Clough Genesis Lesson 10

Liberal’s assault on Genesis 1-2; the creation of man – Genesis 2:4-7

Turn to Genesis 2. Genesis 1 dealt with the creation at large, actually from Genesis 1:2 to Genesis 2:3, and now beginning in Genesis 2:4 we have the so-called second creation account. Now part of my job as pastor-teacher is to equip you so you’ll be able to handle yourself when you’re faced with certain attacks that may be made against the Bible. One of those attacks occurs just at this point. You may hear this in the college classroom; if you are a parent you may read this in one of the textbooks that your children bring home from school. The attack goes like this: Genesis chapter 2 and Genesis chapter 1 give contradictory creation accounts. There are two creation accounts given here and they do not line up logically, one differs from the other. Genesis 1, for example starts out with the universe in a watery chaos, so we have Genesis 1 speaking of water, it starts out, in other words, wet, and Genesis 2 starts out dry. Two different settings, it is said, for creation.

And then these critics will say to us that in Genesis 1 the plants and the animals or man are created in that order, but a careful reading of Genesis 2 will show that man is created, then plants, then animals, a different sequence, and therefore they argue this is a conflict. They’ll also tell us that in Genesis 1 God’s name is Elohim, and He is using that name exclusively there whereas in Genesis 2 the claim of Yahweh is given; His covenant name and they attribute this to different authors. The liberal critics from the last century and into the early part of this century held to what is called the documentary hypothesis. And this hypothesis stated that certain schools got together and the Old Testament was sort of scraped and accumulated together from these schools, and one school called God Elohim, another school called God Jehovah, another school called God something else. And these schools were known by letters, the letter being the first letter in the name for God: E school for Elohim school; the J school for the Jehovah school; the P school for the priestly school; the D school for the Deuteronomic school and these schools all got together and wrote, and so where we have conflicts in the texts we can explain them simply as products of different schools. Of course, this completely destroys any kind of coherent, logical, reliable Word of God.

We conservatives have never bought this and so we have an answer to this question of two so-called contradictory accounts. As Christians we can say well, I just believe the Word of God and let it go, that’s a true statement, but you ought to be able to defend yourself if you are an ambassador for Christ. When someone comes out with a statement that says dogmatically the Bible has a contradiction in it because of this, this and this, you ought to be able to nail them right there. Don’t you let them get away with this attitude and this assault, it’s God’s Word they are attacking. And we do not let it go lightly. So we have answers and we must know what those answers are. It’s too bad we have to waste time doing this before we get into the text but in order to prepare and equip ourselves we have to.

One answer that we have is that in the ancient world the sequence of thought always progressed in literature from the general to the specific. Now that’s not too hard to conceive of, after all, you know how your newspaper is written. When you pick up your newspaper and look at the headline story, how has that journalist composed the story? The first paragraph has the whole central message in it and then after reading, he drops the whole story on you in the first paragraph, then you come to the second and third paragraphs and then details are developed. This is good journalism, it’s because you may not have time to read this.

Now the Old Testament is written exactly the same way. First you have a general statement, then you have a specific one. Even countries outside of Israel wrote things this way. Egypt, for example, on the stelas, had their stories written with a general account first and then a specific, and we know from those cases there weren’t four or five different schools with conflicting accounts, sort of coming along with a chisel and chiseling out their part of the story and somebody else would come along and chisel their thing, and we have this kind of sandwich made up of different pieces. No, that’s not how it went. In other words, it’s a failure to grasp how the Genesis text was created.

So we say the first answer is that Genesis 1 gives you the general summary statement of creation; then Genesis 2 comes in, in good literary style, and picks up the theme of one of those seven days, the sixth day, and amplifies part of that six day’s work and this fits with the stream of ancient literature in the East.

A second answer is that in Genesis 2:5-6, when it talks about the fields, the plants of the fields and the herb of the fields, that that’s not talking about the same plants as were created on the third day. The plants of verse 5 are cultivated plants; notice what it says. It says, “plant of the field,” the shadeh, this is the cultivated farmer’s lot; it’s not talking about just every plant on earth; and then “herb of the field” or the cultivated field. So we deny the liberal contention, we say that the plants here are cultivated plants and of course they didn’t exist because there wasn’t a cultivator. These particular plants were begun in the Garden of Eden; we’ll have more to say on their origin next Sunday when we deal with the problem of where was Eden? But this Sunday we’re looking at the overall and probably we’ll get to verse 7.

Another answer we have concerns Genesis 2:19; the liberal says surely verse 19 proves that there’s a conflict. The liberal will take you to verse 19 and show you that the animals are there created after man of verse 7. And so they say, you see the sequence, you’ve got man created in verse 7, you’ve got the animals created in verse 19, not look at that; that’s a conflict, they say. Not so again, we conservatives reply, not so because a verb in the past tense has various ways of expressing itself. We used to know these before we had creative writing in English courses, but there is a perfect tense and then there’s a pluperfect and the pluperfect tense describes action that occurred prior to the past point. For example, before you set foot in the lobby this morning certain things had happened to you. And because certain things had happened to you, therefore you came in etc. etc. etc. And you might be telling the people a big story; you might tell them in sequence, let’s see, I did this this morning, I did this this morning, I did this this morning, by the time I got to church I had that finished, and now let me tell you about what I had finished, and come back t it.

Let’s see in the Bible where this occurs. We can watch another case and the reason we can do this is to show you that we conservatives aren’t fudging the text to meet an opponent. This is built right into the way the grammar operates. The pluperfect and the perfect in the Hebrew don’t have different expressions. You have to interpret the verb forms by the context in which they occur. So you can’t look for a pluperfect form, there is no such animal. But we can show you an illustration where it happens in a very famous place.

Turn to Exodus 19, just before the giving of the Law on Sinai. And in Exodus 19:2 it’s describing how the Jews “were departing from Rephidim, and had come to the desert of Sinai, and had pitched in the wilderness.” Now for all the world, when you read verse 2 it sure looks like it’s repeating the action or continuing the action of verse 1, but it isn’t. Verse 2 goes all the way back to Exodus 17:1 and in 19:2 the word “were departed” ought to be translated they “had departed.” The author, in other words, comes back to a previous act, picks up the narrative and now moves on. It’s just a retrieval device. And it’s the same thing, that therefore is occurring in Genesis 2:19 with the animals. There what God is saying is that He made the Garden for man, He planted it, He got it all set up, put man in it, and the animals that He had previously created He brought to the Garden. It’s that simple. Now everyone would go along with that if it weren’t for the fact that they had certain theological biases against an inerrant, authoritative, absolute Word of God.

Jesus, of course, takes both of these, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, as coherent. Remember his discussion about divorce? What does He say? Have you not read that in the beginning He who created them created them male and female, and then he says, and they shall be one flesh? Well, right in two sentences what has He done? He’s quoted from Genesis 1 and He’s quoted from Genesis 2. Now isn’t it amazing that Jesus didn’t have all the courses in higher criticism and he didn’t understand that Genesis 1 and 2 were contradictory accounts so he went on and quoted them anyway. We conservatives say that Jesus Christ is our authority in the handling of the text and we handle it exactly like He did, without benefit of higher criticism. So much for the liberal assault; Genesis 1 and 2 are not contradictory accounts.

We begin this morning’s exegesis with Genesis 2:4. We will progress to Genesis 2:7; this section of the text. “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens. [5] And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. [6] But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. [7] And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

Now this scene, and it’s a scene, it has to be pictured as a picture, is a very graphing one. It happened on the sixth day of Genesis 1. It’s going back to that series of days and picking out one act of God that was most important. Let’s look at verse 4 a moment, the introduction of this section. It starts out with this, “These are the generations,” in the Hebrew the word is toledot, which comes from the word to bear children; toledot is a signal in the Genesis text that we’re encountering a subsection. Notice for example, if you want to trace this down for a moment, turn to Genesis 5:1, we did this when we dealt with Genesis 1:1 but just to kind of lubricate things and review, remember how Genesis 5:1 reads: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him.” Genesis 6:9, “These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.” Genesis 10:1, “Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham and Japheth; and unto them were born sons after the flood.”

And so periodically in the book of Genesis we have this toledot, this break. The best interpretation of what’s going on here is that Moses apparently used sources. We don’t know where he got these sources, maybe the patriarch Abraham brought them down with him from Babylon, and then maybe Joseph kept them in the archives of Egypt, Moses had access to the archives of Egypt since he was a scholar as well as a military general, and then he took these things and developed the Genesis text. Of course he was given direct revelation to protect its inerrancy but it does appear he used secondary sources, and many of these sources…, the first one may have been written by Adam himself, and then maybe the next one by Seth, and maybe another one by Noah. We can’t speculate because we don’t have enough material to speculate. But anyway, the sources are there and each one of these sources begins, “And these are the generations.”

So beginning with Genesis 2:4 the liberals are right in one thing, that they recognize that there is another account here; of course. But they’re wrong in saying the account conflicts. We say the account is there and the account is arranged by the Holy Spirit to draw attention to man as the Lord of creation. Of all the things created in Genesis 1 the most important is man, and so therefore man warrants a second account, a review account.

Notice too that each one of these toledots, “The generations of the heavens and the earth,” speak of what comes forth. Remember back in Genesis 6 where it talks about the generations of Noah, all right, Noah has already been talked about at that point and so what happens in the book, “the generations of Noah,” is what Noah has produced in history, his progeny. And then the generations of Shem, Ham and Japheth don’t describe the life of Shem, Ham and Japheth, they describe the progeny of Ham, Shem and Japheth. And so using that analogy when we read verse 4 here, “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth,” we’re not going to read about the creation of the heavens and the earth because they’ve already been created. What we are going to read about is what they brought forth.

The author, immediately at the end of verse 4 draws our attention to this by reversing the sequence of the words. He starts the verse by saying these are “The generations of the heavens and the earth,” but then he finishes the verse by saying “the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” See him reverse it; he’s drawing emphasis and saying to us people, now you’ve looked at the heavens and the earth, you’ve got the big picture, now just forget the big picture a moment and let’s come on down, condense and focus in on one thing: earth. And I want to show you about one thing that happened in that one place, earth. So the title prepares us for what follows.

Now we must specify the relationship of Genesis 1:5, 6 and 7. To do that we go back to a slide which we showed you about the structure of the Genesis text, back when we were going through Genesis 1. And this particular structure will remind you of some of the things. Some of you who don’t know Hebrew, if you have trouble reading your English Bible, try that on for size; that’s what the Genesis text looks like. Now the structure. Genesis 1:1-3 has a tripartite structure in it; it starts out with an introductory summary statement in verse 1. Then in verse 2 it has a circumstantial clause. You remember when we studied that; a circumstantial clause has a Hebrew structure to it with the Hebrew equivalent of “and,” a noun and a verb. Then the main verb is in verse 3, “And God said, Let there be light.” So Genesis 1:1-3 has a tripartite structure: introductory statement, circumstantial clause, main verb.

Now the same thing happens with Genesis 2:4-7. We start with verse 4 with an introductory statement, there translated in modern translation, “These are stories about man in connection with the cosmos when it was created,” but that’s equivalent to what you just read. Then verses 5-6 refer to the circumstantial clause, again there’s the pattern, “and” plus a noun, plus a verb, and then the main verb occurs in Genesis 2:7, “and God formed the man.” So we have an analogous structure, and that now helps us come to the text and interpret it so we can be a little more precise about what’s going on.

Now we can interpret Genesis 2:5-6 to be circumstantial to the main action of verse 7. So let’s look at this and see what we’ve got. Whatever we put in verses 5-6 that is the circumstance of Genesis 2:7, Genesis 2:7 being the main emphasis of the author. If you were to dramatize this and most sections of the Old Testament can be dramatized, it’s very pictorial. If you wanted to dramatize it, verse 5-6 would be the setting on the stage and verse 7 would be the first act. So you’ve got the preparation. You’ll find the text of Genesis does this, it prepares you eyes, the eyes of your mind to see a picture and then to live with the picture and watch what God does with the picture.

Let’s look at Genesis 2:5-6 in detail. This is the stage or the setting for the action of verse 7. “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew,” skip at the end of that phrase down to the beginning of verse 6 because in there you have a parenthesis which I’ll explain in a moment, “but there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.” Now we’re going to give you the structure of these verses and show you something about them. Again to aid in our interpretation, what we’ve got here is what is known in literature as a chiastic structure. A chiasm looks like this: it has four layers to it; it starts out with A, which is a statement of something, a proposition, an idea, and it ends with B, which is another statement or an idea. And in the middle of a chiasm these ideas cross and you have the bottom idea repeated in some sort of a way at the second step and the top idea then repeated at the third level. And then finally the fourth level, so you get an A, B prime, A prime, B structure. And this is visible is you read verse 5 and 6 carefully.

Notice how Genesis 2:5 starts out; “every plant of the field,” and “every herb of the field before it grew,” in other words, the nonexistence of cultivated plants. This sounds awkward to us but that’s the way they expressed it. Nonexistence of cultivated plants equals A, so no cultivated plants. Now if this is a chiasm, then that should be explained somewhere in the middle. Well, let’s just skip a moment, we go from the top of verse 5 to C, section A. Now drop to verse 6, “there went up a mist from the earth,” and it literally “irrigated the whole face of the ground.” So B has to do with irrigation. Now let’s look at the last part of verse 5 and see if you can see those two elements reversed in there. Notice halfway through verse 5, “For the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth,” that answers to the irrigation of verse 6, that’s B prime; “God had not caused it to rain upon the earth and there was not a man to cultivate,” the cultivated plants. And that’s A primes.

So the chiasm now helps us come to an interpretation. And let me correct a false interpretation. Many people come and say look at Genesis 2:5-6 and they say what this is saying is that you have an absence of plants, simply because man wasn’t there, and rain and plants occurred after man was created, so you have this sequence: no plants, creation of man, rain and plants. Wrong. What you’ve got are two different things here being discussed, A and B. A has to do with cultivated plants and the author wants us to understand that before man was created on the six day there weren’t any cultivated plants in the fields; there were plants, wild plants, but not cultivated plants. These were created when God planted the Garden in Eden and not until. The reason is simple: there was nobody there to cultivate them. That has deep significance, incidentally, about man’s relationship to nature that we’ll conclude with this morning.

Then the second subject being discussed is water, the hydrologic cycle. How was the earth watered in these times, and the statement is made in verse 6, “a mist came up from the earth,” now that’s not once. In the Hebrew it’s an imperfect verb and it means it would keep coming, it’s a state; the mist would keep coming up from the earth and keep irrigating the whole face of the ground; it’s not a once and for all act, it’s a state or a condition.

Now what is this word “mist?” The word “mist” is a word that occurs only one other time in the Bible. Now when Bible students are faced with this, this really causes a jam because if you don’t know what a word means and it only occurs twice, how can you tell what it means? Did you ever hear somebody use a word and you know of listen to him and you wonder, what does he mean by that; well, if I just sit here long enough he’ll use it again and I can figure it out and maybe three or four usages I’ll understand what that word means. But the problem is if he never uses it again you’re dead. And that’s the problem with this word; we really don’t know what that word “mist” means. So just be careful, that’s a translator’s guess and it’s not dogmatic. There have been some recent research done on that word and it seems, if we compare it with extra biblical literature that it doesn’t mean mist but it means artesian wells; it’s the idea of the water spurting forth from the earth. Next Sunday when I deal with the location of Eden I’ll show you how in the world’s mythology man, after the flood, faintly remembered this watering because all the gods come up from the underworld, the gods of fertility, and they bring the water from under the ground up above the ground; it’s a memory of Eden and the hydrologic cycle there.

So the earth was radically different, that’s what verse 6 is saying. Today the hydrologic cycle occurs with the atmosphere as the conveyor belt, the rain comes, as you see here in Lubbock, the annual rainfall coming in on or two days and drains all off into the canyon and the rain is all over then for the whole year. So it runs off some place, it evaporates, and the atmosphere brings it back as a balancing engine and it rains again. And so the atmosphere forms a transfer system. Now in the hydrologic cycle before the flood it seems the Bible is telling us that the transfer mechanism wasn’t the atmosphere at all but it was the earth itself, that somehow the rivers, that by the way ran from Eden, showing that Eden was on a height of ground, the mountain of God, and the rivers flowed away from Eden to water the whole face of the ground. Well, if they kept coming up out of the ground of Eden somewhere the water had to return. And so there’s a strange kind of hydrologic cycle reported for antediluvian world system. It has implications, incidentally, for some geological problems associated with the flood. We’ll get to that when we get to Genesis 6.

So Genesis 2:6 is to be taken very seriously; it’s describing an important difference between that world and the world you and I know; “the mist” or “a spring kept coming from the earth and watering the whole face of the ground.” Now in the middle of this chiasm, now here’s the beauty of this author, he has set forth the stage with A and B, and in the middle of A and B he has placed the problem of man, and so now we are ready mentally for verse 7. He’s saying that they hydrological cycle was different and then the other missing ingredient, or the one that we don’t find, he said, was the fact that man wasn’t there; man wasn’t there to till the plants. So Genesis 2:7 is the creation of man and what do you see in verse 8? The planting of the cultivated plants in the Garden. See, it all flows.

So now we come to Genesis 2:7 and we want to pay very, very careful attention to verse 7. Verse 7 is the closest picture we have to our creation. What you see in verse 7 is your great-great-great-great-great grandfather; every person in this room this morning carries the genes of Adam. Notice I did not say carries the genes of Adam and Eve because Eve got her genes from Adam. This is why they’re bifurcated later in the chapter. There are no Eve genes original to Eve; Adam was the original source of all genetic material and this is why male and female today are said to be “in Adam” in their unsaved state, or “in Christ” in their saved state.

So Adam, then, is made. And we want to watch, just as though we were watching on television this act. So “God formed man of the dust of the ground,” the word for “formed” is the word that used in the Old Testament text for a potter’s wheel, and these giant wheels would be turned by a small pedal device, and the potter would stand at his shop and work with his hands this mound of clay until he produced a vase or pot of some sort. And the process of making this is called forming. And that’s exactly the picture the author wants us [to get] here. It’s a mighty picture; here you have God, God the Son presumably in His preincarnate form, standing on the surface of the earth picking up dust with His hands and building man’s body. You see what’s so tremendous about this picture is that at every other point in the Genesis 1 narrative, when God creates the plants, when He creates the animals what does he say? He says let the earth sprout sprouts, let the earth bring forth living creature, except when He comes to man and when He comes to man He personally designs it and it comes off His fingertips. That’s the picture of the creation of man. That’s what the author is saying, under the power of the Holy Spirit, he’s telling us, look, look how important man is, don’t demean his body; his body was personally designed by God, through God’s fingertips. Man’s body is something to be proud of and not castigated as the ascetic streaks go in Christianity.

So God personally forms the man, and from the dust of the earth. Now what is the dust of the earth? A few weeks ago we warned you about this passage and we said the theistic evolutionists, those people who are always trying to mishmash creation and evolution together try desperately to get around verse 7 because verse 7 causes them real problems. And so they try to make evolution occur inside verse 7; well, how they get evolution, they say well, you see what God was doing, He was taking the dust of the earth in the form of an animal body and then He worked with the animal body and finally got him up into some sort of an advanced state and finally, whoa, there goes homosapien. There’s only one problem with that interpretation. It says in verse 7 mad was made from the dust of the earth, and in Genesis 3:19 you’ve got the same author using the same word and I defy you to make dust in Genesis 3:19 equal an ape. “…for dust you are, and unto dust you shall return.” When we die do we go back to an ape body? Of course not! Obviously the author in Genesis 3:19 means what all of common sense would tell you he means. He means the dust of the earth; what else happens to a body. It doesn’t make any difference if you are buried in a $5,000 gold covered casket, you’re still going to turn into dust. Now if you want to have yourself mummified after the form of the Egyptians you can prolong it a little bit, but your body is still going to turn into dust.

All right, so then what’s the proper interpretation of Genesis 2:7? God is stooping down with His hands, getting the dust of the earth, a picture of what is made, what is the chemicals, where do the chemicals come from that make us, the calcium that makes the bones and so on. It’s the earth. And so He’s getting the chemicals out of the ground, and making man with it; tremendous picture here. Someone has once said that chemically, if you took all the cost of the chemicals in your body you’d be a little bit less than $10.00 and the material worth of your body is under $10.00. Of course with inflation it’s going up every day but nevertheless, that’s the material cost. However, if God were to present you with a bill for the feat the labor costs would blow your mind, so just because the material costs are low, not the labor costs.

“The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,” and then He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” You’ll notice at this point, we want to go back to man, Adam before he starts breathing a moment to show you something about his character. In Hebrew the word for man is Adam, and the word for ground is adamah; see, there’s a little pun here on the word; man is named for that from which he comes, and the most obvious feature of man is that he’s made of dust. I’ll show you that a little bit later; the Bible always makes us remember that: you’re made of dust, don’t ever forget it, says God. And Paul, when he writes in the New Testament picks up the imagery of this act.

Just to show you again that you can’t get slippery and slidey with the way you interpret Genesis 1 and 2 and hope you’re going to come out in the end with a reliable New Testament, because the New Testament presupposes a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2. Turn to 1 Corinthians 15; right smack in the middle of the discourse on resurrection what does Paul talk about. 1 Corinthians 15:45; we cite these passages to assure you and try to encourage you to see that the New Testament authors are remarkably consistent. They read the Genesis text just like the average Christian unschooled would read the text. “And so it is written,” and here he’s quoting the verse we are now studying, “The first man, Adam, was made a living soul,” see, and if you are a regular here I encourage you to take a yellow pencil and to mark very lightly your text here to remind yourself that here in the New you’ve got a citation from the Old, until we see how little of the New is really New.

But then Paul goes on. I Corinthians 15:46, “However, that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural….” Verse 47, “The first man is out of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven.” And Paul distinctly makes this categorization between Adam and Christ. Remember that’s the subject of the whole chapter here, 1 Corinthians 15, and in verse 47, the first man, Adam, comes forth from the earth, the adamah; Paul read his Hebrew and he knew Genesis 2:7 and he knew the force of that little pun on the word, and that’s where he makes his remark here in 1 Corinthians 15:47.

Back to Genesis 2:7. So God makes the body, He’s got it all formed. We don’t know how long it took, the nearest picture, if you want a real picture for your mind of God creating your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s body in the Garden of Eden, the great picture might be of Jesus when He knelt down in the dirt, and remember He spit into the dirt in one point in the Gospels and then He took the spittle with the clay and He put in the person’s eyes. Now He made sort of a mush with the dirt before He healed the person’s eyes. And while He was doing that He was fingering the dirt; now that’s the picture you’ve got here of Genesis 2:7; God fingers the dirt to make man. It ought to give you a sense of your worth to think that God did this.

So He “formed man of the dust of the ground,” and then after He finished He “breathed into his nostrils.” He can’t breathe into the nostrils until the nostrils are formed, “He breathed into his nostrils the breathe of life,” and then “man became a living soul.” This is central to the understanding of man for the rest of the Bible; a simple little formula, the body plus the spirit equals soul. The soul is the result of the spirit indwelling a body; that’s the proper sequence, or logical order to those ideas. That which corresponds to the Greeks, the Greeks call soul, if you read and Aristotle and Plato, they used “soul” for the spirit, the immaterial side of man. Be careful; in the Hebrew nephesh or soul does not just mean the immaterial side of man. There will be expressions found in the Mosaic Law, “my soul hungers for water,” it’s not talking about the immaterial side of man, he’s talking about his body. So soul includes both the material and the immaterial. Here’s the material, here’s the immaterial, and here’s their union. If you want a modern illustration of that you think of a light bulb; you have the filament, there the filament is the body, you turn on the electricity, the energy to it, there’s the spirit, and what do you get light? And that’s the soul; the soul is the result of energy, so to speak, flowing into the body.

Now because this congregation is filled with seriously questioning people, I want to convince you that when you read Genesis 2:7, I want to convince you that the spirit, that whooo, when God breathed into his nostrils the breathe of life, it means a literal breath, and that the way they visualize the spirit was breath. It came to me when I was going through Israel a year or so ago and there’s be signs about the winds on the road, and you look at the sign and it was the same word for spirit. And I did a double take, what’s this talking about spirit, is the spirit coming out of the hills? No, because the word is a double word, it means spirit or it can mean wind. You just have to decide on the basis of the context.

Now in Genesis 2:7 God breathed in; at that point the human spirit is there. Be careful, all through the Old Testament the authors do not speak in terms of abstractions. We love to have our abstractions because we get the zeal from our Greek background. This abstraction to get the soul here and have this theory of the personality and that theory of the personality, and so on, and this is good because obviously if you’re going to work with a person you need a theory of personality. But the authors of the Bible are interested in only giving you concrete observation.

So, for example, you realize there’s no word in the Bible for emotions? Not one! Well, then how do they express the fact they’re upset or they’re happy? They name body organs. So for example if they’re upset they’ll say my bowels churn or they’ll talk about their stomach, Paul does this in Romans 16, about Christians, talks about his stomach, his bowels, his heart, his kidneys. Well, what are they naming all their organs for when they could just call it emotion? Because if you will sit still a moment and think how you feel when you’re upset, where do you feel your upsetness? Don’t your feel it in your body? And if you are one blessed with an ulcer you know exactly where you feel it. So emotions are expressed physically and the Bible reports the emotion, not as an abstraction but as where you actually feel it.

Now the same thing here with the human spirit. The Bible doesn’t go on to describe 18 characteristics of the human spirit, but it does link the human spirit with the phenomena of breathing, just in out; that, whatever it is, is a function that shows the spirit is there. Now let’s look at some texts to prove this.

Turn to Genesis 49; in Genesis 49:33 we have the death of the patriarch, Jacob. Look how his death is described; “Jacob made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed and gave up the spirit,” …gave up the spirit, synonym for death; like James, a body without the spirit is dead.

Let’s turn to Job 34:14-15, “If he set his heart upon man, if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath,” you see how the spirit and breath are cited together? [15] “All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust.” And we could show verse after verse if we wanted to, you could show Ecclesiastes 8:8; Ecclesiastes 12:7; we could go to the book of Acts, Acts 5:5, 10, the death of Ananias and Sapphira, they gave up their spirits; Acts 7:59-60, Stephen gave up his spirit.

But let’s turn to one last verse that’s remarkable for its clarity of this, let’s go to Ezekiel 37:1; in Ezekiel 37 is this…it’s a prophecy of the restoration of the state of Israel, but we’re not today interested in the prophecy side, we’re interested in the imagery side; notice this imagery. It’s built from Genesis 2:7. “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones. [2] And caused me to pass by them round about; and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and lo, they were very dry. [3] And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, You know. [4] And He answered to me, Prophesy upon these bones: and say unto them, O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. [5] Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones, Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you,” and then what will happen, “and then you will live.” [6] And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

[6] And so I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a noise and, behold, a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. [8] And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them above, but there was no breath in them.” They were not yet living. [9] “Then he said to me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. [10] And so I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived,” so what is the feature? Same consistent simple picture. Nothing complicated, God makes the body and He breathes into it and it’s alive.

Now there’s some implications for this today and a question that we have to treat from time to time and that is the matter of abortion and the matter of whether the fetus in the mother is living or not. Now today, unfortunately the arguments become clouded because those proponents of liberalized abortion have ulterior motives, they basically are insecure people, irresponsible people who want to go out and fornicate and not pay the consequences and so therefore they have liberalized abortion laws. After all, there are some things that one can do to avoid becoming pregnant. But nevertheless, they want to have their cake and eat it too, as it might apply. And so we have the situation of liberalized abortion which must deny the value of the fetus; and so the value of the fetus, according to the Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973, is worth only that which society gives it. It’s a very revolutionary decision and law, because what that says, as I’ve said so often from this pulpit, is that the next thing it’s going to open up is euthanasia, that is, what happens to your 85 year old grandmother with crippling arthritis? What social value does she have, and someone some day is going to say she doesn’t have any so kill her, euthanasia.

But we have to say on the basis of the Word of God that the fetus has value but the question is what value? Is the value of the fetus identical to a living person or is the value of the fetus valuable but not quite that of a living person? And through this concept we’ve just learned in Genesis 2:7 we can answer it. Let’s turn to Exodus 21:22. Every time I go through this some pregnant woman in the congregation gets upset; just relax and hear me out before you turn me off.

Exodus 21:22-24, this is a famous passage in the Mosaic code; “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follows; he” the attacker, “shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. [25] But if mischief follows, then you shall give life for life,” now obviously whatever happens in verse 2 we can say this: you have a pregnant woman, she is assaulted and she is injured so badly that she loses her baby. That much we know. The question is what, in verse 22, is the word “mischief” apply to? Does it mean that when the woman is injured and she aborts that the baby, it’s a miscarriage type situation where you have premature birth, or do you have such a thing where the woman is assaulted and gives birth prematurely and the fetus lives, that sort of situation. Is that the case? And this is the argument about interpreting this thing. If “mischief” means the fact that the baby dies, which would mean then that “the fruit depart from her” is talking about premature birth, “and no mischief follow,” that is, the baby comes out all right, if that’s the situation then Exodus 21:22-24 has nothing to do say about the problem we’re discussing.

However, if instead of that verse 22 means “so that her fruit depart from her” and the baby is jettisoned dead, as an immaturely developed fetus, and you have a real true miscarriage, then the word “mischief” in verse 22 can’t mean the miscarriage because the miscarriage is covered by the “fruit” departing from her. In that case, then we would say you have the attack upon the woman, you have a miscarriage occur, and the man pays a fine for causing the woman’s miscarriage. However, the word “mischief” would men if the woman is injured, then the man will pay for that injury. For example, if the woman dies from the injury then the man will die in capital punishment. What this would mean is that the fetus under Moses is not considered worth capital punishment, or translated, does not have full soul life. And I personally take this position, although it has been challenged in the 1973 March issue of Christianity Today, in which a man points out that there is a Hebrew word for miscarriage which is not used here. However, there is one other place where this “fruit depart from her” occurs in very suspicious context.

If you turn to Numbers 12:12, here the same language is used and look at what the situation is. “Let her not be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half consumed when he comes out of his mother’s womb,” the word “come out” is the same word “fruit depart,” the idea again she gives birth, but surely in verse 12 whatever she gives birth to is not living, it’s dead, stillborn; in that kind of a situation you have an analogous type thing of an injury causing this situation to happen. So I don’t see how one can dogmatically say that miscarriage is an impossibility in Exodus 21:22-24.

I further find that in the ancient Near Eastern law codes that parallel Moses, their codes will parallel, you know, you have this provision in Moses for theft, you’ll have that provision for theft, and lo and behold, in Assyrian law code, you can read it in Prichard’s Near Eastern Text, you have a section there which talks about injury to a pregnant woman and it talks about “and when the injury occurs the man will pay for the fetus with his life,” indicating that in Assyria the fetus was considered equal to life. It’s strange that Moses, when he writes the same thing, seems to be more lenient than the more strict Assyrians.

Well, it’s a hint that the fetus does not have full legal status. But we have other sources of this. We point out, for example, that the baby doesn’t take its first breath until after it is out of the womb. The baby is not independently breathing and in that case we would argue, using the same picture of Genesis 2:7 and Ezekiel 37, that the baby, therefore, is not a full nephesh simply because, though his body is being formed, he isn’t breathing on his own, he hasn’t taken his first breath. And there’s something very, very special about that first breath; in the first breath the baby breathes bigger breath than he’ll ever breathe the rest of his life. And this is how pathologists determine whether a baby ever lived or whether it was born still; they cut out the lungs, or at least at one time they used to, they cut out the lungs to see if the lungs float, see if there’s a residual volume of air there because those lungs came out and in the womb were all completely empty and no matter how hard you may breathe you’ll never get rid of all the air in your lungs. It’s just impossible to do; you’ll always have residual air from that first breath. So there’s something special about that first breath that the baby takes.

All right, we find a consistency of usage in Luke 1:35, the pregnancy of Mary. Here she was told that in her womb would be prepared a body for the Son of Man, and in Luke 1:35, a passage which we read every communion service, notice the language that the Holy Spirit talks to her with. And keep in mind, Mary is probably pretty scared here; don’t visualize the virgin Mary as some adult woman, she’s probably a 17 or 18 year old little Jewish girl and she was being asked to bear the Messiah, fantastic responsibility. And in verse 35, “The Holy Spirit shall co me upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” And we could, if we had time, go to Hebrews 10:5-7 and show again there that Jesus Christ says “a body Thou hast prepared for Me.” And so the body is finished and then He comes to indwell.

Well, to show you that this is not some idiot interpretation that I made up or that Professor Waltke of Dallas Seminary made up a few years back, this goes way, way back, even into pre-Christian times. It was interesting that Israel has recently passed a liberalized abortion law. And when they did all the theology came boiling to the surface with various rabbinic debates. And in the Jerusalem Post of February 1977, one of the great rabbis said this; remarkable statement: There is a general [sounds like: hal lak ic] consensus,” that means tradition, [hallakic sp?] is the word to go, the way, “There is a general [hallakic sp?] consensus that until the head or greater part of the fetus emerges from the mother’s womb it is not nephesh, a living soul, and therefore the term [sounds like: ret zah], or murder, cannot apply.” I’ll read that again: There is a general [hallakic sp?] consensus that until the head or the greater part of the fetus emerges from the mother’s womb it is not nephesh, a living soul, and therefore the term [retzah sp?], murder, cannot apply.”

So we conclude then, on the basis of the biblical data, the fetus is not on this chart; the fetus does not have life equal to that of a full human being, or equal to its mother. However, does that mean we demean the fetus? Not at all! Turn to Psalm 139:13. Again as we have said time and time again from this pulpit, Psalm 139 is a psalm that ought to be studied by every woman who expects to bear children; it’s a central passage on pregnancy, verses 13-18. David speaks of being covered, “You possessed my kidneys,” literally, “You have woven my together in my mother’s womb. [14] I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are thy works…. [15] My substance was not hidden from thee, when I was made in the secret, embroidered in the lowest parts of the earth. [16] Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in thy book all the preordained days were written…. [17] How precious also are thy thoughts unto me.”

David is pointing out that during the nine months of developing in his mother’s womb his body was being put together for the job to which God called him. And therefore, husbands, when your wife is pregnant you will do your best to see that she takes care of herself and is protected because in her womb God… and the word is “embroider,” God is embroidering together a life for the future, a body that will become a living soul and will have to do a job, he’ll be called; God calls him to salvation, if he becomes a Christian he has a job to do. And his body is being created with that future task in mind. That’s what that hard to translate verse in verse 16 is talking about. David asserts that all the genes that were given him, his natural skills in music, for example, just didn’t happen to be there. This is why David formed the whole musical worship of the Old Testament. He was the one that got the Levitical choirs really organized; he was the one that organized the liturgy around the temple. He had a natural ability in music and his son did too because his son composed many psalms—Solomon.

Now, where did he get that from? Because he was put together that way. God does not put you together physically to do something that is totally mismatched with what He’s going to call you to do later in life. And so a child, during the time of the fetus is to be protected. So we therefore conclude that the fetus has value, important value, value next to a living thing but is not equal to the life of the mother.

What practical effect does this have? Just this: in an emergency, if you are a doctor say, a Christian doctor and you have a choice, look, this mother’s life is in danger and we have to abort at this point, if you hold to the classic Catholic position that the fetus is full life, the only way you can abort is to say and bring in the doctrine of lesser evil and say all right, as a physician I’m going to have to sin here, the question is, where am I going to sin least, I’m going to have to kill one life to save another, and so you place the doctrine in the position of having to sin. But if you take the position of nascent life, as I have pointed out here, which goes back to Judaism, if you take the position of nascent life you safe the doctor from this kind of decision; with reluctance he aborts but he’s not sinning when he does it if he does it to save the mother’s life. This is not a carte blanche for promiscuous abortions but it does keep a person who is faced with that choice of having to sin either direction he moves.

In conclusion we want to turn to Romans 8 because the subject really wasn’t fetuses; the subject was Adam, the creation of man. And Romans 8:20-21 we want to look at one principle in conclusion. Remember we said at the very beginning to keep your eye on those cultivated plants; remember we said that all the creation had been made except the cultivated part of creation…except the cultivated part of creation, the gardens, that which is pleasing; what did it await for? Man.

Application: Man is what completes the creation; it is man that brings creation up to its ordained beauty. The getting back to nature movement of Rousseau and others is not biblical; nature left by herself is wild and the Bible says that’s not the way God wants it, He wants it cultivated, used, beautified, not ruined but beautified. And who is the agent of beautification of nature? Man. That’s why the cultivated plants could not be put in and the garden could not be put in until man came. But what did man do? He fell, and in verses 20-21 you see the results.

Romans 8:20-21, “For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly but by reason of him who has subjected the same in hope. [21] Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” We could, in our great-grandfather Adam, have brought nature up to her full beauty; instead we rebelled against God and against His Word; we fell into sin, became depraved beings, and what did we do? We brought nature down with us; we ruined nature. We are the source of ecological problems; man is, because he rebelled against the instructions of God. You see, one way or the other, beautify or ruin, that’s the job; we do it with ourselves or we do it with nature.

Next week we’ll deal with what man did in paradise and where was paradise.