44. God, His Creation and His Image Bearers

G' day and welcome to Stories Of A Faithful God.

I'm Dave Whittingham.

Who are you?

What defines you?

What makes you you?

Our world is always seeking identity and people find it in all sorts of places.

People define themselves by their skills, by their job or role in society.

They define themselves by their political party or their sexuality or their country or their colour of skin.

People find identity in their sport team or hobby, in their accent, the school they went to, the part of town they grew up in.

Sometimes people seek identity in the religion of their parents and grandparents.

The search for identity is good and right.

It's good to want to know who you are.

It's wise to try and get that understanding.

Every attempt will fail, though, if you don't find your identity fully and firmly in the God who made you.

All those other things, they can never satisfy, never properly quench the thirst of belonging, never gratify the hunger of the soul.

In this episode, we're going to be looking at the first couple of chapters of Genesis.

In these chapters, we get to see the joy of understanding ourselves by understanding the wonder of the powerful, creative, faithful God.

And so, without further ado, I present to you our next episode of stories of a Faithful God.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis, chapter one, verse one.

Those words are so familiar and yet so important.

Our world, our universe, our existence isn't random.

It didn't come about by chance.

It's not meaningless.

There was a creator.

He had a design in mind.

The universe came into being because of the power, creativity and plan of this person called God.

Doesn't that make you want to know this God?

Don't you want to understand who he is and what his plan is?

These very first words of the Bible entice us to read on.

When it says heavens and earth, it doesn't mean the spiritual realm and the physical realm.

It means the universe.

Everything on this planet and everything about it and everything around it.

But the focus of God's creation is this planet.

As we zoom in, there isn't much to look at on the planet.

A vast, dark mass of water.

No life, no light.

A blank slate, so to speak.

Even though our eyes can't penetrate the darkness, we're told that something or someone is stirring.

Verse 2 says, now the earth was formless and empty.

Darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

If you've ever been to a musical stage show, you know how the orchestra plays an overture.

Music that Gives you a taste of what's coming.

And then silence.

It's like the world holds its breath for a moment in anticipation of what's about to begin.

Well, now the world is about to begin.

And the Hebrew word for spirit is exactly the same word as for breath or wind.

And so the presence of God's spirit is the same as God's breath, ready to speak.

And he does speak simple words, words that anyone can say with no effect.

But when God says them, the result is breathtaking.

In verse three, God says, let there be light.

And immediately, immediately, in obedience to the command of God, light shines out, driving away the darkness.

What astounding power.

What awesome authority.

In ancient creation myths, when the gods create the world, they do it by speaking magical words, secret words.

Words that if you or I knew them and spoke them, we could make the world as well.

Because the power is in the words.

But in the real world, the power isn't in the words.

It's in the God who speaks the words.

When I teach this to kids, I get them to hold out their empty hands and say, let there be an apple in my hand.

And we check and lo and behold, no apple.

God isn't some creature like us who just happens to have special secret knowledge.

No, his power and authority is way beyond anything we could ever achieve.

In fact, his word is so powerful that something that doesn't actually exist yet must obey and come into existence at his command.

Not like when we make something where we might go and find a piece of wood and use tools to shape it into something that wasn't there before.

No, here at the creation of the world, there's absolutely nothing.

And from that nothing, God summons something.

Light.

And the light is beautiful, wonderful, good.

It isn't evil.

It isn't even neutral, like some random collection of photons that just happen to be there.

No, God looks at the light and he says, that's good.

How wonderful is that.

How comforting that this creator wants to create good things.

When you get a new boss or a new teacher, you're on the lookout to see, is this going to be a good thing or a bad thing?

Is he or she going to do things well, or are they going to mess everything up?

Well, for this God who we're encountering, the first action he takes is to create something good.

His second action is to create order with that goodness, to impose structure onto the chaos.

And in verse four, we read, 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.

It's a wonderful start, but it is only a start.

As we read about what happens the next day, we get a feel for just how chaotic this new world is.

It's really hard to picture.

I want to think of an ocean down below and a sky up above, but it's much wilder than that.

There's water everywhere.

Not out in space so much, but certainly around the planet.

It's kind of like when you look at one of the gas planets like Jupiter, and you ask, where does the planet actually start from?

A long way away.

It looks obvious, but if you flew into it, it would be kind of hard to tell.

You'd just slowly be enveloped by more and more gas.

And earth here at the beginning seems to be a bit like that with the water.

There's no structure to it.

It's just everywhere.

But again, God speaks.

And in obedience to his command, the world becomes much more structured and ordered.

In verse six, we read, 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.

Normally we just take the sky for granted.

It's just there.

And yet the air we breathe, the clouds floating way up high in all their beauty and majesty.

The fact that we don't have to exist and move through a mass of floating water.

Unless you live in England, I guess, but even you get relief occasionally.

But all this isn't by random chance.

It's by design by this creative God establishing order on his planet that he's made preparing it for what's to come.

Evening comes, then morning, and the second day is complete.

The third day is again about imposing order and structure.

Again about preparing the planet for the life God's going to create on it.

Again about putting the chaotic water in its place.

In verse nine, we read, then God said, let the water under the sky be gathered into 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.

Have you ever seen videos or maybe even experienced the enormous rolling waves of the sea?

The mountainous waves that rise up in the deep ocean, powerfully driving on, tossing giant boats around like leaves.

And yet when they reach land, they're forced to stop.

When God's putting Job in his place, reminding him who's the one in charge, he asks job in chapter 38, verse 8, who enclosed the sea behind doors when it burst from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and total darkness its blanket, when I determined its boundaries and put its bars and doors in place, when I declared, you may come this far, but no farther, your proud waves stop here.

The power of God to command the sea, to determine when and where it can move, where it must give way, is astounding.

Thousands of years later, the first disciples of Jesus, they were all Jews who'd heard about this God.

And unlike the nations around them, the they were convinced that there was no way a human could be their God.

They weren't tricked by the pretensions of a Caesar or Alexander the Great, men who were worshipped and sacrificed to.

And yet, over time, they became convinced that in Jesus they'd met God.

One of the reasons for the dramatic change in their understanding is what they saw and heard from Jesus.

When they were out on the Sea of Galilee together, they were caught in a windstorm in a small boat.

They thought they were going to drown.

Remarkably, Jesus is asleep at the back of the boat, so they wake him up.

Perhaps they expect him to grab a bucket and start bailing the water, or jump on an oar to help row to land.

What he does, though, is completely unexpected.

Mark 4:39 tells us that Jesus did this.

He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the sea, silence, be still.

The wind ceased and there was a great calm.

Who has that power, whose words have that authority to command the waves to stop moving?

Only the Creator, God.

On the same day, God summons the dry land up from the watery depths.

He also begins to fill that land with life, plant life.

In verse 11 he says, 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 again, in obedience to God's command, the earth produces vegetation.

And what astounding vegetation.

Think of the giant trees that tower up in the rainforest, the small pieces of moss that grow in the tiny cracks in the rock, the fern hanging off the edge of the cliff, living off the spray from the waterfall.

In the description of the vegetation, there's a new phrase, each according to their kind.

As God creates this abundant vegetation, it's ordered and structured.

Every plant has its place and its type.

And God looks at it and it's good evening, morning.

The third day is over.

Having begun to put things on the land, now God puts things in the sky, things that we might have thought were already there, things that highlight again God's astounding power.

God puts lights in the sky.

And you might think, hang on a second.

Didn't God create light back on day one?

And yes, he did.

But the only source of that light had been the power of his word.

Now he creates sources for that light that'll rule the light, govern it, and give time and order and structure to this world.

God says in verse 14, 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 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 over the day, and the lesser light to rule over 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.

Notice that even though it's obviously talking about the sun and the moon, they're not named.

That's because in ancient times, as is sometimes the case today, the sun and moon were worshipped as gods and carried the names of those gods.

This passage is the true God telling us, no, these aren't gods to be worshipped.

They're objects that he's placed there for his plans and purposes.

But of course, this passage speaks into our culture as well.

It tells us these objects in the sky that define our days and seasons and years, they didn't just randomly form there over billions of years.

They were placed there in a moment, at exactly the right distance from Earth, at exactly the right angle to Earth for the exact purposes of the Creator of the Earth.

And the stars, they're not there to guide our destiny.

They don't have that power.

They've been placed by God to give light.

They've also been placed to point us back to our Creator, to give him glory, to show us just how wonderful and majestic he is.

Psalm 19:1 says, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands.

Day after day, they pour out speech.

Night after night, they communicate knowledge.

One of the things I love about that is, the more you look at the heavens, the more they declare the glory of God.

When you move from the city to the country, you're like, wow, God didn't just create eight stars, he created millions.

And then you get a telescope and you discover even more.

And then you send a telescope into space.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990.

Its first pictures were blurry and disappointing.

Because a tiny mistake had been made polishing the mirror.

It turns out the telescope needed glasses.

Once that was fixed, though, they pointed it at a patch of space they thought was empty, just vast, endless blackness.

When the picture came back, seeing further than had ever been seen before by humans, it was filled with stars, a hidden wonder waiting to be found so that they too could declare the glory of God.

And when the more powerful James Webb Space Telescope was launched, some of those stars turned out to be not just one star, but whole galaxies, all put in their place by the powerful Creator, God.

Verse 17 says, 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.

The next day, God fills the places where he's put the waters, the sea and the sky.

He says in verse 20, let the water swarm with living creatures.

And let birds fly above the Earth across the expanse of the sky.

I love that word, swarm.

Let the water swarm with living creatures.

The NIV uses the word team.

And the water does swarm or teem with living creatures.

From the enormous blue whale weighing up to 150 tons, to the tiniest krill weighing 1 to 2 grams, the vast ocean is filled with life.

And just like with the stars, so much of that life is just waiting to be discovered.

And then there's the grandeur of the birds, soaring through the sky, riding the wind like expert surfers.

The detail of each feather expertly placed to create an astounding variety of design.

No wonder God looks at all this life he's created and again calls it good.

And then he says something new, something not just creative, but kind, generous.

He gives a gift to these creatures by blessing them.

In verse 22, he blesses them by saying, be fruitful, Multiply and fill the waters of the seas.

And let the birds multiply on the earth as abundantly as God's made them.

He invites them to make more, to multiply their numbers, to enjoy filling the earth he's created.

Evening comes and morning comes.

The fifth day.

Having filled the sky and the sea, there's just one place left to fill the dry land.

Verse 24.

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 on the ground according to their kinds.

And God saw That it was good.

Have you ever watched a dog sniff the wind?

Or seen a cat balance on a fence?

How about an elephant mother caring for her child?

Or a koala sleeping in the fork of a tree?

Have you seen a grizzly bear catching fish?

Or a colony of ants walking in a line to the food?

Think about the shuffling of a mouse in the forest at night.

Or a worm winding its way through a world of blackness.

Or a lion crouching in the grass.

Or penguins huddling together through the long Antarctic night and the blast of the icy winds.

Think about the majesty of a reindeer with its hairy antlers, the strength of a gorilla, the wisdom of a spider as it weaves its web.

The howl of a wolf, the sleekness of a cheetah, the voracious hunger of a caterpillar, the gentle constant chewing of a cow.

All imagined, all planned, all designed and called into being by the powerful word of the Creator, God.

There's one last creature to make a creature.

That's definitely a creature, a created thing.

And yet it's going to have the privilege of a very particular relationship with its Creator.

God begins in a very unusual way.

Instead of saying let there be, like let there be light, he says, let us make.

Let me read it to you and then we'll think about it.

Verse 26.

Then God said, let us make man.

Or a better modern translation would be humanity.

Let us make humanity 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.

So God created man in his own image.

He created him in the image of God.

He created them male and female.

The Hebrew word for man is Adam, and it can mean an individual man or humanity.

The English word man used to do the same thing, but now that gets a bit confusing.

But what's God doing here by creating humanity?

What does it mean to make humanity in his image?

It's worth reading the entire Bible to get a full picture of what that means, but I think this passage is highlighting at least two aspects of it.

The first is rule.

Humanity 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.

Up until now, we've seen the rule of God.

He creates things, he orders them.

He decides where they go and where they stop.

Now he places humanity on earth to rule.

Not without him.

We're not a separate kingdom to God's kingdom.

Rather, we rule as God's representatives, as his appointed Governors these days, we put flags up to show which country owns a particular area.

The flag says the rules of this country apply here.

But back in the days of kings, kings didn't put up a flag.

They put up an image of themselves showing everyone who's in charge.

When coins were invented, kings started putting their image on them.

It was a way of getting the message out there.

Jesus uses that as an example when he's asked if the Jews should pay taxes to Caesar.

He asks for a coin and says, whose image is on it?

And the people reply, caesar's.

And Jesus says, give to Caesar what is Caesar's, in other words, the coin, and give to God what is God's.

In other words, you belong to God.

His image is on you.

As image bearers, we both have authority, and we're under authority.

The purpose of our rule over the world is to show the world the character of God, to rule the world as God rules, to display his goodness and grace and love and mercy and justice, and bring glory to Him.

We'll see in the next episode why humanity has become so bad at that, as well as rule.

The other aspect of God's image I think this passage is picking up on is relationship.

As I said before, God speaks in a very different way here, by saying, let us make man in our image.

People have different explanations of that.

I've seen at least six.

Some say God's just using the royal we, meaning me.

But that doesn't really explain why he only says it here.

I think the best explanation is that it's alluding to the trinitarian relationship within God.

Obviously, that relationship isn't spelled out here or even fully until the New Testament.

But it's hard to get away from the fact that as soon as God starts addressing his own relationship, he also emphasizes the relationship within humanity.

You see, God doesn't just create individual humans in his image.

He creates humanity in his image.

We're both one and many.

You hear it in verse 27 that I read out before it says, so God created man, singular humanity, united in his own image.

He created him in the image of God.

He created them male and female.

There's both a Him, a singular humanity, and a Them.

And it's so important that the them is male and female.

For most of history, women have been treated as lesser, as tools or objects, although we like to say that that isn't the case today.

For many women, it's very much still their experience when they're sexualized, objectified, used to serve the interests of men.

But Right here at the creation of the world.

The God who created us says equal, equally honoured equally in his image.

Not just equal, but needing each other.

Men need women, women need men.

Not necessarily in marriage, but as a collective humanity.

If we try and rule the world, one without the other, we won't accurately reflect the image of God.

We'll be stunted or distorted.

Of course, while it's so important to emphasise the unity, it's equally important to emphasise the difference.

Men are men and not women.

Women are women and not men.

We can't choose to be the other gender.

We shouldn't try to be the other gender.

It's a distortion of the idea of equality to say that we're all exactly the same.

This passage says, same in your humanness, same in your value, different in your gender.

And it's only when we recognize and live out both the sameness and the difference that we truly reflect the image of God.

After making them.

God blesses humanity, all humanity, male and female.

Like he blessed the animals, but he also gives humans authority to rule.

Verse 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.

For anyone who thinks the Bible is anti sex, they haven't read the very first command to humans.

It's hard to multiply without having sex.

God isn't anti sex, he's anti at being used in the wrong way.

As humans multiply, they're to subdue the earth, which is fascinating.

God's been creating order out of chaos throughout the chapter.

But there's more work to be done in the detail of the world God's left work for the humans.

It's our job to care for the world, to not destroy it, to manage it in a sustainable, loving way.

It's shocking the damage we've done and the way we've wiped out so many species, species that we were created to lovingly rule over.

We've used the world, rather than ruled over it, for the world's benefit.

We must do better than that.

At the same time, some people speak as though the planet would be perfect if only it didn't have humans.

As though we should work to make no imprint on the Earth, which just isn't true.

It's our job to subdue and order the world.

Not for our benefit, though, but for the benefit of the whole planet and for the glory of God.

As well as blessing humanity, God also abundantly provides for us.

He isn't stingy or mean.

He says to humanity in verse 19, look, I have 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 then the creation is complete.

It isn't just good.

Verse 31 says, 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.

That's it, done, complete.

Which means on the seventh day God can rest, not because he's puffed out or tired, but because the job's been done fully.

Every other day is part of a pair.

Day one and four are pairs.

On day one, God created light.

On day four, he created the sun, moon and stars to shine that light.

Same with days two and five.

On day two, God separated the waters above and below and created sky.

On day five, he filled the sea and the sky with fish and birds.

And then days three and six.

On day three, God created dry land and vegetation.

On day six, he put creatures, including humans, on that dry land and gave them the vegetation to eat.

But day seven stands alone.

A day to enjoy the completed work.

A day of rest and blessing.

A day where, strangely, we don't hear about how there was evening and morning, almost as though the day continues.

2:2 says, 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.

How wonderful to be able to rest in the completion of all that work.

Rest in the joy of beauty and abundance.

Many years later, Israel was given the land of Canaan to be their rest.

But because of their sin, it could never satisfy in Jesus.

Though Christians look forward to joining God in an eternal rest, a rest where the hard labour of this world is over, where the sin that interrupts the rest in the Garden of Eden will finally be done away with.

When the works of obedience Christians seek to show to the Lord Jesus, instead of being mocked by a world that hates him, will be recognized by God Himself.

Revelation 14:13 says this.

It says, then I heard a voice from heaven saying, right, blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.

Yes, says the Spirit, so they will rest from their labors, since their works will follow them, and there will rest forever with our God.

The rest of chapter two drills down into day six from chapter one.

At times it can feel like it's a different, incompatible account of the creation, but it does fit together while telling more detail of the story.

The best illustration I've heard of it is this.

Imagine the six days of chapter one as like folders on the desktop of your computer.

The titles of each folder tell you the various things God's created on each day.

In chapter two, it's like we've moved our mouse over the day six folder, clicked it open, and we can now see a lot more of the detail of the day.

And the purpose of giving us that detail is to focus us even more on the relationships between God and humans and and between man and woman.

In verse four, we hear a phrase we're going to see a few times in Genesis.

These are the records.

Or as the ESV puts it, these are the generations.

In this case, we're told these are the records of the heavens and the earth.

Each time we hear that phrase, it doesn't tell us about the thing or person in the records, it tells us a record of what comes from them.

So we've already heard about the creation of the heavens and the earth.

Now we're going to focus specifically on one key aspect that comes from that humanity.

We get a strange sort of description of the start of day six from verse four.

It says, the time that the Lord God 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, but mist would come up from the earth and water all the ground.

It's strange, because weren't plants made back on day three?

How come they aren't here on day six?

I don't think it's talking about all vegetation.

Rather, it's specifically talking about plants of the field, the sorts of things humans will grow and cultivate on farms.

It's alluding both to the good work humans will do as they spread out and subdue the world, the work given in chapter one, but also to how hard that work will become in chapter three when the people turn away from God.

So a lot of the shrubs of the field that will come up later will be weeds and thorns and thistles.

Then we're told how the man is made, and this Time, it is the man, and as opposed to the woman.

In verse seven, we're told then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.

I love how God does this.

He creates the man in a way that highlights both important aspects of his existence.

Firstly, he's made from the dust of the earth.

That is, he's a creature, a created thing made out of the other stuff that God's made.

Later on, we're told that God makes the animals out of the dust of the earth as well.

The man's very much not God.

It would be arrogant to think that he's more than a creature, as though he's equal with God.

At the same time, though, there's such an intimate closeness with God that nothing else in creation has.

It's like God gives him mouth to mouth or mouth to nose resuscitation.

Except I guess it isn't resuscitation.

He's never been alive before.

I don't know.

Is that just sussitation?

Either way, there's a similarity to animals who have the breath of life in their nostrils.

But there's a difference in the intimate way God puts it there.

Another way we see the intimacy of God with man is that this verse, verse 7, is the first time we hear God's name, Yahweh, the name that gets translated as Lord in capital letters.

The verse says the Lord God formed the man.

The name Yahweh gets specifically given to Israel to identify their God, the one true God, the God they had a special relationship with.

That special relationship, though, starts with the very first man for all humanity.

As God breathes into him, the man becomes alive.

We spoke in chapter one about how monotheistic Jews came to believe that Jesus is God.

Well, another way they became convinced was by seeing Jesus give life to the dead.

That's an exclusively God power.

Having given the man life, God then gives him a wonderful, beautiful place to live.

A place where he can have life not just for a moment, but for eternity.

Just like how he could see the personal care of God in creating the man, we see that same care as he creates a garden for the man.

Verse 8 says 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.

These two named trees in the center of the garden are going to play a key role in the coming events.

Soon we'll see.

They both represent something that belongs exclusively to God.

For now, it's enough to see that God's given access to the tree of life.

God's provided not just food, but food for life, eternal life.

He hasn't held back any goodness or kindness.

His care for the man is lavish and extravagant.

You can see that in the rest of the garden as well.

There's every tree, pleasing in appearance and good for food.

There's nothing stingy about what God's given.

We see that as well in the beautiful waters that flow through the garden.

Verse 10 says, 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 Havilah, where there is gold.

Gold from that land is pure.

Bdellium and onyx are also there.

The name of the second river is Gihon, which flows through the entire land of cushion.

The name of the third river is Tigris, which runs east of Assyria.

And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Two of those rivers are well known today.

The Tigris and Euphrates.

They begin in modern day Eastern Turkey, flow through Syria and into Iraq, and then join up before emptying into the Persian Gulf.

The other two rivers, the Pishon and Gihon, aren't known today, certainly not by those names.

This description does two things for us, though.

Firstly, it tells us the garden is a real place with a real location, even though we can't find it today.

Secondly, it again draws our eyes to the abundance and goodness of God's provision.

Rivers are a source of life.

And the river in Eden doesn't just stay as one river.

It branches out into four rivers, four streams of blessing.

It's no wonder that so much of the earliest human civilization developed in the Tigris Euphrates Valley.

The abundance and goodness is also seen in the land that the Pishon flows through, the land of Havilah, where there's good pure gold as well as onyx and bdellium.

And if you're anything like me, you've been wondering where you can top up your onyx and bdellium supplies.

I'm just kidding.

I had to look them up.

Onyx is a stone and bdellium is a tree resin.

And interestingly, all these precious things are linked to the Exodus.

Gold is used extensively in the making of the tabernacle.

Onyx is the stone in which the names of the twelve tribes of Israel are carved, worn by the high priest and the manna they eat in the wilderness, the miraculous food provided by God that's described as looking like bdellium.

There's a continuity of the good and faithful provision of God at the creation and to his chosen people.

After this description of the garden and elsewhere, we're told how God puts the man in the garden not just to laze around all day, but but to work it and tend it and care for it.

The man works just like God worked back in chapter one.

It's part of the honor of being in God's image to take part in the generous, loving care of the world.

In the garden, God gives the man a command, a loving command, a generous command.

He says in verse 16, you are free to eat from any, any tree in 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.

God isn't holding back here, trying to keep the best away from the man.

No, he is protecting him.

Remember, if the man can eat from any tree, that means he can eat from the tree of life, the other tree at the center of the garden.

God's putting before the man life and death, blessing and curse, joy and despair.

And he's saying, choose life.

God wants to give him abundant, wonderful life.

When I've taught this to kids, they often ask me, if the tree can kill the man, why does God put it there in the first place?

And the answer is that without it, there'd be no real faith or obedience.

God's inviting the man to decide, do I believe in God?

Is His Word faithful?

Do I want to obey Him?

And the answer should be obvious.

In God, there's life and goodness and abundance and love and joy and peace.

If you reject him, there's only death.

Why on earth would you not choose God?

The timing of when God gives this command is important because he hasn't actually made the woman yet.

That means the woman doesn't hear the command directly from God.

She's meant to hear it from the man, not because the man's better, but simply because that's the task God gives him.

It's the task he's going to utterly fail at in the next chapter, with eternal consequences.

When the Apostle Paul is talking about the roles of men and women in the church, specifically in regard to teaching, he makes the point that man is made first.

And just like here he isn't saying that men are better than women.

He's simply saying that that was a task God specifically gave to men.

After giving the command to the man, though, God says something that would be easy to skip over, but it's actually quite shocking.

He says in verse 18, it is not good for the man to be alone.

I will make a helper corresponding to him.

The shocking part is that there's something here in the creation that's not good.

In chapter one, we heard over and over again that God looked at what he'd made and it was good.

But man being alone, that's not good.

Not that it's evil.

It just isn't right.

Men can be so stubborn in thinking they don't need the help of women, as though women can be a nice accessory, nice to have around sometimes, but we don't really need them.

But it's so foolish.

It's not good.

God sees that what's good is for the man to have a helper.

Helper is an interesting word.

It's not that the man will have his work and the woman her work, and they'll kind of come together occasionally.

No, the man is given the work of tending the garden, and the woman is given the task of helping the man.

Some people see that as degrading, but that's because our society values power and authority and downplays service.

Some men will use this to claim authority over women, to use them and abuse them and control them.

It's such an evil misuse of God's good plan.

Men are never told to command women.

When the apostle Paul talks to husbands, he tells them to lay down their lives in service of their wives, like Christ did for the church.

Authoritarianism in a marriage is abuse.

Some might say that the title of helper dehumanises the woman.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

And this passage utterly emphasizes that.

Firstly, by God saying he's going to make a helper corresponding to the man, which gives a hint as to what's about to happen.

We're told how God makes all the animals out of the ground just like he made the man out of the ground.

And God brings all these animals in front of the man so he can name them, just like we've seen before.

This is a godlike task.

The man is like the animals made from the dust.

But he gives names, just like God gave names to everything, all throughout chapter one.

And that difference is why none of the animals correspond to the man.

Animals do help men, but whatever helper God has in Mind, they're not going to be like a horse or a dog or a sheep, a thoughtless animal required to do the bidding of the man.

So verse 20 says, the man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the sky, and to every wild animal.

But for the man name, no helper was found corresponding to him.

There is no animal that can help him rule the world.

Then, just like when the man was made, we're now given a detailed description of how the woman is made.

Verse 21 says, so the Lord God 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.

Then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man.

It's so interesting that God doesn't make the woman in the same way he makes the man.

He doesn't just mold a new person out of the dust of the earth.

That would suggest a separateness between the man and the woman.

But this emphasizes the unity, the equality.

How can you possibly say a woman is less than a man?

They're made out of the same flesh, which is exactly what the man instantly recognizes.

He's so excited, in verse 23, he cries out, this one at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

This one will be called Woman, for she was taken from man.

People aren't really sure of the background meaning of the words for man and woman here, but just like in Hebrew, that it's written in English preserves the important similarity between the two words.

Man and woo, man, same and different, equal and different.

The man is so excited that here is someone who's not an animal, someone who, just like we saw in chapter one, is made in God's image.

We're told in verse 24.

This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife and they become one flesh.

The one fleshness of every marriage relationship harks back to the very first marriage, where the woman marries the man out of whose flesh she was made.

They came from the same flesh, and then they become the same flesh.

They become one flesh in sex.

They become one flesh in their children, who carry the traits of both parents in some hard to define way.

They become one flesh through an emotional connection.

And we get to see something of the joyful intimacy of their relationship in the last verse of the chapter, verse 25, both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.

This isn't about body shaming.

They weren't worried about the size and shape of anything on their bodies.

Rather, nakedness later on is related to guilt.

And here there's no guilt between them and God, and no guilt between the man and the woman.

Imagine a relationship like that where there's no pain, no guilt, no worry about what the other person will do or what you'll do.

No harsh word, no insulting look, no failure to serve or help.

It's almost unimaginable, isn't it?

The sin we'll explore in the next episode is so endemic in our hearts that we just don't ever get to fully experience that joy.

And yet God's wonderful plan is to produce that sort of marriage, not between a man and a woman, but between the Lord Jesus Christ and His people, his church.

This creation that's been so tarnished will be replaced with a new creation and a new wedding.

Revelation 21:1 says, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven, and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more.

I also saw the holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband.

The joy of the original creation was just a shadow pointing to the coming new creation.

The joy of the original marriage was just a shadow pointing to this coming great marriage.

A marriage that will only exist because of the saving work of the Creator God, the Father, who sent His Son to save the world.

The Son, the Lord Jesus, who died to defeat sin and rose to defeat death, and the Holy Spirit, who works in people's hearts to transform them to be like Christ, so that together, not just as individual Christians, but as but as a united, transformed people of God reshaped into the image of Jesus, we can join in perfect union with Jesus for all eternity.

And right now, God's saving his people for that eternity, for that wedding.

All over the world.

He's using that same power and passion he used to create the world.

People who are lost in sin and darkness, cut off from light and life, unwilling and unable to turn back to the God who made them.

God's doing miracle after miracle.

In 2 Corinthians 4, 5, the apostle Paul says this as he's describing his Gospel mission.

He says, for we are not proclaiming ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your servants, for Jesus sake.

For God who said, let light shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ.

Now we have this treasure in clay jars so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us.

The power and love of God we read about in creation is still active today.

God's powerfully, lovingly saving his people, shining his light into our hearts, preparing us for the wonderful, eternal new creation.

Back in the Garden the idyllic scene is not going to last long.

There's an enemy afoot, a creature who wants the power of the Creator, and humanity's about to choose the wrong side.

But that's a story for next time.

Hi again everyone.

Thanks for listening in to this episode.

If you enjoyed it, don't forget to give a rating or review in your app.

I'd also love it if you can tell your friends about the show.

I want to help as many people as I can enjoy God and so I'd love for you to pass on the news about the podcast.

If you want to spend a few minutes thinking more about the beautiful creation that God's made, I've put a little video link in the show notes and you can click on that and look at a three minute video that celebrates the wonderful creation.

For now, keep trusting Jesus and we'll talk again soon.