So far in Genesis chapter 2 we're getting a little bit more of the story after the sixth day at and after the sixth day You know, we understand that Yahweh made a man and he put him in this garden that he planted a garden where it's just easy and luxurious and fun to live and but in his job is simply to keep that garden and he warns him about two trees and The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which if he eats the fruit of that tree, he will surely die. God promised him that. Dying, he would die. And he also planted another tree in that garden, which is the tree of life, which gives the eater eternal life. So that seems like a pretty good creation story. You could sort of just call it done at that point, right? I mean, OK, we made this nice place. We put Adam in it, what more is there to say? Well, it's interesting because God is actually, God does not delight in making a machine and setting up everything in advance and then just letting it go. God did not lay down tracks, put a train on it, and then say, okay, train, you're going from point A to point B, go. He's not just an engineer. God laid a highway and he's driving a car. And that means he's making decisions along the way. He's saying, we're going to stop here for a while. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. He reserves the right to continually intervene in his own creation. He's not an absentee god. The god of the deists, deism was a very prominent philosophy at the time of the founding of this nation, The god of the deists was very much a standoffish god. God made the world, put it in a little box, wound it up, and then let it go. He's just standing here, benevolently watching the machine play its way out. He wound up the music box and he's just watching the dancer dance. And that's all he does. And we're supposed to look up to him and derive moral benefit from this and call him good because of that. That's not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible has his fingers in there all the time. The God of the Bible is like, I'm a part of this. This is my creation. I own this thing. I permeate this thing. I am going to be a part of everything that happens. And it's going to happen in a way that people can watch me you know, intervene. They can watch me make decisions. Did he know beforehand what was gonna happen? Yes. Did he plan it and ordain it? Absolutely. But still, he wants us to watch it play out logically, in time, because he's glorified by that. And he's telling everybody who's watching, whether it be Adam and Eve, the initial witnesses, or us later reading Moses' account of this, he wants us to learn how he thinks and how he does things. Exactly, you know, how he makes his will come about. He wants us to learn about his character. He wants us to learn how to make our own decisions at times. He has delegated authority to us. Now, here's how authority plays out in the real world. You're going to see the Lord deal with challenges to authority in the next few chapters. Actually, the whole rest of the Bible. You know unfortunately the end of this chapter is the end of the good part as far as you know as far as God And you know this perfect keeping he set up That's not true though because it's so much better when he You know when he's like okay. I've been intervening Miraculously and through my word in various places, but now I'm gonna intervene in the biggest way yet I'm going in my son is gonna go in there and be a part of this thing forever and And that, oh golly, anyway. Sorry. All right, so somebody want to read chapter two, verse 18? And the Lord said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him. All right. That's kind of an interesting little contradiction, seemingly, right? How did he finish the last chapter? What did he say about creation? It's good, it's very good. It's really good. But now, he makes Adam, puts him in the garden, and says, it's not good that he's alone. Is this God saying, whoops, I forgot something? Of course not, thank you. Boy, when I hear nothing, I'm just like, all right, what's wrong with you people? I'm sorry, but the time change should make you more lively this time around, okay? I'll put up with this stuff in the spring, but anyway, all right. Right, of course not. So why is he declaring everything good then and saying it's not so great now? Did I miss your explanation of, It's likely to be day six. Day six or not very long after. Yeah, I think so. He wanted Adam to recognize that there was a problem, shall we say. And we're going to get to a little bit more about that in a moment. But again, what we're seeing here is God saying, I'm going to let my will unfold logically in front of you. I designed all of this. I decided this was going to happen. I also decided that Adam was going to have to look around and realize there was something missing. And I decided this, and then I am going to respond to it. That's why, you know, you ever wonder why, you know, God, who knows everything, says, you don't have because you don't ask. You know, and the rebellious child in us says, you already know what we need. Why do I have to ask? This is why. He wants us to learn. He wants us to participate in this. you know, at all times. And boy, I got so much out of Joe Hummerkaus' weekend here because, you know, so much of our prayer and so much about our lives and what we're missing would be provided for if we would just ask him for it. And it never, rarely I should say, occurs to me because things are getting better. Thanksgiving vacation, isn't it great? I've been learning since that weekend to pray more and it's been good, you know? When we need something, you know, our first impulse as believers should not be, how will I do this? It should be, how is the Lord going to provide this? Start with prayer, and then look around and say, did God provide me with the means? Start with prayer. Permeate everything with prayer. Anyway, he wants Adam to look around and say, there's something missing, and I can't find it. And that's what we're getting to next here. These things, by the way, the reason why I'm harping on God unfolding his will logically in front of us is because chapter three makes no sense unless you see it that way. God set this whole thing up, allowed it all to happen, arguably ordained it to happen. How can anybody be blamed for sin? But Paul says, you don't get to ask those questions. Right there, he's like, the problem isn't your logic, The problem is you thinking you have the right. God is holy and you aren't, shut up. That's a good starting place when we're questioning God. Be quiet. Job, it took him like 42 chapters to figure this out. We can do better, I hope. It's been a while, new covenant, hopefully. I don't know, we'll see. Verses 19 and 20. Now out of the ground, the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was his name. You were 22, I'm sorry. And 20, yes. And 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. Yep. So first thing we learn is that Adam, can just look at an animal and recognizes where it fits into God's creation. Okay, Adam is way smarter than any of us. Adam has the untainted, unspoiled, uncursed, perfectly made by God, no problems brain right out of the gate. He could just look at an animal and him knowing God, seeing creation, reviewing this animal, Adam can say, oh yeah, that's a thus and such. That's a giraffe. I called it that because it has a long neck. I also called it that because of 18 other things, which I immediately could tell about it, but that future scientists are going to take thousands of years to figure out. Because Adam's really, really smart. Adam is one of the most intelligent, and I don't say wise, but I do say intelligent men that has ever lived, most likely, because he has an unspoiled brain to start with. None of the stuff that we've accumulated, both genetically and with sin, generations of sin behind this, you know, and he's just, yeah, he can just say, oh yeah, that's a thus and such, that's a so and so. You know, he's got, you know, I don't know if he lives in a kingdom, plow, and class, order, family, genus, species world in his classification system. It doesn't really matter. Whatever he was doing to classify them was probably the right way to do it. So yeah, I mean, he names things, he names them, and that's their name. I mean, it's the Hebrew way of telling you, Adam looks at things and intuitively grasps their nature. Now, that's true for animals. Not necessarily true for everything, but it is definitely true for animals and Adam. So, you know, hey, he's the king, it's appropriate. He is the head of creation, the authority over all the things God put on the earth. Adam is his delegated authority. So, he's a classifier. He can make distinctions. He can tell the difference between things. He's a lot like God in that respect. And the one thing that he came to at the end of this time is that, okay, I've been all through this garden. You know, God has paraded so many animals in front of me. And none of them are anything really like me. I mean, there's similarities. A gorilla goes by and it's like, dude, you got thumbs. Wow. But we're the only ones. But other than that. You know, there's physical similarities, but there is nothing like him. He knows that there's nothing here that has the things that set him apart from all of the other animals. There's nothing in here that shares the image of God with him. There's nothing in here that is uniquely qualified to be his partner. They all have partners. I mean, you know, he already understands the way they procreate, the way they reproduce. He understands intrinsically so many things about biology that we don't get yet, even now. And he's looking at them and he knows all this. And he says, these things aren't me. Wow. So, you know, no help. He's like, I'm alone. You know it must have been a strange feeling for him. You know. It's like. I mean you know not alone like Depressingly alone because this guy's walking around and talking to God all the time, but still it's like hmm And he knows that that's weird that that's different nothing else in creation is like this So I want to point out again that if you believe any of this stuff you can't believe in evolution. It's just not possible Yeah, just pointing it out one more time. But, you know, there is no way that Adam can emerge as a separate species and not have an Eve that comes right along with him or comes out of him in some way. You know, just, you know, it's obvious, but I just like to make the point regularly that, you know, you can't mix evolution and anything in these chapters. And the fact is, according to Christ and according to Paul, you need everything in these chapters. You can't be a Christian and not believe this stuff. So you can't believe in evolution. You are not allowed to do so. Sorry. You can fight with it a while. The Lord will let you struggle. But once you pull out logic and use it on this text and on the things that Christ and Paul said about creation ordinances, about you know, how federal headship works, about how it is that if you're an Adam, you sin, but in Christ, you are made alive. If you believe any of that stuff, you cannot believe that any of this took any significant time at all, nor that there were things that gradually approached Adam's intelligence over time, you know, no. Anyway, so verses 21 through 23. As long as I have been studying anything that deals with the original languages of this, I have not understood why do we call it a rib. It's not a rib. It's a side, like a side of beef. It's a big chunk. When I was a little kid, I remember asking my mother after the little Lutheran Sunday school class, so Adam actually was missing a bone? Does that mean that all boys have one less bone in their rib cage than girls do? And my mother, bless her heart, and I don't think she's listening, said, yes. Later on, I believe she corrected herself. But I was little. She didn't know what I could grasp. It was probably easier just to say, that's right. The Bible's true. Be quiet. Go away. You bother me. Anyway, yeah. And I remember, I mean, I probably sat there for days going, back then I could feel my ribs. They're even. They're even. It made no sense to me. You know, I wished that I had hurt myself in a way to get an x-ray so that I could see the picture and count the bones. Anyway. But anyway, he didn't make her out of a bone. He didn't make her out of a rib in the sense of, you know, baby back ribs. You know, it's a side, like a side of beef, a big chunk. I mean, you know, a huge section of flesh that he removed from Adam. And he then restored what's physically missing in Adam, obviously. But there's no question that Eve's DNA is of the same species that Adam's is. She was generated from his creation. She is not an entirely separate creation of her own, interestingly enough. He didn't form her out of dust. She's not a different creation. She's not a different species. They have the same, essentially, you know, DNA patterns. I mean, they're not, I don't, I doubt that they were twins in every way, but the chromosome counts, but, but I don't, you know, I just don't know. We're not really told enough to know that kind of stuff, but. I don't know, I think he mixed and matched a little bit with the DNA, probably, just because he could, but she is definitely the same species that Adam is, and yet created out of him. Adam is the first human being, she is the second. She is not a parallel creation. It's interesting, he could have totally made her differently, but then, it's almost like, you know, she's her own person, and he's his own person, and they're just sort of symbiotic, rather than being. literally before we get to the talk of what this means on flesh, the same exact kind of flesh, so to speak. So did you notice? God is so great. It's the little details in this passage. I love them so much. God anesthetized him. He didn't have to, right? I mean, Adam could have been awake the whole time. God could have done it without pain. He's like, oh, hang on a minute there, Adam. You might want to look away. He doesn't do any of that stuff. God is like, there's things you don't need to see right now. Why don't you just, oh, you want to take a nap? You take a nap, buddy. Right now, you want to take a nap. That's right. Go to sleep. God anesthetizes. God, there are so many little details in the rest of this chapter and the next chapter about how God deals with people. that make him, I don't know, again, he's so merciful, he's so loving. You know, he's like, yeah, you don't wanna see this. And Adam, you know, Adam, Adam the classifier, Adam who understands the nature of the things he looks at. Adam looks at her and what's the first thing he says? 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. He knew right then that she's his species, his type. She's his counterpart. She's everything he lacks to fulfill the creation mandate. They're supposed to be fruitful and multiply, but he can't do it. Now he can. But she's not just a vessel for having kids. She is his helper. She's alongside him for everything. She's the perfect complement. Everything he lacks, she's got. This is what marriage ought to be, right? I mean, two people who are way too much the same often don't make it. Two people who are way too opposite often don't make it. It's got to be you have things in common, and you have things that the one's good at that the other one really isn't. And those change over time, because God in his mercy says, I'm not going to make you out of stone. You people are going to adapt together. I don't know. Anyway. But it's interesting what he names her, because, you know, man is Ish, and he calls her Isha. I just pronounced those words. The really weird thing, Isha, the way it's spelled in Hebrew, that's not the same real word as Ish. It doesn't use Adam as a real word. It's a totally different word that sounds like it should be the feminine version of man. He's writing poetry. He named her poetically. This guy's already in love with her. You know, there was, oh no, you don't fall in love at first sight. He totally did. He totally did. He looked at her and he was just like. Yeah, you're like the feminine side of me. But he says it in such a way as to sort of, you know, it's hard to know exactly. You know, this is a root word that doesn't show up anywhere else in biblical Hebrew or in many ancient languages. It's kind of similar to one of the words for fire, which makes you wonder if she was a redhead, maybe. I don't know. But I don't know. But he looks at her and he's just like, And he's coming up with lines, man. He's coming up with pickup lines. He's like, oh, oh, oh, oh. Yeah, let's work this thing out. Yeah. It's so cool. I don't know. I mean, it's good poetry. It's good Hebrew poetry. He's not, you know, I don't know. Yeah, he's not a dude, bro. Anyway, but I don't know. He's classifying her, and he's writing poetry that connects her to himself, yes. He might not have gotten all the animals, you know, if women had come sooner. Well, yeah, I know, because probably they all of a sudden will. He's like, yeah, this is all fine and good, but you and me, let's go over here and walk a little bit. I got the, you got to see this stuff in the garden. You haven't seen it yet. Yeah, yeah, they're going to, yeah, I mean, they're going to get in the conversation without any history, which is interesting. But I'm sure they both have a lot to talk about. Anyway. I don't know, I just, but that, you know, and right at the beginning of the thing he says, though, is the thing I kind of want to really point out. This, at last, and that's there, it's in the original, at last, he has been looking for her. By the end of that classifying experiment there, he was getting desperate. He was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're a this, you're a that. Where is my help? Where is the one who was meant for me? And he's been getting desperate through the course of his day, days, however long this took. He's been wanting to find her. He didn't know what she was, but he's been wanting to find her. He knew he had a need. God put a need into him. And it was still good. That's so cool. I don't know, I just, you know, and that part of creation continues, right? I needed until I, until the Lord brought her to me. You know, no question. In every aspect of my personality was lacking something. And I don't know, I hope your relationships have been like this. Mine certainly was. All right, so somebody read verse 24. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Okay, so I think there's some question is whether Adam said this or Moses said this. I know ESV pulls it out of the quote. ESV says like this is an aside, like Moses is writing, oh by the way, this is why, maybe. I don't know, I could see Adam totally thinking this too, even though Adam doesn't have a father or mother, you know, he kind of, I mean, you know, again, he knows scientifically what a father and mother are, and he knows You know, and he has probably some association with father with the God who made him. So, but beyond that, you know, he, you know, but I could totally see him looking at this and seeing, looking at her and seeing the future and realizing what what needs to be said here, what needs to be, because God, whatever happens, whether Moses wrote this or whether Adam said it, it's been true since this very moment, what is said here, that man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. So God's vision for the family does in fact include children moving out to become their own families. It really is true. Gotta happen. Now, moving out, you can define that differently. I know that in a lot of ancient cultures, moving out meant moving into the next wing of the house. Okay, fine, whatever. And for some of us, moving out is a thousand miles away, or two, or four. I'm sorry, those of you, my children, who may be watching. No, I'm kidding. You know, whatever it is, though, it is a separation. There is a separation now. The relationships aren't the same exactly anymore. And, you know, when children move out and become their own families, two separate families have joined by marriage and sex into one flesh. Because this has both meanings in there. You know, it's both about, you know, genetics and parentage, and it's about, you know, sexual relations. And Paul kind of leans into that a little bit in 1 Corinthians, as I recall. You know, and he's like, you know, who all are you one flesh with? You know, this is why you don't do some of the things you all have been doing, Corinthians. You know? You know, anyway, but so that's important. And this is, by the way, the very first implication that fornication is wrong. I have read so many people. justifying sex before marriage biblically, or attempting to, and it's just like, seriously, come on. You know, I mean, you know, I don't know, it's, okay, maybe, you know, you could make a pretty good case, actually, that there is not an absolutely direct thing that says don't do it, although I think in the New Testament it's pretty clear. But, you know, if you care at all about The implications, if you care at all about what the bigger meanings are behind things, the gist of all of this is that sex is something that happens in marriage, and that's it. You know, one man, one woman in marriage, period. No other options are available to somebody who is obeying God. Nothing. So, anyway, he's also making a legal statement here. And it's an important legal statement. Marriage is just as sacred as the bond between a parent and a child. It's that real in God's eyes. You know, if they leave their fathers and mothers and join together and become one flesh, and that's meaningful in any way to God, then Adam is saying, as far as God is concerned, that is just as real as the fact that you have a father and a mother. Your marriage is just as real. This thing which, you know, our culture wants to define as this increasingly not useful legal fiction, you know, no, it has a real presence in God's will and in God's mind. And in fact, it is how Jesus has decided to define his relationship to us, to the church. So we need to take that seriously. You know, the bond between him and God, between him and his father, is just as real as the bond between him and the church. Just as real in God's eyes. The infinite, eternal, Trinitarian bond of father and son is as entrenched in God's will and purpose and character and plan for the universe as his connection to the church that he came and saved. Wow. That's all packed into this. And the New Testament helpfully unpacks it for us in places, but anyway. All right, finally verse 25, and I'll read it so nobody else has to. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. And you know, you almost kinda gotta wonder, why is this a thing? Why does this need to be talked about? You know? You know, I mean, yeah, we kind of know what's coming in Genesis 3, and that's sort of part of that story a little bit. But still, it's like, why does Moses, why does the Holy Spirit feel like this needs to be said? And there's reasons. You know, nakedness has sort of two components to it at this point of the narrative. One of them is innocence, obviously. I mean, they don't know any better. They don't know any differently. You know, they live in a place where clothing is not required by any such of the imagination. You can go your whole lives and never put a stitch on, and you don't ever get cold or hot or anything, and nothing. And also, it's not just innocence, but it's also vulnerability. You know, you are vulnerable. You are very vulnerable when you are not wearing anything. And we are not just talking about the physical attacks here. You know, you are emotionally vulnerable. You are, you know, you've got it all out there for the world to see, you know. And, you know, people talk about that. We joke about it a little bit. But, you know, they're innocent. But it's entirely safe for them to be this vulnerable. They have no enemies. There is nobody who is going to take advantage of them in any way. They have a perfect life at this point. They've never done anything wrong. So there's no reason for shame. There's just nothing. That's what all of this means. They don't have the knowledge of good and evil yet that they're about to gain experientially in the next chapter. And so they just don't have any idea. And God left them that way without saying, you know, you should really put some clothes on. It's just because of what I prefer. You know, God doesn't say that to them because there's just no reason to do it with them right now. Do I think that would have continued forever? We have no idea, honestly. I am not going to play a lot of what-if games about what would have happened if they hadn't fallen, if one of them had fallen and the other one hadn't, all of this other stuff. We're not going to play a lot of those games because they're just pointless. I mean, God ordained history to go in a certain way, and I'm just glad that he's in charge of it. That's fine with me. We're not going to talk about counterfactuals. One other thing I'm going to point out is that there is never a suggestion. Of all the things that are going to be restored in the kingdom of God, of all of the wonderful things about Eden, about how the future is going to lift the curse and restore all of this stuff. There is never a suggestion that we're going to revert entirely to the state of verse 25. The future is closed. Nakedness is over. That was an Adam and Eve thing. It ain't going to be like that in the future either because Paul delights in talking about it. He says, on one occasion very emphatically, that if he goes to be with the Lord, he's going to feel naked until his body is risen and he rejoins it, and he's clothed appropriately in the glorified body. Then, he won't feel naked anymore. He'll be clothed. And that's a little bit of a euphemistic sort of way of using this. But clearly, he thinks that being naked's not all that great. And we are described as being clothed in his righteousness. What is given to the people in Revelation who are saying, how long are we going to have to wait? They're given a white robe and told, just wait a little longer. It's not going to be. A shame forever. And this is how, so God's long-term plan for this was not a total reversion to Adam and Eve for this one thing. Is that a hand? Yeah, because they had their own righteousness. They were perfect, right. But for eternity in the future, you know, I mean, God has said that his forgiveness is like forgetting that it ever happened. It's in the depths of the ocean, as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. He has promised not to hold things against us. But the fact of the matter is, once we have sinned, we eternally require Christ's righteousness. We will not eternally struggle with sin, hallelujah. But we do eternally require to be clothed in Christ's righteousness, and we're gonna be happy about that. You know, we're not gonna be like, boy, well, I just, Lord, I wish I didn't have to put you out like this. We're not gonna be like that. We're just gonna be happy to be with him, and he's gonna be happy we're there, and you know, all of this is just, it's gonna turn into the perfect marriage of the lamb and his bride somehow. And I don't know, it'll be, you know, God ordained all of this stuff because I believe that he saw the end to be better than the beginning. In some way that is just hard to foresee going into chapter three, where everything in the world literally falls apart. In some way, God had a better plan than leaving them to their own perfect righteousness forever. He really wanted them to need his son's righteousness. He really wanted to glorify his son to that extent. He wanted them to fail so that his son could be the king of his kingdom forever and ever. Not Adam, not his natural descendants, but Christ. And then Christ would save his own. Anyway, which is great. So, all right. Hey, it's 1014. We actually kind of got out ahead of time. Questions, comments? I mean, this puts to an end the greatest lie of our day, right, what we're dealing with. It's settled right here as a Christian. If you believe the Bible, Genesis 1 through 3, this, what we're dealing with now is, like, if you're a Christian, you cannot participate in this. You cannot say, well, this is what it, you know, maybe, no, it's, this is definitive. This is creation of order. This is natural. This is nature. This is the way God created us. There's no room for any compromise or capitulation. It's just so clear. How can you misunderstand it, which is amazing that people do. Yeah. Once you make one little part of this symbolic just to compromise, just to sort of try to find common ground with the world so that you can have a conversation, you know, without needing to be, you know, have them rain on your science parade or whatever. Once you've done that, you've thrown out, you know, the whole thing crumbles apart. God's house was built all together on the cornerstone, and you can't just pull out pieces of it and say, we didn't need that. You have to go along. It is all or nothing. Nothing in here is symbolic language. Not a thing. This is told in exactly the same way that the rest of the book is told. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Once you give up a little thing, you've given it all up. You've gone down the path of, frankly, the liberal, and you are going to end up in a place where you are denying of virgin birth, you are denying who Christ is, you are denying the need for salvation, what it actually entails in your life, you're denying sola fide, I mean, faith alone, you're denying grace alone. You know, one little piece of this thing will make the whole thing fall apart. It stands strong, but only in your faith in the text and what it's saying. That's important, that, yeah. Ken Ham's right. Without Genesis, you got nothing. All right. Well, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this. The way I just described it in my poor human way, it sounds like a house of cards. But the fact is, it's just a very well-built building. And you still need effort. Lord, we need all of you. We need all of the things you put into this. So I pray that you will help us to understand these things as the weeks and months go on. I pray, Lord, that you'll prepare our hearts for church this morning to hear your word preached and that you'll change us as a result. In Jesus' name, amen.