Episode Details

Remsen Bible Fellowship; 10/29/2023

Introduction

Genesis is the book of beginnings. So far, in the past four weeks, we’ve covered the first 34 verses, the prologue. Prologues are important. They set the stage, they set expectations, they prepare you for what is to come. They give you the baseline assumptions upon which the rest of the work is built. But, now that we have those foundational assumptions in place, we move into the body of the book. 

Man’s Importance

 Genesis 2:4, “These are the generations 

                  of the heavens and the earth when they were created, 

                  in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.”

First of all, I need to note the phrase, “these are the generations.” Six times in the first 11 chapters, and 12 times in the book as a whole, we will encounter this phrase. And it serves as the phrase that organizes the material which Moses is presenting. Remember that the Bible did not originally have chapter and verse numbers, and as a result those numbers are sometimes helpful and sometimes not. What is far more important for understanding the Bible are the internal ques given by the authors in terms of theme or even structure: parallels, chiasms, or what we have here: repeated words and phrases. The first “section” of Genesis falls from 2:4 through all of chapter four. 

And what is interesting in this section is that it is described as “the generations of the heavens and the earth” pulling our minds back to 1:1, but then the focus is laid squarely on one aspect of this creation: the creation of mankind. What we’re being tipped off to at the very beginning is this truth: whatever happens in the heavens and the earth, man is going to be in the middle of it. 

We already learned from 1:26-28 that man, unlike all the other creatures, is made in the image of God. And part of what this entails is his representation of God’s rule, which means that the fate of the world - heavens, earth, all of it - is intimately linked with what happens to the man and the woman. The fate of humanity has cosmic importance. Literally.

Man’s Purpose and Limits

In the following verses we read of the garden God created, and the special place of man within it. 

5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— 7 then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. 14 And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. 

15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” 

Before we get to the central theme in this chapter, let me hi