Morning again. It’s good to be with you. We’re going to do a little bit of more work in uh in God’s word this morning in uh Genesis uh chapter 2. So, we’re taking the summer to go through the first 11 chapters of the great opening salvo in our scriptures. uh Genesis 1-11, which just magnificent chapters that tell us who we are, how we came to be here, who our God is, what creation’s all about, what our responsibilities are. And just before we get into it, why don’t we pray together? Father, your word is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword. And uh we want to humble ourselves before it this morning. Your word is uh teaches us. Your spirit uses your word in our lives. And I pray that father whatever we’ve come expecting this morning uh those expectations would be exceeded as your spirit just applies the word to our hearts. So we thank you for it and we pray in Christ’s name. Amen. So so we linger together through these opening chapters. We’re filled with awe. It it guides and fuels our worship. Really humbling for us to consider the greatness of God in the first chapters of Genesis. And same time we’re very affirmed because of the value that God bestows on us. We’re the pinnacle of his creation and the focus of his love and his attention and his redemption. So chapter 1 gave us the account of God speaking uh the universe into being. He filled a a formless void with light and then began to organize things and separate one thing from another. And then some plants would be nice. So there were plants and trees and vegetation filling the earth. He placed the greater light of the sun in the sky and then the lesser light of the moon to govern the night. And he mapped out the stars, constellations. Then all that tremendous variety of living creatures began to appear. And he filled the earth with flying and creeping and lumbering and sprinting movement. And the seas teamed with all kinds of aquatic life. And birds of every color filled the skies. and land animals, mosquitoes, duck build platypus and uh mice and elephants and cicas, all the rest. And finally, we saw just a grand climactic creation of man, of male and female, called to be fruitful, to increase in number, to image God in subduing the earth and ruling over it as God’s representatives, as his vice regents on this planet. And we talked about how that task given to us to accomplish on earth is similar to what God’s other created beings called the Elohim or the holy ones or the sons of God, what they were assigned to do in the heavenlies. And all of that, everything we’ve talked about happens in Genesis 1. How do you possibly follow that up without the rest of the Bible feeling like a total antilimax? And when you begin the the Bible with such a big bang, where do you go from there? Well, chapter 2, at first glance, it seems like a bit of a repeat because verse 4 introduces the new content of chapter 2 by saying, “This is the account, the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” And we wonder, have we already, didn’t we just do that? Is this a review? Are we starting over? But we’ll see the author of Genesis, he didn’t lose track of where he was. He didn’t copy and paste things twice. In Matthew 19, Jesus quotes both Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2 as authoritative scripture. And while chapter 1 gives us kind of a wide angle macro view of creation, chapter 2 homes in on three key relationships that we have as a consequence of being the centerpiece of God’s purposes on earth. Chapter one is linear. It’s chronological. Chapter 2 is thematic because these three relationships, these are the pillars on which lives get built. One of those pillars is we’re called to rule. We have a unique relationship with the rest of creation. And two, we’re called to submit and obey. We have a relationship of subservience to our creator. And three, as we’ll see, in a complimentary relationship through which we can fulfill our mandate to be fruitful and multiply, we have a wonderfully unique relationship with a spouse. So our relationship with creation, with our creator, with our spouse. Genesis chapter 2, we’ll put a microscope on all three. Now, of course, we’re at a disadvantage as we do this because what we read describes life at its freshest and best, as it was always meant to be. None of us have ever seen the world like that. We’ve fallen into sin. So, our our chapter today points toward amazing plans and purposes that God mapped out for us. Also kind of makes us homesick for a place that none of us have ever known. God’s with us in this, though. I’m sure it’s no mistake that in Genesis chapter 1, God is repeatedly referred to as Elohim, and that’s the general and sometimes even plural name for God. But in chapter 2, we have the repetition of the compound term repeated over and over again. Yahweh Elohim. Our English translations translate as that is the Lord God. And Yahweh is that personal name that God has given us to know him by. It’s intimate. It’s relational. So, even though chapter 2 might remind us of all the mess we’ve made of these three relationships, Yahweh Elohim, our intimate father God, he hasn’t abandoned us. He hasn’t given up on us in any way. All three relationships can be restored and renewed and made beautiful again as we follow him. So, the first relationship we want to consider is just our relationship with creation. This is a relationship. We’re called to subdue, to rule, to exercise dominion over it. And the most miserable way that any of us can botch that up would be to miss the creator and worship the creation. Creation is not never meant to be worshiped, but it’s always been a great temptation for different peoples and different cultures. In the ancient book of Job in chapter 31, Job recognizes the temptation to worship nature. what it would mean if he actually succumbed to that. He says, “If I have regarded the sun in its radiance or the moon moving in splendor so that my heart was secretly enticed and my hand offered them a kiss of homage, then these would also be sins to be judged for I would have been unfaithful to God on high.” So in the world of Job or in the later world of the New Testament or many places on earth today, homage paid to the moon or the sun or to other elements of creation, it just doesn’t go away. Some traditional African religions, neopagan religions such as Wikah, the moon still can receive offerings or prayers. Indigenous religions might honor or thank the moon for the way it gives the seasons. And even major religions like Hinduism or Shinto in Japan have deities that are represented by the moon. Interesting. Tomorrow, July 20th, marks 57 years since man first landed on the moon, 1969, not to fall on their knees and worship it, but to plant a flag of dominion on it. Now, we can debate the appropriateness of one nation planting a flag of dominion on that lesser light that God gave to govern the night. But exercising dominion as God’s representatives, that’s the creation mandate that he has given us to fulfill. And I think with the moon landing, man seemed to get a lot of things right. On his return to Earth, Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on the moon, addressed Congress and he said, “It’s been my privilege to be the first man to set foot on the moon. I thank God and I thank you for giving us the opportunity to see some of the grandest views of the creator and the man who joined him on the surface of the moon that day, Buzz Aldron. He was an elder in his Presbyterian church in Texas. It was known as the Church of the Astronauts. And just before leaving the capsule to step out on the moon’s surface, Aldron asked Nassau in Houston for a few moments of silence, during which he observed a communion with the elements that his church had sent into space up with him. And as he parttook of the meal, he silently read the words of John 15:5. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. And it was then that Aldron followed Armstrong onto the moon’s surface. Now NASA avoided broadcasting uh that observance of communion. But on the return trip, the night before splashdown, there was again a live broadcast from the capsule. And Aldren took the opportunity to read uh something we read in our responsive reading this morning from Psalm 8. When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon, and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him? Nassau wasn’t prepared for that moment. And and Aldridge’s uh Aldren’s words did go out live to all the millions who are watching. Any relationship with creation that doesn’t honor the creator is, as Job put it, it’s a sin to be judged because it’s being unfaithful to God on high. So once we acknowledge that we’re placed on earth as God’s appointed agents, then it makes sense of the mandate he’s given us to rule and the work we’re to put our hands to. After taking his own day of rest at the beginning of chapter 2, which surely God models for us that that work is not all we’re created for. Chapter goes on to speak of God planting a garden in the east in a region called Eden. There was a labor shortage there. Verse 5 says that there was no man to work the ground. And although in every other aspect of creation, including the animals, God spoke them into existence. With man, we read in verse 7 that God went to work. He placed his own hands in the mud. He formed man from the dust of the ground, then got down face to face, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living thing. There’s an honoring and an intimacy reserved for God’s creation of mankind unlike anything else he created in the universe. And following that unique act of creation, a few verses later, verse 15 says, “The Lord God took the man, put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to take care of it.” So man was immediately assigned an active, not a passive role in regard to creation. Late John Sto. He was a great Bible guy, a great scholar, a teacher, also had a passion for what is known as creation care. That’s an area of study that our own John Wood sitting back there, biology professor, specialized in for many, many years. And one definition of creation care would be this. Creation care is the biblical responsibility to wisely steward, protect, and cultivate God’s creation in ways that honor the creator, promote human flourishing, and preserve the goodness of the created order for present and future generations. So, John Stodd tells the story of a British gardener. He was showing his pastor around the beautiful garden at the height of summer. And the pastor was just waxing eloquent about the glories of creation, the wonders of the creator. And the gardener eventually grew so fed up because he wasn’t getting any of the credit. So he indignantly said to the pastor, “You should have seen this garden when God had it to himself.” And Stodd goes on to say that that theology was correct. A garden is neither exclusively the work of God. It’s not exclusively the work of human beings. It’s the product of both. And without a human cultivator, every garden would just degenerate back into a wilderness. So Stodd warned, he warned against the deification, the worship of nature, but also the other extreme, the exploiting of nature. And he said, “Exloitation is not treating nature as if it were God, but it’s regarding ourselves as if we were God and doing whatever we want with nature.” There are those who, you know, have really taken Christianity and the Bible to task over God’s word to us to fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living creature that moves on the ground. There’s a man named Lynn White who he heavily criticized Christianity for insisting that it’s God’s will for us to exploit nature to our own ends. He said that Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt for its environmental carelessness. And another scholar, a guy named Ian Macccar, referred to Genesis 1 as three horrifying lines about man’s dominion that have been used to excuse the destruction and despoiling of nature for the last 2,000 years. He calls Genesis 1 a ghastly, calamitous text. But is it is that what dominion over the earth involves? It’s a very tender scene in in verse 19 of our passage where God presents to Adam the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and he gives Adam the responsibility of naming them. Naming something is surely an act of dominion never intended to lead to exploitation. You know there were some pastors in the 17th century who defended the entertainment of cockfighting and bear baiting. That’s where they would chain a bear to a steak and then have very large dogs attack it all to the entertainment of the people watching. Really cruel form of exploitation. You know, Proverbs 12:10 says, “A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.” Psalm 104, if you want to read it, it’s a very rich nature psalm that declares how God makes springs flow and so that animals can be be have their thirst quenched. and he gives grass for the cattle and how all living things look to God to give them their food at the proper time and God opens his hand and satisfies them with good things. So our our relationship to nature to creation is not one of worship. It’s not deification. It’s never meant to be exploitation. But we have this posture of cooperating with God to manage this vast array of resources he’s placed at our disposal. We manage and administrate. We want to honor the creator, want to promote human flourishing, and want to leave something for the generations that come after us so they can enjoy it just as we have. Having created the world, uh God could have kept its management all to himself. John Sto says he deliberately condescended to make us collaborators or co-workers with himself. He created the earth. He told us to subdue it. He planted the garden, but put Adam and Eve in it to work it and take care of it. As a result, we’re left with a hugely complex set of decisions to relate wisely to creation. What do we utilize? What do we leave alone? What do we extract from nature? What do we preserve? How do we reclaim land? How do we manage forests and fisheries so that all the following generations can benefit? How do we look after animal populations to prevent either extinction or overpopulation? And none of these are simple matters. But if creation care, being God’s representatives on his creation, not creation worship or exploitation, if creation care is our goal, then we can glorify God. We’ll never do it perfectly, but we can glorify God in the work of stewardship that he’s assigned us with. Now, much more could be said about that. Uh, talk to John Wood if you’d like a deeper dive into that subject. We need to move on to our second key relationship. be briefer on this one because it gets addressed much more thoroughly in the next chapter in John chapter 3 or Genesis chapter 3 and it’s our relationship of obedience to our creator God. Now that relationship of obedience is laid out for us in Genesis chapter 2 through the presence of this unique foliage. There’s two trees that occupy the middle of the garden. One being the tree of life, the other tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Tree of life was available to humans. Tree of the knowledge of good and evil was prohibited. And therein lies our inherent relationship of obedience to our creator. We don’t know how the tree of life worked. 1 Timothy 6 tells us that God alone is immortal. So we shouldn’t assume that Adam and Eve were born without any normal inclination to aging. You know, we have a family friend who worked as a receptionist in a clinic downtown where doctors did a lot of plastic surgery and Botox treatments to help keep people looking young. And the friend mentioned to my daughters just how uh great, how wonderful the stuff worked. She told them about one lady who after the treatments miraculously looked like she was 23 years old, but in reality she was an ancient 28. [laughter] really are we that desperate to cling to our youth? So, I wonder if Adam and Eve ever, you know, perhaps feeling a little 28ish, decided to go take another nibble from all those super strength antioxidants of the tree of life and and have their youthfulness refreshed. At [snorts] tree of life, it remained available until it was withdrawn from them after the fall of man into sin. But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it was off limits right from the start. And maybe we can hear uh the echoes of a modern voice at this point objecting to God saying, “Hey, hey, I didn’t ask to be created. I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t ask to be put on this spinning ball of space.” But despite having nothing to do with it, here I am. And then you tell me that Earth is my playground and that I’m basically the boss of it. And that sounds great. But then comes the bait and switch. And I knew it was too good to be true. Because now you tell me that to keep things right, I’m going to have to obey you and submit to you and deprive myself and relinquish my will to yours. That’s some game you’re playing here. By banning me from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you’re not letting me grow up. You’re keeping me down. You’re not allowing me to become all that I can be. Well, that modern voice, it may sound plausible until we start thinking about all the things that we never want our children or grandchildren to have to learn about good and evil. We don’t want them to learn what it mean how how it feels to be assaulted by a stranger or what it’s like to go through the hope and heartbreak of having multiple sexual partners or or the agony of abortion, the pain of divorce. We don’t want them to feel any of that stuff. So many things we don’t want our children exposed to or have their eyes open to when it comes to good and evil. Of course, as soon as Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tree, they learned too late that God wasn’t out to spoil their fun. God wasn’t out to take away their freedom. He’d given them everything. He’d given them life and a beautiful garden and fruit to eat and uncursed work to do and an innocent spirit and and even a naked spouse. How much better does it get than all of that? But that simple restriction placed on their lives also gave Adam and Eve the opportunity to learn learn something far better than the knowledge of good and evil. It gave them the opportunity to learn how to worship God. Martin Luther likened that prohibited tree to that was Adam’s church. That was his altar, his pulpit. Here he was to yield to God the obedience he owed. Give recognition to the word and the will of God. Give thanks to God. Call upon God for help against temptation. Worship in scripture should be thought of this way. It means to ascribe great value or worth to someone or something and then make sacrifices. Have it cost you something to keep that thing central in your life. So by that definition, you can look at that and we could turn a lot of things into our focus of worship. Our our career, our spouse, our money, our children, our sports team, our garden. We could assign ultimate value to any of those things and make huge commitments and pay an enormous cost to keep them central in our lives. But the Bible would have us know that worshiping anyone or anything other than God, it’s going to be glitchy. It’s going to be as unstable as a bad Wi-Fi signal. And it can be lost at any time. I mean, children, if they’re the focus of our worship, they can move away. We can lose contact with them. Careers can become redundant or or given over to AI. And money can disappear with one bad investment. And only the worship of God is stable enough to see us through all of life and beyond life into death itself. in the garden. Every time you can imagine, every time Adam and Eve walked past that tree of the knowledge of good and evil and made the sacrifice not to eat from it, it gave them an opportunity to keep God central in their lives and to affirm the ultimate worthiness of God. And without that restriction, would Adam and Eve ever have learned to worship? I don’t know if they would have. And learning to worship is so much more significant than learning the sad realities of good and evil. That forbidden tree, it didn’t restrict Adam and Eve’s lives. It enlarged them. By obeying, they could stand in a more mature relationship with the one who give them who gave them life and who called them to rule. So our passage Genesis chapter 2 provides insight into our relationship with nature, our relationship with our creator. Other key relationship in our chapter is that of Adam to his wife Eve. You know, many who have studied this passage uh have comment on the fact that all throughout chapter 1, God would make something and he would say, “Oh, that’s good. That’s very good. It’s good.” But suddenly in chapter 2 verse 18, we have God saying something’s not good in his created world. Lord said it’s not good that the man should be alone. I’ll I’ll make a helper fit for him. Now this happened after God had paraded all the animals in front of Adam to be named and says there was no suitable helper for Adam that was found among them. Not a horse, not a ferret, not [snorts] even man’s best friend, a dog. You know, we can all we we have great fun with dogs. They’re loyal and protective and affectionate and playful and spend a lot of hours with a good dog, but the fellowship we have with a dog is always at the dog’s level. You know, we can talk down to the dog. It’s never going to talk up to us. So, in saying that it’s not good that man should be alone, God declared something all of us instinctively know that single men need help. They need a lot of help. So, God looked at Adam and said, “I’ll make a helper fit for him.” And rather than be insulted by that word helper, uh, as if that’s a subservient role for women, Rebecca McGlaughlin points out that the term helper in the Hebrew Bible is overwhelmingly applied to God himself. He is repeatedly referred to using that same Hebrew word as our helper. It’s a it’s a term also used of military reinforcement. So, it shouldn’t be viewed as demeaning in any way. And when God says that Adam needs a helper fit for him, that helper fit is a compound prepositional phrase made of two Hebrew words that literally means this. A helper is someone who is like opposite him. Like opposite. Can you think of a better way to describe marriage than that? You know, in many ways, women are very much like men. In other ways, they’re very opposite. It’s like two puzzle pieces. And if they were identical, they wouldn’t fit together. But because they’re like opposite, they’re perfectly complimentary. Not only physically, although though that’s certainly part of it, but in many other ways as well. You know, last week I mentioned an interview with Louise Perry. She’s a self-described liberal feminist who writes a lot about men and women and and uh their different essential differences, particularly their sexual instincts and responsibilities. And she says that sometimes people look at her writing and they they say, “Well, she’s she’s indicting men. She’s just got a thing against men.” But she says, “No, she believes that there are all kinds of virtues that are found in men that are found more often in men than in women. She’s the mother of two boys herself. She knows the challenge of youthful male energy and the tolerance for risk that sometimes makes them do wildly adventurous things. She sees an energy in young men that needs to be challenged. And that the the solution is not to pretend that men and women are psychologically and physically the same. In an age where the internet offers an endless stream of male and female discontent against one another, Perry notes how crucial it is for men and women to have positive mutual exposure to one another just so they can keep one another dradicalized. She says she’s promarriage not not only because it’s a means of having children. It also allows her to look at the differences that clearly exist between men and women and rather than read them as antagonistic, read them as charming and interesting and funny. She says there’s no better arena to learn that than in marriage and become genuinely fond of the opposite sex. So maybe in the garden, you know, Adam, the single guy, he’s meeting this one who is like opposite him. Maybe he needed someone to ask him, “What are you thinking about right now?” And he would have to answer that. Or, “Where do you go for walks by yourself and and leave me with no one to talk to but these creatures hanging out by trees?” Or, “Adam, [snorts] would you say I look more 23-ish or 28-ish to you right now?” You know, and he he needed someone who was like opposite him. So in Genesis chapter 2, Eve had a very big day. She got created. She met God. She found a man. She got married. It’s a lot for a girl in any one day. Easiest wedding ever. There was no gown to shop for, no meddling mothers-in-law. And for the reception, they could just have fruit and it was it could all be done. That very limited pool of men in Eden, she even found a guy who could sing to her. Adam’s words in verse 23 are stated in the form of a Hebrew song or a poem. So we can imagine Adam in his best berry white baritone. You know he sets his eyes on Eve his wife. He says this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. And then chapter two gives us that classic statement on on marriage. Words that are quoted and strengthened and affirmed by Jesus in the New Testament. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother, hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. That’s God’s purpose for marriage. It be permanent. It persevere. It’s held together by such a strong superglue that it can never really be dissolved no matter what the courts or what public opinion would say. It’s not easy in our age to affirm that because we we have many different relational permutations and combinations. Not easy for people to see and affirm the all the advantages and benefits of what is sometimes sometimes dismissed as traditional marriage. In an article for the Atlantic magazine, sociology professor author Brad Wilcox points out what he terms the awfulness of elite hypocrisy in marriage. He’s a professor. He says he’ll ask his students at the University of Virginia if they think it’s morally wrong to have a baby outside of marriage. And typically, he says twothirds of the class will say, “No, it’s it’s not morally wrong.” Willox says they don’t want to say that they promote one or they they promote or value one family structure over another. And then he’ll ask those same students who are almost all unmarried. He says, ‘Do you personally plan to finish your education, work full-time, marry, and then have children? 97% of them will say yes. Then he’ll ask, “If you came home at Thanksgiving and told your parents that you or your girlfriend were having a baby, would your parents freak out?” Again, 99% of them said yes. Wilcox says those answers aren’t surprising because the great majority of those students about 80% come from an intact family with married parents. He says my class at University of Virginia is not exceptional. 73% of elite colleges and universities of the students naturally were were born are um were born to married parents who have since stayed married versus about 50% of high school seniors. At the same time, he says though, a majority of my students are liberal or progressive on many social issues, and they don’t want to be judgmental about lifestyles unlike their own. But there’s a problem, he says, with this disjunction between my students public family ethic and their own private family orient orientation. A disun disjunction he says he sees regularly in elite circles because voluminous research shows that being born into a married stable household confers enormous benefit on children whether the parents are rich or poor it doesn’t matter. Yet he says, “Many elites today, professors, journalists, educators, other culture shapers, they publicly discount or deny the importance of marriage and the two parent family and the value of doing all you can do to stay together for the sake of the children, even as they privately greatly value every one of those things.” On family matters, they talk left, but they walk right. It’s an unusual form of hypocrisy that, however well-intentioned, contributes to American inequality. It increases misery, and it borders on the immoral. Traditional marriage, it hasn’t lost any of its potency, any of its value, its right, its rightness, its resilience, its durability ever since God first spoke those words about it in Genesis chapter 2. And if anyone chooses to devalue biblical marriage, if any of us are nervous about how we’ll be viewed by others if we if we try to promote or value one family structure over another, well, if we do that, we’ll end up dishonoring God, and we’ll end up failing to look after the interests of our fellow human beings. So, our passage concludes with the words, “The man and his wife were both naked. They felt no shame. None of us can imagine a life without any shame at all. You know, you can imagine being without shame in your relationship with God entirely, or being even in entirely without shame in your relationship with another human being, even your spouse. I mean, for us, even in the best of marriages, there’s still part of us that wants to hide and and fears being exposed to our partner. Adam and Eve were they were so shameless that they could look themselves in the mirror without any regret or disappointment or self-loathing. None of us are able to do that consistently. But in Jesus, we have a pathway out of shame. You know, he met it headon. He disarmed it like disarming the bomb in our souls. Isaiah 53 says he came to earth to be despised. Hebrews 12 says he endured the cross. He despised the shame because Jesus took everything that you and I have to be ashamed about. all of our sin, all the ways we’ve failed God and other people, took it on himself so that when we put our faith and trust in him alone for salvation, all those toxins of shame can be drawn out of us. Romans 10:11 says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” Psalm 34:5 gives this beautiful image. Those who look to him are radiant. Their faces are never covered with shame. So any any shame that any of us have brought into this room this morning, God says those who look to him are radiant and their faces don’t need to be covered with shame. So we can all all of us can walk out of here without shame and with radiant faces with a a renewed commitment to looking after this creation nature that God has given us to look after. And we can rejoice that that uh there’s a worship of God that we have the opportunity to do. and uh and we don’t have to learn everything there is about good and evil the hard way. And if we have a spouse, we can just delight in the one who is like opposite us and who compliments us in all those ways. So, we have a lot to pray about or thank God for this morning. I just want to invite you to take some personal time with God the next couple moments. And here are some things you might want to pray about. You might want to thank God for the privilege of exercising care and dominion over his creation. Pray that you’ll do your part well. Thank him for receiving the worship that you have for him this morning and throughout the week. And praise God for the complimentary fitness of men and women. Thank him for the gift of marriage. And thank him also that because of Jesus, you can look to him and be radiant with a face that’s never covered in shame. Just uh whatever the Holy Spirit prompts you to pray of those, just uh pray for the next couple moments and then I’ll close us off.