The Garden

Transcript

Good morning, Saints. Good morning. man. It is sweet to get to sing with you all, to get to pray with you all. I’ve honestly been very, very encouraged this morning. I woke up this morning looking forward to preaching. There’s this thing that happens where there’s like all this anxiety and all this.. you can’t stop thinking, you can’t sleep as you’re prepping the sermon. And it’s always like, you know, I’m exhausted on Saturday night and I feel like I need to kind of conk out and just get some sleep and then you can’t stop thinking and you’re just like, you got to edit stuff. And I often find myself at two or three in the morning waking up in a panic and emailing myself. This is how I send myself reminders. I email myself notes like, change this part of the second point, you know.

So, I’m pretty sure I sent some notes along at like, I don’t know, 10 or 11 or midnight last night. Restructuring my points a little bit for the PowerPoint. But all that to say, when I woke up this morning, I was really looking forward to seeing you all and to worshipping with you all and it’s just, it’s always such a joy. So, thank you for loving our family well and thank you for being our family. I get to open God’s Word with you all this morning. So, if you have a Bible, I want to invite you to open your Bibles to Genesis chapter 2. Genesis chapter 2. We’ll be looking at verses 4 through 17. And if you’re visiting or if you don’t have a Bible with you or if you don’t have a Bible at home, there should be one in the seat in front of you.

And if you don’t have a Bible at home, we would just really love for you to have a Bible and not only to have it but to read it. So, if the Bible in the seat in front of you is the first Bible that you’ve ever owned, we would like it to be a gift from us here at Trinity Church. If you’ve opened your Bibles to Genesis chapter 2, if you’re able, I want to invite you to stand for the reading of God’s Word.

The Garden Home

Genesis chapter 2, beginning from verse 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. 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. And a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground. 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. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 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. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. Bedelium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Kush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 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. This is the word of the Lord. Father, as you spoke all things into existence, with just the power of your word, we ask that you would speak to us this morning from your word. In Jesus’ name, amen. Please be seated. Have you ever wondered why it is that people are drawn to nature? Why they feel calm when they go out into the forest? Or even just a park. We have Laurelhurst Park just down the street from here. I started to do this thing when I’m working at the church during the week, is that I do a loop from here out across 32nd and up to Laurelhurst and through the park around the pond. And it’s amazing. Everything just kind of calms down and quiets down in my mind.

But have you ever wondered why that is? Why listening to the rushing of a river or hearing birds sing, feeling grass or moss beneath our feet is somehow calming, therapeutic? Studies show that being out in nature lowers anxiety, increases focus, increases the ability to think clearly, helps us sleep better, lowers blood pressure, reduces the risk of chronic illnesses, and the list goes on and on and on. Psychologists have also studied something called the blue mind effect, where it’s been shown that just looking at water reduces stress. It improves mood and even has positive cardiovascular effects. And the thing is, it doesn’t really matter what the water source is. It can actually even be just a pool. Just looking at water makes us physically and mentally healthier. It’s almost like there is a design for us to want to be in nature. It’s almost as if we’re supposed to be outside in creation.

It’s almost as if we’re somehow yearning for even a semblance of that in our daily lives. And it’s almost as if we respond positively when we receive that for which we were designed. There’s something in us that longs to get back to the Garden of Eden. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the very structure of who we are as image bearers. So far in our study of Genesis, we’ve walked through the first six days of creation as well as the seventh day of creation week, where God rested after creating the entire universe. We studied how God spoke the whole universe into being out of nothing, ex nihilo, with just his word. And then after creating everything, after speaking everything into existence, we read that on the seventh day God rested. And now we come to our text where we see God creating the garden and forming the man, Adam, from the dust.

Man’s Divine Design

After getting more of a wide-angle view of creation in chapter one, here in this section of chapter two, the focus zooms in a little bit on how God creates and commissions the rulers of his kingdom, the man and the woman. Now, saints, I mentioned this the last time I preached a couple of weeks ago, but I’d love to highlight it again with this sermon. You know, when we hear preaching from the Word of God, when we hear teaching, when we read about some doctrine or some truth from Scripture, it’s really easy just to kind of walk away from that with stuff that we learn, like things that we pack away, new kind of theological checkpoints, new stuff for Bible trivia to remember. Learning more about God, don’t get me wrong, learning more about God is a very, very good thing, but we should pray and we should ask the Lord to do something in us with his Word.

We should ask the Lord to give us a greater desire to live more fully for him, to live more fully for his glory. What we get to do here is hear from the very words of God, and this is an immense privilege. Do you ever stop to think about the fact that when you’re sitting under the preaching of the Word of God, or when you open your Bible at home and you study it, or when you attend a Bible study, or when you sit down with some friends and speak Scripture to each other, that what you’re doing, what you’re hearing, what you’re saying, what you’re sharing, what’s edifying you are the very words of God. And I think that when we kind of gloss over that and we move past that very quickly, we can sort of just fall into this religious space that all other people more or less fall into,

where they have their authoritative texts and they have their less authoritative texts. And for us as Christians, our authoritative text could just happen to be the Bible. Saints, we should pray that the Lord would keep us from that, and that every time we hear the Word preached, and every time we open our Bibles, our minds just fire on all cylinders, and there’s an excitement and a wonder in us to know more about this God who created me and who loves me, and to enrich my worship and my desire to live more fully for Him. So let’s take a look at our text. Let’s take a look at our text where we’ll see the shift from God’s transcendence in chapter 1, and transcendence meaning His existing outside of space and time, to chapter 2 where we see His eminence, which is His presence within His creation,

from transcendence to eminence. We see the latter, God’s eminence, in His very personal relationship with Adam and Eve. Now we’ll study this portion of Scripture which tells us about the Garden of Eden in two sections. First, in verses 4 through 14, our text shows us the man and his home in the garden. And in verses 15 through 17, we’ll see the man and his responsibility in the garden. Verses 4 through 14, I won’t reread those verses, we just read them, but keep your eyes there as we look at the man and his home. Our passage starts off with noting the generations of the heavens and the earth. The word translated as generations can be understood as account, or genealogy, or history. We’re being shown how the creation of man actually fits into the broader history of the creation of the universe. Again, this is going from kind of a wide-angle lens to zooming in on what we saw in chapter 1 of Genesis.

And in this same verse, Moses, in speaking about this history, this accounting, this story of what happened, he zooms in a little bit and says what kind of God it was that did this. And what Moses does here is he actually uses the personal name Yahweh to refer to God. He intentionally writes LORD God. And when you see LORD in all caps in your Bibles, that’s actually a translation of God’s personal name. That’s not just saying God generally. But LORD in all caps in your Bibles, this is the word Yahweh. This is the personal name of God. Normally, these two names, Elohim and Yahweh, are isolated in the original language, with Elohim referring to the sovereign creator, the ruler of all, the God above all things, and Yahweh being the personal name that he gave to Israel. His unique covenant commitment to his people and the way that he revealed himself to his people

in love and in personal relationship and in making himself accessible to them and to know him. So in this portion of Scripture where the creation of his image-bearers is highlighted, it’s interesting that the name that’s used to describe the one that created them is the personal, relational name. And so Yahweh planted a garden. It’s a very good world that God has made. It’s a beautiful world. Everything is growing as it should. Everything is working as it should. The animals aren’t attacking each other. They’re not eating each other. Man is able to live in harmony with the rest of creation. Man, in his responsibility to name and to rule, he’s having animals that normally, in our minds, should be attacking him and eating him and from whom he should be running, but he’s interacting with the natural world in a way that shows that there is no sin, there is no death, there is no evil,

there is nothing but goodness and beauty and perfection. The world in all of its beauty and wonder is as it should be. This is the context in which God creates man. In this world that is free of sin, that is free of death, that is free of despair and loss, God creates man, and this is the home that God graciously provides for his most prized creation. Now, I touched on this during my last sermon, and I kind of went in depth, but God’s creation is really amazing in how intricate it is. As we marvel at what God has done in creating the world around us, everything from the mountains to the ocean to different animals to each of you, we marvel at God’s creative power. And as a cool little side note, I did see, and I don’t think that I was necessarily the inspiration,

but I think I saw a lot more nature pictures on people’s social media accounts the following week, so it was really exciting to see people going out into nature and enjoying God’s creation and marveling at the one who created it all. Everything from the air that we breathe to the precise thickness of the Earth’s atmosphere to the tectonic activity of this planet, it’s all balanced just so to make life here wonderful. And we see more of a glimpse of this in our chapter today. As all the various kinds of life come to be through the creative power of God, his universe takes shape. Notice the plants and various kinds of bushes are still growing. There’s no rain, the text tells us. There’s some kind of mist providing water, the water that’s needed for life, the water that’s needed for things to grow in their own time.

Some scholars actually say that it didn’t rain until the flood. They say that this text shows us that there was a system that watered everything and maintained everything and provided just the right amount of moisture in order for things to grow. And while that’s possible, it seems that no one knew what God was talking about when he told him that a great rain was coming. Plus, it’s one of those things where maybe that’s the case, maybe that’s not the case. There’s no need to be dogmatic here, but there is this beauty in the fact that in this text we see that God creates this system that waters everything through a mist. However, it does seem that the rain didn’t come until after the fall. So all that to say, this is my biblical argument for the fact that the weather in the Pacific Northwest is, in fact, a product of the fall of man.

Sorry to those of you that like our weather. One thing is certain from what we see here in verses 5 and 6, and again in verses 8 through 14, the process here that allows things to grow and flourish is pre-curse. It’s pre-fall. And so it works perfectly. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine everything working perfectly? Everything being as vibrant and lush and full of life as it can possibly be? No weeds, no death, only fruit and growth and life. Those of you that garden, you’ll marvel at this. Just imagine. Everything just grows perfectly. Everything works perfectly. There’s no failure in the system. Adam’s work really was just maintenance of what God created to work perfectly. And so in this perfect setting, God makes Adam, and he makes him out of dirt. He makes a physical form out of the dirt, and then he blows breath into his life, into his lungs.

And this is the breath of life. Although man had the form and the components of life upon being formed, there was a transcendent reality that only God could give. God breathed into Adam the functions of every organ. He set the biological process into motion, the inner workings of all that is needed to live and thrive. And only when God did this did man become a soul. When Moses records God breathing life into Adam, it seems he’s connecting the way that God spoke life into the universe with the way that he spoke life into humanity. From the dust, and yet filled with the very breath of God. When we consider this forming of the first human, we can almost picture a potter taking clay from the earth to shape and to fashion his masterpiece. The mind goes to Psalm 139, 13, and 14. For you formed my inward parts.

You knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. Saints, I elaborated on this the last time, and I won’t belabor the point, but the human body is a marvel. And it’s a marvel not just because it’s this interesting thing biologically and scientifically, but because God created an image-bearer, and he breathed life into him. It’s beautiful. Adam is then placed into a very special place, a very special aspect of creation in a very special place, the Garden of Eden. The word Eden means luxury, or bliss, or a happy land. Percy Sproul calls the Garden of Eden a sanctuary where God invites humans to enjoy fellowship and peace with him. The perfect place. A holy place. The home of the first people is God’s personal garden, a place where everything works as it should,

it grows in the best possible way, full of God’s goodness and creativity and reflecting his beauty. Our text tells us that this garden is full of trees that are beautiful, full of trees that are pleasing to look at, as well as those that bear good fruit. Notice, not just edible fruit. Good fruit. Delicious fruit. Tasty fruit. And then there are two trees that are representative of divine wisdom and of eternal life, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, one that keeps people in the garden with God, and one that ultimately leads them out of it and leads to death. And then our text tells us that there are these rivers that flow out of Eden, one dividing into four, flowing into areas with gold and precious stones and other resources, and all the details about these rivers show us how vast and how plentiful,

how abundant in resources this garden was. And although our world is different after the flood, making it harder to map all of these rivers out in their entirety and all of their connecting points, these details tie into historical accounts, both in Scripture and otherwise, of vast natural resources, of connections into different areas all over the globe, of ways that we can see the earth sprouting forth, all of these beautiful things that God created. And the idea here is that what’s happening in the garden of Eden, in this river that flows out of it, is that it is a place of abundance. It is a place of beauty. It is a place of provision. It is a place that God created to reflect His creative power. Isn’t this picture incredible? Can you just imagine this place? Can you just imagine being here? Everything in just the brightest color possible.

All the animals, all the bugs, everything just beautiful, perfect. Doesn’t it make you long for this place? I really want to be there. Going forward, Eden becomes this powerful theme throughout all of Scripture. Joel 2.3 looks back to Eden to remind people what they’ve lost. It’s tragic. Isaiah 51.3 looks to Eden to consider how God will comfort His people. Eden is also a picture for God’s people of future redemption, and then at the end of the New Testament, the end of the book of Revelation, the end of the Bible looks to the restoration of Eden and the new heavens and the new earth. At the end of God’s Word, God promises us that what’s been lost will be restored. Adam had a chance to witness God’s creative power and His wisdom and seeing how everything worked together in perfect harmony in this wonderful place. God’s constant presence, the plants and the trees,

Work and Obedience

the way everything was watered and received what it needed, the coexistence of all the animals, it was paradise. But in this paradise, Adam was also given a couple of responsibilities. This brings us to our second point, which we see in verses 15 and 17, the man and his responsibility. Let’s reread those two verses.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 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

— Genesis 2

(ESV)

. In this place, Adam has two responsibilities, work in and keep the garden, and the second responsibility is obey God’s command. God shows Adam the beautiful garden that He made for him

and then He puts him to work. And notice something. Work is not a product of the fall. Work is a product of creation. Creation is God’s work, and our work is a product of God’s creation. The product of the fall is the pain and the challenge of work, and in some ways, likely even our attitude toward work. If this sounds somewhat strange as we consider our jobs, as we consider going to jobs that we may not necessarily care about or jobs that are painful or difficult or challenging or not as rewarding as we would like them to be, maybe it’s because of the way that we think about work. Maybe it’s because of the way that we consider what it means to be a working people, what it means to be a people who give ourselves to work. Maybe we need to consider what it means

when we say that we are to work as unto the Lord, to invest into lasting and to good things and to see the way that we provide for our families and benefit others through our giving and of the resources that the Lord provides as something worthwhile and beautiful. You see, God’s good design is for us to work. In His infinite wisdom and in His creation of a perfect universe, where everything works as it should, God created man to work. It’s a beautiful thing. Much can be said about a biblical view of work, but the problem itself isn’t work. But rather, it’s work after the fall where the toil and the pain and the fruitlessness wear on us and discourage us. But saints, as born-again Christians, we can and should change the way that we think about work.

We should see value in contributing to the world around us and seeing opportunities in our work to show Christ to others through our work ethic, through our faithfulness, through our joy, doing all things as unto the Lord, honoring Him and the responsibilities that He’s given us. In the garden, the work that Adam was given to do was joyful. And after the fall, that work is difficult and toilsome and at times very, very unrewarding. But nevertheless, God reminds us here in His Word that His design was for us to be a people who work, who give ourselves to producing good and beautiful things and to investing the resources that He provides from His work into being a blessing to the people around us, into being a blessing to our setting. And so Adam is told to work. As a way to bear God’s image, he’s also told to keep the garden,

to protect the garden. Work and keep. Serve and guard. The imagery should make our minds go to the priests working in the tabernacle, serving and keeping it, as we see in Numbers 3, 8, and 18. God’s good design for people carried on even after the first man and woman failed in their responsibilities. And so we see here throughout Scripture that idleness has never been an option for us. The people of God have never been given the option to sit and wait for the Lord’s return. Rather, we are to work and to do good things with our work. Adam’s other responsibility, as is seen in verses 16 and 17, is to obey God’s command. Verse 16 is actually the first command seen in the Bible. God said, you have everything in the garden to use. God is speaking to Adam and he says, you can eat of any tree,

you can utilize all of these resources, you can enjoy this place. But Adam, just not this one tree. Just the one. Adam is called to faithfulness not only in his work, but also in his obedience. This command comes with a warning. If you do this, Adam, you will die. The text says, you shall surely die. This is the first mention of death in the Bible. He wouldn’t die and he wouldn’t know death if he didn’t disobey. The tree was a test. There wasn’t anything in it that was toxic or there wasn’t anything that was dangerous. God created a good garden with flourishing and good and beautiful things. This wasn’t a poisonous tree. But disobedience introduces death. The evil that man would experience was disobeying God, was breaking from his Creator. Can you imagine this world that God spoke into existence in which Adam lived, in which Adam was told this?

A world that doesn’t know evil. A world that doesn’t even know what sin is. A world that doesn’t know that something can go terribly, terribly, terribly wrong. And God says to Adam, just don’t eat of this tree and everything will stay perfect. You won’t die. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil wasn’t merely about knowing something or learning something, but rather it was about being able to choose for yourself what is good and what is evil. See, the first man and woman, when they ate of the fruit, they chose for themselves. They decided that it was a good thing to do. And boy, were they wrong. It was off limits because God, in creating man in his image, made him sinless and told the man to listen and to trust him. Fullness of life that stems out of full obedience. Not obeying means not trusting in his provision,

The Better Adam

not trusting in his generosity. The whole garden, all they could want, just not this one thing. God says, trust me, believe me. And we know how that story goes. Genesis 2, 16 and 17 shows us that faithfulness to God’s commands is the only way to live. Isn’t it interesting that even in the perfect setting, even in this place free of sin, free of distractions where everything works, where all of our work produces something good and beautiful, even here Adam was like, man, you know what I need? A woman. More on that next week, though. I don’t know about you, but my heart longs for Eden. As I’ve been studying this text, I’ve reflected on, you know, how sad it is that this was lost. And how gross the sin in my heart is that caused us to lose it. See, it’s easy for me just to look at Adam and say, what did you do?

I would have done the same thing. Because it’s the sin in the heart that pulls us toward disobedience and away from God. And so as I’ve reflected on my own sin, I’ve also reflected on God’s kindness to reveal it to me, to draw me to himself. And it’s also revealed this desire and this longing for a time where my sin will be no more. Along with longing for Eden, my heart is also filled with hope as I’ve studied this text. Hope for a better future. Hope for God’s promises to come to fruition before my very eyes and for me to see him as he is and to be in a place with him free of sin and death and sorrow. In the garden there were trees that God created that were beautiful, pleasing to look at. He also created trees that were for sustenance, for food.

He also created a tree of life, and he created a tree that was a test of disobedience and to see if disobedience and personal autonomy would be more enticing than God’s goodness. The first Adam failed, and he chose disobedience and death. He chose personal autonomy instead of God. And after humans wandered and suffered and longed for release from the curse of sin and its effects for a long, long time, a second Adam came into the picture. The God-man Jesus, wrapped in flesh, and gave himself to save the people who had rebelled against him and who were dying in their sins. He sacrificed himself as a payment for their sin by dying on a tree, just like the tree from which Adam ate. One tree revealing man’s disobedience, another tree on which the disobedient were reconciled to their God and which gave man a way to come back to Eden.

What we long for and what we look to getting back to, we see here. Sinless perfection, no death, no pain, no rebellion, just man with his creator in perfect, joyful fellowship and eternal worship. We see a picture of this beautifully in Revelation 22, verses 1 through 5, where by way of the tree on which Jesus died, we get back to the garden, to the tree of life. Then the angel showed me the river of the waters of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb through the middle of the street of the city. Also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the lamb will be in it

and his servants will worship him. They will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads and night will be no more. They will need no light or lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light and they will reign forever and ever. Christian, we’re headed back to Eden. The second coming of the better Adam will restore what was lost by the first. Amen? Would you pray with me, saints? Our great God, creator of the universe, creator of all life, sustainer of all life, and our father, we thank you for your kindness and for your goodness in not letting us stay in our sin and perish in it forever. We thank you for sending your son, Jesus Christ, to repair what the first Adam’s sin ruined and what our sin continues to ruin. We thank you for your love and for your mercy

and for the fact that you’ve made a way for us to come back to what you initially created. Father, would you create in us a deep and an abiding worship of you and a desire and a longing to be with you? Would you make us excited to live lives that are wholly given over to you? Would you give us a greater picture of the one through whom this is possible? In whose name we pray, amen.