Friday, November 30, 2007

God Will Provide

And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there He put the man whom He had formed. 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. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. Genesis 2:8-10

God is now providing everything necessary for His creation to be able to survive and thrive as a living being. The garden of Eden was a real, physical place at this time. It was literally a paradise on earth. In fact, the word for this garden in the Greek version of the Old Testament is paradeison, the word we get our English word paradise from. God made sure that all the senses of man were going to be engaged in wonderful sensing in this place. Notice how the trees were not only "good for food," but also were made, "pleasant to the sight." And not just one or two or three trees were provided, but "every tree" that could bear incredibly edible fruit! He also saw to it that the man would never have to worry about devising and maintaining irrigation. God created the irrigation of one large water source which divided into four rivers to provide abundant water for this special garden.

The love of God is shown to His finest and highest creation with this perfect provision for the physical part of man. He will provide later for the emotional and spiritual parts of man as well, but that is for another piece. Know here that God is beginning a work that He has never stopped. He is making sure that man has the best provisions available to himself.


Your Joyfully Loquacious Believer,
LEE

Sunday, November 25, 2007

The Great Potter forms His Clay

Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed unto his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. Gen. 2:7

In this passage we will find it useful to look at the original language so that we can get a more accurate picture of what is being given to us by God here. The word that is translated ,"dust" is a Hebrew word which does mean dust, but it also can mean "clay, earth, or mud." This gives us a better picture of what the word "formed" means, because it is strongly suggested that God is acting as a potter shaping His clay into the form He desires. Thus, man is not created as solidified sand, as a hardened form that is unchangeable. He is molded as clay that God, and God alone, can remold into a person of new life, as the New Testament speaks of. God is sovereign over the form of every person, physically as well as mentally and spiritually. In fact, the spiritual "molding" of the Great Potter is far more significant in our lives than anything else. That is what God does when we are re-created by His grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

It says here also that God "breathed" into man "the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." God's breath is the breath of the Spirit. In the NT, when we come to Jesus by faith that He died to pay the penalty for our sin, rose again from the dead and is coming again, we become a "new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17). God makes us into a new "living creature," which will live forever in soul, and eventually will have a newly formed and perfected body after Christ's return (1 Corinthians 15:35 ff.).

At this point, the man is first created just as God wants, and the man is in a sinless state. He is directly from God's hand, and there is no blot in him. Now we must understand that the man is not perfect and complete, as we shall see later. It simply means that the man is clean and pure of body and heart and soul. We need to understand this, because this is also what happens to the new believer in Christ. He or she is not made perfect, but that one is made pure and clean of heart and soul. And just like the first man, the ability to choose to sin is intact in the new believer as well. God understands this and provides, just as we will see He provided for the first human beings as well. For now, we see that the Potter has formed man from His clay, and molded him and made him alive. Each of us has our starting point with God's "molding" and making us alive with His "breath".

Your Joyfully Loquacious Believer,
LEE

Monday, November 12, 2007

Preparing a Place for Us

Genesis 2:4-6 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. 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, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground

Here we have the beginning of what some have called a "second" account of creation. However, though there are sharp differences from Genesis 1:1-2:3, these verses from 2:4 and through the beginning of chapter 3, nowhere contradict the "first" account. The idea that these are two mutually exclusive accounts of creation is the fruit of a liberal view that denies the Word of God came from God at all. It is the rejection of a truly Christian, faith-based, biblical worldview, and instead the acceptance of a humanist, critical, liberal worldview which believes the first duty of a biblical interpreter is to question the text rather than to search for meaning. What is happening here is no more complicated than God giving a more detailed account of creation that centers on the creation of human beings.

One of the things that we see here is the preparation of a place that God would prepare especially for His creation. When, in verses 5 and 6, it is described that there was "no bush of the field yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up..." the entire earth was not being described. It was instead, as the context will show, that God was describing the place He would establish as the ultimate paradise on earth for human beings to live in.

Your joyfully loquacious believer,
LEE

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Day Seven - The First "Holiday"

Gen, 2:1-3 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work He that He had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all His work that He had done in creation.

This day of rest can easily be misunderstood. It certainly isn't the case that God needed to rest because He was weary. He does not tire nor is His power ever exhausted. If we simply take the text on its face, we see no mention of God being tired or needing the restful seventh day to recuperate. So, if the reason was not that God needed rest, what was the reason?

God doesn't leave us wondering. The passage tells us that God "blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work that He had done in creation." The reason for the seventh day rest period was so that a day could be set aside as "blessed" by God Himself, and as we see later (i.e. Exodus 20:8) set aside for men to reflect on and worship God the Creator of all. It was a day that God defined from the very start as a "holy" day. Those two words together form a combination that we now speak as one word, the word "holiday." It should give us pause to understand that what we often think of as days made for us to engage in often questionable recreational pursuits were designed instead to be days of remembrance, reflection, and reverence of the very One who gives us all that we have to enjoy in the first place. I hope that the next time a "holiday" comes around, you will try at least in some way to make it a "holy" day as well.

Your joyfully loquacious believer,
LEE

Monday, November 5, 2007

Day Six - "It was very good."

Gen 1:31 And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

The third unique aspect of day six is that God pronounces it "very good." Upon the completion of every other day, God has labeled it as "good." Here, it is more than that. Why? The truth is, we don't fully know, we can only guess. It could be that the day itself was special because it was the day when all the work was done, and thus "very good" was an expression of completion. It could be that the phrase "everything that He had made" refers to everything made on that day, and not necessarily to everything made on all the other days as well. If that is the case, then the addition of human beings to the mix as God's crowning achievement might be what causes this to be "very good." It could be that God saw His beautiful creation perfectly expressing His loving heart and, for the moment at least, pure and holy and innocent and that was worthy of being deemed "very good." Whatever the case may be, this is the first and only time that expression is used with God as the source in the entire Bible. If we turn to the original language we find that the expression means that this was "exceptionally" or "especially, or "exceedingly" good. It was good to the greatest degree, and "in the widest sense," according to Strong's Hebrew and Greek Dictionaries. The universe had never seen this kind of goodness, nor would it be seen again. Nothing was corrupted, nothing was incomplete, no provision from God was missing. It was uniquely perfect at the end of day six. It was indeed "very good."

Your joyfully loquacious believer,

LEE

Saturday, November 3, 2007

The Dominance Factor

Day six is so remarkable and unique that it warrants a second look. In fact, we will spend one more post on day six next time. I want to look at another unique aspect of the creation of human beings on day six, what I call the "dominance factor."

God said to His newly created male and female human in Genesis 1:28, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

God the Creator specifically gave our ancestors dominance over all else that He created. That doesn't mean that we, as inheritors of this dominance factor, own what God created. Our dominance is not inherent, that is, we are not dominant over the rest of creation simply because we are human beings. The "dominance factor" is a gift granted to us by the Creator! What authority we exercise we possess only because God has granted it to us. It is a secondary authority, a bit like the authority that a property manager has over the property of his employer. We are stewards, managers, and caretakers of God's estate. Therefore we are responsible to care for the creation as best we can for the good of ourselves and the good of the rest of creation.

In today's world, there seem to be two opposite errors that are made concerning care for the creation. One is to elevate the creation itself to "godlike" status and engage in the popular liberal pastime of hyper-environmentalism. This position not only dishonors God, it ends up destructive of the very thing that it seeks to elevate. The second error is to believe that our authority over creation is a license to abuse God's creatures and created environment.

We should view our dominance as a privilege that we take seriously enough to truly care for God's created order. We should manage for the good of the environment and all that reside on this earth, which includes human beings as well. Yes, we have dominance gifted to us. We have the authority to use the resources of the natural world. We do not have the right to worship it, or to abuse the privilege God has graciously given to us from the very beginning.