Open with me in your Bibles to Genesis chapter 2 in some previous studies last month. We looked at Genesis chapter 1 and now we'll continue this series through Genesis 1 through 3 in Genesis chapter 2 and we'll deal with the first part of it today. And so Genesis chapter 2, starting with verse 4 and reading through verse 17. Hear the word of our God. This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprung up. For the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth, and there was no man to work the ground. But streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east in Eden, and there he put the man he had formed. And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground. Trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden. From there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon. It winds through the entire land of Havilah where there is gold. The gold of that land is good. Aromatic resin and onyx are also there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris. It runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it and the Lord God commanded the man you are free to eat from any tree in the garden but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for when you eat of it you will surely die this year in my eighth grade catechism class and I have a good class I'll have to brag at the beginning of the year we we reviewed question and answer one what is your only comfort in life and in death, that I am not my own, but belong body and soul to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. And I asked them a question after we had looked at that. I asked them, is this a confession that Adam would have made? Would this have been Adam's confession? And they thought, thought a little bit. Most of them were starting to shake their heads no. One student said, well, Christ hadn't come yet. So how could this have been Adam's confession? But then another one said, well, Adam, before the fall, hadn't sinned. He didn't need a Savior. And I thought that was a very perceptive answer. And I think that's something very crucial for us to grasp, for us to understand the Bible and God's relations with humanity, with us as creatures. We confess question and answer one of the Heidelberg Catechism because we're sinful. Because we need a Savior. We need Jesus to save us from our sin in our misery. But Adam was created perfect. He had no sin. He could fully keep God's law. And so we need to keep these two periods of human history distinct before the fall and after the fall. Because the fall, Adam's sin, it had enormous consequences. It introduced profound changes, especially in the relationship between God and man. And if we don't keep these distinct, we fall into confusion. And this is a biblical teaching that we can find in our confessions. But in our world, it is being questioned by many. And so this morning, we're going to examine the beginning part of this account of the fall. And as we do that, we'll have two points, only two. God creates and God commands. Doesn't mean we'll end any sooner, but we only have two points. So God creates. Genesis 2 is sometimes called a second creation account. And in some ways, we can see how it overlaps with Genesis 1. There we heard already about the creation of man, and now we see it again here. But we shouldn't think that they're in conflict with one another. Instead, what we have here in Genesis 2 is another angle, another way to describe God's creational work. And Genesis 1, we could say, focused on the big picture. It was a more cosmic view. Now we get a more focused view. And even in Genesis 1, there was this focus, even in that big picture, on mankind, as we saw, as the pinnacle of creation in many ways, created last there as God's image bearer, made to subdue and rule the rest of the creation. But Genesis 2 now focuses very much on particulars, we could say. We look at this creation of man and we focus especially on that. That is what gets filled out. And we get more details on it as we get the creation of a certain man and woman and not just creation of men in general. And so as we read our text, we could take verse 4 as a heading for what follows. The book of Genesis is divided by this heading, the generations of or the account of. And this is the first of ten of these that we find. If you quick glance over to chapter 5, you see the second one. This is the account of Adam. And so we have our first one. This is the account of the heavens and the earth. And then we move through as we go through Genesis. So we could say the storyline, the narrative really begins in verse 5. That is what we have. And as we look at verse 5, it's similar to what we saw with Genesis 1, verse 2. Genesis chapter 1, verse 2. There, it gave a description of what the earth was like. It talked it was formless and void, or it was unproductive and uninhabited. And here we find something similar. Verse 5, there was no shrub of the field yet, and there was no plant of the field. It had not yet sprung up. There's this two-fold lack. This two-fold lack of vegetation that is given. And then we're given the reason why, if we continue on in verse 5. Why is it there wasn't this shrub of the field or this plant of the field? And we find two reasons. Because the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground. And the best way to interpret this seems to tie these together. The first type of vegetation can be understood as wild vegetation. And what does wild vegetation need to grow? It needs water. It needs rain. But the second type of vegetation could be taken as cultivated plants. Cultivated plants. And what do cultivated plants need? They need a cultivator. They need somebody to work the ground so that they grow. And that's the second reason there. There were no domesticated cultivated plants because there was no man to work the ground. So we see that there's no wild plants, there's no cultivated plants. And this sets us up for what God is then going to do. Because what does he create? He creates the very things that we're lacking for vegetation here. And so, verse 6 is where we find the first one. Now, the NIV, as you see, has streams there, and in my version, at least, it gives an alternative to that. And partly, as the Hebrew word there, is somewhat uncertain. So, it says in verse 6 that streams began growing up, but an alternative that many translations go with is mist. And when we look at this word elsewhere, it refers to what seems to be clouds. And so in verse 6, it would be best to interpret this as there had been no vegetation because there was no rain, but now clouds began to go up. And they began to go out and they began to water the surface of the ground. And so that first lack is being dealt with. There was no wild vegetation because there was no rain. And now God has sent rain on the earth. And then in verse 7, he addresses the other lack. He forms man from the ground. He forms the one who would cultivate, the one who would bring about that cultivated plant spoken of. And before we go on, I think there's something somewhat profound just in that, that God made us to work. Maybe we don't like that idea. Probably our kids don't like that idea. But our work is an integral part of God's design of creation. There was this lack. There were no cultivated plants and God is solving that by sending man. Work is not a result of the curse. It was part of God's good creation. To be sure, the curse certainly affects our work, as we'll see later in chapter 3. But labor by itself can be seen as a good thing. And this is something we constantly need to remind ourselves of in our world roundabout, especially our world that's obsessed with amusement and entertainment. What is work? It's just that four-letter word that gets in the way of us doing what we really want to do, of really enjoying ourselves and having a good time. And I think we as Christians, we need to see work as really one of the primary ways in which we love God and love our neighbor. That as we pursue it rightly, it can be something that brings us great joy and fulfillment. Yet we know that in this world that is under this curse, it is true that it can also be a source of frustration and anguish. But work wouldn't have been that way for Adam. So God forms Adam to work. Now He forms him, we read in verse 7, of the dust of the ground. And He breathes into him the breath of life. And he becomes a living being. Now, as we read that, we might be tempted to think of man being made in the image of God, and that this is portraying that, how he's brought about into the image. The problem is that we find all of these descriptions also true of the other animals. That they likewise, in verse 19, are formed from the ground. They likewise are living beings. And we see elsewhere in the text that they likewise have the breath of life in them. And so this isn't so much about God making Adam in his image. It's talking about Adam being made a living creature. A living creature among the other living creatures that he's made. And we'll talk more about how God distinguishes him from the creatures when we look at the latter part of chapter 2. So God creates man, but he not only creates him, he provides for him. And we see that in the rest of chapter 2. And we see it through his provision in the garden, but then even more so maybe in his provision of a wife. And we'll focus on that first part this morning. God creates Adam and then the next thing we see is he makes a garden. He plants a garden in Eden. Notice that Eden, as it's described, is a larger area and the garden is within it. And in this garden, this garden in Eden or this garden of Eden, God makes this garden a place of bounty. He plants it, and what does he cause to grow? Every kind of tree that's beautiful and good for food. Think, you know, it's another thing to pause on. It's not just food that he gives, it's beauty. The garden, as God's bountiful provision, filled Adam's senses. It filled all of his senses. It was a place of wonder and beauty and not just a place to fill his stomach. But in this garden, we read of two trees. And we'll talk more about these trees in a minute. But they tell us that this garden isn't just a normal garden. God is doing something distinct here, something special. But as we read, on the garden not only had all these trees, verse 10. What else does it have? It has an abundant water supply. And that's no small thing. For those of you who've driven in the Central Valley, you've probably seen the signs. Food grows where water flows. And that's a truth we see around us. And so this was part of the provision for Adam that God gave. That there was this river right there for Adam to use. This cultivator who was placed in this garden had all the water he needed to do his work. The interesting thing is we don't have just verse 10. We read about these rivers for five verses here. And why is that? These verses seem to be telling us more than just about the garden's water supply. And in some way, they seem a little out of place. Maybe we should skip over them, jump on to more exciting stuff instead of descriptions of various lands and what we find there as these rivers meander around. Why are we told of them? Why is time spent on them? What do we need to know about these four headwaters, as they're called? Do they just color the narrative? A little extra flair, maybe? That doesn't seem to fit. If there's one thing that we find in the Old Testament when we look at its narratives, is that it doesn't give extra details. When you read a story in the Old Testament and it tells you something, you know it's going to be important. You know it's going to come up in the story. And I think that's something that's important to remember here. Why are they here? What is their purpose? Well, I would argue that the primary purpose is to indicate to those who are reading that this garden that he's describing, that this garden talked about, it's a real place. And he does that by locating it in relationship to other real places. Now the problem is that there's much debate on these rivers, on trying to identify them. Everyone agrees on the last two, and most of you probably know of them, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the two main rivers of Mesopotamia in modern-day Iraq and Kuwait. But the next two, the Pishon and the Gihon, they're much harder to identify. And we could say the problem with interpretation really starts in verse 10. If you look in 10, it says, A river watering the garden flowed from Eden. From there it was separated into four headwaters. Now often this has been taken to say that there you had in Eden this river and then it split apart into four main rivers that went to different places. And when people take it that way, they run into the problem that even the Tigris and the Euphrates, the ones that we know, they never come from a common source, a common river. They come from the same mountain range, but they certainly don't come from one stream. And so some have taken it a different way, and I think it's more helpful. When we think of rivers, what do they usually do? Usually, they join together and continually join together to form a larger and a larger river that eventually goes all the way to the sea. And this is what we find exactly with the Tigris and the Euphrates, that they eventually join together before they enter the Persian Gulf. And this take, if we say it, would be to reverse the common perception that as he looks at these four rivers, it's not them splitting out, but it's them coming in. He's looking upstream at the four headwaters, the four headwaters that feed this one river that flows through Eden into the garden. And I think it fits better with the language that we have here of headwaters. And as we look at the rivers then, it makes a lot more sense. People have taken these and they've shown that there's a great probability that we could identify them with four different rivers that all meet together right in what would have been southern Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq, Kuwait, and then join together and go through Eden and water the garden. And the author, as he tells this, we see he wants to identify these rivers for his audience. He wants them to know where they are. And so he gives different amounts of information on them depending on how well they're known. Because if you noticed, we get the longest description with the first and the least with the last. The fourth river, in verse 14, we just get its name, the Euphrates. Everybody knew about the Euphrates. That's all you needed to say. But the Tigris, the next one, well, that might be a little less familiar. And so we're told that it's by a shore. And then the same thing with the Gihon. It's related to Cush. And then the Pishon. It's related to the land of Havelah. A land that maybe they weren't familiar with, but they were at least familiar with what it produced. The gold that was there. The aromatic spices. The onyx stones. And so, our author here, as he's going along, really pauses for a good section here. So that his reader knows that he's not talking about a fairyland garden. He's talking about a garden that is by these rivers. These rivers that his audience knows to some degree or another. That it's located in a place. That there was a land Eden. And there was a garden that God made there at the beginning. Let us now go to the second point. God commands. So God's created Adam. He's provided bounteously for him in this garden of Eden. And we read in verse 15 that God takes and he places him in that garden. And he places them there for a purpose. We look at verse 15. The Lord God took the man and he put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to take care of it or to guard it. This is Adam's purpose and we can really take it as command. What Adam was to do there. What he was supposed to do. But beyond that general command we get verses 16 and 17. We get this specific command. Now these trees again come up. There is this specific command about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You're allowed to eat from all the trees. I've given you this great bounty, but this one tree, this one tree there in the midst of the garden, you may not eat from it. Because if you do, you will surely die. Now what are we to make of these commands? What is God doing here? And here I think it's helpful to remind ourselves of what we talked about when we looked at Genesis 1. Genesis 1, especially 28 through 30. There we saw God's command in a big picture way, we could say. We could look back to there. What does he say? Genesis 1, 28, God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground. God said, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground, everything that has breath of life in it, I give every green plant for food. And it was so. And so we see in there that God, He created man to have authority. To have authority over the animals. To have authority over the plants. And we talked about it, that He's called to go out, fill the earth. He's to go out, take over new areas, rule them, spread human society. One characterized by a rule that is modeled on God's rule. A rule that has true righteousness, true holiness, true knowledge. But now in chapter 2, are God's commands different from that? Is Adam just supposed to stay in the garden? Is that how we should take this? He just stays there indefinitely. I think this is where, again, we see the two different accounts. Genesis 1, we're given the very big picture. In Genesis 2, we see more the details and specifics. We find out here in Genesis 2 that that big call to subdue and rule, that it was first going to be applied to a garden. To this garden that God had planted. That it would be applied there first. And that in that garden, there would be a specific test, a very focused test for man. A test that would determine how man was going to use his calling to subdue and rule. How he would use that call. Would he do it as one subservient, one subservient to his God, his creator, his Lord? Would he do it in true righteousness, holiness, and knowledge? Or would he do it in rebellion? Would he break his command? And I think in chapter 2, that greater context of what Adam was to do isn't forgotten altogether. It's there, but more implicitly. And one way we could see that is back in verse 5. We had that two-fold lack. No wild vegetation, no cultivated vegetation. And then we read of God sending that rain over the whole face of the earth with the implied conclusion that that would also be where man would eventually go. The cultivator would go. And I think that we also see this greater focus even in the description of the rivers. There is a secondary reason there. They not only locate the garden, but they remind us that there is this world outside of the garden. This world that man would one day go into. This world that he would need to subdue and to rule after he passed the test in the garden. And as we think of God's commands here in Genesis 2, It's also helpful for us to remember that when we looked in Genesis 1, we said that man was working towards a goal. That there was something definite ahead of him. That there was a reward. He was made in the image of God. And just as God, through his creation days, worked and judged it good, And then at the end of it, entered into his heavenly Sabbath rest. So also, man was to follow that pattern. He had a work to go to fill the earth, to wait God's judgment of good, and then likewise, enter his Sabbath rest. And so if we remember that as we look in Genesis chapter 2, We're reminded that the Garden, the Garden of Eden, though it's very blessed, though it's very good, it's not heaven. It's not the final reward. It's not the reward for man's labors, but he was looking for something even greater. The new heavens and the new earth are something greater than just a restoration to this garden in Eden. And we can see hints of that in our text. Maybe the most clear way is, again, these special trees. We have all of these trees there, and we saw already the one would be a testing tree to test Adam. But there's also the tree of life. How does it function? Well, we find out later in chapter 3 that it grants eternal life. That there was something that Adam was looking forward to. That this tree symbolized this reward that he was going towards. And maybe even more subtly, we can see something of the forward-lookingness of Adam's nature. That he was looking for something greater, even in the way he was created. Look at, as we mentioned with verse 7, he's formed from the ground. He has this breath of life. He's a living creature. And as we looked at all of those, we said there's something he shares in common with the other living creatures. The other animals God has made. He is made distinct. But it emphasizes that he's made from dust. And it's not a bad thing to be made from dust. Let me emphasize that. That's part of God's good creation. But as we look elsewhere in the Old Testament and the New Testament, we find that dust always communicates something more transitional, something more temporary. That Adam, the man from dust, would have been looking for something more lasting, something more eternal. And this is what we see the Apostle Paul doing. If you want to look over in 1 Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, Paul is talking to the Corinthians and he's pressing on them that there is a real physical resurrection. And one of the questions they have is, well, we see bodies go into the grave and turn back into dust. How can there be a real physical resurrection with that? And Paul says you don't see one of the needed things. That the body of the resurrection is different from the one as first created. And so if we start reading with verse 42, So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable. It is raised imperishable. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. For it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being. The last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that, the spiritual. the first man was of the dust of the earth the second man from heaven as was the earthly man so are those who are of the earth and as is the man from heaven so are those who are of heaven and just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man so we shall bear the likeness of the man from heaven i declare to you brothers that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of god nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality. And as Paul is here contrasting, note verse 45. His contrast is not that between a sinful body and a glorified body. His contrast is between Adam as created. As he quotes from our verse here, Genesis 2, verse 7. And he contrasts it with Christ in his glorified, resurrected body. The first man, Adam, became a living being. The last, Adam, a life-giving spirit. And so I think we can see in this that even Adam, as created this man from the dust, was destined to become Adam the man from heaven if he obeyed, If he had kept that test in the garden, the perishable would be changed into the imperishable. And so, in chapter 2 here, as we look at God's commands to Adam, they really set before him two possibilities. Obedience that would lead to eternal life. Disobedience that would lead to eternal death. And Adam's choice would be revealed in the garden, through this tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And God's commands to Adam, and these blessings, these punishments that are attached to them, it's often called a covenant, since other similar relationships are called covenants elsewhere in the Bible. And it's likely that the Bible itself refers back to this as a covenant in passages like Hosea 6 verse 7. But it doesn't exactly matter what we call it, but we need to see that God's original relationship with Adam, that it's essential to see how it differs from our relationship with God now. How it differs from a Christian's relationship with God now. There is this major difference between God and God's relationship with his people because of the fall. Because of this disobedience that Adam would bring. Adam was created perfect. Adam could act perfect. And Adam, if he had obeyed perfectly, he would have received those rewards. That tree of life, the Sabbath rest. But once Adam sinned, he brought sin not only on himself, but all his descendants. He brought the guilt of sin, and he brought the effects of sin on all of us. And thus, we're born not as Adam was created. We're born sinful. We act sinfully. And we cannot merit any reward through our sinful actions. Instead, we stand in need of a Savior. We stand in need of someone to pay for our sins and someone to earn for us the reward of eternal life. And that is what Christ did through His life and death. Christ who is called the second Adam, the perfect Adam. And thus we need to contrast these two covenants before the fall and after the fall. A covenant of works and a covenant of grace. And we must not confuse them. Adam didn't need grace. He received God's goodness. He received his blessing. He received his beatitude. But he didn't need forgiveness. He didn't need salvation. And Adam in that covenant of works with God really shows us what Christ does for us. And thus in Romans 5 verse 14, Paul calls Adam the type of the one who was to come. What Christ would do. And us, under the covenant of grace, no part of our salvation can be based on our works. If it depends on us, we're doomed to fail. Our works cannot be the basis for how God relates to us. How either we come into relationship with Him or how we stay in that relationship. It's all of Christ. It must be all by Him. And this would probably be a good place to stop with the emphasis on our need for Christ. That for all who repent and believe, He's fulfilled these things for us. That He has fulfilled what Adam has done. That we're not only forgiven, but we look forward to the reward of heaven. But there is another issue we need to discuss with this text. An issue that is raised because of the context in which we live. And so the question we need to ask here are, are Adam and Eve meant to be taken as historical people? Or are they in some ways parabolic or literary figures? Is our text describing events that occurred in history, Or are we to take it as describing a general truth about mankind? And it doesn't really matter where we come out on that issue. And I raise these questions because recently, in circles quite close to us, these questions have been raised. The historicity of Adam and Eve, it's a live topic right now in light of various scientific advances. There's especially tied with the Human Genome Project. And maybe some of you have read about or heard about the recent controversies at Calvin College over two of their professors and what they wrote. And it's always proper for us to make sure we're properly interpreting God's Word, that we're claiming it teaches what it actually does teach. But on this issue, I think the Bible is quite clear. Adam and Eve are to be taken and read as historical. And before we look at the evidence, why does it matter? Let us briefly mention that. If Adam and Eve are not meant to be taken as historical, the problem is it's very hard to understand the fall as historical. And that has profound implications on our reading of the Bible and our theology, our interpretation of it. If there is no fall, then God created man sinful, or at least with a tendency to sin. And if we look at it that way, it becomes somewhat difficult to align with what we know elsewhere in the Bible. If man was never perfect, if he was never able to keep God's law perfectly, God created a world that needed to be saved or redeemed right from the beginning. And it's hard to understand how we would call this world good. And it's also hard to understand God's wrath against sin. And also the need for Christ's atoning sacrifice, his death. How does that fit in? if men and women were created sinful from the beginning. And so it matters quite a deal to how we look at the Bible, to how we think about God and his relationship with men. And so as we approach this, we'll mention a few points this morning. We can't look at everything. But I think one of the strongest arguments for the historicity of Adam is the testimony of the rest of the biblical text. Paul certainly believed that Adam was historical, that there was a historical fall. And it's very hard to read a passage such as Romans 5 in any other way. And we could go through other examples in the New Testament and in the Old Testament. And some who doubt that Adam and Eve were historical, they will grant that point. They will say, yes, Paul believed Adam was historical. But he was only going along with the common conception of his day. And we don't need to follow his example in that. I think that is very problematic. That gets us into much trouble as we think about it. Now another helpful study is to look at chapter 2 here and think about what text it's connected with. What's connected with the narrative of Adam and Eve? Can that help us to know whether we're to take it as historical or not? And as we read in Genesis, we read this connected narrative that it starts here and it continues through the rest of the book. And so, if we start doing that, we come to the question, where should we make the break? If Adam isn't historical, what about Abraham? And in what reasons do we have for taking him historical if we don't take Adam as historical? And the last issue we could mention here is what elements we find in the text itself. And this is where the rivers, I think, stick out. Why did he spend so much time on the rivers, you ask? Because I think that's a very important point for the author. That he is seeking, through this description of the rivers, to say that I'm not talking about an imaginary garden, an imaginary fence. But this is a garden that we can locate in space. This is a garden that is part of this world and the events that take place there are part of history. They are real events just as this garden can be located by these real rivers. They should be taken as real. Now in this I don't want to make light of how difficult this issue is and that many of those who think about it that I don't want to impugn their motives. But we must be aware of this. The historicity of Adam is a very serious issue that has very serious consequences in our theology. So we need to be aware of it, aware of that discussion and to guard ourselves against it. And so as we close, dearly beloved, we've seen that God created Adam, how He created him, made him to work, made him for perfection, to enjoy blessed fellowship with God and His Creator, looking forward to eternal life. And now we see ourselves sinful with our frustrated work, cursed by sin. We see our need to turn to God. To turn to the God who has provided salvation for us. The call to repent and believe in Jesus Christ. The second Adam who has earned eternal life for all who place their trust in Him. May your only comfort be that you are not your own, but belong body and soul in life and in death to your faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we pray that you will make us faithful. We pray that you will guard your church, that you will make us proper interpreters of your word, and that we will guard it from error. We ask that you sustain us in this world, and we turn and we place our trust and our hope in you. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.