Alright. Good evening, everybody. The common theme tonight has been it’s cold. Yes. It’s cold, and it’s gonna get colder.
So I hope you bundled up. And, make sure you leave a little water dripping tonight. It’s gonna be a hard freeze. So make sure you take care of those issues. And, looking forward to, you know, some good quality time tonight in the Lord.
So, if you joined us online, thank you for being here. If you’re here with us tonight, again, thank you for being here. We are on business meeting night, so we will be starting off our we’ll start our live stream and then shut it off at 07:00. So we’ll pick up with our business meeting then. So let’s go ahead and open with a word of prayer, and then we’ll get kicked off back into Genesis.
We hopefully will be finishing chapter one tonight and maybe even, getting into chapter two just a little bit. But let’s go ahead and go to the Lord in prayer. Father, we thank you so much for all the blessings that you give us this and every day. Father, the seasons change and as much as man tries to understand and predict weather and all of those things even the meteorologist will say to me only God knows for sure what’s gonna happen because they don’t know but you do and father that’s how it is with everything in our life. We don’t know from day to day what’s really gonna happen, but you already know.
God tonight as we go back into your word in the book of Genesis, and we’re still in the first, six days of creation that we’ve been studying. Father, just reveal to us the things that we need to see, that we need to understand and to know and to to hold as truths that we might be wise in our walk in you. Father, we ask all these things in Jesus precious and holy name. Amen. Amen.
Amen. Amen. Alright. So as those of you that were here last week or joined online know, we got down through verse 26 and then we stopped. Don said, tonight, you should have went on and covered verse 27, because it’s still talking about the creation of man.
I said, no. I stopped there for a reason. And so we look back at verse 26 and we talk about the fact that God created man in his own image. Says he created in his image and likeness. And we talked about that last week of how it’s in God’s image, but it doesn’t mean that we look just like him.
It means that we’re in his image. It’s also in his likeness. So we have some similarities, some things that we could ascertain about God from people, but we don’t look just like him and certainly we don’t act like God. But he did create us, in his image. And he said, let us, meaning it was the Triune God.
It was the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It was not, only one of the Trinity. All three were together in this creation. And so God created man and his image. And when he created us in that way, it’s something that we can look back on and understand that we did not evolve from something else.
That God created us. I wanna tell you, this is what a scientist said. It would take 40 different stages of evolution to form a human eye. What possible benefit could there be for the first thirty nine stages? Right?
And said, Darwin himself said, if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. At at, Genesis at University of California, Berkeley listed a series of complex structures from the hair of mammals that he thought could not have been produced by thousands of years of small mutation. The Darwinists, the ones that were supposed to be following Darwin’s, met this with absolute ridicule. So when they were met with proof that it couldn’t happen, they just got mad and said he couldn’t possibly be right. So when we look at all this, we understand that God created man.
Now God created man. Not only did he create man, mankind in his image, but he created mankind as a full grown person. He didn’t create Adam as an embryo. He didn’t create Adam as a follicle. He didn’t create Adam as just a tiny little baby.
He created Adam as a full grown person. So god created him. He didn’t evolve from something else. He was created as a full grown person. Now not only did god create man in his image, but verse 27 says, so god created man in his own image.
In the image of god, he created him male and female. He created them. Then god bless them, and god said to them, be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
So not only did god create man, mankind in his image, but he created them in their kind, male and female. So human as their kind, male and female, separate. Not the same. He didn’t create males that became females or females that became males. He created male and female.
Totally separate. There was not the same. He created them in their humankind of their own kind. He didn’t create monkeys that became people. He didn’t create, lizards that became people.
He created male and female of their kind, male and female mankind. So for us to understand that and to hold on to that is something that we have to do very much because in this world we live in today, the world is trying to skewer that view and take away the biblical worldview and to cause you to believe that it couldn’t possibly be true. That there’s all these other things. So if he created them in that way, then we wouldn’t find any evidence through fossils to the contrary. If they found evidence through fossils of some kind of creature that began to evolve into a whole different kind of creature, then that would be something that would say this couldn’t be true.
They have never found that. And according to what I read in scripture, they’re never gonna because that’s not how God did it. He created mankind on the sixth day, and he created them male and female. He created them separately. So, he told them to be fruitful and multiply.
Fill the earth. So all of these things that happened in as he created them, he blessed them. Now I want you to understand and see that the person, the human, is the only thing he created that he then turned around and blessed. He didn’t bless the birds of the air. He didn’t bless the fish of the sea.
He didn’t bless the the trees and the vegetation. He blessed the one that he created in his own image. He blessed man. That’s the only one that he blessed. So is humankind better than animal kingdom?
Yes. God created us to be over all of that. Is humankind blessed by God? Yeah. It says so right here.
It’s not animals kind that’s blessed by God. It’s humankind. God bless him. That’s the first thing he did. He blessed him.
So without his blessing, life wouldn’t only be, unbearable. It’d probably be useless if he didn’t bless it. Right? Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth.
God gave man a job to do right off the bat. Okay. I created you now. Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth.
God gave him a job. Man cannot fulfill god’s plan for him unless he populates it. Right? That’s what god’s plan was. Be fruitful and populate the earth.
That’s what we’re supposed to do. So then, you know, of course, you have the whole argument that people try to throw out. Well, that means that, the only reason people are supposed to have sex is because they’re supposed to be populating the Earth. But that’s not true. In fact, God gave mankind desire for sex that would help populate the Earth.
But the very first part of the union of sex was to create the bonding of the one flesh relationship. That one flesh relationship. That was the very first thing. And so when we look at all of this and we understand, if you look at the animal kingdom, the animal kingdom does not have sexual intercourse for, bonding. It’s strictly for mating for during the season that their body says they’re supposed to do that.
Human, people do not have a, what what they don’t have a season of heat. Although sometimes I wonder. They they don’t know. If they did, then we would know this is when we should be able to have babies. Right?
But there’s people spend a lot of money trying to figure out how we’re gonna have a baby. You don’t know. So the reality is God didn’t make humankind only to populate the earth. There are other things. And he created that union between a man and a woman as a one flesh bond.
And that’s why it should be treated as something that is precious and special and god given and not just treated as an act to have someone have pleasure. It is an act that is holy before god. And so he created it that way. He said then, in all of this, not only will you go be fruitful and multiply and sub fill the earth and do it, but you have dominion over the fish and the birds and the air. And he said in verse 29, I have given every herb that yields seed, which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed, to you it shall be for food.
So all of the things that God did, all of the stuff that he showed us, everything that he created, he put man over all of it. And then he told us that all of the the herbs and the and the fruit and the things that came from those, all of those things should be for food for man. And so if it’s for food for man, understand this. Apparently, before the flood, we were all vegetarians. Didn’t say he gave the animals for food at that point.
Right? He said he gave the herbs and he gave the plants. He gave the fruit. He gave all that for food. It’s later after the flood when god says these are for you.
That all these animals are for you. But he put us over the animals. He made us to work, the ground. He made us to do all of those things and to make, life to fill the earth. Not just in human form, but also in the plants, in the trees, in the animals, and all of those things.
We were supposed to be fruitful and multiply in all areas, not just in humans, but in everything. And so those are the things that we needed to do. He says in verse 30, also to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth in which there is life. I have given every green herb for food, and it was so. Then god saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.
So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. It was very good. Everything that he had done was very good, and it was the evening and the morning of the sixth day. So those are the six days of creation. People go back sometimes and they say, well, you know, then it turns around in in chapter two and it goes back and it starts doing it again and starts putting it in in different ways or what?
No. Here’s the way to look at it. In Genesis chapter one, it talks about the six days of creation. In Genesis chapter two, it basically clarifies the things that happened on those days. It gives you more information.
One commentator that I read said, it puts it more in Adam’s perspective of what happened when you get into chapter two because it gives you more information about the things that occurred, like the fact of how Adam was created and then how Eve was created and those things. And they were taken away, that Eve was taken from the flesh and so of Adam and all of those things. So it gives us a little more detail. It doesn’t change anything that happened in chapter one. It gives us a little more detail.
But the one of the most important things I want us to see in the first part of chapter two is this. Thus, the heavens and the earth and the host of them were finished. And on the seventh day, god ended his work, which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work, which we he had done. Then god blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it, he rested from all his work, which god had created and made. So several things.
He rested on the seventh day. Do you think God rested because he was tired? He didn’t rest because he was tired. God didn’t get tired. God got tired, we’d all be in trouble.
God didn’t rest because he was tired. He rested because he was done. He completed the work that he set out to do. He’d completed all of that and he rested because he was done. He did so for several reasons.
One, he rested to show his creating work was done. Two, he gave a pattern to man regarding the structure of time in a seven day week. Did you know that there was an attempt during the French revolution to change a week to ten days? There was an attempt during the French revolution to change a week from seven to ten days. So instead of measuring a a seven day week and a a thirty day month and they they were gonna change it to ten days and everything would be in tens, it failed miserably.
It didn’t it didn’t work. We’re on the seven day cycle. That’s how God designed it. We’re on the seven day cycle. So not only did he rest because his work was done, he also gave a pattern to give an example and, the blessing of rest to man on the seventh day.
Now there’s a lot of people that will say, oh, yep. And so because of that, that seventh day, that Sabbath day, then, you know, you’re not supposed to work. You’re that that’s it on that particular day. You’re not supposed to work. Well, here’s the thing that we need to look at.
Does God work on Sunday? God works on Sunday. Right? Yeah. God works he works every day.
God takes care of self every there’s no day that God doesn’t work. So here’s the thing. Instead of being so wrapped up in the actual day and saying, oh, on that Sunday, you’ve got a rest. The reality is the way that man was created, man needs a day of rest. Whatever day that might be.
Man needs a day of rest. He needs to take a Sabbath rest to unplug from the things that are the stresses in life and to worship and spend time with God. Whatever day that is. That’s what man needs to do. Man needs to rest.
He needs a day that he rests. Is it have to be on Sunday? No. It doesn’t have to be on Sunday. But in as much as possible, scripture also tells us to not forsake the gathering to believers.
So we should try everything we can to not have to work on Sunday, but we all know there are jobs that require it. We don’t have a lot of choice in this fallen world. That’s the way it works. But instead of arguing about whether you should not work on Sunday, we just need to understand that we need to take a day of rest. We need to take a Sabbath day of rest, meaning rest from the stresses of life and worship to God on that day.
Not just rest, but a day of rest and worship. Because when God rest, he blessed blessed man. He took that seventh day rest. And in all of that, he looked at what he had done, and he said it’s very good. It’s something that we should then worship him for all that he did.
So we should be worshiping and resting at the same time. God bless that day and he sanctified it. He blessed that day and he sanctified it. It says he blessed it and he sanctified it because in it, he rested from all his work in which God had created and made. So he blessed it.
He sanctified it. And so, therefore, we need to take that day, whichever day that that it is, and we need to use it to worship God and to rest from those things. In it, he rested from all his work. All that had been done, but I want you to notice one other thing here. Every day that it showed one through six, the passage ended.
So the evening and the morning of the whatever day. Right? It never says that on the seventh day. On the seventh day, it never says so the evening and the morning of the seventh day. It tells us in that that, he sanctified it.
His work was done. God had created it, and he rested on the seventh day. But it doesn’t anywhere say in there the evening and the morning of the seventh day. The description of every day ended with that, but the seventh day doesn’t. It’s because God’s rest for us isn’t confined in a literal day.
The reality is the rest that we seek is not in the day, but in God himself. That’s the rest that we seek. And so when we get to that point and we’re seeking rest, we’re seeking in God. Our ultimate rest is when we join him in heaven and we have rest in God. But there is no evening and morning of that seventh day because everything have been completed and that signifies the end.
And so it’s the rest that we find in God. So important for us to understand that that rest that we seek is not a, it is a a rest in a physical sense, but the ultimate rest is resting in God and all that he does. So we need to look at it in that way as well. So, verse four through seven. Let’s see if we can cover this.
Verse four through seven, it says this. This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth, before any herb of the field had grown. For the lord god had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground. But a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the lord god formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.
Okay. So several things that we wanna talk about there. First of all, understand that God made the heavens and the earth. And when it in this particular passage, when it says, when it says let’s see. Let me find it here.
And the Lord God formed man of the dust. And it says the Lord God, made the heavens and the earth. So in verse four where it says the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Is the word Lord in your copy of God’s word, all caps. That is the first use of Yahweh in scripture.
That is the first use of Yahweh in scripture indicating Yahweh God, the unspeakable name made the earth and the heavens. It it doesn’t say any other God. It says the Lord Yahweh God made the earth and the heavens. So it’s the first time in all of this passage that we see the Lord Yahweh used. And so, it’s important for us to see that and understand We get that Yahweh is the God that created all of this.
No other God, Yahweh, okay, is the one that created this. He says before any of the plant was in the Earth. So history began even before there was vegetation. There was just like a a a space and a watery globe. Right?
God didn’t cause it to rain. It basically was a thick vapor over the Earth, and there was a, evaporation cycle that would then turn into a cycle of dew falling down on the ground. And that was what was happening. There was no rain as we know rain. So there was a moisture that would form over the earth to cause plants to grow and that sort of thing.
But it was not a rain like we know rain. It was simply, like a mist or a dew that would fall, and that’s where all of it came from. So God had not yet caused it to rain. In fact, the rain didn’t start until the flood came. That’s the first mention that we find of actual rain.
And so he had not caused it to rain on the earth. He had not also caused man at that point. So things were growing and things were happening, and there was nobody working the ground. There was nobody plowing the field, planting the seed, doing anything. God was creating every bit of it, and it was all growing according to his design.
He was growing every bit of that. And then it says that god formed man from the dust of the ground. So here’s the one thing about that that I want us to really hold on to when it says that he formed man from the dust of the ground. He didn’t form man out of nothing. The animals, the plants, the earth, he spoke and it was there.
But man, he formed from dust. So he took the dust, the earth that he created, and he formed man from the dust. He didn’t just speak and man was there. He created literally created man. He formed man.
He took the time to literally think of it like this. He took the time to design every little element of man as he put him together, as he formed man from the dust in the image and likeness of God. He took time with all of that. It doesn’t say that he did that with the animals or the plants. He spoke and they were there.
But man, he actually formed with his own hands. He formed man from the dust. Now he formed man from, how valuable is dust? Right? I mean, look.
Dust we look at dust as the worst thing ever. Right? Nobody wants dust. You don’t want dust in your house. You don’t want dust on your car.
Nobody wants dust. It’s the basic element. There’s nothing spectacular about dust. And and basically, it has very little worth. Man alone without God is almost worthless.
God formed man from something that had very little worth. Man himself apart from God is basically worthless. Man dies returns to what? Dust. So God took him from dust.
He returns to dust. It’s what happens in between. Right? But God formed him and without God, he’s he’s worthless. With God and everything that God did is the most incredible organism that’s ever lived.
God did something else with man. After he formed him from the dust and he took up every little part of him and he formed the whole thing, then god breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. He did not do that with any animal. He didn’t do that with any other species. Mankind is the only thing that God literally breathe life.
The breath of God was breathe into Adam and he had life. He formed him. He created him. He did everything and all the stuff about him and then he still didn’t have life until he breathed into him. So he literally breathe the breath of life into Adam and he became a living being.
That word breath in Hebrew is, Ruach and the, in Greek is Pneuma, and it literally means he put his breath or his spirit within man. God’s breath, God’s spirit, he physically put in man. Nothing else. We’re the only one. Now think about that.
Would he do that if he didn’t have a purpose for every single one of us? He has a purpose for every one of us. He created us. He took time with us. He he formed mankind and, I mean, it even says he formed nostrils and then he breathed into his nostrils.
So everything about us, he formed. We’re still exploring the human body. We still don’t know how everything works. If we knew how everything works, nobody would die of cancer. If we knew how everything worked, nobody would have, lung disease.
If we knew how everything worked, nobody would have arthritis. Nobody would all these things wouldn’t happen if we knew how every but we don’t. We don’t know how everything works, and god created man in the beginning. And we still don’t understand it all. So god created us.
He breathes his own breath into us, his own spirit, and we became a living being in the image of god to worship God, to serve God, to have a mission from God. And he gave us that mission. And so when we read all this stuff and we stop and think about today, when people are arguing about man and and how man evolved or how, you know, all these things happen and and it’s different and, you know, all of this stuff. Go back to Genesis. Read what it says.
How was man created? He was formed by God. His breath was given by God. The spirit of God was breathed into man. There’s a purpose.
God created male and female of the species. He didn’t create one. There there are some that try to argue that god created Adam first, right, before he created Eve. And then when he created Adam, he was a, a being that had, basically, he was male and female. And for a long period of time, it was Adam was male and female.
And then he created woman. He took him out of Adam and made a female. That’s not what it says here. He created male and female. He created them separately.
He didn’t create one with both. He created them separately. And he created them for their own purpose. Each one, both of the same kind, humankind, but male and female, both for a purpose. The purpose to join together in one flesh and create life to populate the earth, to take care of the earth, to take care of the animals and the birds and the earth and everything about it.
That’s part of what we’re supposed to be doing. So So we’re supposed to be doing every we’re supposed to be over all of that. And so God did that. So when we hear all of the noise today and people are trying to distort the biblical worldview and replace it with some other type of worldview, go back and read Genesis. Just go back and read if we just you just go back and read the first two chapters of Genesis, it is as clear as it can possibly be.
It is as clear as it can possibly be. Why are we studying Genesis? Because the world is so confused and discombobulated right now and all these theories that are being presented as fact and all of this stuff that’s going on in the world has the world so messed up and so confused that they don’t even know what it’s supposed to be. Let’s go back to the beginning and see how it was created in the first place. So that’s why we’re back in the book of Genesis studying that book.
Sir? Hebrew word Mhmm. For dust that that’s used for that. The root is clay. Right.
So that follows the it follows that all the way through the bible. Right. We are the you are the father. We are the clay. Right.
They formed us out of clay, which it it it’s a central theme through the entire bible. Right. That’s exactly right. And, you know, the whole point that we have a hard time some I wanna say we, I mean, mankind has a hard time sometime understanding is that when God created us, He created us for His purpose. He didn’t create us for our purpose.
He created us for his purpose. We are creation. We’re not the creator. And so he gave us the ability to procreate because he said go and fill the earth, But we are not the creator. He is.
We are the creation. That’s right. That’s exactly right. It it because it’s right. And and the whole point is if you if you have a hard time with that, think about this.
If that wasn’t the case, then every time a man and a woman had sex, there would be a child created. But it’s not. It’s created when God chooses, when he decides and when he creates that person. He says, before you were in your mother’s womb, I knew you. Meaning he created everyone.
So wonderful way for us to, get back into Genesis and get through that first, instance of creation and go all the way through the first seven days. We will pick back up next week in, chapter two. We’re gonna pick up in verse eight. I believe that’s right. Yes.
Verse eight of chapter two. We’ll pick up with that, and we’ll continue on. Like I told you when we started this, this just study of Genesis will most likely be longer than a year. Okay? So we’re gonna be studying.
It’s gonna take a long time. But we’re gonna go through it thoroughly. We wanna study it. We wanna get back to the basics and understand what we need to know and not what the world tries to tell us. So we’ll be back in Genesis chapter two next week.
So for those of you who joined us online tonight, we will, be kicking off our business meeting in just a few moments. But I wanna say thank you for joining us tonight. Love to have you on Sunday morning, 10:45, in person or online, either way. And we look forward to you being there and joining in with us at that time. But for tonight, God bless, and good night.
