Clough Genesis Lesson 11

The environment man was put into – Genesis 2:8-14

One of the great specifics that we have seen in the chapters, and particularly last week we dealt with Genesis 2:7 is the creation of man. If Genesis 2:7 is literally true, then it means that man, and particularly man’s body, is the only part of creation that came in direct contact with the fingertips of God. And that would argue that man’s body and man’s being is the most complex of beings in the universe and the most detailed and most carefully put together. Before we go on to any further discussion of Genesis 2:8 and following we want to make some comment about implications of Genesis 2:7. We always try in these series to show you specific applications and implications of the text, because if we don’t we find people think they know the Word of God and then they go out into fields, like psychology for example, and they master their field and they have their Bible over here and they begin to live a schizophrenic existence between what’s going on in their professional field and what’s going on in the Word of God, as though, in other words, God’s Word has nothing whatsoever to say that would be of pertinence to the study of psychology.

So we want to bring out a recommendation produced by Dr. Paul Ackerman; Dr. Ackerman is the one who is starting a creation society for the humanities. Dr. Ackerman teaches psychology at Wichita State University, and he suggested that if the field of psychology, and in particular experimental psychology, and then later clinical, would adapt the creationist model they would come to some very startling and very optimistic conclusions about dealing with such things as learning disabilities, mongoloid children and so on. Here’s what he has to say:

In the field of psychology there has always been those, in recent years, dealing with the evolutionary framework that hold that man is just so much matter; that is, they are holding to a materialist reductionism; we reduce all reality down to matter and the chemical reactions of matter. Now within this area of thought there has been a big battle going on between those psychologists who say everything is due to your environment and the others who say no, everything is due to the genetic potential with which you were created or born. And so we have this group that says environment is the all-important thing and the other group says it’s the limitations of your birth that’s the all-important thing, and so the argument goes back and forth. Dr. Ackerman suggests the argument can be terminated once and for all by simply bringing in the creation model. To illustrate this he goes to the Mars Probe, and you remember when the planet Mars was probed by remote control, there was a vehicle that landed on the surface and you remember a few touch and go weeks when the little pod that they had built on this module wouldn’t extend out to get the sample of dust off the Martian surface, and at Houston and other places in the country the scientists were interested in trying to use backup in what they call redundant systems to work this leg out and they finally got the leg worked out because the vehicle had been, what they call, “over-designed” for its mission. “Over-design” is something that used in the military, it’s used in other areas where you have a machinery that just can’t fail because the mission given that machine is too critical. And so over-designing means that the machine has redundancy, that is, three or four systems are capable of doing the same thing, so if one fails we call on system two; if system two fails we call on system three.

Well, Dr. Ackerman says this concept must be brought to the study of man. Says Dr. Ackerman: The concept of over-design would be useful in formulating a viable scientific creation model for experimental psychology. If the mechanical body a person lives in were designed by an infinitely intelligent Creator, scientists might expect to find evidence of overlapping and redundant systems similar to those in the Mars vehicle. This would allow alternate modes of operation in the event of a failure of one or more key psychological or biological systems. And then to illustrate his point further, he cites case histories, amazing case histories, of children who have faced the most awful of defects, psychologically and physically and have triumphed. For example, a young student who is now at DePaul University in the north: in 1953 surgeons removed the entire left half of his brain to save his life. Now those who believe that all things are due to your heredity and to your birth insist that the brain centers for speech and language are all located in the left lobe, so they predicted that this boy would never be able to use or speak language normally, thinking in terms of this premise that everything is geared to the left lobe. But at age 9 his IQ tested out in the dull/normal range, at age 21 his verbal IQ in the bright/normal range, this is verbal IQ, words and language; age 26, superior range for verbal intelligence. Obviously the boy’s brain had some backup capacity on the right side to take over from the left when the left was completely destroyed by surgery. Now this is amazing that a person can adapt this well. In other words, God has some sort of backup systems unknown because this just blew everyone’s mind, when this boy could do this kind of thing; it violated every theory in the book.

Another case: a young mongoloid child, Nigel Hunt; when Nigel was only two weeks old his parents were told by experts that no matter how much love and care they could give him, he would always be an idiot; nothing they could do would alter that fact. Fortunately for Nigel his parents refused to believe the experts. With great patience the boy’s mother worked with the growing child. Making a game out of it she spelled words phonetically as soon as the boy could talk. Her devotion was rewarded, for by the time Nigel started to school his parents were told that (quote) “no child in his primary school could read better.” As Nigel grew older his astounding accomplishments continued. He taught himself to type using his mother’s typewriter. And then at age 17 became the first mongoloid ever to write a book and an autobiography entitled, The World of Nigel Hunt,” printed in 1967.

Well, obviously in both cases the evolutionary reductionists, the heretical idea of God, would have tossed these kids in the human garbage can saying they would be idiots for life, give up, there’s no hope for them. But the creationist, using the creationist model would argue there must be over-design, let’s push and let’s structure a system so we can bring out these redundant systems; on the other side, showing the tremendous advantage that there is at birth a great deal of in-born equipment. The previous two examples show adaptability after birth and after destruction. But here’s an example on the other side, showing that when we are born we come with fantastic equipment.

A more recently documented illustration can be found in the work of psychologist Gene Sacket; he experimented with infant monkeys and found evidence that they would have an innate ability to recognize in terms of visual preference their own species as well as react to certain social cues. For instance, two and four month old monkeys, that had never seen another monkey, nevertheless showed signs of fear when exposed to pictures of an angry and threatening adult monkey. Similar evidences for human babies have been shown by Franz and Bell.

So obviously once again we have the human baby born with a massive amount of God-consciousness; it’s simply false to argue like most educators argue, that you’re born with what they call the blank slate, and that therefore it’s important that the teacher teach you all the values and so on because you have a blank slate and unless anything is put on the slate, then there are no values put into the person. We would argue on the basis of Romans 1 that man from birth has God’s law written on his heart and so obviously we’d expect to find the baby coming with a lot more equipment aboard than the humanist, the reductionist and the evolutionist would think. And so Dr. Ackerman calls for the vigorous application of the creationist model in his field of experimental psychology, all of this coming by way of implication from Genesis 2:7. If God created by His fingers the body of man, then we have got to say either He created it perfectly, intricately, and with over design or He created it sloppy. Now which kind of handiwork would you expect from the God of the Bible?

This morning we go on in our study of Genesis 2 to the environment that man was put into. In verse 7 we study his creation, and Genesis 2:8-14 we study his environment. Let’s look, if man was such an object of God’s care, then where did man get placed; what kind of a home did God make for man. After all, we know Jesus Christ’s words to the disciples that “if I go, I will prepare a place for you, and if I prepare a place for you I will come again and receive you unto Myself.” Doesn’t it appear logical, then, that before redemption, as man was created, God would prepare a place for him. That’s the story of Eden and the Garden of Eden. Let’s read Genesis 2:8-14:

“And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there He placed man whom He had formed. [9] And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. [10] And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. [11] And the name of the first is Pishon; that which compasses the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; [12] And the gold of that land is good: and there is bdellium and the onyx stone. [13] And the name of the second river is Gihon; the same is that which compasses the whole land of Ethiopia. [14] And the name of the third river is Hiddekel; it is that which goes to the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.”

Now we said last week in discussing the problem of Genesis 1 and 2 that one of the frequent problems always has been, in studying the Bible, particularly dealing with the criticism of it, that people want to read the Bible the way a western writer would write the Bible. It wasn’t written by western writers and can’t be read that way. And so we said that Genesis 1 is the general, and you always have a general statement and then you have a specific development. This is the specific development; this is the sequence, just like modern journalism, rather than, say a different kind of style or writing.

Well, in Genesis 1 we have the general and in Genesis 2 we have the specific. In Genesis 2:8 we have a repeat of the same idea. Verse 8 actually is a topical sentence; it describes everything from verse 9 through verse 25. And when you read verse 8 you have to read it as a topical sentence. In fact, if you look at verse 8 carefully you’ll notice there are two parts to that topical sentence. The first part says “God planted a garden,” the second part says, “and he set a man.” Now look at how the author has given us this topical sentence and then precisely, very rigorously and clearly, in verse 9-14 he amplifies the first part. Verses 9-14 have to do with God planting the garden, and then verses 15-25 have to do with setting the man in the garden. So again we proceed from the general to the specific. It is the pattern of ancient writing. So looking today only at the first part of verse 8, because we’ll only have time to deal with verses 9-14, and therefore we’re not going to deal with the setting of man in the garden, we’re just going to deal with the garden itself.

We’re only concerned, then, in the topical sentence of verse 8 with the first part, “The LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden.” Now the question: the verb “plant,” “God planted.” The Hebrew tense form has to be interpreted, not only by the laws of syntax and grammar, but it has to be interpreted by the context and we said how valuable and how important it is. Is this to be translated by the simple past; is it to be translated by the perfect, is it to be translated by the pluperfect. That is a decision we have to interpret because how we translate that verb has a lot to do with how we understand the text.

Suppose we treat Genesis 2:8 with the verb “plant” as a pluperfect. Then we’d translate it, “And the LORD God had planted a garden,” meaning that the garden had been planted before the action of verse 7. But if we translated the verb this way we’d run into a conflict with verses 5 and 6 because in verses 5-6 it clearly states that all the cultivated plants were not yet, until after man was created. So the garden wouldn’t have been planted; so we can knock out the pluperfect as a translation and we can choose between the past and the perfect and really it doesn’t matter too much between those two. So we accept the usual translation of verse 8 that verse 8 describes action after the action of verse 7; man is created first, then the garden is planted, which means man in a spectator to the planting of the Garden of Eden. It means that man was created at a certain point, at a certain point in space, that he looked east, because it says the garden was to his east, and the man looked to the east, and there in the east he saw the Garden of Eden being planted by God. Now the exact scene is not described, the result of the scene is but how God planted the garden is not.

Let’s look further; man is created, the garden planted east of the situation. Now what does that mean? Let’s draw a map; this Sunday, next Sunday and the Sunday after next we will be amplifying features of this map. See how fast, those of you who have studied the Old Testament, see how long it takes you to recognize the shape that this map is assuming, for each Sunday we will add details of the map and then in three weeks you will see that this map, lo and behold, reflects a structure that ought to be familiar to most of you.

First let’s assume that Eden is some sort of an oval shaped thing; this is just an abstract concept of Eden; Eden as a region on the antediluvian earth’s surface. In that region to the east part of it was the garden. The garden is not identical to Eden; the Bible very clearly says God planted a garden “in Eden.” So the area of Eden is larger than the area of the garden. Now man was created in the western portion, apparently because the picture that you get in the text is that behold, to the east there is the garden. To the east of what? To the east of from where man is. So man is created first, then the garden.

Now we want to be careful because our liberal friends will come in and say ah, verse 8 then is a contradiction because verse 8 says that the plants followed man, where in Genesis 1 it says that plants were created on the third day and man on the sixth. Our answer to that is but the plants in verse 8 are cultivated plants; plants needing the care and culture of man. And so therefore there is no conflict; verses 8 occurred on the sixth day, it is part of the sixth day work. It’s man’s home.

Now you remember, from verses 5-6 that we inferred, deduced certain things about this garden. And we want to remember what we deduced because when we read and interpret the text about what the garden looks like we want to have all this background in mind. Remember verses 5 & 6 made two propositions; one is that there were no cultivated plants before man and the reason was very simple as it’s given in verses 5-6, there was no one to take care of the plants so why put cultivated plants needing cultivation before man who was going to be the cultivator. And then the second thing that we would want to look for in the garden is that it had a ground system of hydrologic cycle, based on the ground; that is, the water would come up from the ground, will spill across the ground, sink back to the ground, so your hydrologic cycle was involving the earth rather than today with the water evaporating and coming back down as rain we have the hydrologic cycle involving the atmosphere. There’s a different hydrologic cycle and the different hydrologic cycle is because there was no rain; there was a ground hydrologic cycle before rain. If we say that rain did not start until the flood or soon thereto, then we would predict that the Garden of Eden must be irrigated by a ground hydrologic cycle; that is the garden was so structured that it did not need rain; it had it’s own system of watering and preservation. A second prediction we’d make is that the garden would be, primarily having come after man, would be to be consisting of cultured plants.

Let’s look, then, at Genesis 2:9-14 and see the details of the Garden of Eden. We want to look at these verses; we observe the text and then we’re going to draw certain conclusions. And don’t think that by the end of this Sunday we’re all through with Eden; we’ll come back again and again to some of these features before the fall and even after the fall when men begin to worship, because before we depart, for the next two or three weeks we want to build a picture of what Eden looked like.

Genesis 2:9, “Out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food;” now remember, God is creating a landscape. One of the first acts of God observed by man, remember man is not conscious until the sixth day. All of God’s work on the first day, the second day, the third day, all the intricacies of calling the sun, the moon, the stars into existence, of calling life itself into existence, were unobserved by man. No man ever saw them. But the first act of God observed by man is landscaping. That is the first thing that our great-grandfather Adam saw in his life; he saw God landscaping an area with beauty and sustenance for him. It’s God’s present to man; it’s God’s house that He made for man. Two things about those trees the text emphasizes; they were ascetically pleasing to the eye as well as functioning with perfect nutrition. So notice that the two ideas of beauty and function come together in the trees of the Garden of Eden. People today get these things split apart; we think in order to make something work it’s got to be ugly or we think that that which is beautiful can’t function really right. Not to God; God says that which is beautiful and that which is functional go together, and these are the twin qualities of the trees in the garden.

Now as always, and again if you learn to read here by watching how the author takes you from the general to the specific, lo and behold it happens again in verse 9; there’s the general statement about all the trees in the Garden of Eden, and then at the end of verse 9 two specific trees are then labeled, talked about. One, “the tree of life,” and the second one, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” We won’t have time this morning to go into defining what those trees were, describing them and so on, that’s coming later, but today we’re just interested in their location. It says that both of these trees were in the middle of the garden.

So now on our abstract map of the Garden of Eden and the Eden area we have three points. We have man created on the western part and we have two trees inside the garden which is in the eastern part of the area called Eden. Then it says the trees being there had to receive some sort of water, and we know from verses 5-6 that there was no rain, so how would these trees be irrigated? The answer given in verse 10 is that “a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became four headwaters.” There’s been a lot of discussion about this verse, Genesis 2:10. There are those who say, thinking in terms of the way rivers do today, thinking of the Ohio and the Missouri Rivers emptying in and becoming the great Mississippi water shed, and we think of rivers converging and coming into one great river and then down here we say this is the mouth of the river, the delta part. But that’s the kind of thinking we have in our generation. It’s not the kind of thinking the way people thought in the ancient times and it’s not the kind of thinking of this author.

This author is describing a divergence of rivers, not a convergence. Notice the language in verse 10; it says that this river “went out of Eden and watered the garden.” Now again drawing our map, placing the garden as a small circle on the east side of the area of Eden, the river comes out from the west and it flows east and it waters the garden. And then verse 10 says, “and from there,” that “there” refers back to the garden, not Eden, “and from the garden it was parted,” so when the river crosses the eastern boundary of the Garden of Eden it splits and forms four headwaters. At the end of verse 10 the “four heads” are headwaters, it’s not talking about the rivers coming together and then flowing west; it’s talking about the river flowing east. I make a point about this because it’s going to come up again and again in the Scriptures, that men have remembered this; men have remembered it in ancient history.

Let’s look further, let’s see what Adam, because remember Genesis 2:4 was the start of a new book and presumably Adam is the author of this book, he’s describing what he and Eve saw; this is our great-grandfather describing, he writes in the present tense. “And a river kept going out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted,” the word “went out” is a Hebrew participle and he’s describing the river, he’s picturing it as he stands by this river and he watches it flow by him, he says it keeps coming out of Eden. Now it doesn’t require a genius to see that if the river is flowing to the east and then it parts into four areas that one immediate implication we can make about the Garden of Eden is that it’s on a mountain; it’s on a height of land because the river must flow down and away from the garden to get drainage. We must also say that to the west of the garden was a higher mountain, for the water flowed from the west into the eastern side of Eden through the garden and then back down. This is confirmed by other Scriptural evidence I’ll show you later.

Genesis 2:11, “The name of the first is called Pishon; is that which surrounds, compasses,” it means it flows around, Hebrew participle, “the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.” At this point we’re going to get into some difficulties geographically so don’t worry; it sounds like we’re heading for a contradiction. I want to expose you to the thought processes that will then tell us where Eden was and resolve the difficulties. So let’s go into the difficulties.

The first river, Pishon, take my word for it right now, was the one that went south. The Pishon, the word means leaping, and it must indicate the fact that this river fell rapidly; it was filled with rapids, it would mean a rapid descent out of the Garden of Eden heading south. It goes around a place called Havilah, and this place of Havilah is noted for three products: “gold,” and good at that, “bdellium,” which is a bum resin, and “onyx stone” is just the translator’s guess, there’s a mineral there and it depends who you look up and whose word it is; everybody agrees it’s some sort of mineral but nobody can really pin this thing down as to what mineral it was. So I’ll just leave it ambiguous, because that’s as far as I could find on that word.

So we’ve got two things, two of which we know: gold and gum resin, and this particular mineral. And it’s some place in a land called Havilah, and this river, after it goes… apparently it flows around it, so visualizing Havilah is a land which is bounded on at least two or three sides by the river Pishon. Now we know from the Bible a little about Havilah because it occurs once again in Genesis 10. Turn to Genesis 10, a chapter we’ll devote much study to when we come to it but keep in mind that the people in Genesis 10 are people who lived after the flood. They are the early postdiluvian patriarchs, and as such these men would go into zones of the new world, the postdiluvian world and they would name the zone or the region where they went after their name. This shouldn’t strike you as strange, you live in a city named for a man, Lubbock, Tom Lubbock, and there are many cities in the United States named for men. And so we find men’s names anchored the foundation of the early geography. Another famous illustration is Genesis 10:6, “the sons of Ham.” Remember Noah had three sons; we’ll explain these later, Ham, Shem and Japheth. Ham is the father of several races, the black races, the brown races, the yellow races and some white races and the red races. In other words, the Bible refuses to talk about man in terms of the color of his skin. The Bible talks about man in terms of his progeny, in terms of his ancestry. The Bible treats history genealogically, not by color. Color is a bad criteria to use to find out one’s ancestry.

So Ham, one of his sons, you’ll see on the list that Genesis 10:6 is Mizraim. Now Mizraim is the old-fashioned word for Egypt. So the land of Egypt is a man’s name; there was a man called Egypt, and so the whole country came to be called after the first man who came there. Now your modern liberal critic and liberal historian visualizes history as just chaotic, there’s no sovereign God that controls anything, the more chaos he can have in his system the more at home he is, and so he visualizes just sort of periodic migrations of globs of people that gradually take on this identity. This is what you’ll always get in the classroom. But that’s not how the Bible looks at history. The Bible says there were definite families and tribes that would settle first this area, then this area, then this area, and as they settled these areas they would name them by the grand patriarch, or the great-grandfather of this particular tribe. And so Egypt was named after Mr. Egypt. He was the first one there, and it was his clan that settled there.

Now along with that in verse 7 you’ll see that another son of Ham, along with Mizraim, Mizraim by the way was white, but Cush, the other son of Ham was black, and his name is the old-fashioned name for Ethiopia. So the country of Ethiopia lying just south of Egypt is called Ethiopia not because a group of tribes just gradually evolved an identity there; historically the reason Ethiopia is called Ethiopia is because of Mr. Ethiopia, he was the first one there. He’s the grandfather of the clan that settled there, and he was black.

Now Cush had a son, he had several sons, one of the most famous ones in verse 8 was Nimrod, but he had another one, Genesis 10:7, Seba and Havilah, and Havilah was the place named south of Ethiopia, where if you look on a map you have the Suez Canal and the Red Sea like this and here’s eastern Africa and then over here you have the Sinai and you have Arabia off here. So you have Arabia and Egypt; this area of Egypt is known as Ethiopia and Havilah was either the name of the east coast of Africa or the west coast of Arabia; this is the general sector in today’s world that was meant Havilah. Now the Havilah mentioned in verse 7 is presumably a black man and it’s a Hamite. But now if you drop down in the text to verse 29 you find under another one of the descendants of Noah, verse 21, by the way, is the break; verse 21 is Shem and he’s the father of the Arabs and the Jews, all the Semites, and under him in verse 29 is “Ophir, and Havilah,” so Havilah was the name of another person who was an Arab. So Havilah, according to the Bible, was named from two men; one was an Arab and one was a Hamite. So you have a flowing back and forth of the Negroid race and the Arab race in this area.

But interestingly from the rest of the Bible and ancient texts we know that this area, southwest Arabia and eastern Africa is known for gold, for gum resin, and for various minerals that could qualify for that third name. So we take then that Pishon was visualized as somehow having gone through this area. It is, in other words, to the south of Israel.

Now let’s go back to Genesis 2 and look at another one of the rivers. In Genesis 2:13 we have, “the name of the second river is Gihon;” Gihon is somehow related to the Pishon because you’ll notice, “the same compasses the whole land of [Cush]” what? Ethiopia, also in eastern Africa. So the Gihon and the Pishon are two rivers that some go south, are visualized in other words as being sort of south of Israel; they flow in that area. And they are rivers that surround these particular areas; at least they seem to be.

Now the next to in Genesis 2:14, “And the name of the third river is Hiddekel,” and some of you will have a marginal reference to your Bible, you ought to if you have a modern translation, that tells you that Hiddekel is the ancient term for the Tigris river, and the last is the Euphrates, and obviously the Tigris in verse 14 is visualized as flowing eastward through Assyria. So those two, in verse 14, are located to the north of Israel.

Now how can we pull this together? According to our map we have the Pishon, the Gihon, one is called the leaping and the other is called that springs forth, Gihon is used again for a spring in Jerusalem, the ancient city of Jerusalem. So these rivers must have descended quite rapidly through mountainous terrain and flowed out around this land called Havilah, and the Gihon around a land called Ethiopia. And we visualize the other two, the Tigris and the Euphrates, as being two rivers that came out of Eden and flowed to a place called Assyria.

Now we come to the three theories of the location of Eden. Obviously we only accept one of these but I show you the other two for a mental exercise, just to show you you’ve got to go through a process here to visualize where Eden was. The first theory we can call the theory of the liberals. The most ardent proponent of this theory is W. F. Albright of Johns Hopkins, America’s father and dean of archeology. Dr. Albright wrote in The American Journal of Semitic Languages an article in which he tried to pin down the location of Eden. Said Dr. Albright: “Eden” according to theory one, “is a myth, that is, it literally doesn’t exist anywhere except in the psyche of man. Somewhere,” he says, “and for unknown reasons, that all men remember this strange place called Eden. Men are always seeking to put Eden somewhere; it stems from their inner subconscious, they can’t help it, it just comes up.” And so Dr. Albright phenomenal evidences of this, things like this: “If you study the myths of the ancient Near East you discover that they thought that the land of eternal life was always the place from which the rivers came. The rivers would be visualized as coming up from underground in the underworld of the gods and goddesses and that would be the place to go if you wanted eternal life.”

And one very famous story of this you can read for yourself in Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Text is A Tale of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is a hero in the ancient Mesopotamian world and he keeps following the Tigris and Euphrates River up, up, up until you know where the Tigris-Euphrates headwaters are up in the mountains, really quite near Mount Ararat. And so Gilgamesh follows this up in a long journey and the story is almost like Homer’s Odyssey, he goes through one thing after another and finally he meets, at the headwaters of the river, it’s a place called the Mouth of two rivers, and he goes into this place and there he discovers Utnapishtim, which is the Sumerian counterpart to Noah. And there he finds eternal life, I forget the story, it’s been a long time since I read it, he leaves the place and never stays there but that is the place where eternal life is, it’s the mouth in the two rivers.

Now says Albright, obviously what happened, thinking that the Tigris-Euphrates River, and they didn’t know the headwater area up here in the mountains, and so as the early Sumerians became more knowledgeable and the traders went upstream they found out hey, these rivers aren’t coming out of the ground, they’re just arising from rain in the highlands. And so they translated the mouth of two rivers to be a mythical non-existent place, just visualizing in their mind that these rivers somehow just went on and on and on forever, and eventually came out of this hole in the ground.

And then Albright traces the fact that in Africa the Nile was said to arise from two sources; today we know that as the Blue and White Nile, but in those days they thought because of a certain counter-current at a place called Elephantine at the first cataract of the Nile that the Nile arose from a god who stayed there and on the iconography and the pottery there’s be the god holding a vase and out of the vase would come the two rivers. And Albright was able to trace this artistic motif into Babylon and he found there the same thing, except in some places there’d be a goddess and she would be standing holding the vase and out of the vase would come four rivers and at the goddess’s feet would be a serpent. Now he would say see, that’s the general symbols of ancient Near Eastern mythology and the Bible writer just borrowed those symbols and put together this very interesting story.

Well, we as Christians would say no-no Mr. Albright, what those myths are a distorted memory of what really happened; think for a moment of a goddess, a goddess of fertility, doesn’t this remind you of Eve, the mother of all living who holds the vase from which comes the four waters, she was the mother of all living from Paradise and they remember the fact that water, the symbol of life, flows from Eve, and it flows in four directions because of the four rivers that man knows deep down in his subconscious, if there is such a thing as a collective subconscious, we all deep down in our being remember Paradise through the experience of out great-great grandfather Adam. And so the four show up and at the goddess’s feet to be the serpent and you can obviously know what that is, and it was Eve who was seduced by the serpent, and so we don’t hold, we don’t laugh at the mythologies of the ancient peoples; those people were remembering something, the tragedy was they did not have it in their Bible to write down and fix their memory and so as father told son, to son, to son, on down, the tale became distorted but nevertheless there are elements of truth in it. So Albright’s theory we have to dismiss but we say Dr. Albright has recovered for us some very interesting material.

Now let’s go to theory two; theory two doesn’t say that Eden is mythological at all. This one was in great popularity in the 19^th century, promoted largely by Dr. Keil, the man who is the author of many of the Old Testament commentaries we use. Dr. Keil said look, we know from a map today, if this is Anatolia or Turkey, and this is the eastern end of the Mediterranean and Ararat is there, we know that the headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates River are up in that area. Now why we can’t we look for two rivers that would correspond to the Pishon and the Gihon somewhere near there. And he found what he thought were two rivers here that flowed into the Black Sea and called those the Gihon and the Pishon, and found that this area had a name which, if you manipulated it enough you could get Havilah and Cush out of it. Well, it was interesting but the weakness of Keil’s theory was that number one the flood would [tape slips] terribly since that time and number two, he had to stretch simple phonetics and language to get his point across. So we have to dismiss theory two which leaves us with the last one.

And what is the last theory? The last theory is that the entire antediluvian world was changed; changed radically and that Eden was located on a mountain in that ancient world; Eden was on a height of land and it gently sloped to the east; on this height of land somewhere back here water came out, remembered, as we’ll discover later, in certain biblical texts as the navel of the earth. And the water ascended out of this place, flowed gently down the slope through the garden God had planted, and from there it parted into four rivers that went and watered the earth.

How do we explain, then, these names? It’s easy; the names can be explained by the simple idea of a geographical frame of reference. When people go into a new area they always carry a geographical frame of reference. For example, when in the United States settlers came from Europe what did they call Manhattan Island but “New” York. What did they call a place in Connecticut? New London. What did the call the river that goes near New London, Connecticut? The Thames. And so we find men with a geographical frame of reference, moving from one world to the next bringing their geographical frame of reference with them and being to label that world in terms of the old world they’re familiar with. Think of how this has been done in Europe and the United States, the Bible’s influence. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, think of what consternation it would cause if some body reading the Bible didn’t know that Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was a derivative and wasn’t the original Bethlehem, and how he could get Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Babylon Long Island, and a few other places together in his head and try to make that fit the geography of the Old Testament. He’d never make it. What was his mistake? He was using a geographical frame of reference that had been brought into another world.

So in our third theory what we say is that men, Noah and his sons, who moved from the old antediluvian world to the post-flood world, when they stepped off the ark and they began to explore they found these two rivers, and the two rivers descended through a great fertile plain that we call the Mesopotamian valley, but when they first said hey, this reminds us of those two rivers in the old world, so we’ll call this one the Tigris and this one the Euphrates. It turns out that in their explorations they never did find two rivers called the Pishon and the Gihon; in this world there apparently were never two rivers that corresponded exactly with those two rivers in ancient Eden. And so no modern river is called that.

But there were lot of other things; the modern land of Assyria was reminding them, somehow, of the flat land that existed before the flood which was called Assyria. The word “Ethiopia” here that you see in verse 13 was some sort of land that was have reminded them, it was dark soil, for the word “Ethiopia” is Cush and it means black, maybe it was a dark soiled area and when they went down into Ethiopia they said hey, this is Cush, the son, he’s named for the land because he’s dark, and where he went he labeled it for himself. And so we explain the names today by the geographical frame of reference.

And interesting for this, if you take a map of Mars and the moon you will discover earthly names; on the maps of Mars where in the old days they used to think Mars had rivers on it and the canals and so on, the four rivers of Genesis 1 are on, still today, maps of Mars. Why? Because the cartographers or map makers used their geographical frame of reference and transferred it to Mars and the moon. And so even there we have a third step of transfers.

Now Dr. Albright points out from other things and we want to capture this because in our third theory we must admit that “myth,” the so-called, and we will call this “myth” in quotes, the “myth” of the Indian tribes, the “myth” of the ancients hold locked within all the garbage, hold pearls of truth. Albright says: “The Babylonian conceptions regarding the sources of the Tigris-Euphrates followed a similar development; they were believed by the earliest Sumerians to rise together from the abode of the gods in the underworld.” Now what’s that a memory of? Where did the four rivers arise in the ancient world? The abode of God, which was west of the Garden of Eden. “Their origin is similarly represented in iconography by two spouting vases held by a god or a genie of fertility in the underworld. And, in the same region was located a wonderful vineyard paradise over which the goddess of life and wisdom held sway.”

Now if that isn’t a foggy but almost clear memory of Eden, I don’t know what is. Don’t laugh at myths; myths is the attempts of tribes of men from all over the world to remember their heritage back commonly under Grandfather Adam.

So where was Eden, then? Eden must have been on some high mountain; Eden probably had two rivers flowing north and east called the Tigris-Euphrates, and had two rivers flowing south, the Gihon and the Pishon. We say in that geographical direction because they refer to Ethiopia in the south in the new world, and presumably they carried this geographical frame of reference with them.

Now we want to look at certain biblical texts about Eden, elsewhere than Genesis 2. Some people think Genesis 2 is the only place in the Bible that talks anything about Eden. Oh no; let’s turn to Ezekiel 28; in this famous passage of Scripture God the Spirit is describing the fallen King of Tyre. God is saying, and making an analogy between his fall and the fall of Adam and Satan. And in this king, we’re not interested in who the king of Tyre is, we’re just interested in the symbolism.

Ezekiel 28:13-14, now remember we speculated, based on the rivers in Genesis 2 that Eden must be located in the height of land because rivers flow down. Now our interpretation is confirmed. “You have been in Eden, the garden of God,” and then it describes the clothes that he wore, and verse 14, “You are the anointed cherub that covers, and I have set thee; you were upon the holy mountain of God; and you walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.” We’ll have a speculation what those are later on but “you walked up and down on the mountain of God,” where? Verse 13, “Eden, the garden of God.” So now the Garden of Eden is confirmed to have been on a mountain or on a high hill. Don’t think of the Garden of Eden as some lush tropical place; it was in a cooler climate; I’ll show you evidence of that later on also.

Now this theme of God’s sacred mountain, which starts, then, with creation, is a theme carried over in all the myths of the world. Those of you, probably most of you here, at least in school sometime read something about the Greek myths. Remember Zeus, where was the home of Zeus? The Greeks conceived of their gods on a mountain, Mount Olympus. If you go to the Canaanites and you read their stories of their gods, where do they conceive their gods to live? Up in the north on a mountain called Mount Zephon. And so everywhere you go people conceive of God on a mountain. What’s that a memory of? Eden. And it’s carried forward in the Scripture? Where did God speak to Israel? From Mount Sinai. And where was the ark of the tabernacle finally located in peace looking for the coming of Christ? Mount Zion. And where did Jesus give His platform in Galilee but from a mount, the Sermon on the Mount. And so it’s a theme that continues through history and Israelite and Gentile and Christian and non-Christian alike always think of God as speaking from a mountain, just repeating again and again the archetype, the original type of God talking to father Adam and mother Eve on His mountain, Eden.

Let’s look further at some things about Eden. Ezekiel 31:8-9; here we have described some of the trees of Eden, and this shows you that it is not a tropical environment. Eden was a model of an arboretum. It says “The cedars in the garden of God could not hide it,” again this is symbolism, we’re not interested in the immediate text of Ezekiel 31, we’re just interested in the reference to Eden; “The cedars,” so that’s one kind of tree that God planted in Genesis 2; cedars in the garden of Eden could not hide him, “the fir trees were not like his boughs, and the chestnut trees were no like his branches,” the third tree it’s ambiguous what that tree is. But the first two, the cedars and the firs, they don’t grow in a tropical climate; they grow in a temperate climate, which you would expect at a higher altitude. And so we find that Eden is remembered.

And I’d like to suggest this, I think this is why most people, and it’s been proved in certain psychological studies, basically enjoy greenery around them. What is it in our soul that cries out for beauty and greenery around us? It’s a memory of Eden because deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down in our hearts we must remember where our father lived and where our mother lived, and this has been carried from generation to generation and it’s almost buried up in the depths of our subconscious so we aren’t really even conscious of it, but somehow greenery helps us, psychologically it’s pacifying, encouraging and people enjoy it. It’s because this, this story, is not myth, the story is literal.

A third thing about Eden, we’ve seen it’s on a mountain, we’ve seen it’s surrounded with many trees and now Ezekiel 36:35; Eden forms the memory of what nature looked like before it fell. Ezekiel 36:35, looking forward to the millennial kingdom and the eternal state, and what does Ezekiel say: “And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden, and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and inhabited.” And with this we have a third powerful thing that we was unique to Israel; no other country in ancient history had this one; the countries had memories of a paradise lost but the paradise lost was always is the back of history, never in the future of history. Only in Israel did they think of Eden from which we came to which we will one day go. And so there was a paradise in the future for the Israelites, promised them by their redeeming God. No other nation had this. No other thought system has this; the only reason communism is optimistic in history is because through Hegel Marx stole from the book of Daniel, but that’s an aberration; materialism doesn’t lead to optimism in the future. That is a stolen thing from Christians.

To show you again, to reinforce this, that Eden became a model for pre-fall nature take a look at this Mesopotamian cuneiform translation and see if it doesn’t remarkably coincide with the Scriptures. What we’re looking [at] here is the memory, unaided by the Holy Spirit’s inspired work, but nevertheless, passed from father to son, father to son, for centuries in Mesopotamia. Here’s their version: “In [sounds like: dew mon] the garden of the gods, where [sounds like: en key] and his consort lay, that place was pure, that place was clean, the lion slew not, the wolf plundered not the lambs; there was no disease nor pain.” Isn’t that the memory of Eden, captured maybe in a partially garbled way but nevertheless captured in the cuneiform text of thousands of years ago? All men knew of Eden; it’s only the modern man who’s become so stupid in his self-exalted intelligence that he thinks he can cut the umbilical cord with the past and then wonder why he can’t explain himself.

But this is not all; Eden recurs in more vivid form. Turn to Revelation 22; here in the very last scene of the Bible, notice how close the correspondence is to Eden. Revelation 22:1-3a of the last chapter of the Bible; “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. [2] In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, there was the tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. [3] And there shall be no more curse….” Observe, as we said, in the Garden of Eden there was the river; the river came forth from the western side and what had happened in the western part of Eden? It was the place where God knelt down into the dust and He created man; it was the center of God’s home, and then in the Garden he placed man’s home, and from God’s home to man’s home came this river of water, not from rain, it came up out of the earth.

And in Revelation 22:1, “He showed me a pure river of water of life,” proceeding from where, from “the throne of God.” And where did the river flow? The river in Eden flowed from God through man’s garden, through the trees that were there for his food, and in Revelation 22:2 where does the river of water come, that comes from the throne of the lamb? It comes to the tree of life, and who eats the tree of life? Men do. And then John, to assure us that history is not cyclical like the Greeks thought, repeats itself again and again and again, but he adds in verse 3, but this time there’ll never be a curse; this time history won’t repeat itself. This time paradise will remain forever and ever and ever.

Now the New Testament gives us an evangelistic application of the truth we just read. Turn to John 4; in John 4 the Lord Jesus Christ comes to that woman at the well, in the hot dusty land of Palestine and in the middle of this discussion, remember He asked her for a drink and she entered into a big long dialogue with Him, but now in the light of what you’ve just learned from the imagery of water flowing from the throne of the Lamb, now does this make more sense in John 4:13, when Jesus turns to the woman and He says, “Whoever drinks of this water, woman, will thirst again; [14] But whosoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, bur the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” In other words, there is no end to the water that I shall give him. Just as that original water in the Garden of Eden and just as the future water from the throne of the Lamb, Jesus Christ pictures this using Jacob’s well.

Until I visited Jacob’s well I was unaware of something; this particular well or shaft sunk 150 feet into the ground has never run dry. In every major drought of the Near East always Jacob’s well has produced water. Why? Because it’s unusual, it’s not like a regular well; the bottom of that 150 foot shaft intersects a river of water that’s flowing constantly underneath the land of Israel and this has been tested and checked. And so what Jesus does is pick this up as an illustration. I used to think that John 4 meant that when you became a Christian you had all the self-contained resources that you ever, ever needed in the future; in other words, you generated your own water is the way I read verses 13-14, that is until I saw personally Jacob’s well.

Jacob’s well looks like this, we’ll look at a few pictures of it. Here is the place, Sychar, where he talked to the woman; Mount Gerazim is to the left, it’s covered over with a lot of religious trappings. This is the well and this little crank here with the string on it, you can get a drink out of Jacob’s well today just as they did in those days, and this shaft is the one that goes 150 feet into the ground, the first part of this is just cement overlay, but that part down there is the actual cut that goes into the earth that was there at the time of Christ and the conversation of John 4. The well is well known, and what does that well stand for? What is its picture? Very simple; the picture is that we, when we are regenerated and share eternal life in Jesus Christ it’s as though we have a pipeline on an infinite supply of water that never runs out. It’s not that we carry the water from the point of regeneration with us, as some sort of quantity X that we just have microscopic quantities of this volume of water we never run out of it, that’s not the picture. The picture is that we’re constantly supplied from that underground stream of that water that never, never ceases. But the imagery of John 4 that you’ve just watched is imagery that is rooted far, far, far, back in history, all the way back in the land of Eden.

Why water? Why the trees? To picture what Jesus is picturing in John 4. Water is necessary for plants; remember the irrigation in the Garden of Eden? It couldn’t be rain; it had to be by surface. Why water? Because water is necessary for plants, and what are plants? Food for man, a direct link from water to plants to men’s life, and then it becomes Jesus Christ giving His life to provide eternal life. How do we get eternal life? By the provisions of the cross and this becomes the waters of salvation.