Genesis 2 English Standard Version (ESV) LISTEN: https://www.biblegateway.com/audio/mclean/esv/Gen.2 The Seventh Day, God Rests 2 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. The Creation of Man and Woman 4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. 5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground-- 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. 14 And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. 15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” 18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 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 its name. 20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. We already spoke about the first part of this passage at the end of the last blog, but on day 7 God looked at all His creation and rested from all of His work, not because God needed to rest, but because, again, God is a God of order and separation. This day, the Sabbath day, would be separate and different--the Bible word for this is "holy"--and set apart for a special purpose and unlike any other day. On this day, God would establish from the very beginning, but also codify it later into His Law that He gave to Moses that no man should do work and no man should force any animal to do work for Him. This was a day for man to rest and enjoy God and everything that God has blessed us with. This completes the telling of the story of the creation week, and explains why we have a 7-day week to our calendar. Even secular society cannot escape the fact that the way that we track time is a testimony to the story of God's creation.
The author of Genesis will now focus in specifically on the story of Adam and Eve. This is not a different account of creation and is not meant to give a detailed explanation of the order or creation--that already happened in chapter 1, but instead this is most likely the account given by Adam himself when he was first created and saw everything that God had made. To Him, everything had already happened and no time had yet passed for him. We see as I mentioned earlier that there is a "genealogy" of sorts that tells us we are starting a new part of the story, specifically the story of Adam and his family. It may sound strange to say "these are the generations of the heavens and the earth," but the phrase "these are the generations" is a key phrase to let us know we are wrapping up one story and starting another. Which story? Well, the next time we see this phraseology is in Genesis 5:1 where we see, "This is the book of the generations of Adam....." so we have just finished the "book of creation" and are moving onto the "book of Adam" in the anthology of the book of beginnings. Please note that in this anthology there is sometimes overlap in the stories, but one story will always be completed before we come back and tell the next person's story in full. I'll try to point out these times when we get to them to avoid confusion. This is one of those times where the beginning of Adam's story clearly overlaps with the story of creation, but the focus has now shifted. We see something new here in Genesis 2 that was not clear to us in Genesis 1. It appears that it took some time for the whole earth to be filled with the vegetation needed to support life, so God intentionally made The Garden of Eden specifically for that purpose and made man (specifically Adam) to be caretaker of the Garden and the animals in it. We also learn for the first time that God planted two special trees in the Garden--The Tree of Life and the The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We see that God made the one river that flowed out of Eden split into four rivers that would carry living water to the rest of the known world at the time. We also see that there was no rain to water the ground at this time, but that God used the dew to provided enough moisture for everything to grow, and that there were no weeds, thorns or thistles that would act as invasive species, but that God still gave man the job to cultivate and work the ground and tend to the Garden--work is something holy that God gave for man to do and is not a part of the curse that we are about to learn about. Our work becoming more difficult and less productive will be part of that curse though. We see that the law of God at this point seems to be reduced down to a few simple rules: 1) Only eat the fruit of seed-bearing plants. 2) Don't eat from The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil 3) Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Man's other task he was given by God was to name every animal in the Garden. God had a special reason for doing this though as He wanted Adam to notice something--every kind of animal that was brought before Adam for Him to name was one kind but two genders--male and female. They all had the ability to procreate and Adam quickly realized that he was going to have a hard time fulfilling the third rule listed above if there was no one compatible with him in all of the animals that God had made. Again, this is God's way of showing Adam that He was different than all of the animals and wasn't like them and God had something special and better for Adam--all Adam needed to do was wait on the Lord's perfect plan and timing. It may seem late in the story for God to be creating woman, but God wanted Adam to have a time where he did not have Eve and was lonely before he had Eve and experienced that intimacy. This all appears so far to be part of "Day 6" of creation because we are told that God made both man and woman on Day 6. I'll address what may seem like an obvious question at the end of this blog related to "how could all this have happened in a single day?," but, for now, let's move on to the story of the creation of Adam and Eve. I want to step back for a minute to verse 7--the Lord "formed" man out of the dust of the ground. This word "formed" is unlike any other word used to describe creation so far as it talks of crafting something from pre-existing materials. But God just used the dirt to make the "shell" of the man, it was not until God breathed His life-giving spirit into man that He became alive. Don't miss this that we are all like Adam first was--"dead"--in our natural state of our trespasses and sins until God breaths life into us (we'll see this again in Ezekiel with the valley of dry bones). God takes special care here to craft man--something He hasn't done for anything else to make man in His image and to breath His spirit into man--to give him an eternal soul and to make man aware of the presence of God, the idea of eternity and the desire for a special kind of relationship with God. Now back to that moment when Adam realized that He had no suitable mate. God once again reaches down and crafts something beautiful out of something pre-existing. This time though He performs surgery on Adam to take part of him to make Eve. Adam would say "this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh," because God had taken the materials to make Eve from Adam's side. God fashioned woman to be compatible with man but different. Man was clearly made from the earth and was made to be rugged and "earthy"--to labor and work the ground and cultivate the Garden and care for the animals and plants in it. But when God made Eve, He made her to be tender and nurturing and able to bear children to be beautiful and sensitive and all these other things that perfectly complemented Adam and filled the void that Adam was feeling. God gave man the responsibility to be the leader as man was the one who came first and received the commandments from God and it was his responsibility to teach God's law to his wife and to protect her and to help her understand the work that God had given him to do and for her to assist him in that work in the ways that God made her to compliment him--this is not chauvinism but or patriarchy, but a realization that men and women are yet again one of the beautiful boundaries that God has made in creation that should be celebrated. There was no desire of Adam to lord his position of authority over Eve, nor was there originally any desire for Eve to rebel against the authority of her husband, both lived in peace and submission to one another because they lived in a state of true love for one another. Let's also not miss the fact that there was no shame at this time. We are told that the man and woman were "naked and not ashamed." There was nothing wrong with the way God made them and nothing they needed to try to hide or cover up--we'll see that in the next chapter once they sin. God made man and woman so that it was clear to each of them that they were compatible with each other and this was not something to be ashamed of and it would bring about great intimacy where the two will become one flesh and "for this reason will a man leave his father and mother and clear to his wife." It's not hard to imagine what Adam (or maybe God, or maybe the author of the book) is talking about when he says "for this reason." This is only the beginning of the story of Adam and Eve, but it is the end of the overlap in the account of creation and the account of Adam and Eve, as all of this seems to have happened on Day 6 as I said before. So, there seems to be an obvious question here--how could all of this occur in a single, 24-hour day? Specifically, how is it possible for Adam to have named all of the animals in just one day? This is a good and honest question. It doesn't appear that God asked Adam to name EVERY animal, but He was only brought the bests of the field and the birds of the air. That's still a lot of animals though, or is it? Creation scientists agree that these parents of each kind of animal made by God at creation would need to have all the genetic information that would later lead to all of the species that would later occur. For instance, we are probably only talking about one male and one female dog that would have all the genetic information to later lead to all the different breeds of dogs that now exist. The same for cats, and so on. There are definitely different kinds of birds--some of which eat worms and others that eat berries and others that are scavengers, but it certainly seems that some birds seem to be a part of the same "family" or "kind" as other birds. Some of the breakdown into species probably occurred pre-Flood and much of it probably happened post-Flood as the entire world will change at that point and creation will adapt and micro-evolution (changes within a kind to make new species) will occur based off of environment and food sources and things of that nature. We see the idea of "kind" established here though and throughout the Bible as those that are "compatible" with one another. Dogs can mate with dogs and make dogs--they don't have to be the same breed of dog to be compatible. Horses and donkeys seem to have been from the same kind at some point, but their offspring (a mule) cannot reproduce. The same goes for a lion and tiger that make a liger. The more that things separated from their original kind, the less compatible they probably were with one another and we ended up with many separate genera and species in what we call "the tree of life" in biology. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species--even this shows the order and design and boundaries that God laid out in creation. It is not hard to imagine that there was less genetic drift at that time and few beasts and birds and that if Adam could easily name all the different kinds of animals rather quickly as God brought them to Him and could have seen that he was of a completely different "kind" then all the other animals. As always, I am open to honest questions. I will again state that this is historical fact--not myth or legend. Jesus Himself will refer back to these events as literal history, so that means that if you don't believe this, you either believe that Jesus was smart enough to know what was true or was simply a liar. In either case, He could not be the perfect sacrifice for man if He was not God in the flesh who committed no sin and we are told in Romans that Christ was the "Second Adam." We'll probably talk about that more next time when we talk about Genesis 3 and The Fall.
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Daniel WestfallI will mostly use this space for recording my "journal" from my daily devotions as I hope to encourage others to read the Bible along with me and to leave a legacy for others. Archives
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