Sermon Tone Analysis

The Work of Man

Review

Last week we completed our study of the creation of the universe and all that was in it.

We saw how God created Light and then focused on creating the earth, then we saw God create dry land and the plants of the earth.

After plant life he created birds, sea creatures and mammals both wild and domestic.

In day six God created his most prized creation and that was mankind.

We also saw how God took a day to simply enjoy all that he had created it.

What we are going to study today is more specifically what it looked like when God created man and what his environment was like, what work God created him for and what commandment he gave him.

I titled today’s sermon The Work of Man because it’s two fold.

We are going to see how man is God’s workmanship or God’s work, and we are also going to see what kind of work God assigned to man.

The Field

History

Some people think that Genesis 2 is a different account of the creation of man apart from what we read in genesis 1:6.

This is not the case however.

As we see in verse 4, This is a history of what it looked like, it’s a reset, or a retelling of the creation of man.

If it was another iteration of creating of man, that would mean that Adam and Eve were not the first humans.

But even modern scientist that have been studying DNA have acknowledged that all the DNA leads back to one fraternal and maternal pair of ancestors for man.

Of course they believe other weird things about how those people got there, but the point is, what their researched has shown is that there was only one beginning pair of people, just like the Bible says.

In fact many scientist even call them the Adam and Eve pair, interesting, I wonder where they got that?

Moses went into more detail about man because the Bible is now going to focus more on man.

In fact this is a pattern that we see throughout Genesis.

After one account is given, the Bible will give us a genealogy or a history of people and then focus in one person or one family.

The same word for Genealogy in the Hebrew is the same word for History and generations.

It’s the word Toledoth.

Genesis is full of genealogies and often when we read through these genealogies we get board and we don’t want to read a bunch of names.

These breaking points in the scripture means that God is about to change the focus.

Why Does God follow a certain line of people through Genesis?

Well in short, God is laying out the road to lead all the readers to the Messiah who we know as Jesus.

I will explain this in further detail in the next few weeks.

The other fascinating thing we are shown in verse 4 is that God has for the first time revealed his name.

Remember in the previous chapter, the word for God was Elohim, which is actually a generic term for God in the sense of the one supreme ruler of the universe and creator of all things.

But now we get the name of God that is translated in the English as all capital LORD.

It’s translated as such because the Hebrew word is YHWH.

Some have chosen to pronounce this as Yahweh, others as Jehovah, some Ye-hoo-ah, and other people have even come up with other ways to pronounce it.

The reason that we don’t know how to pronounce it is that the Jews were so afraid to pronounce the name of God they just decided to call him “The Name” which in Hebrew is called Ha-Shem.

The other reason we don’t know how it was pronounced is that the original Hebrew was only made up of consonants with no vowels, no punctuation so we have to guess at what sounds go in-between the letters.

Sorry to geek out on you here, but you have to at least learn this once.

So all caps LORD is the name of God compared to Lord, that is translated as Adonai.

Adonai is more the word for what we would use the word Lord.

Like Jesus is the Lord, he’s the master of your life.

The interesting thing about Yahweh, is that you see the term Yah in most names in the Bible.

like Jerimiyah, or Jah-shewu, or Eliyah etc.

This is because people were giving glory to the name of God as they were naming their children.

So for instance those names I used Jeremiah means - Appointed by Yahweh.

Joshua means - Yahweh is salvation, Elijah means - My God is Yehweh.

The last thing I will say about the tetragrammaton YHWH, is that it is used 6800 times in the scriptures so obviously it is very significant.

Did you know that Jews today won’t say the english word God?

They still use the word Ha-Shem or they will spell it out G-d.

So that they are not writing the name.

Pre-cultivation

The history that God is unfolding for us here is that before there were cultivated plants or farming fields God had setup his own irrigation system for watering the vegetation.

Verse 5,6 shows us that there was no water cycle like we know of today.

There was no rainfall, so what God did instead was to have moisture or dew come-up from the ground and this was the water source for the vegetation on the earth.

The Hebrew word for field denotes a cultivated field which is no doubt referring to farming practices.

Pre-man

The other thing to note of in verse 5 is that this was the condition before man was made, notice it says that there was no man to till the ground.

This is clearly another argument to show that this isn’t a second creation of man, but that we are reflecting back before man was created.

So before Adam is even created, the word gives us a clue as to what one of the jobs will be for him and that’s farming.

Ok now the stage is set for man to arrive, Lets read how man was made in verse 7.

How Man was made

This more descriptive account of the creation of man is very intriguing.

Remember last week we talked about how God made man in his own image?

Well now we see man created at of the dust.

Both accounts are true, but this historical retelling is pointing us to the means of how it happened.

Last week was the News article heading

“God Makes Man in His Own Image!”

and this week is the narrative of how it all happened or the details in the article if you will.

Made of Dust

What is God communicating with us by telling us that man was made out of the dust of the earth?

First of all it states that we are earthly creatures, we are not extraterrestrial beings planted on this earth.

There are people who believe that we are lifeforms that were planted on this earth by an alien race.

This is a perversion of what is taught in the Bible, yes a supernatural being created man, and thus we are from out of this world.

But these people would not define him as God.

Also, The Bible tells us that man is a new unique species.

Notice that God didn’t create us out of plant life nor did he create us out of animal life.

This again shows us that man is to have dominion over those previously created things.

I’m blown away once again at the detail that God gives us to prove that we are not planted nor are we evolved from other life creations.

God chose the least precious of all materials to make man out of.

The second answer to the question is this.

Spiritual Being

Because we were made out of clay, there is zero chance for us to become a living creature, unless God himself would have given us life and that’s what we see in verse 7. God breathed life into man and man became a living being.

If you are snoozing through this teaching, wake up here.

This is very important to understand.

Your body is not that which gives you value, it’s the spirit that God has put inside you.

It’s your soul, it’s the real you, it’s the person that God chose to create.

This body, it’s just a ball a clay that’s going to fall apart and fall back into the ground again and turn back to dust and yet look at how much time we are consumed with our bodies.

Feeding it, clothing it, caring for it, pleasing it.

Yet, how much time do we spend feeding our spirit, being clothed in the spirit, caring for our spirit, pleasing God.

We live a dichotomous life don’t we?

We have this fleshly life that we have to please in order to survive, and then we have our spiritual nature that we have been given, and then given stewardship over.

Which is temporary and which is eternal?

In The Gospel of Matthew, Jesus said:

So The Bible makes it clear that our spiritual nature is much more important that our fleshly being.

The creation of Adam shows how we are God’s workmanship, literally formed and molded.

The Garden

Where was the Garden of Eden located?

We don’t know where the Garden of Eden was, even with the clues the Bible gives us.

One of the biggest challenges to knowing is that The Garden was destroyed in the flood.

Also we are not sure of the description given, if it speaks of the way the land looked before the flood or after.

It would make a lot of sense that the land wasn’t recognizable before the flood and after.