Genesis 2:4-9

Hey, welcome back friends.
Thanks for joining us again
as we continue our way through Genesis.
Today moving into really what we consider
the second of two creation accounts.
Sort of nest,
the second one in some ways
nests inside the first one.
The second one as we move through this,
you will notice, I think right away,
that it’s much different flavored story.
For one thing, the language is different.
We’ve been
consistently using the word God.
We’re now going to move really to the word Lord.
Lord God at some points.
This is a difference in the way
that the terminology about God is used.
Also, this story is different.
It’s less layered,
it’s less organized,
it’s a kind of earthier,
not,
I don’t wanna say messier,
but it’s a more condensed story
and it jumps to the main points far quicker
without some of the trapping.
So let’s,
we’ll get a couple of verses in here
and then we can talk about some of this.
In the day that the Lord God made the earth
and the heavens when no plants of the field
were yet in the earth and no herb of the field
had yet sprung up for the Lord God
had not caused it to rain upon the earth
and there was no one to till the ground.
So in the first story we have God moving over the face
of the deep, of chaos, of creation.
Here we have kind of a,
again, that condensed.
The earth seems to be made,
but there’s no plants yet.
There’s no herbs.
So there’s also no rain.
So if you’re going to try and as people have done,
try to locate this story within the other story,
I don’t know, you’re somewhere day two,
day three, but this story simply isn’t
told like that.
The Lord has not caused rain
and there’s no one to till the ground.
So this presumes the role of someone who is going to come
and partner in or at least work in the creation alongside God.
The earth needs not only the finished work of God,
but the as of yet undone work of someone who will come later.
And this sets the stage in a very different way.
I don’t think you have to read further than this one verse
to realize we’re coming from a very different perspective
than in the first story.
Yeah, so let’s remember our context.
We ended with chapter two,
verse four yesterday with this idea that the generations of the heavens
and earth were created.
Now it says in the day that the Lord God made.
I think what’s interesting here
is that immediate transition phrase in the day,
because our previous creation story focused
on that day structure.
It had that beautiful kind of rhythmic liturgical order to the days.
We need that transition to get us into this story.
To your point, and in some ways I’m just rewording
what you just said, Clint,
we now are finding a very different kind of rubric
of understanding the creation.
Instead of seeing it as this ordered intentional
day by day process,
we’re now going to see it
from the lens of God’s intention,
of God’s even relationship that was built into the creation.
It is not
contradictory.
If it would have been,
the writers would have glossed it differently.
They would have not put them side by side.
It’s clear that these are intended to go together,
this bridge of these simple words.
In the day that the Lord made,
this is supposed to point out
that these stories are connected.
Yet,
as we change perspective and frame,
we’re gonna get to see it from a different vantage.
And I think
what we find in this story
is that God’s intentionality
was more than just creating order.
It intended a kind of created relationship
and a created partnership even
that we’re gonna see flashed out.
It is because of this story that intensifies
the story that came before it,
that we begin to see the setup
for what we’re gonna have happen in chapter three,
which of course we’ll get to.
But I just wanna point out how beautifully connected these are,
despite the fact, to your point, it’s very clear that we’re seeing it from different lenses.
Right,
because of the way
that day is used in the first story,
I don’t wanna argue translation here,
but I think a more helpful way
to think about this introduction would be at the time,
rather than in the day,
at the time the Lord God made,
because this story is using the word day
very differently than the first story.
In the first story,
that is an ordered measure
of a specific time period in which something happens.
Here,
it’s a much looser reference.
It’s just when God made things,
this is what happened.
It’s not as structured,
it’s not as logistical.
It’s simply when God did it,
this is what happened in the midst of that.
And so,
a very different.
So,
verse six here, but a stream would rise from the earth
and water the whole face of the ground.
Then, verse seven, we get into kind of the meat of the story.
Notice how quickly we go from God’s work
in creation generally to the specific
of the creation of humans.
This story wants to go there immediately.
We took
almost an entire chapter
to get there in the first chapter.
Now, we go right there in two verses in this one.
So, verse seven,
then the Lord God formed,
and the word here is sort of fashioned like pottery almost,
the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life
and the man became a living being.
Now,
again,
what a different way of telling the story.
In the first story,
you’ll remember God spoke
and things came into existence.
Here, God actually works in the parameters of creation.
He gets down in the dirt and he builds a man,
the shell of a man,
and then puts breath.
And remember that in both Hebrew and Greek,
the word breath is also the word spirit,
and the word wind.
And so,
this idea of breath is not just physical breath, not just lungs,
but of spirit.
He animated the man,
he gave the wind of life,
he put breath in the man,
he kneels down, he builds the man,
and at the breath of God,
at the giving of breath,
the man becomes a living being.
So,
I wanna just point out a couple things here.
Notice that this story shares the kind of emphasis
that the previous story had,
even though, like Clint said,
it’s a much abbreviated version of the natural processes.
We still have water coming up,
a recognition of how important water is
to sustaining our life as we know it.
Also, this idea that God is making life possible
on the entire planet.
So, this idea of God’s creative sustenance.
And then,
what I think is so fascinating
is this language for the dust of the ground
that we had in verse seven.
This comes from that Hebrew word,
atama, or what we later are gonna see is Adam,
the idea of dust or earth.
This idea that we have even in our worshiping life today,
if you come on the National Wednesday,
that connection to from dust we came,
to dust we’ll return,
from earth we came to earth we return.
That God takes the building blocks of creation,
that which is,
and God makes out of that,
something that is even able to bear the life of God.
That’s what we later see from the Christian interpretation
of God taking on life in Jesus Christ.
This idea that God even took on the very human earth
and flesh that we as humans were created in.
So, that’s reading from the New Testament backwards.
The point here, being made by the author though,
is that we are deeply connected to this original earth.
That God takes of the stuff that’s here,
and God then fashions that into a thing,
and then by God’s breath,
life,
spirit,
spiritual ability, God makes life appear in that thing.
And I think the image that helps me here,
Clint, is if you’ve ever had a child who is walking along
and they accidentally step on an ant,
and they’re distraught because the ant doesn’t keep going,
they don’t yet understand that idea of death.
There’s this idea that we have that,
when there’s breath in a thing,
it has a kind of mysterious vitality and life,
but when that breath leaves that thing,
then it no longer is.
And that’s both a physical reality,
but we also have a spiritual overtone to this,
that God instills within the human ability.
Well, we’ll see that teased out later,
but I think that’s a beautiful vantage here in this text.
Yeah, and clearly,
we have in that first story,
this idea of the image of God.
Here,
the idea of the breath of God sort of carries that weight.
It is literally the spirit of God that animates humans,
that makes them come to life,
that makes the transition.
This shell is ready to live,
but until the breath of God enters it,
it is not a living thing.
And that is the story’s way of saying
that life depends on the movement of God’s spirit,
particularly human life here,
though one could argue maybe all life in general.
And now we move to verse eight,
“The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east,
“and there he put the man whom he had formed.
“Out of the ground,
the Lord God made to grow every tree
“that is pleasant to the sight and good for food,
“the tree of life also in the middle of the garden,
“and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” So again,
unlike the first story,
or in contrast to the first story,
where we have a kind of global or even universal story,
this story shrinks its setting to a particular place,
to a garden here in Eden,
or near Eden,
that the idea that we’re going to confine this story
to a specific place within the whole of creation,
where God plants a garden and puts the man in it.
And in the garden,
we’re not told about the whole of creation,
but in the garden,
there are plants that are good for food,
they’re pleasant for the eye.
Again, that sense of it is good here,
it’s very good.
And the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil,
which are going to come
into the story later.
But you can kind of tell this story is much more agrarian.
God is in the dirt,
man is made of dirt,
God is planting things,
things are being watered.
The first things that come to sight after the man,
unlike the other story where the man is last,
here we have essentially the man being created first,
and then there are plants.
So the man has access to all this within the garden.
And it’s a different,
it’s a very different story
in that it’s far more contained than our first version.
Yeah, and it has in mind setting up
a kind of spiritual theme that the other
took in a very different direction.
Let me explain it this way.
The first one,
we saw towards the end of the creation story
at the very beginning of chapter two,
the end of chapter one there,
we saw the lesson being that because God made
and because God’s greatness is so vast
that God rests on that seventh day,
that we have instituted this liturgical daily kind of schedule
as part of our human experience of the world,
that to be faithful and to follow in the way of the Creator
is to live in this hollowed day, right?
We already,
we’re only a couple sentences in to our English
translation of this second story,
and we already have not only God making this life,
but God setting up this tree that we know
is gonna play such a prominent role,
or the idea that God is making this lush garden,
Eden means in Hebrew, delight.
It’s this verdant, beautiful,
idyllic kind of place,
and yet we are already seeing the beginning of foreshadowing
of the kinds of difficult choices
that are gonna lie ahead in the story.
There’s a kind of very specific telling
of what is a cosmic story.
It’s specific, and that’s a specific garden,
specific creation that God’s working on,
and yet we can already begin to get this sense
that what God is doing here is already setting the stage
for a much more cosmic story of all humanity.
It’s setting up this thing that is vast
in its particularity.
Does that make sense?
I may be saying that in a difficult way.
Well, one way that might be helpful to get there is that scholars,
as they think about these two stories
in the way in which they interact with one another,
this first story,
I’m sorry, this second story
is often thought to be older.
It has a more mythic kind of feel to it.
It’s more comparable to some of the ancient stories,
and it makes sense that this looser story was told first,
and then someone came in and kind of provided more structure,
provided more detail in the specifics.
And so as we read this first story,
we’re going to, I’m sorry, this older story, the second story in the Bible,
we’re, I think, going to see the ways
in which this story mashes things together.
So you have creation,
you have Garden of Eden,
you have Tree of Life,
Tree of Good and Evil,
you have loneliness,
you have temptation,
you have command,
you have disobedience.
All of these things get wrapped up together in a way
that’s not as clean as the first story is.
The first story is very segmented,
very regimented.
This story is more like putting all those things in a bag
and shaking them up,
and it’s the way that it’s told
that helps deliver us ultimately to the story.
So the next piece,
we won’t really spend much time
with this, in fact, we’ll probably skip it tomorrow,
but I do want to tell you,
verses 10 through 14
are kind of a stage, a location thing.
There are rivers involved,
and in the ancient world,
they located this garden in that general region,
and this helped them draw the map of it.
But for our purposes,
I don’t think there’s much at stake
in these verses, you can sure read them,
but I don’t think they do a lot for us.
So we will probably pick up tomorrow with verse 15.
I’m curious,
Clint, check me on this.
In the first creation story,
would you say, is there ever a setup for the idea
of the moral order of the universe?
I mean, here we have right away this idea,
God creates the human,
we have the garden,
and we have this thing,
the tree, the knowledge of good and evil.
Do you,
is there an analog to that,
would you say, in the first creation story?
No, I think in the first story,
we see not a lot of interaction between God
and the created order,
other than the call to be fruitful,
to multiply.
There’s really no inherent struggle.
I think that story is told with a single purpose
to talk about creation.
I think this story,
creation is the opening purpose,
but it quickly moves to other themes.
And in that, I think we see a major difference
between the first and second story.
I think the first story is far more contained,
and the second is a multipoint sermon,
really.
It’s not just an account,
it is a lesson,
and there are multiple themes in it.
Yeah, I think tomorrow and Monday,
by the end of Monday or Tuesday next week,
I hope that will be a very clear case.
All right,
sounds good.
Well, friends, thanks for being with us today.
We will see you tomorrow.
Thanks, guys.