Thank you, Scott. I do appreciate Scott and Dale both being willing to help us with our music while Mark Dongen is on, I guess we'd call it, what do you call it? Parental leave? What's that? Paternity leave, that's the word I'm looking for, paternity leave. That Mark is taking a little time off from leading our music because he didn't really know when that baby would show up. And I tried to tell him, you know, the baby's born now so he can be back, but he's taking a little longer time off. So I appreciate the man willing to help out and take care of our music. We're always in good hands. This evening we're going to continue our study through Genesis. We're looking at the first 11 chapters, if you recall, of Genesis. What we find in these 11 chapters is God's display of why we so desperately need his blessing. on the world. We began with the song, Fount of Every Blessing, and this is a stark reminder in these chapters why we need God to bless us. We see our true condition that we're in before God. And what we have in the first 11 chapters is a theological interpretation of selected events. God led Moses to pick out a number of events that transpired over the course of probably several thousand years, or a couple thousand years at least, and give a theological interpretation of these events that had happened in the history of humanity, all for the purpose of showing why Israel is going to have a special relationship with God. Genesis provides Israel with that theological and that historical foundation of why is God forming a covenant with them under the Mosaic Law and selecting them from all the peoples of the world for a specific purpose. What is behind all of that? And the answer, as we see unfolding, is the depth of sin of mankind, the desperate situation that mankind was in, the hopeless position we'd be in unless God did something. Because man could not do anything to rectify his sinful condition. It needed God to move, and God began to move through the nation of Israel. We've looked at the first chapter of Genesis all the way through verse three of chapter two, as we've seen the creation itself unfold. And if you can't remember exactly what those days were like in creation, I encourage you to walk down the Dalt Sunday School wing. If you walk down there this morning, you may have noticed there's some new artwork on the walls. We didn't plan that out to coincide exactly with the study through Genesis, but we were contacted through Elaine DePalma, actually, hooked us up with a lady that was trying to donate eight pictures that she had painted that were an interpretation of the first week of Genesis, the creation week, and asked if we would take the art, and we said we'd be glad to. So those pictures were donated to us, hung yesterday, and they just happened to coincide right with our study of Genesis. So you can take a look at those and be reminded of what happened in each day as God began moving. Because we saw, as we looked at these chapters, that the focus in Chapter 1 into the beginning of Chapter 2 is that God is acting. We see the word Elohim 35 times in those 34 verses. The Creation Count is explaining that what kind of God it is who is establishing his theocracy with the nation of Israel, who's creating a special nation here. How powerful is this God? This is God so powerful that when he speaks, creation responds. In fact, creation comes into existence because he speaks. And obviously, as we mentioned a couple times, that the question is there if creation will respond to God, well, should not Israel obey him? If he's that kind of a powerful God, should not we listen to his word as well? The first verse, as we looked at Genesis chapter 1, declares the message in a summary fashion that God created everything. And then the initial circumstances of creation that followed, it began in a formless and void state. It was not productive. It was a formless wasteland. It was not full. It was an empty void. Well, the next six days unraveled all of that. It took it from a wasteland to something that was ready to be inhabited. And then it filled it up with creative creatures, the ultimate being the creation of man on day six. And then we saw last week on day seven, God instituted the concept of rest. as God then blessed his creation. He created everything, it was very good, and he rest. He ceased from his creative activities and set aside a pattern of giving a rest on that day of the week for the purpose, the created purpose of mankind, to worship their creator. That brings us to where we're starting this evening in verse 4 of chapter 2. And this begins a section that really, if you ever study your way through Genesis, you can chunk it down by the times we find these words. There's actually one specific Hebrew word that is normally translated, these are the generations of. If you jump over to like chapter five, verse one, you see that chapter five, verse one says, this is the book of the generations of Adam. And you can go on and you'll find verse nine of chapter six, these are the generations of Noah. You have a word, the Hebrew word is toledot, that describes these are generations. Well, we have that word beginning verse four, But here's translated as the account, because it's hard to think of heavens and earth having generations. But it's that same word, these are the generations, this is the record of what now happened to God's creation. That's what's been unfolding. There's 11 major sections in Genesis that's all based on this key word that separates the sections. This first section, these are the generations or this is the account of the heavens and the earth. This first section is showing us what became of this universe that God had so marvelously created that we just had the record of for the previous chapter where we went through the seven days there. This marvelous, glorious creation that God had made and he had peopled with the pinnacle of his creation, humanity. What happened to it? And we'll see that what happens is it's cursed because of disobedience. And from that curse it begins to immediately deteriorate and decay rapidly. And that decay spreads throughout the human race. And the pinnacle of the result is that death now comes into created order. And death becomes part of all creation. So that is what's being unpacked in this first section where we take this glorious creation and we begin showing here's the record of what occurs. And that's the way Genesis lays out. It keeps narrowing the focus. This is the record of what happens to the universe. The next stage is this is the record of what happens to the first man, Adam. It narrows down. This is the record of what happens to Noah and and then we you all know that we eventually narrow down to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and and we keep narrowing the focus down because Moses is explaining that this nation of Israel that now has the Mosaic Law Remember Moses is writing while he's in the wilderness. They've received the Mosaic Law. He's recording all this. This is how we got here This is why God gave us this covenant because God is moving to through his many blessings to restore and undo what's happened to his creation. And he does that through his mercy and his grace. That's why these first 11 chapters have so much deep theology in them, because Moses is building the foundation for understanding God's elective purpose in the nation of Israel. The first chapter stressed the importance of the word of the Lord. God spoke and it happened. God's word was the powerful means of creation. The second section, again, focuses on the word of the Lord, but it takes a different direction. This time the focus on the word is that the word of the Lord is a test of obedience. We saw all creation, all of the universe, responds to the word of God in perfect obedience because it's powerful. Will God's creative man respond in obedience to the word of the Lord? What was stated as a simple fact in chapter one regarding the creation of man as being male and female is explained and developed through a narrative that we'll look at this evening. As the focus is placed on those parts of the land that are going to be directly affected by what comes as a result of the fall of man. What is impacted when man sins? So the focus is narrowing down as we see these are the generations of heavens and earth. This is the count. We start narrowing the focus on what is impacted when man makes the blunder of things. So, it's to show what the magnitude of sin is, the level of destruction that can only fully be understood when the nature and the purpose of humankind is understood first. That's what this is all about, and I want to make sure we understand that as we get ready to move into it. We'll take the chapter in several sections as we work our way through. Three, I think we'll break it into this evening. And it begins with a recount looking at the creation of man from drilling in a little bit deeper. We already know on day six God created man, he made them male and female, but let's revisit that and drill in a little bit deeper. What was God doing when he created man? How did that come about? And how does that help us understand what comes in play with the fall? We'll look at verses four through seven first of all. Let's read those. This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven. Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth. There was no man to cultivate the ground, but mist used to arise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground. Then the Lord God formed man from dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. Verse four. In that day, who made earth and heaven? God did? Let me ask again. Who made earth and heaven? Huh? Look at what it says. What does it tell us? Lord God. I'm bringing that out because this is the first time in the Pentateuch, in this whole section, that Yahweh, the covenant name for God, is used. Up until now in chapter 1, I mentioned Elohim is the word for God. It's the word for God that focuses on His power, but for the first time now, Moses, as he goes in to say, okay, let's look at what happened to creation. Let's understand what happened. Moses immediately introduces the idea of the special name for God that the nation of Israel will know God as, Yahweh, the covenant God. This is the God who centuries later, I mean, like I said, there's 1,000 years or more, a couple thousand years between the time God created, probably more like 4,000 from the time God created till he formed the Mosaic covenant. But this same God is the one that we're referring, and he wants to make sure that people get that. This is our covenant God, Yahweh, the Lord God, capital L-O-R-D, God, Yahweh Elohim. This is the God, and also, notice what he created. How is it listed in verse four? God made what? Earth and heaven. How is it in verse one of chapter one? Heavens and the earth, right, we know that one. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It's flipped around here, and that's just to help us, clue us in that there's a change in attention now as we go in. We're focusing not on the big universe that God has created, but specifically we're gonna focus on what's happening here on the earth. As Yahweh begins to explain more, what is he doing, the covenant God? Verses 5 and 6 give us the setting for the creation of human life. This is a time, he says, before there were any wild shrubs or there were not any cultivated grains. That's the idea of the shrub of the field or the plant of the field. Those are specific words that refer to wild shrubs or cultivated grain. We don't have anything like that. And he just mentions there's no rain. because there was no man to till the ground. The plant here, this type of plant requires human cultivation to produce the grains that are necessary for edible food. Obviously the people of Israel are very familiar with cultivated grains and the production of grain to produce bread. They lived with that for decades and actually centuries in Egypt. And so they understand cultivated grains, but he said this is before that because man wasn't here yet. We're transitioning into day six and man's not here, so there's nobody to cultivate it. The dimension of tilling, though, anticipates already the expulsion of the garden under the curse that will come in the very next chapter. Because we know, I'm sure all of you know, the curse brings about what in the ground? What kind of plants come up? Weeds, right? The weeds. Well, at this point there are no weeds. So he just makes that little note here in passing that this is before there were any needs. And it also anticipates the great flood of chapter 6 that will come, the flood, when he says there's no rain. We don't necessarily have to take this that it never rains between the creation week and the flood that comes thousands of years later. We don't have to necessarily understand it that way. But he's saying in between this first day, rain hasn't occurred yet, man's not in place, things aren't quite complete yet. But in the community that Moses is writing to, the ruin of all these cultivated plants was part of the covenant blessing and the curse. God had told them in the Mosaic Law, if you obey, you will have grain that will grow and it will be very bountiful. If you disobey, weeds will grow up instead. So he's setting the framework to interpret all of these ideas of the covenant that will come later. In verse 7, we see that the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground. Formed is a term that signifies an act of creation by design or intent. God didn't just chance upon a pile of dirt and say, oh, well, this looks like it might make a good man. God intentionally formed it. He designed it by creation. Man, even though the first chapter made the point that man is a creature in God's image. The emphasis, if you remember, on the first chapter was that he was going to create man in the image of God, male and female. Well here, even though he's an image bearer, he's nevertheless still a creature like the other creatures. He comes from the dust of the ground. He is not divine. The notion that man's origin would somehow be connected with that which is divine is deliberately excluded. Man is unique. He's a unique image bearer and we'll see, he also says in this verse that God breathed into him. So man is a unique creature but he's still a creature. He does not have And the idea of like a divine spark or something, it's not a piece of the divine, the whole idea of pantheism that says divinity is in everything, especially in every living creature, that there's part of godness in all. That's implicitly being rejected right from the beginning here in verse seven when he says, man was formed from the dust of the ground. God didn't take a piece of himself to make man, he took a piece of the ground that he had created through his powerful word and used that to form man. But then he did uniquely breathe the breath of life into man as he breathed into his nostril. That word for breathe in verse seven is used in the Bible for God and for the life that's imparted to man. It's never a word that's used for animals. One thing we can probably conclude from this is that the moral capacity that mankind has that the rest of the created universe does not possess, no other creature possesses the moral capability that man has, that comes by virtue of this in-breathing, this special life-giving act of God that was unique to man, that constitutes man being an image-bearer of God. that brings with it a moral capability and a moral culpability that no other creature possesses. Man is unique as an image-bearer. So that just is expanding a little bit on the idea of what is man? What is God doing when he creates man? And then he moves into the place that he prepared for man. Man had to dwell upon this earth, but not only on an earth that was prepared in general for habitation, this is a special place that God is gonna prepare. He's gonna put man in a perfect, ideal place, a special garden that he prepares. And we have that. Record in verses 8 through 17. The Lord God planted a garden toward the east in Eden, and there he placed the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon. It flows around the whole land of Hevelah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good. The Bedellum and the Onyx Stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon. It flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris. It flows east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and to keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, From any tree of the garden you may eat freely, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die. This description here of the Garden of Eden appears to deliberately, again, cast a foreshadow on the description of the tabernacle. I think I mentioned that briefly in one of the previous weeks, but the tabernacle seems to intentionally replicate a number of things about God's first creation, because part of what Moses wants to people understand is is as God has taken up residence in a special way manifesting his presence and dwelling among you he's re-establishing what is lost in the original creation. God created man to have communion with him. Sin suffers that communion but through his divine initiative of selecting the nation, man is recovering that. And through God's work in the tabernacle is the visible manifestation of God by which the community can have that communion. And there's aspects of the tabernacle that are linked carefully to the garden and the descriptions we have of the garden and the way the tabernacle is later formed. Because both are places where mankind would enjoy the fellowship and the presence of God. If you think about it, in the verses I just read, there's really an inordinate amount of attention that's given to the description of the garden. It goes into details about this garden that exceed the rest of details. You know, we have nothing really in the description of just, for example, about mountains. We've gone through the two chapters. Obviously, mountains are created. They're majestic. We see throughout Scripture how mountains display the power of God. They're not mentioned here. We spent a lot of time talking about this beautiful, glorious garden that God created for man. Eden, as it's described here, appears to be a very specific place. The word itself means delight, but it's obviously describing a place. It's not a condition, it's not a general name for a garden, this is a specific place. And in this garden, there's beautiful, lush trees, including two special trees that will come into play as we go, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Obviously, if you know anything about Genesis and the rest of the Bible, you know that good and evil become a very predominant theme as we go forward. Good and evil. And now we have them introduced here at the beginning. All this information about the rivers. There's this river in the garden that then branches into four different rivers. It's a bit of a digression, but it spends time relating to the richness of the lands. And it ties this richness of lands into the known world to show that this garden was in a specific place. And a lot of care is taken to describe the character of the lands from which the four rivers flowed. It does provide locations. As you probably know, that lines closely to the land that's later promised to Abraham and to his descendants. It's not an exact description. We can't quite tie it down. Because only two of the rivers are well-known. The Tigris and the Euphrates, these can readily be identified. But the other two rivers cannot, even though they contain more extensive descriptions here in the text than the well-known ones, Tigris and Euphrates. The details of the lesser rivers seem to parallel, though, the role that the garden and the tabernacle had with each other. The richness of the metals, you have the gold and the onyx that was there in that one around the land. So you have this richness that's composed there. And that all makes up part of the richness of the tabernacle. Seems like overall what God is doing as he describes these rivers, he describes this garden, he's describing all that, he's trying to show that the glory of God's presence is reflected in the beauty of the surroundings. The reason the tabernacle has to be so beautiful is because it is to reflect the glory of God. The reason creation was to be so spectacular was to reflect the glory of God. And it seems like that's the emphasis here. And if you jump all the way to the end of your Bible and you go to Revelation 21 and you have the new Jerusalem coming down, again, you have these various elements of beauty that are called out as God is going to dwell with his people. And that beauty reflects the glory of God's presence. The big story of scripture always pictures paradise as being restored in the final end. So we start with paradises destroyed by sin. God restores. He's recreating. He's recovering. You get to the Eschaton, where you have the end of all things, and paradise is restored. And throughout there, every time God's presence shows itself, it's surrounded with this picture of great glory that's described in all these beautiful terms. And that seems to be the point here as we're building up around this garden, that this garden has to reflect the glory of the God whose presence is going to manifest itself there in a special way. And then we're told that once this garden's there, God placed man into it. In verse eight, God planted a garden toward the east and he placed man there. And then we have again in verse 15, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden. He's placed there, he's put there. The point of this whole account is to give us the purpose for God putting man there. Man was given an activity. God created man and he gave him something to do and that something to do was within the garden. And he's told he was put there to do two things. He's to cultivate it and he's to keep it. I'm just curious because I don't know what versions you have. Does anyone have that the first task of man in verse 15 translated as something other than cultivate? What's that? What do you have? Okay, dress it, to work it. There are some English translations that even go as far as translating it to serve it, and that's why we wondered, because both of these words, the Hebrew words that are translated as cultivate it, or it can have the meaning of serve, the word that's translated is to keep it, these are words that are used frequently in scripture for spiritual service to the Lord. This isn't just labor that the man was given. This is a spiritual service to his God. And Moses selects words that are rich in the idea of spiritual service, describing that this is how man will be conducting his worship of his Lord. The highest privilege a person can have is to worship his God, and God put man in the garden for the purpose of ministering in active worship, doing the things that God had given him to do Ultimately, to keep it, to obey God's word, keep is used, for example, one of the places you see it often in the Old Testament, the word is used for keeping the commandments. In other words, to heed God's word, to obey what God has said, to keep his commandments. Well, man is given here the job of keeping, is keeping the garden, because there's not a lot of commandments to deal with at the moment. Verses 16 and 17 though does give us the very first commandment. The very first commandment, there's one particular tree that man is not to eat of. All the other trees, the emphasis is really on the broadness of God's generosity. Any tree of the garden you may eat except for this one. The one tree you shall not eat. Just as in the remainder of the law though, enjoyment of God's good land is always made contingent on keeping God's commandments. Obeying what God has said. There's this one command here, if you want to obey all these trees and this lush garden that has more than you can possibly need, you have to keep this one commandment. Again, that sets up the pattern for the law. In fact, the construction of the statement that we have in verses 16 and 17 emphasize, as I said, the provision of God is plentiful. God expects them to liberally enjoy themselves with all the vast riches that he's given them, the lushness of the garden. And the inference, remember this is to, the one tree they can't eat is to know good and evil. The inference of the command is that God alone knows what is good for man and what is not good. What is, in other words, what is evil. God alone knows. A man must trust God and obey God because God is the only one who knows what is good. The freedom of verse 16 really has no meaning without the emphatic prohibition that comes of except for this one tree. It doesn't really show how generous and free man is to indulge in every tree unless you put against the one exception. That prohibition brings it out. And we have entering into the account the concept of death. which becomes a major theme in Genesis. The basic idea being really more of alienation or separation than sensation or annihilation of life. Obviously, the cessation of life is part of death, but the root meaning of the word itself carries more of the idea of a separation or an alienation from God. Man is put here in this garden with this perfect relationship with God and ability to interact, but if they disobey, that's severed. and you will surely die. An emphatic statement, you will dying die. There's no doubt that you will die. This is what will happen. So man's in the garden, he's received that. And then we'll wrap up the account here as we look at the rest of it. Verse 18, then the Lord God said, always using Yahweh in here, the covenant name for God throughout, then the Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone. And remember, God is the only one who knows what's good. He says, it's not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him. Out of the ground the Lord formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to every beast of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a helper suitable for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. Then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. The man said, whoa. That's a lucent translation. The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she has taken out a man. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed." The rest of this chapter, what I just read here, is all providing an example that God has the knowledge of what is good for man. He looks and he says, he assesses, it's not good for man to be alone. God is the one who knows what is good and he knows what is not good. It's not good here is actually not the word for evil, because man is not in an evil state by not having a woman at this point, but he is not good. We have the contrast of evil, which is the exact opposite of good. This is just God saying, this is not the good it should be. We're not evil, but we're not where good is at. The best, the ultimate, is not here. So God says, I will make. A verb there of divine deliberation. God contemplates the situation and says, I will make. I mean, that's using our human standpoint. God never has to really contemplate everything, but there's deliberation here. God throughout all of creation has determined before eternity ever be in eternity past what he would do and part of that decision is that it's not good for being a man alone. We're going to create a woman. So God goes about doing that. He creates a helper suitable. The King James calls it a help meet. The idea is two words that describe the idea of partnership tied in with exact correspondence. This person will, this other creature will be an exact correspondence of man. that will be a perfect partner for man. So a suitable helper is a very good way of translating it. The point of narrative here is that there was no helper that corresponded to man among the animals. All the animals came past Adam there and he names them. which shows an act of dominion over them. Man is placed higher than the animals. He is given the authority to name them, just as we mentioned in chapter one, when God named the darkness, it shows his authority over darkness. Man has authority over the animals, but in that parade of animals, there was none that was a suitable helper for man. There was no one who corresponded to man, so a special act of creation of woman was necessary. And God set about doing that. There was not a suitable partner in all of the animal kingdom. Man was by himself until woman was created. Again, it reinforces man is not like the other creatures. God created man in a special way as image bearers, male and female. We know how he created man from the dust of the ground and breathed the life into him. Now we'll get the record of how he created woman, another image bearer that has that unique characteristic. Also, through this parade of animals coming before Adam, clearly the man would have become aware of his solitude as he named all these animals. It would register with him. Adam obviously had intelligence that far exceeded ours. It was not corrupted at all by sin at this point. He had perfect intelligence. These animals were Parading past him, he was able to take one look at them and says, this is a draft. This is an elephant. I know what this is. I look at it and it's got that characteristic. Well, in the process of that, he'd come to the conclusion, but there's no one here that's like me. There's no correspondence to me. Man would be aware of his solitude. And then God says what he did. Verse 21, the Lord God calleth the deep sleep to fall on the man. Interesting that we have that deep sleep being called out because at other crucial points in the coming narrative, as God starts unfolding his plan of restoration for his creation, there will be many times when new relationship is initiated as God provides for the recipient that's deeply asleep at the moment. We have in Abraham, when God is going to establish the covenant with Abraham, he puts Abraham into deep sleep. We have it with Jacob, when he is going to leave the land and he's going to have the promise in Genesis chapter eight that he'll get to return to the land someday, he's in a deep sleep and God gives him the dream of Jacob's ladder. So there's other crucial points where deep sleep says God is the one who's initiating because man's passive. He's not doing anything at this point. God is taking the necessary steps to move his program forward. And when man wakes up, God has taken a rib from him and formed that rib into a woman and brings her to the man and man immediately responds. Probably a better translation than I gave you even when I read it. Man said it's probably more along the lines of ooh la la. It's a very exuberant Hebrew construction. We have it translated kind of passe, just the words, this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, but the constructions in Hebrew is a jubilant response. Man is much more excited about the fact they seize this perfect correspondence than simply recognizing that she's from my rib. In fact, the narrative really makes no explanation of the rib. It says that that's a detail, but it doesn't take up and develop that detail at all. Many throughout history have made much about the fact that the woman was formed from a rib, that she's not above a man, she's not below a man, she's beside a man. I'm sure you've heard those kind of statements, and I have no problem with those, but other note, the text doesn't develop the detail of the rib at all. What man, what's developed is the fact that man, Adam here, recognizes that this woman is the one who corresponds to me. She is the one who is like me. He recognizes his own likeness in the woman. He is the one who bears the image of God and recognizes here is another image bearer. She corresponds perfectly. And with her, mankind has reached its creative goal in having a complementary, complement as in complete, with an E in that word, not an I, complementary partnership, man and woman. She completes man. That which was lacking has been completed. We now have mankind, man and woman. all in the image of God. And because of that, the man is jubilant and excited by what he sees. That really ends, in verse 23, the account of that creation, but Moses isn't done. He tacks on what we'd think of as an epilogue. Before he moves the narrative along, he takes a little pause and he gives a little epilogue to this chapter to explain an implication that comes out of this creation account with God creating man and then woman. This is the foundation of marriage. Marriage is formed here in the garden when God created man, and he created woman, and he puts them together. And Moses tells us this is what God intends to be the ongoing pattern. In fact, Moses is giving us this word in verse 24, but Jesus in Matthew 19 quotes from verse 24 here. And when Jesus quotes in Matthew 19, he attributes the speech to God as that God is the one that says, for this reason man shall live as fought. There's no difference between Moses recording it under inspiration and God speaking it divinely. This is the Word of God that is meant to be obeyed. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. That one flesh includes, but it's not limited to, the physical level. Yes, it includes the intimate relationship that is designed to come out of marriage, but it's not exclusively limited to that. This is the divine intent. The man and the woman help one another. Remember, Adam is put in the garden, given tasks of service to God. Now he can complete those tasks perfectly because he has the one who completes him. The one who is the suitable helper so that now he can serve the Lord and keep the Lord's commandments the way that God intends. And for that reason, man and woman together are able now to serve as God's representatives to the world. They're the ones that are to have dominion over the world. This is the framework through which mankind should fulfill the divine charge that was given in verse one, that they are now to propagate, in other words, multiply and fill the earth and rule over it, have dominion. This is the unit that is to be the basic structure of that charge to be fulfilled. the family unit, the husband and wife, man and woman together. They will fill the world as they multiply through the birth of children, and they will rule over it together jointly, serving God as a unit. Moses tacks this on because for Israel, this biblical paradigm of family is important. It was necessary that they understood that it was found in the garden narrative right from the beginning. This is what God intended. Leave and cleave, or leave and join, as we have in the New American Standard, are words commonly used in the context of covenant. We're to leave off disobedience, we're to join to the stipulations of the covenant. That begins with the pattern of man and woman. And then the final verse is just a commentary that really transitions us to the next chapter. At this point in the narrative, the land and the blessing of the chapter is full. And everything is perfect. And they're naked and they're not ashamed. There's no shame whatsoever. But that anticipates the problem that will come in the very next chapter as we encounter the fall of mankind into sin. So being naked and not ashamed anticipates the central problem that comes. Their nakedness was truly literal. They were without any clothing. But it anticipates and signifies something much more as the next chapter will fill out. So as we think about this, some of the general things that we can just learn and conclude is, again, we are reminded that mankind was created with great care and with infinite planning by God so that mankind would have the capacity to serve the covenant God. God is the covenant-making, covenant-keeping God, and he created man with the inherent ability to serve him and to live within that covenant capacity. Sin has never been the result of God's insufficient promises, or I mean provisions, or the insufficiency of God's blessing. God has always been generous in his blessings. He gave abundantly and exuberantly to mankind. Sin has never been because man was looking at God who was stingy and holding back. We have to remember that is still a case. God is a God who alone knows what is good. Every time our sin nature is telling us that we deserve something else that God has withheld, it's a lie. God is an exuberant, generous God, a God who lushly provides for us everything that he alone knows is good. Anything God has not provided for us is not good. And when we take it, it becomes evil. God alone knows what is good and we are to trust that word of God. Not only is God powerful in his word, his word gives us the framework for good. We also are reminded more about what it means to be in God's image. That being created in God's image entails a partner or suitable helper for man with woman, man and his wife. The likeness that man and woman share with God in chapter one finds an analogy here between the likeness that man shares with his wife. Remember, God said, I'll create man in my image as a likeness of us. Well, man and woman have likeness that correspond to the likeness that mankind has with God as image bearer. The woman alone makes it possible for man to achieve the blessings that he would otherwise be unable to do. He cannot do these things alone. Does that mean that every man must be married to achieve God's design? No. We know from Paul that's not the case. But we do know that the majority of times, that's the exception, because God is in a great plan of restoring his creation. And part of that plan, God does pick a few out, like Paul says, that he uniquely gifts to go through life. single for the purpose of having special assignments in that restoration process. He gives single individuals the ability to dedicate their entire lives, all of their effort, all of their energy to serving God without the distractions, or not distractions, but the encumbrance of of caring for a family and providing for a wife, well, it can be distracting. You can't do 100% of your effort for God. So there are times where God has unique individual, but the standard pattern that still is in play is that which reflects creation of a man and woman together because that is the way that man fulfills the divine commission of multiplying and filling the earth. But unlike how our current society is taking that, that divine plan for marriage is one man and one woman becoming one flesh and living together in integrity. There is no multiple marriage partners. There is no one man with one man, one woman with one woman. There's none of these other aberrations that our society has come up with. The divine plan for marriage is one man, one woman coming together in one flesh, and living that way in integrity, serving God together as a suitable companions that complete one another for this purpose of serving God. Any questions this evening? Patchy? Innocence, I'd call it. They were not sinful. I do not know. The scripture never says. The question, if you could hear, Patsy, is when Adam and Eve were in the state of innocence, when they lived in the garden, you know, during whatever amount of time comes between chapter two and chapter three, and they're living in the garden, were they eating from the tree of life? I don't know. The tree of life, obviously, we know from what's revealed, is if they eat of that, they can live forever. That doesn't mean that necessarily that single time of eating it keeps, will make you live forever. It could imply that This is a tree you must periodically eat from to continue life. So we don't know if it's a tree they periodically ate from that would continue life or if it was they never ate from it. Scripture never says. Anything else? Nino? Why is there a death tree in the middle of the garden? Why did God even put that there? Why even have a giant self-destruct button in the middle of the garden? The why is because God is an all-wise God that is seeking to display His glory, and part of the way He's displaying His glory we see throughout the remainder of Scripture. We'll talk about, I'm sure, more next week, but part of it is God displays His glory by showing His mercy his loving kindness, his long suffering, his patience, all things that we would never see if we did not have the contrast of sin. Just as we wouldn't really know the lush provision of God without the single prohibition, we really wouldn't know the holiness, the righteousness, the grandeur of God unless we had the backdrop of judgment and sin that it stands against. So part of it is to give a backdrop to show God's glory in all of its many facets. And part of it is to show that we as mankind need to be forgiven by God. We cannot earn our way at all before God. Whatever scenario that you can possibly conceive of in your mind of how mankind could be related to God, it seems like God has intentionally taken a period of time to show that, yeah, I put man in that kind of scenario and man failed. Here you have, there's one single command. It's a pretty simple command. You only have a couple people, so it's not even like you have a high number of people that could possibly fail. They're not even, at this point, man doesn't even have a sinful disposition. Everything's tipping in man's favor that man will be obedient, and man fails. And it seems like as you go through all the different dispensations, that there's just different scenarios that you could conceive of. Say, okay, man just needs a really tight list of things to do. And if we give man a tight enough list, then we'll just keep that list and we'll be obedient to God. Well, we have the Mosaic Law. It's a pretty tight list. The whole Old Testament shows that man does nothing but blow that continually. Well, maybe if we just had enough grace from God and we could really see and experience that God overcomes sin by his own actions. You know, maybe something even extreme as giving his own son in death. Well, that would show enough love for mankind that man will obey. We live in that scenario now, and we see that doesn't work. So it does seem some of that is, so the only answer I can give directly is it seems like this is necessary for an all-wise God to show His infinite glory in its fullness. We need it. Any others? All right, well, let's close in prayer, and then we are going to formally install Aaron as our assistant pastor here this evening, which is a joyful time for us as a church. So let's close in prayer from this time in our word. Father, we do thank you that we were able to once again open your word and be challenged from it. What an encouragement to see the infinite wisdom of our God. and how you created, and how we can see your creation was full, it was perfect, it was glorious. Father, we stand in awe of you. Father, we see that you also created us in a unique fashion, that we are image bearers of you. We readily admit that because of the sin in our lives, our sinful disposition, we are flawed image bearers. But we know we still bear your image. And we rejoice that through the gracious work of Jesus Christ, that image is being restored. It's being shined up again. And Father, our prayer is that you would increasingly make us better and better image bearers. That we would shine in a way that reflects the glory of the one whose image we carry. And may we do that as we move into this coming week. This we pray in Jesus' name, amen.