We live in a world where no one seems to know any more what being human really is. Sci-Fi films like The Matrix, whose sequel is just opening in cinemas, challenge our very concept of reality and make us ask the question, “what is really real?” Genetic engineering holds the promise of completely altering our physical make up. It is theoretically possible even now to combine human and animal genes in a human being to produce hybrid creatures that would be part human, part beast. The world of Frankenstein’s monster is not far away, at least in theory. At the level of human society, the social engineers of the mass media empires and of government are also busy radically redefining what constitutes appropriate human behaviour and social interaction. Marriage as an institution seems to be dying in favour of serial cohabitation and producing extended, blended families. In such uncertain times, as Christians we must cling to the fundamental truths about human existence laid down for us by the Creator Himself. Genesis Chapter Two contains some of those principles, and that’s where we turn this morning.

Genesis Two zooms in from the Big Picture of chapter One and focusses on the earth as the dwelling place of Man. We see this right from the start. Genesis One verse One says God created the heavens and the earth, but Genesis Two verse Four says he created “the earth and the heavens” – it reverses the order to show that the emphasis in this section is on the earth.

Genesis Two sees the created universe not as an end in itself but as a means to the greater end of providing a perfect place for Man to live and enjoy perfect relationships in. So we learn that all of Creation is made for Man’s sake. Why did God make the world? To provide a home for the Human Beings he made and loves. This is why this chapter tells the story with what appears to be a slightly different order than chapter One. Instead of six days of creation, Genesis Two sums it up in one day. In verse 4 what the NIV translates as “when God created” is literally “in the day” that God created. Genesis One says the vegetation was created on the third day and man was created on the sixth day, along with the land dwelling animals. But Genesis Two seems to imply that man was created before the vegetation and the animals. There are other possible interpretations that try to harmonize the chronology of the two accounts, but I don’t find them completely adequate, nor do I think it is necessary to do that. I think the language of these early chapters is just not completely literal, in the way it speaks of the days of creation. The “days” are not so much a purely chronological sequence, as a logical progression. Chapter One presents Man as the pinnacle, the crowning glory of Creation, so it has him created on day six after everything else, whereas Chapter Two is presenting the equally important truth that Man is God’s intended reason for Creation, and so in this account he is made a living being before other life is created, to show that what God had in mind from the very beginning was to make Man, and the rest of Creation is made for him.

It’s like the chicken coop I’m building. I’m not making it for the fun of it. The only reason I’m building it is to populate it with chickens. If I were telling someone about the process, I might describe how I bought the posts and some other wood at the RSL auction the other day, then I dug the post holes, and concreted the posts in and put up the chicken wire, and so on. And when I was finished, I got the chickens from Trevor and Allison and put them in it. Or I could tell it this way. I could say, “We were given some chickens by Trevor and Allison and so I had to build a chicken coop for them.” That makes it sound like the chickens came first, but literally they didn’t – they’re still out on the farm. I think God is telling the story of Creation from two different viewpoints like that, using language that is partly symbolic or figurative.

How literally are we to take, for example, the description of God forming Adam from the earth? Did God literally take up a handful of dust and fashion it into a model of a man? How did He do it? Did he make a mould, pour in the dust and just add water for instant Homo Sapiens?! Well, maybe, who knows? But it’s not all that important how literally we imagine the process happening. Let’s focus on the meaning and significance of the story. Whatever else it is saying, Genesis Two is teaching us that Man is both like and unlike the other animals. Like the other animals, he is a creature of the earth, a material being. He owes his very existence to the earth. The fact that he is in some fashion formed from the dust of the ground excludes certain other explanations of human origins.

Genesis was probably written at the time of Moses, and for the first Israelite hearers of this message, it immediately said that the religion of the Egyptians was drastically wrong. Humanity is not the product of the ancient gods and goddesses. In most ancient beliefs, human beings were created, not from the matter of the earth, but from the matter of heaven – from some body part or bodily fluid of a god! Interestingly, this pagan belief survives in the Koran of Islam, which teaches that Man was created from a blood clot.

In our own society, if we accept Genesis Two as an accurate, God-given account of human origins, then we cannot accept that humanity evolved from other animals. Rather, Adam is fashioned by God directly into something quite new and distinct. Genesis also denies those who claim an extra-terrestrial origin for humanity. Human beings are not children of the stars, or the offspring of aliens. Man was created, brought forth by God, from the earth. And all subsequent biblical religion is very down-to-earth. Genesis teaches us that the physical creation is good, and that humanity is part of that physical creation. Our physical, material bodies are important. We are not just souls or spirits trapped in a body, like the ancient Greeks imagined. We do not just HAVE a body, we ARE a body, we do not just HAVE a soul, we ARE a soul. We are, as the text says, a living being. And the New Testament agrees. It teaches that at the resurrection we will have a new, glorious body. We will not be floating around in the ether as disembodied spirits.

As we consider the language of Genesis One and Two, note also the close parallels between these chapters and Revelation Twenty One and Twenty Two. That is, between the first two and the last two chapters of the bible. Both speak in highly symbolic language of trees, food, rivers, and life-giving water. In Genesis Two and Three the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life appear. This tree of life reappears at the end of Revelation. I will say more about the significance of these trees next week when we come to chapter Three. For now let me just say that the language of the first part of the bible has a lot in common with that of the last part, and both are highly symbolic, because they deal with things that are outside of our normal range of experience and comprehension. No one alive has experienced the perfection of Creation or the perfection of the New Creation to come.

Now it’s true that the mention of existing rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates, and other places known to the original hearers of this tale, means that the author intended us to think that a real garden once existed in a real place, somewhere in the area we know today as the nation of Iraq. So, whilst I think these were real trees and real rivers in a real garden that God made for real people, our earliest ancestors, Adam and Eve, they are also symbols, pointing to something beyond their mere physical being. They stand for God’s Sovereignty and Rule over His Creatures, and God uses them to communicate the Covenant of Creation that He makes with Humankind through Adam.

God’s everlasting Covenant has many expressions in scripture. God renews his covenant with Noah, with Abraham and the patriarchs, with Moses, with David. We see it here in its primeval form, as God covenants with the very first man in his state of innocence. A covenant always involves covenant regulations or stipulations – that is, rules. And it also includes the consequences of breaking the rules. The Covenant is all about relationship. A marriage covenant regulates and formalizes the relationship between husband and wife. In the same way, the Covenant of Creation is all about relationship. And that Covenant is revealed in the message of the Two Trees. The Two Trees speak of the fundamental relationship of the Creator God with the creature He has made in His own image. It is a relationship of caring and love from God’s side, and obedient, dependent gratitude from the side of the man. The most succinct way the bible sums up the covenant between God and us is this. God says, “I will be your God and you shall be my people.” That’s what he’s saying to Adam and his wife in the Garden. Implied in that is that he is God and we are not. Even though he chooses to covenant with us, he is not dependent on us in any way. We, however, are totally dependent on Him for our life and being. He is the One who provides the Tree of Life and the living water. He is the One who has our best interests at heart, and who provides for us.

The Tree of Life symbolizes the Blessings of the Covenant. It symbolizes God’s side of the Covenant Formula. I will be your God. That is, I will give you Life, life in all its fulness. But alongside all this perfection and newness in the Garden, there exists the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. And that Tree signifies Man’s side of the Covenant. For Man to stay within the bounds of the Covenant relationship set up by God in Creation, he must remain dependent on God and not try to become independent. He must be like God without trying to be God. He must obey his Creator. Ancient covenants always contained the ideas of covenant blessings for keeping the covenant and covenant curses for breaking it. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil represents the Covenant Curses. In the day you eat of it, you will surely die. That is, you will lose the covenant blessing of life evermore, symbolized in the Tree of Life.

In this story, Genesis defines evil as fundamentally rebellion against God. To take the fruit is per se to know evil, because it is to disobey God and break the Covenant of Creation. That is why it is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As long as you obey God and don’t eat its forbidden fruit, it is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good. But if you eat its fruit, then it also becomes for you the Tree of the Knowledge of Evil.

I realize that there is much more to explain and discuss in this chapter than I can possibly do in a twenty minute sermon, so if you have any other questions, you may like to raise them with me later. I want to go on now to draw out a few implications of believing Genesis chapter Two, for how we think and feel about ourselves as human beings and how we will seek to act and influence our society.

First, Man is not an animal – he is created in the image of God (1:26); and in his male and femaleness he reflects the unity in diversity of God. He is created for a real and personal relationship with God that the animals do not have. Adam and Eve are created in the image of God, and they are told to rule over the animals and care for them, as God’s vice-regents on Earth. Here in verse nineteen we see Adam naming the animals. In chapter One it is God who names creation. Here Adam is acting as God’s image by naming and ruling over the animals, something no animal can do. There was a wildlife documentary maker interviewed on Parkinson the other night. And one very interesting point he made was that human beings take an inordinate amount of interest in animals and their preservation, whereas animals very rarely give two hoots about other animals outside their own species. They certainly don’t observe them and study them and name them. Animals don’t care for Man, or for each other, but Man cares for animals and feels responsible for them. This observation fits perfectly with the view of Man we find in Genesis of course.

But there is a new mystical pagan animism arising in our culture. It comes out in songs like Savage Garden’s “I want to live like the animals…” You see it in nature documentaries that speak about the mystical healing powers and awesome presence of dolphins and whales and mountain gorillas. You see it in people wanting to leave behind civilizing restraints and just go where their so-called animal instincts take them. The Christian must say no to all this, and also strongly protest any line of genetic research that takes us down a path that blurs the distinction between human and animal life. Man is not an animal.

Second, though he is in the image of God and acts like God, Man is not God – he is made from the earth like the animals; he is bound by the covenant of Creation to worship God and obey Him; he is forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So we must speak out also against the deifying elements of New Age religion that urge people to seek the god or goddess within. We are created for the God who is for us. We must trust in His goodness and his Godness, not in our own.

Third, let me say something about Marriage: when a man and woman marry they are reflecting God’s original plan in creation. Genesis presents this male-female relationship as the norm upon which all human society must be built for it to fulfil the Covenant of Creation. There is no room in Christian theology or practice for the idea of same-sex unions. A homosexual marriage is not a marriage at all. Genesis Two makes it plain that there could be only one right and proper companion for Adam. No beast was intended to be Adam’s mate, nor another male. The bible does not sanction a man leaving his home to be united with another man. God simply did not create humanity to enjoy homosexual relationships, and he certainly did not intend for human society to be founded upon same-sex unions. Those relationships are a result of the Fall, which is described in Chapter Three.

Furthermore, we know from Genesis and other parts of scripture, that this heterosexual one flesh relationship of marriage is meant to be exclusive. Not only is a man not to marry another man, or a woman to marry another woman, but they are to reserve that most holy of relationships for just one human being. That is God’s intention from Creation, as Jesus said to the Pharisees, who wanted to justify divorcing their wives when they felt like it.

They asked “Isn’t it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together let not man separate.”

For as long as we both shall love? No! God’s intention is one man one woman for life, forsaking all others. And listen to the intimate way that Adam rejoices in the wife God has provided:

“This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called ‘woman,’

for she was taken out of man.”

The leaving and cleaving process mentioned in verse 24 is because of this one flesh relationship sanctified by God in Adam and Eve. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” That means that marriage is more than just a sexually exclusive relationship. It is one that takes priority socially over other human relationships too, even the relationship with one’s parents. How many marriages have been ruined because one or both partners were unwilling to put their loyalty to their spouse above their loyalty to the family home?

Note the mutual interdependence of Man and Woman. The first woman came from Man, but every man since has come from a woman, as we are especially reminded on Mothers’ Day! Now some people think that the language of Genesis is sexist and demeaning, because it calls the man’s wife his helper. But “helper”, or “Helpmeet” in the older versions, implies no inferiority whatsoever. The word translated as helper, the Hebrew word ezer, everywhere else it occurs, refers to God as man’s helper, like in the name of Moses’ son, Eliezer, which means God is my helper. God is certainly not inferior to Adam, and he is called the helper of man also. Genesis sees male and female as equally human, together ruling over creation. 

Well I must finish up. Let me do so by reminding you of how the Covenant of Creation is fulfilled in the New Testament. There we see Jesus presented in Romans 5 as the Second Adam, our new head. He is the One who brings us back into the eternal covenant. He secures the covenant blessing of eternal life that Adam lost. He is the Real Man. If you want to know what it means to be fully human, then look at Jesus and get to know him better. As we are changed into his likeness, we become the human beings God intends us to be, and one day, when Jesus returns we will be made perfect as Adam and Eve were in the garden.

The bible begins with the first marriage, an earthly marriage between a man and a woman. But it ends with another marriage, a heavenly one, the marriage feast of the Lamb. And we, the church of God, are his bride. All earthly marriages are but a faint illustration of the relationship between Christ and the church.  Are you a member of that church? Will you be there on that day, dressed in white, perfect and without blemish? In the end it doesn’t matter whether or not like Adam you have an earthly wife. Whether or not like Eve you have an earthly husband. All that matters is whether you know the Lord Jesus Christ and are united with him by faith. Eve knew the joys of an earthly union with Adam. But we know the higher joys of a heavenly and spiritual union with our Saviour Christ.