Genesis 1-2 - God’s Sovereign Design
Main Idea: God created everything there is for His glory and our good, and invites us to join in His work of creating life and order.
GOD IS THE CREATOR OF EVERYTHING
So, believe in Him and trust in Him alone! Rely on His power to get you through each day and each season, and don’t turn away from the source of life!
GOD DESIGNED MANKIND IN HIS OWN IMAGE
So, treat others with respect. Don’t hate or desire harm for others. Value your own life because God put it in you, and He made you like He is in consciousness and language and fundamental character.
GOD DESIGNED MARRIAGE
So, value marriage! Don’t be content with merely enjoying a life mate without holy commitment - embrace the good gift of marriage God’s given mankind!
Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by YouTube)
I read a article this week in the magazine The Scientific American, and it said this, We exist and we are living creatures. It follows that the universe we live in must be compatible with the existence of life.
However, as scientists have studied the fundamental principles that govern our universe, they have discovered that the odds of a universe like ours being compatible with life are astronomically low.
We can model what the universe would have looked like if it's constants, the strength of gravity, the mass of an electron, the cosmological constant, what it would have looked like if those had been slightly different.
What has become clear is that across a huge range of these constants, they had to have pretty much exactly the values they had in order for life to be possible.
The physicist Lee Smolin has calculated that the odds of life, compatible numbers coming up by chance, is 1 in 10 to the 229th power. For those of you that, like me, might not be mathematicians, that's 10 with 229 zeros after that.
It's the odds of life compatibility arriving by chance. Physicists refer to this discovery as the fine-tuning of physics for life. What should we make of the fine-tuning?
Perhaps there is some other way of explaining it, or perhaps we just got lucky. Very scientific, very scientific. As we see our world today, as we look back, we wonder how did all of this get put together?
And these are the same types of questions in one sense that even ancient peoples were looking at in the ancient Near East where the Bible was penned. And they had their own creation accounts. I have some summarized versions here.
In the Egyptian cosmology, how did the world start? Here's what the ancient Egyptians thought.
There was a chaotic, watery state of pre-creation in which the Egyptian creator god Atum resided in before his water form was released out of an egg into the waters. Atum self-generated out of the waters and arose in the shape of a pillar.
To begin the creation of the world, Atum spat out a pair of divine beings, Shu, the god of air, and Tefnut, his female counterpart, the goddess of moisture. Shu and Tefnut, in turn, produce a second generation of gods.
Their son, Geb, was the god of the earth, and his sister wife, Nut, was the sky goddess who was kept from her brother husband by their father, Shu, the god of the air.
Before their separation by their father, Geb and Nut were able to produce another generation of gods, Isis, Osiris, Seth, and Nephthys. Isis and Osiris in turn produced Horus. So there you have it.
Here's how we think it all got put together. Or you can look at the Babylonian cosmology, where Abraham and all of Israel originally came from and where they were exiled for a time.
In the Babylonian account of the origin of creation, everything originated with water, and the freshwater goddess Apsu and the saltwater goddess Tiamah made Mumu the stormy wave god, not the article of clothing that some of you may know.
They made Mumu the stormy wave god and Lakmu and Lakamu a pair of giant sea dragons that made Anshar the god of the skies and the heavens and Kishar the god of the earthly realm.
From those two came the important gods, Anu, Enlil, and Ea, as well as the other gods of the sky, earth, and the underworld. These were too noisy for the freshwater and saltwater goddesses, so they decided to destroy all the new gods.
The god Marduk promised to conquer Tiamat if he were given supreme authority over the gods. The gods agreed to put him in charge.
Marduk kills Tiamat, and from one half of her body he made the dome of the heavens, and with the other half he made the earth.
He established the dwelling of the gods, fixed the positions of the stars, ordered the movements of the heavenly bodies, and set the length of the year.
Then, to gladden the hearts of the gods, Marduk created men from the blood of Kingu, the general of Tiamat's army. Finally, he made rivers, vegetation, and animals, which completed the creation.
In recognition of his triumphs, the gods bestowed all their titles and powers on Marduk, making him the god of gods.
So as we enter into the book of Genesis, those are the kinds of world views that are in the places right around the children of Israel.
So they would hear, maybe someone's on a business trip from Babylon, and he's selling some clothing items, and he says, oh, listen, you guys got to know about how the world was made.
And it's why Babylon is the greatest kingdom on earth, because our king was descended from some of these gods. Or the Egyptians, where they would say, yes, all of our pharaohs, they are descended from the gods, as the gods commingled with humans.
And so they have a divine right to rule and to reign. And here the Israelites have something that, though there are passing similarities between some of the elements of what's said, it's a whole different picture.
Instead of battles and warfare taking place, there's a sense in Genesis 1 that this god is drastically different than all the other things that have been mentioned throughout all the ages.
The luck god that we are currently looking for in Scientific American. Who put this thing together? Scripture says God did.
First today, we're going to look at the fact that God is the creator of everything. And the account in Genesis 1-2, there are two main pictures that are painted for us by the Lord through these writers.
And the first of these in chapter 1 through chapter 2 and verse 3 is a state of chaotic, lifeless, dark water put into the world that we know today with light and life.
Then in chapter 2 verses 4 through the end of the chapter, it looks at a specific section of land that was barren and there was no life there. And what God did in that section of land to create who we would know in reference today as Adam and Eve.
So first, we're going to look at Genesis chapter 1 and verse number 1. Here's the heading that's given to everything that's going to follow. He says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Now, when we read the word heavens, we often think of God's dwelling place. Here, it's specifically talking about the skies and the land. It's not that God didn't have a dwelling place before, and then all of a sudden he made one.
Here, it's the skies and the land. In verse number 2, it says, now the earth was formless and empty, or if you will, unordered and uninhabited.
He says, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. So much like if you asked a scientist today, hey, where did life begin? What happened initially on planet Earth?
Everyone from scientists today, or if you looked at the Egyptians or the Babylonians, or here in the Bible, you get water first. Water is where life is.
But instead of it being like the gods all around them, where the gods are formed out of the water, or there's like saltwater goddess and freshwater goddess, Scripture says God was already existent. He wasn't born out of the waters.
He existed before all of it. Then in verse number 3, then God said, let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. There was an evening, and there was a morning one day.
What God outlines for us here is, He says the entire world is unordered and uninhabited, and so through these six days listed in Genesis, He's going to organize everything into where it should be, so that what was unordered, what was formless, is now
formed, and what was empty now has inhabitants. So day one, He says, where there was all darkness, now it's ordered into light and darkness. Verse number six, Then God said, Let there be an expanse between the waters, separating water from water.
So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above the expanse, and it was so. God called the expanse sky. Evening came, and then morning, the second day.
So at first, you have it's all water, all dark. Day one, God separates light and dark. Day two, God separates the waters below, or if you will, the blue below from the blue above.
And he says, now these have their places. It's not going to be all water. He puts in here this firmament, or we might think of today the atmosphere, that God is the one that formed it.
Aren't you grateful that though it can get a little toasty here, we don't live in such a climate, God hasn't set up our atmosphere so that we burn and that we can't go outside at all during the summer months.
There are some times where, frankly, I feel like I can't go outside during the summer months, but if I did, I would survive. But God has set it up. God perfectly formed our atmosphere to be what it needed to be to bring life.
So God separates now the blue below from the blue above. Verse number nine, he says, Then God said, let the water under the sky be gathered together in one place and let the dry land appear.
And it was so God called the dry land Earth and the gathering of the water he called seas. And God saw that it was good.
Then God said, let the earth produce vegetation, seed bearing plants and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit with seed in it, according to their kinds.
And it was so the earth produced vegetation, seed bearing plants, according to their kind and trees bearing fruit with seed in it, according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. Evening came and then morning, the third day.
Day number one, light from dark. Day number two, blue oceans below from the blue above. Skies and waters separated.
Now day three, he separates the land from the seas and he puts vegetation on it. Then day four, then God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night.
They will serve as signs for seasons and for days and for years. They will be lights in the expanse of the sky to provide light on the earth. And it was so.
God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night, as well as the stars.
God placed them in the expanse of the sky to provide light on the earth, to rule the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. Evening came and then morning, the fourth day.
So days one through three, God works on the formlessness of our world, that he separates out light from dark, he separates out seas and skies. Day number three, he separates out land from water.
Now he's going to work on the empty part, and he's going to put inhabitants in each of these places. So up until this point, God's light has been providing the day and the night.
Now God hands off, he delegates that task to the sun, moon, and as it says there, as well as the stars. Or maybe as in some, he made the stars also. Oh yeah, you know those billions and trillions of lights out in space, the burning balls of fire?
Yeah, he also made those. As he goes through here, he makes the sun and the moon, and God's not foolish. He here is not saying, oh yeah, the moon is a light.
It's a light like the sun is a light. Obviously, we know today the moon reflects the light of the sun, but here the writer in Genesis isn't giving us a play by play of all of the material aspects of our world.
He's not saying here's when the atoms came into play, and here's all of the laws of quantum physics. That's not the question that he's answering. And so as he goes through here, it's not that God didn't understand what these things were really like.
Frankly, to these people in the Ancient Near East, it might have completely blown their minds if he had shown them every aspect of creation as he sees it.
Even as we look at our world today, we're often confounded by how things exist in the way that they exist.
Pastor Ron has a degree in biology, and I know you have looked many times at the intricacy with which God created our world and created the creatures in our world.
One thing of note is that the nations all around Israel looked at the stars and the planets as being representative, or sometimes they literally thought that these things were the gods.
So if you go to Egypt, you have Ra, the sun god, and here the writer in Genesis says, yeah, he's not a god, he doesn't even really get a name, he just gets the greater light.
He doesn't even give him the designation of the Hebrew word for sun that is used in other places, but he says these are not rival gods to him. Whatever exists, God made it.
He says don't fear the sun god, don't fear these wandering star spiritual beings, don't fear the demons. He says don't fear them, whatever exists, God has made it. So we got days one, two, and three.
Lights day one, he puts lights in on day four. Then day two, he separates the waters below from the skies above. Day number five, he says, all right, let's put inhabitants in.
Verse number 20, then God said, let the water swarm with living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.
So God created the large sea creatures and every living creature that moves and swarms in the water according to their kinds. He also created every winged creature according to its kind, and God saw that it was good. God blessed them.
Be fruitful, multiply and fill the waters of the seas and let the birds multiply on the earth. Evening came, and then morning, the fifth day. So you hear God says, I've separated out, seas below, skies above.
Now I'm going to put things in both the seas and the skies. One thing that I want to note here, guys, if you go to verse number 21 here, it says, so God created the large sea creatures.
And if you look back even just one verse, God said, I'm going to make two things. Let the water swarm with living creatures and let birds fly above the expanse of the sky.
Then verse 21, ignoring the very, very first thing he says, so God created every living creature that moves and swarms in the water according to their kinds. He also created every winged creature. Okay, he said, I'm going to make two things.
And then he makes three things, which is very similar to the day before when he says, I'm going to have this greater light and the lesser light. Also, I made the stars.
Here, this word great sea creatures, if you got a very old translation, might say whales, or perhaps if you have a newer translation, you might see the word even sea monsters, depending on anything. What in the world is being talked about here?
So we went over both the Babylonian and the Egyptian accounts, where there are these sea serpents, these sea dragons that people viewed as, we don't know what's out in the water, but we're real scared of it.
You can even see this in the legends of today, where you have movies about Megalodon, or you have, there was one other one.
Technically, Godzilla, I think, technically falls within this same type of thing, where we fear the giant thing that might be in the water that we don't want to get us. Kind of an older example, 20,000 leagues under the sea with the giant kraken.
Here, people in this area greatly feared the oceans and the seas. They thought the ancient goddesses Tiamat and others lived. And God says this word here, the tannin.
Most elsewhere where it's used in scripture, God says these things are not rival gods to God, and God doesn't have to fight against them and win a great battle to bring you spring. He says whatever exists, God made it.
So if it's a whale, if it's a real creepy looking octopus or squid, here as they viewed them as spiritual beings, he says even if there's demons, God is the one that made them. They are not challengers to him.
They are his creation subservient to him. Then on day six, God, if you'll remember day number three, God separated the land out from the seas. Now day six, God fills the land, and he puts all of the creatures on it.
Verse number 24, Then God said, let the earth produce living creatures according to their kinds, livestock, creatures that crawl, and the wildlife of the earth according to their kinds. And it was so.
So God made the wildlife of the earth according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that crawl in the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
Here you might wonder, that seems like an odd pairing, an odd grouping of ways to say all of the land creatures, livestock, wild animals, and creeping things.
Technically, I could file all of the land animals under things that can talk and things that can't. And you'd have like humans, parrots, and gorillas, if you count sign language, and the things that talk and everything. What's up with this breakdown?
And it's with an eye towards the book of Leviticus, where God's going to say, hey, here are the things that you can eat that are good. Here are the things that I don't want you to eat, because you're going to get sick. Don't eat the vultures.
Don't eat the chameleons. Don't partake in these things. And so here, right from the beginning, the Bible's one coordinated story together.
It's meant to be read, not in isolation from all the other books, but in connection with it. And so God here is even reinforcing, yeah, even the unclean animals that you're not supposed to eat, it's not that they're uniquely evil or something.
God even created those. So if we are looking at some of the ancient cosmologies, then we would look at this list and we'd say, wow, God made everything.
There's a huge lack of like the fighting the other rival gods, and there's no mention like of God's self-generation. He just was, and he just made everything.
And the sea, instead of being God's rival and enemy that he has to fight, it just does what he says. Like, he doesn't have to throw a spear at it. He just says, let there be land, and there's land.
Let there be light, and there's light. What is different about this incredibly powerful God? And as we look at the ancient list, we might say, yeah, that's the crowning whatever of the earth.
And here, I didn't belabor it earlier, but day four with the night stars and the sun and the moon, those are those heavenly rulers that were viewed as spiritual beings. And he gives them, he tells them to rule over these things.
And so we might expect, okay, who's going to be in charge of the earth? It's probably the things that are ruling days and nights. I also wanted to mention, as it says there, these lights are going to be for seasons and for days and months.
That word seasons would speak to in the rest of the Old Testament, Passover, the feast of first fruits. It would be how you would know when it's time to celebrate God in these feasts. How do you know?
It's because the moon and the sun and the stars, well, let's know the sun, but the moon and the stars are showing you, oh, this is the time of year it is.
It's time to go up to Jerusalem, or it's time to go up to another location to celebrate these feasts. They point the way towards what God has set up for His people.
So you might think, okay, probably the sun, moon, and stars, just as with all of the other legends, those are going to be the things that rule over the earth. But we see next that God designed mankind in His own image. We can see this in verse 26.
Then God said, the crowning achievement of everything, let us make mankind in our image according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.
Here, when God says, let us make man in our image, that we are made in the image of God, this word image elsewhere in the Old Testament is used often to speak of an idol, a picture or a representation of a God.
It was used in Babylon to describe their kings alone. They didn't believe that everyone was an image of the gods, just King Nebuchadnezzar or King Belshazzar. Only they were the image of the God.
But God says every single person that you interact with is made in the image of God. The New Testament authors would revisit this theme often.
You can read in James chapter 3, where James says, you guys are cursing one another, you are speaking demeaningly and downgrading, debasing one another. And he says, don't you realize that they are made in the image of God?
And when you insult them, when you drag them down, you are doing harm to an image of God. Just as throughout the Old Testament, you would have people that were irate whenever someone would destroy a graven image or an idol. They would have outrage.
How dare you destroy this thing that pictured Baal or this thing that pictured Marduk? And God says, I view people with that care. Not just the kings, not just the rich.
I view people as being made in my image. People being in God's image is that in their consciousness, they're like God. If you go to any person, it's different than when you converse with a dog or a cat or even the sign language speaking gorilla.
There's something different about the consciousness of humans. It's something that we were given by our God. We are like our God in even the gift of language that we're able to be creative, we're able to write, we're able to create works of art.
Just as our God is creative, that He made all of these things, and He didn't make just cows, but He made the proto cows and He made the dogs. He made all of these things that we can enjoy. And He says, part of what I've put in you is that creation.
And our actions and our words and our attitudes, we can show what God is like. If you didn't notice before, it's not just Christians that can be kind or that can do good things to others.
People that are not saved can do good things or perform charitable acts. Well, how is that? It's because they're made in the image of God.
And as such, we are called not to devalue, kill, insult, or look down on others because they picture God. Verse number 27 says this. So God created man in his own image.
He created him in the image of God. He created them male and female. Here, when God says that he created them male and female, we read that God is the creator of gender, not Western society.
He is the one that made us biologically male and female and calls us to flourish within what he made us as. We're not called to question his decision or devalue it, but to embrace it and find his purpose for us within the gender that he gave us.
God throughout scripture highlights beneficial things of both men and women all throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, and he describes himself in the terms that he uses for both of those.
So God says in Genesis 2, which we'll get to in just one second, he says that he made a woman who would be a helper suitable for Adam.
The word helper is the word easer, which almost universally throughout the rest of the Old Testament, God uses to talk about himself. He says, I am the helper. I am the one who comes alongside, who defends, who protects.
God uses exclusively in Scripture the pronouns he. He identifies himself as a male. When Jesus came to the earth, he was a male.
And God has specifically designed both genders to be a picture of who he is, his care for others. You can think of Jesus' words, even as he looked at Jerusalem and thought about the destruction that would come to the temple.
And he said, how I wanted to wrap you back in like a mother hen wraps in her chicks. So God is the one that has created gender, and God has a plan for you to be able to flourish within his design.
Verse number 28 says, God blessed them, and God said to them, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.
Here God gives that initial creation commandment to mankind, where he says, what I have done in ruling over and subduing and ordering and filling with inhabitants, I want you to continue doing the exact same thing wherever you find yourself.
Then in verse number 29, God also said, look, I've given you every seed bearing plant on the surface of the entire earth, and every tree whose fruit contains seed, this will be food for you.
For all the wildlife of the earth, for every bird of the sky, and for every creature that crawls on the earth, everything having the breath of life in it, I have given every green plant for food, and it was so.
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed. Evening came and then morning, the sixth day. So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed.
On the seventh day, God had completed his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it he rested from all his work of creation.
Here, God resting is not that he was real tuckered out from all the work of speaking and forming. Instead, it's that God stopped working.
This is the exact reason that he would later give in the Old Testament to say, children of Israel, once a week, just like God stopped working one day a week, he says, I want you to do the same.
Realize that I, God, am the one that makes you able to work, able to enjoy, able to have crops. He says, so one day of the week, I want you to stop. I want you to worship.
I want you to put a focus on me and not worry about harvesting, weeding, any of those things. So I want to remind you guys today, maybe sometimes you feel very busy, you feel like you're always working. Remember that God can work behind the scenes.
That was one of the things highlighted in Scripture. So here, God has these six days and then there's a seventh day. And if you notice, there's no mention of morning and evening.
This is the seventh day. The idea given is that God rested from his work and he didn't have to hop back in and go, oh, I forgot to make this thing or that thing.
He has now delegated to the sun, moon, and stars to set light and dark and the seasons and days and hours. And he has given to mankind the rule to take over the earth, to subdue it, and to establish God's rule further and further over each area.
Then Genesis 2 verses 4 through 25, where we'll end today, we see this, that God now focuses in on one section of the earth. That's a barren wilderness. There's nothing there.
We've read a lot about plants and animals and all those types of things. It's not in this portion of wilderness yet. Verse number 4.
These are the records of the heavens and the earth concerning their creation.
At that time that the Lord God had made the earth and the heavens, no shrub of the field had yet grown on the land, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not made it rain on the land, and there was no man to work the
ground. So here is a section of land that God says, I want man to work in this area.
He says, but mist would come up from the earth and water all the ground, then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and man became a living being or a living soul.
Here we are uniquely created and formed by the hand of God. We were not, as in some of the Babylonian legends, we didn't come from the blood of a vanquished general sub deity or God that God formed us.
And so that gives every human being incredible worth that we were created by God. Verse number 8, The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed.
The Lord God caused to grow out of the ground every tree, pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden, as well as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
A river went out from Eden to water the garden. From there it divided and became the source of four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon, which flows through the entire land of Havila, where there is gold.
Gold from that land is pure. Bedelium and onyx are also there. The name of the second river is Gihon, which flows through the entire land of Cush.
The name of the third river is Tigris, which runs east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.
And the Lord God commanded the man, You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.
So here, God gives Adam a starting place, Eden, to fulfill his mission, subduing the earth and ruling over it. He gives him one section to work first.
The rivers that are mentioned there in verses 10-14, they communicate life and flourishing and wealth. If you had a river, it was a good place to live.
All the precious stones, gold and bedelium and onyx that are there, it says that there is wealth that is in this place. Those particular stones are mentioned as being placed in the tabernacle and the temple as well.
Many of the things that are mentioned in Genesis 2 are recreated in both the tabernacle and the temple. And this Garden of Eden has been referenced as God's really cosmic temple.
The Book of Ezekiel and Chapter 28 would phrase Eden as being kind of a mountaintop and where all of this would take place. The Tree of Life is something that was common in the Ancient Near East.
Many of them would mention some fruit that would give someone immortality.
It was always something you had to tie rocks to your ankles and be dragged down to the bottom of the sea, grab the plant, and then take the things off of your ankles and swim back up, and then you could eat the fruit and then you would be immortal.
But a tree of knowledge of good and evil is completely unique to the Bible and to Israel.
Here, the question that is poised by this section of scripture is, will Adam be content with God's definition of good, which has been everything, and evil, eating from this one tree, or will he determine right and wrong himself and ignore God's
expressed knowledge? Is he going to rely on what God has said, or is he going to take matters into his own hands and redefine right and wrong? The answer to that question we find out next week. It's not today.
Lastly, then in these final verses of chapter 2, we can see that God designed marriage. Verse 18, Then the Lord God said, He has Adam, he's in the garden, he's given him a mission. He says, It is not good for the man to be alone.
I will make a helper corresponding to him. I'm going to make someone like him. The Lord God formed out of the ground every wild animal and every bird of the sky and brought each to the man to see what he would call it.
So they're in that land of Eden. God makes each of these individual creatures and he brings them to Adam. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name here in the Ancient Near East.
If you knew something's name, if you called it something that said that it had a purpose, that you knew what it was, it was kind of a subduing thing that he says, Okay, I know what this thing is. This isn't just the freaky thing. This is a lemur.
And it gave you some sense of normalcy in that. So Adam here, he's ruling over the animals. He's giving each of them names, perhaps purposes as well.
Verse number 20, The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the sky and every wild animal, but for the man no helper was found corresponding to him. There was no one else that was made in the image of God. There was no one like Adam.
So the Lord God, verse 21, caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept. God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place. Here God makes uniquely forms woman.
One commentator, a pastor from the 1700s, Matthew Henry said this, Eve was not made out of Adam's head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near
his heart to be beloved. That might be reading just a little bit into it, but I thought that was a very picturesque summary of this type of thought.
Verse 22, then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man. And the man said, this one at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. This one would be called woman for she was taken from man.
The Hebrew word for man was isha, and the Hebrew word for woman was isha. It's one extra thing on there. So isha to isha.
In English, it also kind of works that you have man and whoa, man, that those were together. Verse 24, this is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh. They are together.
They are one flesh. It's not man owning woman and it's not them just multiplying, but they are one together. This marriage covenant is to have and to hold or to leave and to cleave.
Marriage is committing to a person and to God to love, respect, care for, and provide for one another an exclusive intimacy until death. Our world today doesn't value marriage, but God does.
Marriage isn't just a piece of paper that Uncle Sam wants you to sign. Marriage is something that commitment to a person, a person, not multiple persons, to a person and to God himself that we say, Lord, I'm committing.
I'm going to be this person's until death does us part. And then verse 25, both the man and his wife were naked yet felt no shame. Here, unlike many stories, there wasn't extravagant riches and fancy clothing.
It's simple. It's safe. They are open with one another and it's humble.
This is marriage and human interaction and flourishing as God designed. All of this is really good news. Like as we've looked so far, we've seen great things.
All of the answers to what went wrong, we find out next week. But I want us to realize that we can learn some things from this passage. First, God is the creator of everything.
So, believe in Him and trust in Him alone. Rely on His power to get you through each day and each season, and don't turn away from the source of life. There is no life outside of this creator God.
Secondly, God designed mankind in His own image. So, treat others with respect. Don't hate or desire harm for others.
Value your own life, because God put it in you, and He made you like He is in consciousness, in language, and fundamental character. Don't devalue yourself. You are made in the image of God.
You have value and worth. Then lastly, God designed marriage. So, value marriage.
Don't be content with merely enjoying a life mate without holy commitment. Embrace the good gift of marriage that God has given mankind. Today, we see God's design, His sovereign design, not subject to any fights with evil demons or sea serpents.
God spoke, and it came into existence. He made man and gave man a purpose. He made marriage, and He gave it a purpose.
Will you embrace God's design for your life? Will you turn to Him as God alone? Maybe you have been pursuing other things.
You've been pursuing maybe a life of finances. You've been pursuing a life of just family. Maybe you've been pursuing a claim or fame or stuff.
Can I challenge you? Worship this God, the only one who is worthy to be worshiped. If God has created you in His image, care about other people.
Love them. They're made in the image of God. Don't devalue yourself.
Don't harm yourself. You are God's. And then lastly, if God has placed you in a marriage, value it.
God created it. If you're one that you'd say, I would never consider getting married. It's just a government thing.
I challenge you. Make that commitment to that person and the God alone, an exclusive intimacy for the rest of your life to flourish and care for and provide for one another. It's really tough because I know what next week brings.
Well, let's do this. Let's stand together. We're going to pray.
We're going to have a time of singing a song, really of reflection from a hymn written in the 1700s along the same truth. But I want to challenge you today.
However God spoke to you, if it's belief in him, wonderment at who he is and what he's done, tell that to him. If you've not put your faith and trust in him, do that today. Call on his name.
If you have devalued yourself or you've been in the habit of devaluing or insulting others, don't continue in that. Make amends. Make it right.
And then if God has placed you in a marriage or if you're considering marriage, embrace it wholeheartedly. It's God's initial plan for you that you would flourish within where God has placed you and when he has placed you.
