take a nap.

I just took a nap.

That's why I'm a little bit spacey right now.

To be able to get through Sunday night.

But God didn't go, oh, I can't stay awake.

I'm tired.

Especially man.

Oh, man, that was a hassle.

Forming Him out of the dust of the ground.

Man, that was a challenge, you know?

By the way, we're going to see that tonight.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

Man is just a bunch of dirt, you know.

Gale Irwin calls him Dirtbag.

Man.

But thankfully made in the image of God, but He comes from dust and when the Spirit leaves the body to dust, man returns.

But God didn't need to rest in the sense that you and I do.

So the idea means that God just stopped His creative work.

That's what it means.

It means the cessation of work.

It doesn't mean, whew!

I'm tired.

I need a rest.

It just means that God ceased from His labor.

Now, God had created everything and seen everything and said it is good, it is good, it is good, it is good, and then God finally rested from His labor.

And He blessed the seventh day and He sanctified it.

Now, the question that we need to ask is as Christians today, are we to be observing a Sabbath rest?

Well, obviously, I can't exhaust this subject because we're studying Genesis, not just looking at this subject of the Sabbath.

But the covenant that God would go on to make with Israel, and the Sabbath issue doesn't appear again until God makes this covenant with Israel, was with them as a nation.

They were God's people at that time.

There was no church.

There were no Christians.

So God with Israel as a nation established the principle of six days you work, and then you rest.

Now, we understand clearly from the New Testament that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

Unfortunately, during the time of Jesus, they got that twisted around.

And they made a whole issue of the Sabbath day and keeping this day of rest.

And they wrote all these expanded laws and rules about what you could do and what you couldn't do and what constituted work.

And the Sabbath became a burden to them.

It wasn't a blessing anymore.

The Sabbath is intended to be a blessing.

And God knows that.

We need to replenish our strength.

We need to recoup.

And as a general rule, there should be at least one day a week for rest.

There are times, and we all encounter this, that we are busy, and we all have periods.

I haven't taken a day off for a week or two or three or four, and we go for these long periods, but it's not wise.

It is not good.

It is wise to have at least a day of rest.

A day when our bodies can be restored and gain new strength.

Now, rest time is not waste time.

It is time well spent to regather strength to spend the rest of the week serving God.

But I do believe, and you can research this yourself, that the Sabbath observance and there was also the Sabbath year, that that was a covenant God made with Israel.

It is not transferred to the New Testament or to the New Covenant with the church.

Of all the Ten Commandments, there's only one that is not repeated in the New Testament for the Christian to observe, and that is the Sabbath day.

And when the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, He rose on Sunday, or what was called the first day of the week.

And so even though the early Christians were Jews, the shift came where they went from Saturday to Sunday, and they called it the Lord's Day.

And when you read Acts and the Epistles, you discover that they gathered and they congregated on the first day of the week, or the Lord's Day, which was resurrection day.

But the simple truth of the matter in all of this is that we shouldn't take either Saturday or Sunday and make it a legal obligation.

We are not under the law.

We are under grace.

We are saved by grace through faith.

And we need to understand that worshiping on Saturday or Sunday or whatever day we choose has nothing to do with my salvation or my relationship to Jesus Christ.

I do think it is wise to take a day and to consider it God's day.

That's why I love Sunday night.

You know, you went to church this morning and coming home today and coming here tonight, I drive by churches that are just sitting.

No cars on the parking lot.

No people in the church.

Just sitting.

And it's become a very popular trend not to have Sunday night church.

It's almost like I did my thing and I went to church.

Now I want the rest of the day.

I understand that.

You get home.

It's hot.

You get in your hammock and your lemonade and you're barbecuing.

I don't want to go back.

And resting and so forth.

But this is a day, I believe, not only to recharge your spiritual batteries, but to recharge your physical batteries.

You come to church.

You go home and rest.

You come back and you get renewed in the Word.

I love the Sunday evening because it's so relaxing.

And it's a Bible study.

My focus on Sunday night is to teach the Bible, not so much to have a polished sermon with intro, three points, and a poem and conclusion.

That's not my focus.

My focus is simply for us to learn the Bible and to grow in our knowledge of the Word and to feed on the Word.

We've slowed down over the years to a chapter and sometimes not even that, but that's what Sunday night is all about.

But anyway, God blessed that Sabbath day.

So there was the Sabbath with Israel.

There was the Sabbath of the nation of Israel going into the Promised Land.

They would rest.

And the New Testament likens the believer coming to Jesus Christ as a rest, a spiritual rest.

When he cried, it is finished, as I mentioned earlier, and you believe on Jesus and you trust in Him, you cease from your labor that is trying to save yourself, and you enter into salvation rest.

So you go from Sabbath rest to salvation rest.

And that's the most important.

There are people that are strictly observing a Sabbath rest.

You know, the sun goes down Friday.

Don't do anything.

It's the Sabbath.

Don't even smile.

Wipe that smile off your face.

I've known people that even think that it's the Sabbath.

You can't have fun.

We move from that to the liberty that we have in Christ to salvation rest.

And we enter into the finished work of Jesus on the cross.

God rested on the seventh day and said it is finished.

And now we rest in Jesus who died on the cross and said it is finished.

And we enter into this salvation rest.

We are saved by grace through faith.

It's not of ourself.

It's a gift of God.

Not of works lest any man should boast.

And it teaches that in the book of Hebrews.

Now, verse 4 says, these are the generations of the heavens and the earth.

When they were created in that day, the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

Now, something very, very, very important for you to understand, and many of you know this, but some of you don't, and you will encounter this.

Don't forget it.

Genesis 2 is not a contradictory recording from Genesis 1.

Critics of the Bible point this out, but they are in error in saying that the Bible has two different contradictory reports of creation.

What we have in Genesis 2 is a re-account with details.

It's kind of a parenthesis that goes into deeper detail about how God created especially man.

It goes into detail that's not found in chapter 1.

So, to say that it is a contradiction is again, absurd and not the case.

It is a recounting of creation with more information and more detail.

They do not contradict.

They complement.

And so those who try to say that there's a contradiction there are absolutely wrong.

Now, in verse 5, every plant of the field before it was on earth, and every herb of the field before it grew, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth.

This is new information that we're getting here.

And there was not a man to till the ground.

You see why when people read that, they go, well, wait a minute.

In chapter 1, He's already created man, and now it says, there was not a man to till the ground.

What's the skinny here?

That means what's the deal?

You know, He already created man, and now He didn't.

Well, first of all, notice that it didn't rain.

Before the flood.

And you don't have rain until the flood.

And when you get rain at the flood, believe me, you got rain.

I think you've seen it rain.

Boy, it rains.

But until that, this is cool, there was a mist that came up out of the ground.

And it watered the whole earth.

And we saw that there was water above the heavens and then the water below the earth.

So in the heavens, it's believed that there was a water canopy that enshrouded the earth that would have created on the earth a greenhouse effect.

And the entire earth evenly would have been a lush, green vegetation.

That's why in some of the high mountains where it's just ice-capped and cold, they'll find mammoth animals that had vegetation in their digestive system that would have been in a jungle which didn't exist up there because the earth existed before the flood as a Garden of Eden.

It was just lush and green everywhere.

And then when the cataclysm of the flood took place quickly, there was this collapse of the water canopy and these things were drowned and then locked into the earth at that place and then the ice-capped developed and so forth.

And the different climates that we have in different places of the world.

If you've flown around the world and flown over Greenland, it's quite bizarre.

You fly over Greenland, it's just white.

And I don't know why they call it Greenland.

There's no Greenland there.

It's just white snow.

And then you fly over Iceland and it's green.

Figure that one out.

I don't know how that ever got worked out like that.

But before the flood, everything was just lush, green and you could go anywhere.

It was just a beautiful place.

So the water came up out of the earth, but there was no man to till the ground.

Now this is where it kicks in.

Verse 7, the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground.

You see, we didn't get that information in chapter 1.

And He breathed into His nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.

Notice that man is more than just a body.

Man is a living soul.

Now unlike other aspects of creation where God just spoke it into existence.

Light be.

In the Hebrew it was Yahiyor, Yahwahiyor.

Light be, light was.

God just spoke it with divine fight into existence.

But here God seems rather bizarre.

He takes a bunch of mud and just starts playing mud pies and fashions it.

And He makes man.

And then He breathes into His nostrils the breath of life.

Now again, here's something you need to be careful with.

I heard a debate once between an atheist and a Christian.

And the atheist ran out of things to say, so he just started attacking the Bible and what he seemed to be is asserted ease.

And he attacked the idea that God is a spirit.

And if God is a spirit, why does He need to breathe?

There's no need for God to have breath.

And yet, the Bible says that God breathed into man's nostrils.

So you get this picture of God taking a bunch of clay and He made this mud man.

And then He gives him CPR or something.

And he goes.

.

.

And He breathes in.

And all of a sudden, this mud man starts to breathe and walk around like I am Adam or something.

But attacking the idea that God has breath, the term God breathed into man and He became a living soul, the term is what's called an anthropomorphism.

It's a large word that basically means a human aspect of man is carried over and attributed to God so that we can understand what God does.

Since God transcends our thinking and knowledge and comprehension, the only way to describe sometimes God's actions is to use human terms or to ascribe to God aspects of human nature.

The ear of God or the eyes of the Lord or the hand of the Lord.

And the Mormons have misinterpreted that and thought, well, you know, God is no different than man.

He's a glorified man.

He has an ear.

He has eyes.

He has a nose.

And He has an arm.

And He's a glorified man in heaven.

So those are anthropomorphisms.

They are human terms to describe God so that we can get our minds around Him.

So that we can get a hold of what He does.

The concept is basically that God just gave man soul.

God gave man life.

Now the animals have this same spirit or soul, but they are living beings.

They are not inanimate, but they do not have an eternal soul because they are not made in the image of God.

Man is distinct and different and separate from the animal kingdom.

We have plant life.

We have animal life.

And we have human life.

Because we have drifted away from our Judeo-Christian roots as a nation, we are beginning to see the devaluation of human life.

It's like whatever happened to the human race.

Well, it doesn't exist anymore.

You're just a product of evolution.

You're just a really highly evolved single cell.

And that's all you are.

You're no different.

It started with the single cell plant life and then lower forms of life mutated and evolved.

And then all of a sudden, here's man.

And the problem is you travel into countries of the world with very little Christian influence, and you will discover how they devalue human life.

There's not a high value of human life.

Go to India where people are allowed to die on the street because of their religious beliefs.

They don't have a high value of human life.

They have rats being fed in temples while humans are dying of starvation right out in front of the temple in the street.

So Christianity elevates man.

It elevates woman.

It elevates marriage into its rightful place.

And if we as a nation lose our Christian roots, then we lose the knowledge of what man is or who man is, and then we also, as we're going to see, we lose the knowledge of what marriage is and the sanctity of marriage, which right before our very eyes is vanishing in our nation right now.

It's just vanishing.

This week in Time magazine, I opened it up, and I can't remember where.

I think it was in Texas somewhere.

It showed a homosexual couple, two women, that had just recently been married and with their adopted little daughter sitting on their front porch.

And it's just like happening so rapidly in our nation right now with what happened recently in San Francisco and all of the homosexual marriages that took place up there.

We've lost the sanctity of life.

We're losing the sanctity of marriage.

And it's a sad thing.

So we have abortion.

So we have euthanasia.

These old people are in the way.

They're a burden.

They are just a weight on the nation.

They're old.

They're in rest homes.

They're no good to anybody anymore.

Let's just euthanize them.

Let's put them to death.

They have no value.

We devalue human life.

I know unbelievers.

Because they do not think from God's perspective or biblically.

It's so very important that you and I as Christians who are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, that we have sanctified thought life and that we understand the issues because even Christians so often buy the lie of the world and fail to value life and value marriage and these kind of things that affect very much so the way we live.

So God formed man out of the dust of the ground.

The Bible says that God knows our frame.

I think it's Psalm 139.

He understands that we are but dust.

So man made from the dust of the ground.

Now we're going to see God making the woman as well.

And God forms the woman uniquely out of man.

It's an interesting process.

God makes man.

And in the New Testament, and we studied this on Thursday night with the men in our leadership class, when Paul argues for men being leaders in the church as far as pastors, elders, bishops, and deacons, that he argues not from culture, but from creation order.

That man was made first and then the woman.

And that the man was not deceived, but the woman.

And we're going to see the foundation for that here in the book of Genesis.

And it's just interesting that this creative order is carried over into the New Testament.

So it's not a cultural issue.

It's a creation issue.

But when God makes the woman, He doesn't form her out of the dust of the ground.

He takes her out of man.

He takes her from man's side.

But woman was made as equally as man was in the image of God.

And that's something that really struck me last week.

It's not that man was made in the image of God and woman was not.

Equally, she was made in the image of God.

But she was taken out of the man.

That was the order, the sequence of events.

So as far as Genesis 2 is concerned, we don't have woman made yet.

It's just Adam.

So the Lord God planted a garden.

Verse 8, eastward in Eden.

And there He put the man whom He had formed.

The word Eden means delight.

So this garden brought great delights.

So we have the first home.

We had the first covenant, the Sabbath day.

Now we have the first man.

Now we have the first home in a sense.

He was given responsibility over the garden of Eden.

Now out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight.

Isn't that cool?

What if all trees were identical?

There was only one tree.

You just went tree.

Everything you saw, tree.

And they were all ugly.

It's so neat the variety of trees that God has made.

Every once in a while, there's a tree down at the end of our street.

It is gorgeous.

It's just gorgeous.

Just the color and the way the branches are formed.

I don't know anything about trees.

It's just a tree.

It's just a cool tree.

I don't know what kind it is, but it's cool.

And you have the big pine trees.

We have a lot of beautiful palm trees.

Just all of the different trees that God has created.

And they have the seed that they bear that they reproduce after their kind.

But the thought there that it was beautiful or pleasant to the sight.

God is interested in the aesthetic.

Why is it that humans are artistic?

Why is it that humans like color and design and shape?

Because we're made in the image of God.

God is artistic.

God has these beautiful trees that He created and they were pleasant to look at.

I think the Garden of Eden must have been just some place.

And so, it says, they were good for food, verse 9, and there was the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and then there was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Or some Hebrew scholars feel that it was just the tree of knowledge.

And that tree of knowledge brought the knowledge of good and evil.

Man was given that ability to choose which tree he would eat of.

Now, there was the tree of life.

In the new heavens and the new earth and in the kingdom age, and then on into the eternal state, there's going to be the tree of life.

And every month, it's going to yield a new fruit.

And you can eat that fruit and live forever.

And Adam, if he would have eaten just of the tree of life, and not eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as God had forbade him to and said, the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die, you know, man, technically, he could have lived forever.

He would have gone on living.

He was created in this beautiful environment.

He was created in an innocent state.

And what an awesome thing that was.

Now, there was a river, verse 10, which went out of Eden to water the garden.

And from thence it was parted and came into four heads.

The name of the first is Pison, the name which compasses the whole land of Havelah, where there is gold.

You say, man, I want to know where this is at.

I'm going to go digging.

We don't know for sure where the Garden of Eden was.

It was somewhere in modern Iraq.

So if you want to go looking for it over there, go ahead.

I'll pray for you.

It was in that area, part of the world.

And the gold, verse 12, of that land is good.

And there's Bedlam and Onyx Stone.

And the name of the second river is Gihon, and the same as that compasses the whole land of Ethiopia.

And the name of the third river is Hedakel, that is which goeth toward the east of Assyria.

And the fourth river is, we do know where that is, the Euphrates.

And the Lord God took the man and He put him into the Garden of Eden, and notice this, to dress it and to keep it.

Here's an interesting thought.

Sin hasn't come into the world yet.

So there are no weeds.

Praise God.

Can you imagine no such thing as weeds?

You would not need weed pullers or weed and feed or Roundup or any of that kind of stuff.

But yet, even though there are no weeds growing, there's still the need to till the garden.

Kind of keep it under control.

To till it's all fruitful and it's multiplying and it's growing.

The man's saying, you know, I'm going to trim the tree here.

I'm going to trim that.

I'm going to climb up and pick me some avocados, you know, and make me some guacamole.

Adam's making guac and stuff.

Brings it home to Eve.

You know, woman, guac.

For tacos, you know.

And they're preparing all that and they're tilling the ground and they're working and so forth.

And the lesson behind that, there are several, but one of them is, is that even before sin came into the world, when man was told that you'll work by the sweat of your brow, and the earth would produce thorns, that even before that, man was to be productive.

Man was to be working.

I think that God made us that way to be productive.

That's why when you sit around and you don't do anything, you feel like I'm inproductive.

And that we were actually made to be industrious or productive or to work and to be involved in making this garden.

Even though God blessed the earth, no thorns, no sin, and whatnot.

I heard the story of a guy that lived in the city and he was walking by this vacant lot every day and he got tired of seeing this dirty old vacant lot.

So he got permission from the owner to clean it up and to make a garden out of it.

And the owner gave him permission.

Couldn't do that today because he'd be too worried we'd sue him or something.

So just leave it a junky old lot.

They cleaned the stuff off and then they prepared the soil and they planted things.

It became this beautiful garden and the neighbors began to just take notice of it.

And one day, a neighbor said, oh, God has certainly blessed you with this beautiful garden.

And this neighbor said, yeah, but you should have seen it when God had it by Himself.

Now, there's some truth to what he's saying.

God wants to use us.

He wants to use your hands and your feet and your eyes to produce.

So the idea that man, even before sin, was industrious, we need to work.

The Bible says if man doesn't work, that he shouldn't eat.

And that if you do not work as a husband and a father to provide for your family, that you've denied the faith and you are worse than an infidel.

Now, there are times when you physically cannot work.

And that is understandable.

But if you are choosing to be lazy and unproductive, that is not right.

It's not good.

It's not healthy even for your own psyche and your own adjustment.

You need to be productive.

So, let's move on.

So, God puts him in the Garden of Eden.

Man in the garden in this perfect environment.

And yet, man disobeys God.

So the Lord God commanded the man saying, of every tree of the garden, verse 16, thou mayest freely eat.

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.

For in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.

Now, could it be any more plainer?

Now again, I'm going slower than I should.

I need to kick it into high gear here.

We're running out of time.

There is the truth behind this that God, who didn't really need man, but yet created man in such a way that He could have a relationship with man.

And He wanted man to love Him.

He wanted to have a love relationship with man.

But for love to be real love, it has to have the freedom of choice.

You can't force someone to love you.

You can't coerce someone to love you.

If you're in a relationship and somebody's trying to force you to love them or blackmailing you or putting you on a trip, well, you know, if you don't marry me, I'll jump off a bridge.

Go ahead.

I love you.

I need you.

And if you don't marry me, I'll do this or this or that.

Don't try to blackmail somebody into loving you.

Try to manipulate them or coerce them or pressure them.

What kind of love is that?

So when God made man, I didn't talk about this too much last week.

God made him a free, moral agent.

God made him with the ability to choose either to obey or not to obey, either to love God.

Now, the disobedience of Adam was in his disobedience to God or the sin of Adam was in his disobedience to God.

It wasn't like the fruit was some big, horrible thing.

Or the tree was even that big of an issue.

It was that God placed it there to allow man the ability to choose.

To obey Him by demonstrating or love Him by demonstrating His obedience.

Or not to love Him by demonstrating His disobedience.

Jesus said, if you love Me, you will what?

Obey Me.

So obedience is a demonstration of love.

And you know, God could have made man like the bees or like the birds with instinct.

All human beings just every day get up, you know, and I love you, God.

I love you, God.

Like a little doll you push a button.

You know all those little dolls?

I had three daughters.

There were thousands of dolls around our house.

They had crates and heads, legs all over the place.

We shipped them all off, you know.

You pulled a little string, you know, and it's like, I love you.

And you pull the little string.

Change my diaper.

You pull the little string.

I'm hungry.

But when you pull the little string and the doll goes, I love you, you just like get all excited.

You get all turned on.

She loves me.

Oh, it's just a stupid little doll.

Anybody that pulls a string does the same thing.

Hand it to some other guy, you know, and let him pull the string.

I love you.

Oh, I thought you loved me.

You know, the thing's programmed to do that.

But see, God didn't design man that way.

Can you imagine if we all had a little string with a ring in our back and God just reached down and pulled us every day?

You know, I love you, God.

It doesn't work that way.

So God made us free moral agents who choose to love Him.

That's why when you come to church on Sunday or every day of the week when you get up and you go to work, when you choose to obey God and you choose to say, God, I love You.

God, I love You and I worship You and I praise You and I want to glorify You and I want to bless You and I want to serve You.

That's such an awesome thing.

And it actually blesses the heart of God.

You actually are important to God.

You're special to God.

You're unique to God.

When we sing on Sunday in the sanctuary corporately and we lift our hands and our hearts and we praise God and we worship Him and we sing, I love You, Lord, it actually blesses the heart of God.

And we were made to do that.

Or we could choose to just rebel against God and live for ourself.

Live in sin and rebellion and be miserable.

What a horrible darkness that is to live in.

That just horrible life of living in disobedience and rebellion against your Creator.

So God placed this tree in the garden and says, Adam, you can eat all these trees.

And they were all beautiful to look at.

It had all this beautiful fruit.

There's a tree of life.

And there's just this one tree.

God put these stipulations on man because He wanted man to choose to love Him.

Now, the Lord God said it is not good that man should be alone.

Now again, after every act of creation, what did God say?

It is good.

It is good.

It is very good.

But then when He creates man and He looks at man, there's no woman in the picture, He looks at man, and in the Hebrew it is, not good man's aloneness.

He wasn't saying that man was not good, jokingly we kind of do that as preachers to get a little laugh.

He looks at Adam and shakes his head and says, you know, not good.

But the idea was that man being alone is not good.

And I think that that holds true today.

God has made us social creatures.

God has made us people who want relationships.

And so He's going to bring the woman to the man.

So much could be said about that.

Not good man's aloneness.

To be a married man and to be thankful for your wife.

To be married and to have children and to thank God for the quiverful in your house.

To be able to say, God, thank You for my children that make so much noise I never get to sleep.

Eat all the food in the house.

Break things.

Thank You, Lord.

Because there's a relationship there.

Not good man's aloneness.

I have to go off places last night.

I just had to go and tried to get someone to go with me.

It didn't work out.

I took off by myself.

And it was just not good to be alone.

It's just calling home every couple hours and talking on the phone.

It's just not good man's aloneness.

I absolutely hate to travel alone anymore these days.

I love to be home or be with my wife, be with the kids, be with the family, or be here with this congregation.

We're made to have relationships.

And so this me generation, this independent concept, yeah, I'm single, man.

I'm free.

I'm cool.

I'm bad.

I'm 55 and I have a Corvette.

Aren't I awesome?

It's like, what a dodo bird.

Sell your stupid car and get married.

Be a normal human being.

Get off your midlife crisis.

Marriage domesticates men.

Sometimes some of these guys around the church that get married, I think, God, they're going to get domesticated.

These wild men that need help.

They need a woman in their life.

Not good man's aloneness.

Adam's what I call not-so-perfect world.

Now because of the time, I trust that the Lord had me say what I needed to say tonight, and I didn't intentionally go this slow, and I'm not trying to entice you back next week.

But let's read this chapter and I'll say a few things.

But I'll be able to go into more detail next week with chapter 3, which will be good because we'll have marriage as God made it, and then we'll have marriage as Satan corrupted it all in one night.

So forgive me for not moving a little faster, but let me say a few things as we go through that.

And I promise you next Sunday night we'll be able to go into more depth.

But it says in verse 19 that out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and He brought them unto Adam to see what He would call them.

And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all the cattle and to every fowl of the air and to every beast of the field.

But notice this contrast.

But for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

So there's an intended contrast between Adam's relationship with the animals and Adam not having a soul mate.

And I'll talk more about it next week where Adam could look up to God and worship God.

Adam could look down at the animals and have dominion over them.

But there was no one on Adam's level.

There was no one like Adam.

And all of the animals, here's man.

He's in the Garden of Eden.

He's working.

He's productive.

All these cool animals.

He can go off and ride a giraffe and ride the back of a shamu and do all these cool things.

But there was something missing.

There was something missing.

Man by himself was not good.

But for Adam, there was not found a helper suitable for him.

And so, here's the Lord's solution for man's aloneness.

The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept.

And he took one of his ribs and he closed up the flesh, said thereof, or he took from his side.

The word rib in the Hebrew literally just means side.

I've heard people talk in a bank and try to make a big deal out of it.

You know, men have one less rib than women.

It's just kind of a silly thing.

Took from his side.

And the rib which the Lord God taken from man, made he a woman and brought her unto the man.

And I'll talk about that in marriage that God brings that person into your life.

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.

So, God provided for man's aloneness.

God provided the woman, not from his head to be above him, not from his feet to be walked on by him, but from his side to be close to him, to be his companion and his partner.

Therefore, now this closing two verses is actually Moses' divine commentary on the historical narrative, which forms a foundation for marriage all the way through the New Testament.

So, we'll be able to spend a lot of time on it next week.

It's quoted in several places in the New Testament.

Therefore, shall a man leave his father and mother?

This is a good idea when you get married to move out.

Cleave unto his wife.

Speaks of permanency.

And they both become one flesh, which speaks of intimacy.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.

There was no sin in the world at this time.

So, here we have the very, very, very foundation for society.

The sanctity of marriage as God created it and God intended it and God designed it.

Now, the homosexual community may have a different idea.

The judges of our nation may have a different idea.

The politicians may have some different ideas.

But I believe the Bible.

I believe God's Word.

God created man.

He created the woman.

He brought the woman to the man.

And He said that there should be this separation, this gluing together, this permanency, and this intimacy, this unity in the marriage relationship.

A man and a woman.

And then He said to be fruitful and multiply.

Replenish the earth.

Fill the earth.

But in chapter 3, we're going to see how Satan has corrupted marriage.

He started all the way back in the Garden of Eden.

And that's been one of the things that he has attacked and sought to corrupt all the way through.

Father in Heaven, we thank You for Your Word.

We thank You for this foundation in the book of Genesis.

We thank You that this is the solid rock of Scripture and we can build our lives upon it.

Lord, help us to love You and to seek to obey You.

To be a blessing to You and honor You in all of our ways.

Lord, I pray that as we go deeper in this text of Genesis and we lay a foundation for marriage and we see this severance and this permanence and this intimacy, that we can understand what Your divine design is for marriage.

And we would be able to understand how Satan has corrupted marriage with polygamy or bigamy or homosexuality.

And all of the different corruptions of adultery.

We pray that we would have marriages that reflect Your divine design.

That we might raise a godly generation.

We might have godly homes.

Lord, we ask that we would be shaped and molded and influenced by the Scriptures and by Your Word and by Your Spirit.

Thank You for this day of worship.

Thank You for this day of fellowship.

Thank You for this congregation, Lord, and these Your people who have come out on Sunday night, Lord, bless them.

May they grow in the knowledge of Your Word.

May they be grounded and have a solid foundation.

Lord, thank You for this fellowship tonight.

Strengthen us as a church.

And we might bless You and worship You.

In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.