As I continue my series of messages in Genesis, my focus today will be on the sixth day of creation, and specifically the creation of Man. But first, I need to start this message with a reference to a scene in Mark’s gospel:
And now, please pay attention to the Lord’s response (verse 24): “Jesus said to them, “Is this
not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures
or the power of God?”
As I cite this text, I realize some might already be wondering what it
at all to do with the message of Genesis and the creation of Adam and Eve.
Please. Give me a few moments. I hope it will become clear.
The problem the Sadducees had was the same problem so many theologians
and those in pews and pulpits across the globe have, and that is: When God
tells us in His inerrant word things that do not fit with our intellectual
expectations, then (they say) God's word must be re-interpreted.
And with that thought at the forefront of our minds, we now turn to today’s
text. I can’t quote the entire section because of our limited time here. I
apologize for that because I am forced by those time constraints to omit a LOT
of God's Holy Word – AND to omit what I’d want to say about this section of
God's word. So, I very much urge you to read and meditate on those first
chapters of Genesis later today. So, here, then, is today’s text. I read only
part of Genesis 1:26 through 1:31 -
(Genesis 1:26-31)
“Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to
Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the
birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the
image of God He created him; male and female He created them . . . God saw
all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening
and there was morning, the sixth day.
Moving now into chapter two, Moses gives us more
detail about Man’s creation. I start in 2:7 and will read portions through to
verse through to verse 25 –
(Genesis 2:7-25) “Then
the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. 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
the knowledge of good and evil. . . . 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.”
Then the Lord God
said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him 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, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my
flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out
of 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.
Just as the Sadducees rejected – to their undoing
– the idea of the miraculous works of God, so do many intellectuals (and those
who parrot them) scoff today at the supernatural work of God. And they do so to
their undoing.
What many of them like to do with these two chapters of Genesis – indeed,
with all of the supernatural works of God, and we haven’t even gotten into the
third chapter when the Serpent talks with Eve – what they like to do with
things they don’t want to accept is find reasons that fit with their worldview and
reject the supernatural.
For them, Adam and Eve were not literal and historical people. They are
simply allegories to explain Man’s appearance on earth. To believe in a literal
and historical Adam and Eve is simply unscientific, and therefore irrational.
Christian! Be careful. St Paul infallibly warned the
Christians at Colossae – and his words stand as a warning for us even in 2024: “See to it that no one takes you captive
through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men,
according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than
according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form.” (Colossians
2:8-9).
If Adam
and Eve were not real people, then St Luke was lying when he traced the lineage
of the Savior all the way back to them (Luke 3:23-38).
If Adam
and Eve were not real people as described for us by Moses, then what could St.
Paul have meant when he wrote: “For just as in Adam all die, so too in
Christ shall all be brought to life”? (1 Corinthians 15:22).
We’ll
find in chapter three that sin and death entered into the world through Adam’s
sin. St Paul tells us: “Through one person sin entered the world, and
through sin death.” (Romans 5:12) But the scriptures also tell us that
Christ CONQUERED sin and death for all who are ‘IN Christ.
This
simple, basic truth IS the very foundation of the gospel message. Remove a
literal Adam and Eve from history and the foundation irreparably crumbles. As
the psalmist warned: (Psalm 11:3) “If the foundations are destroyed, what
can the righteous do”?
Christian,
be careful. If Adam and Eve are mere allegories – fictional stories
invented to make a moral point – if they were inventions of Moses, can we be
certain that Jesus’ resurrection is not also an allegory, a story invented to
illustrate life’s triumph over death? And perhaps even MORE germane to these questions
is this one: If Adam and Eve did not exist as special and unique creations of
God, then perhaps He who is called “God” is also not historical but is only another
ancient and superstitious-laden allegory.
I know I
am spending a lot of time on this point – as I have spent in the last two
messages – but I believe God has embedded a critical principle in these first
several chapters of Genesis – not only of the Creation Days, but of the talking
serpent in chapter three, and Noah’s global flood in chapter 6.
And that
principle is this: When people – regardless of their educational degrees and
reputations – when people disagree with God and teach others to doubt His
inerrant and infallible word – God always has the last word and always proves
to be correct.
So, please, be careful. If we start to doubt the veracity of God's
word about ANYTHING, then we have slipped onto that broad path that leads to
destruction. Satan will have successfully deluded us – as he deluded Eve into
doubting God's word – we will find ourselves WITHOUT an anchor – the ONLY
anchor God has provided us to protect us from the swells of life and of false
philosophies whose currents WILL pull us further and further out into
treacherous waters.
Listen. You know the Bible well enough to know that we can be
very religious – and still go to hell. We can receive the Sacraments every day –
and still go to hell. We can be kind to our neighbors – and still go to hell.
We can be leaders and teachers in our churches – and still go to hell.
The Lord Jesus said as much: (Luke 13:24ff) “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for
many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. Once the head of the house gets up and shuts
the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord,
open up to us!’ then He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know where you
are from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate
and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets’; and He will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you are
from; Depart from Me, all you evildoers.”
Remember what Jesus said to the religious
scholars of His day: “Is this not the reason you are mistaken,” Jesus
said to the highly educated leaders of His day, “Is this not the reason you
are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures or the power of God?”
Christian, please. Take God seriously. Take His
word seriously. For millennia scholars and those in the pews have tried to dilute
God's truth – and yet here we are millennia later and God's word remains our
firm foundation while the bones of those ‘scholars’ have turned to dust.
Okay, let’s turn again to today’s text and focus
on God's instruction to Adam, whom Luke calls God's ‘son’ in his genealogy of
Jesus (Luke 3:38).
It’s important to remember God's relationship with
Adam because Scripture ALSO calls those who are in Christ His son and daughter.
St Paul is only one of the writers of New Testament scripture to call us God's
children: (Galatians 3:26) “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.”
And Romans 8:15-16 - For you have not received
a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a
spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we
are children of God.”
And the point of this
‘sonship’? It’s this: God gave Adam ONE commandment. In all the wealth of
comfort and blessings in that Garden, Adam had to obey only one commandment.
And look what he has wrought on himself and on humanity all these millennia
later.
Now consider what happens to
us AND to others when WE disobey God's simple commandments to us: Love the Lord
with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, and to love others as ourselves.
But we are not done yet. I want us to focus on
yet one more relationship that God confers on the Christian – a relationship He
did not even confer on Adam and Eve.
Not only are we sons and daughters of God through
faith in Jesus, but we are ALSO given by the Father to Jesus in a marriage
relationship. Listen to St Paul in his letter to the Christians at Corinth: (2
Corinthians 11:2-3) “For I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy; for
I betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present
you as a pure virgin. But I am afraid that, as the serpent
deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the
simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.”
I want to focus the remainder of this message on the truth
of our spiritual marital relationship with Jesus, for Holy Writ repeats the
message throughout both testaments in allegorical form – comparing a human
husband-wife relationship with the spiritual relationship of the Church with
Jesus the Bridegroom. Perhaps one of the more well-known passages that speak to
this relationship is in Ephesian 5. You can look at that text later on if you
like.
But listen to what God said to faithless and adulteress Israel
who went astray from Him. Speaking to the nation just prior to their Babylonian
captivity in the 7th century BC, God said: (Ezekiel 6:9, NRSV) "Those of you who
escape shall remember me among the nations where they are carried captive, how
I was crushed by their wanton heart that turned away from me,
and their wanton eyes that turned after their idols."
Listen now to James in the New Testament: (James
4:4) – “You adulteresses, do you not know
that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore,
whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”
Christian:
YOU are the Bride of Christ. YOU are betrothed to Christ. And greater than the
love of ANY human husband is our Savior’s love for YOU His bride. And so it is
good to ask ourselves this question: Why do
husbands stay faithful to their wives? Why do wives stay faithful to their
husbands? We all know the answer. It’s because they love their spouse and would
never do anything that would devastate their beloved.
Likewise, Christians strive to avoid a sinning – NOT because
we’re afraid of judgment, although that certainly is a valid reason to keep
from sin. But the PRIMARY reason – at least it SHOULD be the primary reason we
want to avoid sin is because we don’t want to hurt our beloved God and Redeemer.
But if you’re human like me, you know how impossible it is to
always avoid sin, whether in thought, word, or in action. A sinless life is just
not part of our spiritual DNA that’s been passed on to us from Adam and Eve. We’d
be more successful changing the color of our eyes or the color of our skin
simply by wishing hard enough.
Until we really understand that we desperately need the Holy
Spirit to change our mind and our will, we will continue a dizzying and
disappointing roller coaster ride of ups and downs.
It should be no surprise then that even the great St Paul confessed
this to the Christians at Rome: (7:18-20) “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh;
for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I
practice the very evil that I do not want. But if
I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it,
but sin which dwells in me.”
Nor should it surprise anyone that long after
Paul wrote those words to the Christians at Rome, he wrote this to the
Christians at Philippi after reciting for them his religious resume: (Philippians
3:8-10):
“I count all things to be loss in view of
the surpassing value of knowing of knowing Christ Jesus my
Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but
rubbish so that I may gain Christ, 9 and may be found in Him, not having a
righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is
through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the
basis of faith, that I may know Him
and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His
sufferings, being conformed to His death.”
Oh, we have GOT to hear this: Even Paul struggled
with his sin nature. And he did so until he died. As he told Timothy (2 Timothy
4:7) “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have
kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of
righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me
on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved
His appearing.”
Do not expect any easy methods to grow in our
love for and in our obedience to Christ. There aren’t any. There
have never been any. So, Christian, what is the counsel of Scripture? Keep doing
as Paul and EVERY other faithful Christian has done through the millennia, day
after day after day: Follow the TEDIOUS process of daily guarding our hearts
against temptations to sin. Being diligently alert day by day to what we permit
our eyes to gaze at, our ears to hear, and our tongues to say. It means being
quick to repent when we stumble – repent to God and ALSO to the one against
whom we have sinned. And then, day by day, get up and continue on that narrow
road that leads to eternal life.
Adam and Eve passed on their sin nature to every person on this planet
today. But when we were ‘born again’ we each became a new creation. The Holy
Spirit entered our lives and became for us an omnipotent resident architect,
working in us that we may live lives worthy of the Lord,
to please him in every way, and to grow in our knowledge of – and our faithfulness
– to our God.
Hang in there, my brothers and sisters. Our
battles will soon be over. And what St Paul said to Timothy, he says also to
you and me: In the future there is laid up for me the crown of
righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me
on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved
His appearing.”
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