Clough Genesis Lesson 12

Planting the garden; Man in the garden – Genesis 2:9-17

In Genesis 2:4-7 we’ve dealt with the creation of man. That’s the first section of this book. Then in Genesis 2:8 we have a title and this title has two verbs in it. One verb has to do with God planting the garden and the other one putting man in the garden. Now as always in Hebrew and I warned you about this when we discussed the differences between chapter 1 and chapter 2, and critics always like to say well, you know these are two contradictory accounts, etc., we said that our defense against this is just simply the way the Bible was written. The Jews, when they wrote, they would always have a general statement or a summary statement and then they would proceed to work the details, much like journalism today.

And the same thing occurs when we get into Genesis 2, the details of it. Genesis 2:8 is the statement of the general idea; it is the title. And there are two ideas in this title; one has to do with the planting of the garden and the other idea has to do with the putting of man in that garden. Therefore last week we worked with the first part of the title, the first part Genesis 2:8a, and we said that is enlarged in Genesis 2:9-14. Verses 9-14 deal with God’s planting the garden in the eastern part of Eden. And we said that this shows you how much God loved man from the very beginning. God thought enough of man that He put man or provided man with the very best of homes.

We also mentioned further that man through history has remembered this, faintly at times, but he has remembered this and you can check it for yourself. If you examine mythology you will see in it often, particularly in art, of this; we have goddesses that appear in these mythological elements and the goddess will usually be standing up and often she will be holding her hands up in the air, as though she’s proclaiming something. Now the students of this art don’t know exactly what she’s doing but it’s apparently considered something, some ritual, but as she holds her hands up in the air usually entwined around her feet, notice… feet, is the serpent, and if that isn’t an obvious memory of the promise that the seed of the woman will tread on the serpent, the serpent and the woman. These fertility goddesses that we are noticing in the world’s mythologies are nothing but a pagan human viewpoint distortion of the Genesis memory of Eve and the serpent promise.

And then we said also, and in particular about the nature of the garden, is that the fertility goddess will often be picture holding a vase and she’ll be in the act of pouring this vase, and out from the vase comes four rivers, and again this is nothing but a human viewpoint distorted memory of the four rivers that came forth from Eden.

Last time we put a schematic on the overhead projector that we will diagram the rough outlines of the geography of Eden. If we visualize the overall area of Eden as an oval we can depict the garden as a circle on the eastern side. Now not necessarily it was a circle, this is just a schematic. So we have the nature or the region of Eden, then we have the garden planted on the east side, notice the garden is not equivalent to Eden. The Genesis text also says that from some point here there is a river that came up from the ground, went, flowed through the garden to water the garden and when it reached the east side of the garden then parted into four rivers, or four headwaters that went out from there.

These four headwaters were called the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Now the reason those rivers correspond to rivers we know in our postdiluvian world is that the men who departed from the ark, Noah and his sons, when they went out to explore, they came on the Mesopotamian valley and they looked out on this so-called cradle of civilization, and they saw these flowing streams and it reminded them of the Tigris and the Euphrates they knew in the old world, and this Tigris-Euphrates we presume went north out of Eden and that it went into a sort of very gentle slope. However the Pishon and the Gihon were never made analogous to any river in our present world because both these words mean a sharply flowing river rapidly stream. So there was a rapid decline in elevation here off the edge of the eastern side of the garden. Presumable the western side of Eden was higher than the eastern side and in this area God planted the garden.

Now it says that God planted this garden and then the man He took and He put in it. So let’s turn to Genesis 2:15 and from verses 15-25 we now pick up the setting of the man in the garden; verses 9-14 the planting of the garden; verses 14-25 the setting of man in the garden. In Genesis 2:15 several of these verbs indicate kind of action being done that will tell you a little about what was going on in Eden, though most people never have noticed this. “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” The obvious force of verse 15 is that man was not created in the garden; man was created outside of the garden, the garden was then planted and then man was placed in the garden, all during the sixth day.

Now where was man created? This is just a guess, the text doesn’t tell us where he was; I would suspect that man was created back here, on the western side of Eden, that he was created in particular at a place that was in the constant presence of God. I think that God probably had His constant presence in the original paradise, that He was there, constantly. He planted the garden east of that position, moved man from His presence into the garden and left man in the garden, and then periodically God, in the form of the preincarnate Christ, would walk into the garden to discuss with man and walk back. He would periodically appear to man in the Garden of Eden but He wasn’t continually with man in the Garden of Eden.

I get that further from the second verb, “the LORD God took the man, and He put him,” now the word “put” here is a Hebrew word which means cause to rest, it’s in a hiphil stem which means… it’s the word from which we get Noah, really, and it means to set down. We’d use it to put a vase up on a shelf, the shelf is the proper place for the vase, the vase belongs on the shelf so you pick the vase up and you put it on the shelf, after you put the vase on the shelf you walk away and leave it there. That’s the connotation of this verb, that man’s place was in paradise, God took him, He put him there just like you’d put a vase on a shelf, and He walked away and He left him there.

All right, so we then have the cause of the setting of the putting of man in the garden. But now when man is put in the garden he’s put there to do something and with this we get a very interesting doctrine for our time. What we have in this text, when this man is put in the garden, we have the doctrine of the first divine institution; volition of human responsibility. Now when man is created, unlike animals, he is created to respond to or reject God’s grace, or in this time God because grace comes after the fall here.

So man is created with a responder in his soul and this makes man responsible. This is what distinguishes man, contrary to all our comparative anatomists, this is what contrasts man with the animals. Yes there are parallels physiologically between man and the animals; yes, there are even psychological parallels and learning theory between animals and man but there is one thing that is not parallel between man and animals and that is you learn in terms of moral absolutes and animals don’t. When you train your dog to bark or do whatever you train him to do or train him not to do, and he does it or he doesn’t, and he looks up at you with this guilty expression on his face, that is not a violated conscience. That means the dog just has learned that when he does that you lick him, that’s why, and you give him a little reminder now and then that this is not to be done. So the dog knows that and he’s responding in fear. But you could train him to do anything, you could train him to any immoral act and he’d be doing it perfectly, the reason for it being the dog doesn’t have a “judger,” any device inside his soul, so to speak, that can distinguish moral absolutes; man does and that’s the rise of the first divine institution, right here.

But notice, when the first divine institution arises, the form that the first divine institution takes; it isn’t abstract, just sitting there and contemplating infinity. The form of the first divine institution, according to Genesis 2:15 is work. He is to work it, in the King James it says to “dress it,” it’s the Hebrew word to work the ground. He’s to work the ground and protect it; to work and to protect it. Now let’s draw some conclusions and then show something where we have to press hard as Christians in our own time to maintain divine viewpoint in our own souls about this, leave alone our neighbors.

First of all, right here it shows you that the first divine institution or human responsibility is used in the form of labor on nature, that that whole garden, remember, wasn’t created because it was made of cultivated plants, it wasn’t made of cultivated plants until the cultivator was created; once the cultivator was there, then the cultivated plants. And so man exercises his conscience, he exercises his choice in actual real labor on nature. It’s not a contentless dream. It’s an actual day to day real labor.

Now this leads us then further; it tells us that there are certain plants in the botanical realm that are not just chance offshoots; they were created dependent on man. Now we’ve said earlier that all life, our lives included, are dependent on a process known as photosynthesis; if photosynthesis were to stop tomorrow we’d all starve to death. Our life on this planet, physically, is dependent on a very thin thing; the miracle of photosynthesis. So we are depending upon plants, but have you ever looked at it the other way? There are cultivated plants that are wholly dependent upon man to produce; grapes, a grape vine is one of these. And so we have various plants that are made for man and just won’t produce apart from man being there to tend to them.

Now, what does this lead us to as far as the doctrine of work? The doctrine of work says that we are created for godly, that is +R, production. Man was made even in paradise, even in the perfect environment he was to labor; he was to labor for godly production. Man is not going to be satisfied unless he produces something, unless he has a family with children in it that will carry on into the next generation the ideals and the efforts of their parents, if he doesn’t have that a man is dissatisfied. If a man doesn’t have a job that’s satisfying to him and he doesn’t create with his hands or create with his mind or do something that’s pleasing to him and productive he’s not going to be a happy man.

Now that goes for Christian and non-Christian alike because it’s dependent on the first divine institution. And this tells you something fundamental about so-called mental health. People feel like clods because they are clods; clods are people who are unproductive. And then they feel guilty about this and nobody sits down with the Word of God to explain why they feel guilty about it but they just feel guilty about it and so they feel dissatisfied and that leads them to do something else and nothing ever satisfies; it’s because they are not doing anything. And so therefore they think oh, I’m overworked, oh gosh, terrible, and so they do less work and then they feel worse, and they do less and less and less and they feel worse and worse and worse until they wind up in the nut house. Now this is the cause of a tremendous amount … don’t underestimate this; this is the cause of a lot of mental illness, people who are so wound up that they wind up on the funny farm, if you look at their life you will see one characteristic in 99.9% of the cases and that characteristic is they don’t know how to wake up in the morning, they don’t know how to eat regularly, they don’t know how to go to bed regularly, the simple basics of life they have lost all control over; their lives are one big chaos. Every day they get up there’s no schedule, there’s no rhyme, there’s no reason to what they’re doing and they have to sit here and think, now what am I going to do, does the fork go in my mouth first or does the spoon go in my mouth first, what am I going to get for breakfast, and this goes on and on, there’s no routine in other words.

Well, if you had to sit down and consciously think through every single you were going to do in the daytime you’d be ready for the nut house by the time the sun went down because your soul isn’t made to handle that decision making all the time like this. You’re supposed to cruise at certain points in your life and you can’t cruise if you don’t have habits developed, so at least there are some things that you can do without thinking about them, or you can do those things and think about something else. God has made your soul this way. There are some people that never figured this out and these are the unhappy people and the people that wind up on the funny farm.

Now let’s look further at this doctrine of work, if man was created to have godly production, be it in the area of the home, be it in the area of work, wherever it may be, then as he undertakes this as unto the Lord, and if the Christian, because of the Lord, then that’s where happiness is going to come from. Now in our own day we have the opposite idea; in our own day somehow work and labor has been associated with the fall and people think that all labor is bad, and therefore we have this pressure concept, to reduce the work week, and they think they’re going to get happiness by reducing the work week. If your job stinks or your mental attitude stinks on your job you’re not going to change it because what’s going to happen; you’re not going to make any money, what are you going to do if you have a 30 hour work week, what are you going to do, spend the other 20 hours at another job that you don’t like. So you haven’t solved anything; not a thing has been solved by reducing the work week; the work week of the Old Testament was forty-eight hours; don’t tell the union about it, they would have violated it. But God said there was forty-eight hours of work; work six days and rest one.

Now in the Bible when we have labor and it occurs prior to the fall, and it occurs after the eternal state begins, then we know that work is integral to man. Let’s look at this; in Eden, Genesis 2:15, we’ve got man working. This is before the fall, the word “dress” means to work, so we can prove that labor pre-existed sin, that labor is not wrong, it is healthy. What has happened is that the fall resists your labor and that’s what makes your labor frustrating. There’s not one man I know that doesn’t have frustrations on his job; there’s not one woman I know that doesn’t have frustrations in the home, doesn’t have frustrations raising children and that’s part of the curse. The children aren’t the curse, though you may think it sometimes, and it’s not the job that is the curse, it is the problems that are associated with the curse in the system that causes the attitude.

But please notice, as far back as Eden the principle articulated in the New Testament, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, which states if any would not work, neither should he eat; if any should not work or labor he should not eat! 2 Thessalonians 3:10 held even before the fall, so obviously we’re talking about something very, very basic. So what happens in our day? We have whole groups in our society that have –R learned behavior patterns, maybe perhaps because their home has never had the Word of God, maybe because their whole culture from which they came for maybe the last 200-300 years has had no exposure to the Word of God, whatever the cause, we’ve got this –R learned behavior pattern that is associates work with evil, and the less work you have the better off you are going to be, and we translated it, out of all the psychological and sociological jargon, it means they are lazy. And so these people then want their freedom to practice laziness, which is find, practice your laziness, only one little thing suddenly comes into the equation and that is I don’t want to be free to experience the results of my laziness.

So I want the freedom for laziness, but baby, don’t let me suffer for it, let me rip you off, you’re a productive person, so give to me, and if you’re not going to give to me then I’m going to compel the government because I’ve got a vote, you’ve got a vote, I’ve got more votes than you have so I’m going to force you to pay for my freeloading. And that’s what’s going on. So in our society today we penalize the productive people; we make unhappy the people that have the right to be happy; we literally steal, for socialism is theft organized to a government level but theft nevertheless because it’s confiscation of private wealth. And so we confiscate private wealth for laziness; we confiscate private wealth for the clods and the tragedy is, you see, is we don’t solve the problem of the clod, because even though the clod may be getting welfare he still feels like a clod because he’s made in God’s image and he’s made to produce. So no matter how much welfare you give the clod he still feels like a clod, he still feels unhappy and you haven’t solved his problem so he thinks all the time, since we’re saturated with the axiom that work is evil, well then, it must be I need more welfare. So he pushes and gets another welfare program going and then you penalize the people working and so what do you teach the people that are working? You teach them that work is evil. So the system today is progressing in a 180 degree direction from the way labor looks in the Bible.

Now here in the west Texas area if you want a dramatic illustration of this, you take your car and you drive down here to where these Mennonites have come in, and about two or three years after they’ve got settled you watch what they’re doing. There’s a group of people that we have differences here and there on doctrinal points, but there’s a people who have let the Word of God invade their mentality about work and they are known as productive people. And they are an asset to any community because they are hard working; they are wealth producers, not wealth consumers. And we need wealth producers. The young people that are growing up today are going to have to, as Christians, learn how to produce for fifty times what their parents did because they’re going to have to support fifty bums the way the thing is going; they will not only have to produce for themselves but for all forty-nine clods that surround them. And so we live in a day, and all the politicians love this because we’ve given every fool the right to vote so the clods vote and the productive people vote, so how can you fight the system; you can’t fight the system, as long as there’s universal suffrage for clods there will always be a problem for productive people.

So this is the problem with labor, but let me show you that labor doesn’t stop with the end of history either. This may be bad news for some people but turn to Revelation 22:3, a marvelous little verse in the light of Genesis 2. We have the vision of the end, the eternal state. Now in the eternal state there is a repeat of Eden, verses 1-2, we studied that last time and we showed you how there are trees there, we showed you about the water coming out and watering the trees, just like in Genesis 3, and then I stopped halfway through verse 3 and left you there and said there would never be a curse again. This Sunday we’re not going to stop in the middle of verse 3, we’ll look at both parts of verse 3 and see if you don’t notice how they are linked. Do you notice something about verse 3 that reminds you of Genesis 2 and 3?

Look at Revelation 22:3, “There shall be no more curse,” and then what is immediately connected with the curse, “but there the throne of God shall be, and His servants shall work for Him.” The word “serve” is exactly the same word that we would use for work. Now what is stated here in the eternal state is that labor continues but without the curse, and now labor becomes enjoyable labor. So Revelation 22:3 assures us that divine institution one, volition, is exercised in connection with real labor.

Now let me stop here and give you one practical application of this, particularly those of you who have been taking the family training program. Spiritually speaking when you’re working with a problem it will often help you if you apply doctrine in the concrete fashion. Let me give you some illustrations of this. You can sit there and claim a promise and say I’m supposed to have the peace of God that passes all understand, I believe it, I believe it, I believe it, I believe it, I believe it, but I don’t have it, and this doesn’t work and you begin to say well, then the promise of the Word of God is wrong. Well, that can’t be so there must be something screwing up here in the way we perceive how the word is to be applied.

So I suggest to you that if you can bring this promise out into a behavior pattern, so to speak, incarnate that promise, you can do something. Illustration: in the Lord’s Prayer it says we pray for our daily bread, but you don’t go outside and look for the parachute to have it come down. The expression that God is going to provide includes the fact that we’re active in the process also, most of the time: faith-doing as well as faith-resting. Take another illustration and we’ve had to use this; someone will get themselves into a state of acute depression or they’ll be hyper, in other words their emotions are all confused, just total chaos, so what do you do? Well, apart from a tranquilizer what other things do we have as biblical Christians, some tools to work with that person that’s crawling off the wall? All right, some very simple things. We have recommended this to people, go out in your garden and just pull weeds for 15 minutes, just do it, pull the weeds out of your front lawn, you’ve got plenty. Now what are you doing? You’re recreating the scene of paradise, after the curse of course, the curse comes in, there’s weeds that come into the garden, and what is Adam to do, God says: you pull the weeds. What are we doing? We’re expressing our faith in some activity, and then lo and behold, it turns out that these people kind of calm down and begin to touch ground again and then later on we can get in shape where we can talk doctrine and discuss something. But it gets them off a high or it gets them off a low, but actively pursuing some sort of a work pattern.

Let’s look at Romans 8 and we’ll see how Paul recognizes that nature is sympathetic to man; that is, nature works in harmony with man by divine design. In Romans 8:20-21 it says that nature, or “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.” What’s going on there is that as man goes, so goes nature; as man falls nature falls. In the final end of history when man is redeemed, those in Christ that is, when they are redeemed in the resurrection, the eternal state begins, then what happens to nature? It is rebuilt. When Christ comes back for the millennial kingdom at the start of it what happens to nature? Isn’t nature transformed and modified? Always! So watch it, man is respected always as the lord of nature. When Jesus Christ was in the boat on the Sea of Galilee He demonstrated man’s command, under God, of nature. As God-man what did He do to the water in the Sea of Galilee? He calmed it down. What did He do to the wind? He stopped it. In other words, as God He was doing it but yet He was showing through His manhood that man is the channel of God’s power to subdue nature.

Let’s turn back to Genesis 2 and see the next thing that happens. After God sets man from wherever he was created into the garden and leaves him there, then God addresses man. Now Genesis 2:15 told us that man was to labor; but man is not left merely to labor. In verse 16 God now commands man… commands man, and I want you to look at that “commands man,” it’s not the verb just to say, it’s not saying pretty please, it’s not being nice, it is a verb of absolute authority, God commands. In other words, in paradise Adam and Eve had to submit to authority. It’s axiomatic; this is another corollary to the doctrine of the first divine institution. Not only is the first divine institution correlated to real activity, it is also correlated to authority. The first divine institution can’t function except under authority. And this is why our authority is either God or our authority is demonic, but our authority is always something outside of ourselves. Man is always responding to an absolute outside of himself. He tries to create his own absolutes but it just doesn’t work that way.

Now let’s look at the implications, the doctrinal implications of the verb, “and the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; [17] Gut of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will not eat, for in the day that you eat thereof you will surely die.” The doctrine here shown is the doctrine of revelation. Now in our basics we have stressed certain features to the doctrine of revelation; in particular we’ve mentioned five things that revelation always has. Revelation is God speaking to man, so we’ve said these five things and we’ve given you these five things in the basics to give you a handle on this doctrine so you won’t get shot down by some liberal who’s all screwed up or some book that you read, that cuts this because today in our generation, every liberal clergyman I know, just professional association, just refuses to accept verbal revelation, I mean, they’ll talk to their congregation about revelation but really when you get them nailed down to a room in a man to man discussion they will admit they don’t believe that God spoke; it’s that simple, men think God speaks but God really doesn’t speak.

So this is why in our basics we’ve always told you to associate in the basics the picture of Mount Sinai with the doctrine of revelation? Why? Because on Mount Sinai God speaks and there were three million people down in that valley to the west of Mount Sinai that heard him. If you had been there with your tape recorder you could have gotten a recording; that’s what we mean by God speaking. So we listed these five things: we said that revelation is always verbal, that means that it consists of words in a known human language, not some gobbledygook but some known human language. God didn’t go blatta, blatta, blatta, blatta, blatta from Mount Sinai; He spoke ten commands in the Hebrew tongue to those people. When Jesus Christ met Paul on the Damascus Road He didn’t go blatta, blatta, blatta, blatta, blatta, He spoke to him a coherent well thought out expression in the Aramaic, which is a derivative language to Hebrew.

Now the next characteristic, we said that all revelation is personal; by that we mean that the revelation comes to you and you’re forced to respond. It’s like the lover who says I love you and you either neglect it and reject it or you accept it; there is no neutrality. If God says do something you either do it or you don’t and you have no excuse or in between; either I defy my God or I bow my knee and I do it, whether I like it or not but I have this choice. And this is expressed many places in the Scripture; in Hebrews 3:12 for example it says, “Harden not your heart” when you hear the Word of God, people, for example who do not take the Word of God seriously and there are many in this city. There are various gimmicks that people respond to but when they come on that basis they’re hardening their hearts to the Word.

All right, verbal, personal, another characteristic is that revelation is always historical. That means that revelation does not come continually in history; it comes at points and then there’s the silence of God, and then God will speak again and then will be a century of the silence of God, then God will speak again, God has been silent for 1900 years, hasn’t spoken once and he knew He was going to be silent because at the Last Supper what did Christ say? I set up communion and I want you to go through this communion ritual, I want you to go through it all the time in the future history because I’m not going to talk to you again. I’ve given you the New Testament and this is a memorial and I want you to observe it. So there’s the historical nature of revelation. Every generation does not get treated to a living, live word from God.

Then we have comprehensive; that means that whenever God speaks in area, be it biology, botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, whatever, if He does happen to speak in that area He knows what He’s talking about. If He gave, for example, the Old Testament people the law that the latrine is dug outside the camp, He had reasons for it. And only recently has science discovered there were reasons for this kind of thing; there were reasons for ultraviolet sterilization in the Old Testament, there were reasons for washing your hands in running water; all these were given there. So God speaks comprehensively.

And finally we say another thing is that God speaks, that revelation is prophetic in that it talks about things over the horizon. The Air Force has over the horizon radar that’s supposed to look for far range; you can’t have a radar that’s going to look in a straight line if you’ve got enemy aircraft and you’ve got to stop them a thousand miles off shore because they’re going to launch missiles at you, you’ve got to see them and you can’t see them with a straight line radar because the earth’s curvature goes down like this and the radar is looking up at 30,000 and the planes are coming in low level, that’s a big help? So you’ve got to figure out some way in which you’re going to bend that beam down and we call that over the horizon radar. All right, revelation is this way, it’s over the horizon of man, it looks at things that man can’t see. And therefore this is characteristic of revelation. So much for the basics of revelation.

Now this morning we want to deal with some advanced topics in revelation. In an advanced topic to appreciate what’s going on here, this is axiomatic to the rest of the Scriptures actually, you have to distinguish between two kinds of revelation. We haven’t done this too much and in fact fundamentalism as a group we haven’t done this too much and I think we’re much to the worse for wear because of it. There is general revelation and then there is something called special revelation. Now general revelation is this: general revelation is the structure of man and nature; that’s all. General revelation is the structure of man and nature so I can see God in nature and I can see God in the structure of how people are made. I’ll explain it in a moment but that’s just the general definition. If this is confusing for you think of it this way; special revelation is God speaking; general revelation is His handiwork and that’s basically the distinction between the two.

Now, here’s the importance of this. In the garden Adam and Eve had both general and special revelation. Think of general revelation; they walked through the garden and they admired the landscaping; gee, it’s beautiful, God must have a sense of ascetics to plan a garden this beautiful. They must have looked at the trees; can you imagine what an exciting thing it must have been to awake… Milton, in his works has given you this, if you want to read good literature instead of the crap that you get in Christian book stores, if you want to read good literature like John Milton, and you read how he struggles with the language to communicate to you what it must have been for Adam to wake up suddenly like this, into the world that he had never seen before. Just think of it, nobody was out there, no father, no mother to take care of him, but all by himself and he looks up and he sees trees for the first time; he sees animals for the first time, can you imagine what an experience this must have been, for the first man on the face of the earth. And so Adam goes out and he looks and he sees from the trees, from nature, and from himself and how he’s made he can make deductions about God. But be careful, this is why fundamentalism has treaded a very thin ground with general revelation. This deduction about God from nature and himself cannot be made without relying upon special revelation. Notice again this verse.

In Genesis 2:16 God gives special revelation. You see in verse 15 it’s general; verse 9-14 is general revelation, He’s made the garden. But now in verse 16 He commands man with regard to that general revelation; Adam, one tree has high voltage in it and baby, you’d better not mess with it. In other words, God has given specific instructions on how to operate with general revelation. So while as fundamentalists we are right in saying that special revelation precedes and is an authoritative interpreter of general revelation we mustn’t forget general revelation. It’s there and it’s there to appreciate our God with.

Now let me show you how to appreciate the essence of God through general revelation, and this ought to become a habit with you, whatever areas you prefer. Some of you like different things about the world, some of you have specialties in the world and you just are going to worship God through whatever area interests you most. But you’ll always use these general principles. God is at the top of the triangle; man is at the lower left, nature is at the lower right. Now let’s watch how general revelation helps us. After all, it’s God’s world, He made it. Let’s pretend for a moment we start studying nature and we look and intensify our concern, be it whatever, but we look at nature and we say what does nature show me about man? So we look this way, studying nature can we learn anything about ourselves that will enable us to live a spiritual life? Can we appreciate certain doctrines that have been given to us as people made in God’s image, not by studying ourselves, lo and behold, but by going over here and looking first at nature; can we do this, and I say we can and here’s a passage of Scripture that shows it.

First of all, we’ve got the original creation of man from the dust, but turn to 1 Corinthians 15. Let’s run by again exactly what we’re doing; what we’re doing by turning to 1 Corinthians 15 is to show you how understanding nature will help you understand and appreciate what God has talked to you about in the Word of God. In 1 Corinthians 15:35 Paul is dealing with the Greeks about the problem of resurrection. Now understandably the Greeks were messed up because they’d been listening to Aristotle and Plato knock material things and they had a dualism in their thinking, that said hey, you know this resurrection really blows my Greek mind. I cannot understand how God is going to bless matter. Well now Paul says all right, okay, the resurrection is tough for you guys so I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll start to discuss the question from the standpoint of creation first, not resurrection, creation. And then if we look with the doctrine of creation we go out into creation, that is into the general revelation, let me show you something about the world that every one of you Greek Corinthians knows. And if you’ll look at this you’ll understand what the doctrine of resurrection is.

So in 1 Corinthians 15:35, “But some men say, How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?” sarcastic questions asked by human viewpoint Greeks. [36] “Thou fool, which thou sowest is not quickened,” doesn’t come alive, “unless it dies; [37] and that which you sow, you sow not that body that shall be, but you sow bare grain, it may be” a little piece of “wheat, or some other grain. [38] But God gives it a body as it pleases Him, and to every seed its own body.” Now look at verse 39, “All flesh is not the same flesh, but three is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another flesh of fishes, another flesh of birds.”

What’s he saying here? He’s saying hey look, Greeks, and he’s saying this to our modern 20^th century men who are infatuated with this idea of evolution, from amoeba to man, the idea we have this whole spectrum transformism, he says now come on, there’s no empirical evidence you can show me that things evolve when you have a certain kind, and he names those four kinds in verse 39 and as you read verse 39 what bells should go off in your mind? Look at those kinds in verse 39, what are the labels, the categories? Have you seen those categories before? Of course you have; those are four quoted from Genesis 1. He says there’s man, there’s the beast, there’s the fishes, and there’s the fowl of the air. All right, he says, now there are many kinds within this but he’s just looking at these various kinds. Now he says look, did you ever see a birth give birth to a giraffe? No; hey, let’s look at what goes on here; birds, robins give birth to little robins, not eagles. In other words, everything stays within its kind; yes, there are variations, yes there are bacteria that become penicillin resistant but they’re still the same bacteria afterwards as they were before. There’s been variation but within limits. Yes, the chimney moths of England were selectively bred by the industrial revolution but they were still moths, they didn’t turn into birds did they? All right, that’s the question.

Now he says every Greek person that lives in this fine Greek countryside around Corinth, you know this, you know this like the back of your hand; you know this because this is general revelation; God speaks to you by the way He has designed nature. Now look Greeks, if you have trouble understanding the doctrine of resurrection, which is tough for you guys, then just go back to nature and look, and just visualize it this way. Let’s let one man be man mortal and the other one be man immortal; that is, man with a natural body and man with an immortal resurrection body. Now visualize these as two kinds; now can one evolve into the other? No way! You can have all kinds of men with natural bodies, but the only way you’re going to get them over to the resurrection body, which is like a new species, is going to be by some intervening action, it doesn’t happen naturally. And this is why he is talking about, in verse 50, “This I say, brethren, that flesh and blood,” the natural body, “can’t inherit the kingdom of God.” Verse 51, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,” there shall be in interference into the system to move us from one sector to the other sector. He says you ought to be able to understand this if you know general revelation; nature shows us something about man.

If we had time you could also go to 1 John 3:9 where the same thing is made except this time it’s made with respect to the old sin nature and the new nature in Christ and he says the new nature in Christ can’t sin. People look at 1 John 3:9 and say oh, what’s that, I sin all the time; because when you sin it’s the old sin nature that’s producing the sin, not the new nature in Christ. These two are two different kinds and they don’t mix. And one doesn’t get transformed into the other. One has to be eliminated through physical death and the other has to begun by spiritual resurrection. That’s how powerful these images and kinds are, you see, in straightening out doctrine.

Let’s go back to our triangle, we’ve seen how looking at nature, studying the kinds, helps us understand doctrines pertaining to man. Let’s start with nature and show this way; if we study nature does nature show us something about God? Of course. Some verses on this: Psalm 19:1-6, a very famous passage of Scripture; Acts 14:15, another very famous passage. Romans 1:20, all these passages teach this. Remember that phrase when Jesus was teaching He said doesn’t your Father send His rain on the just and the unjust alike? In other words, by studying the climatological patterns of nature, can’t you see grace functioning there? All right, that’s general revelation; studying nature teaches you something about God.

All right, we can work it the other way; we can say let’s study man, for example, and if we study man we look at God; what does man tell us about God? If we study man and his being can we know something about God? Yes we can, Romans 2:15 says so. Romans 2:15 says that man has within him a sense of conscience, and that tells us that our God with whom we have to do has spiritual requirements, or is righteous and just. We can see the attribute of righteousness and justice of God by noticing that man has a conscience, and therefore our soul, your soul, is a revelation of God. Even Romans 1 says that the degenerate, most gross person you can ever come across in your life is a revelation of God. You say what? Yes, because in Romans 1 what does he say? His precise argument is that look at the degenerate person, how did it all start? It started in compound carnality or its unbelieving equivalent, idolatry, and what happened? It worked down, down, down, down, down, down. Was that person ever able to maintain his lifestyle of ungodliness without paying a physiological price? No way. And so therefore he says when you look at the gross person that’s grossed out, bottomed out, you are watching the wrath of God and you are watching that this tells you something, that God’s handiwork has a fail-safe system and a person who is going to habitually rebel against God’s Word is going to pay a physiological price.

And so man also teaches us about nature, we can look at man and study him and say hey, what does this tell us about nature? It tells us that nature needs man, right here in Genesis 2, and Genesis 2:16 the command is that he can eat of the trees, the trees were given for him, nature exists for man; man is to cultivate the trees and so on.

Now Genesis 2:17, the final verse for today is where the test is given. He says, according to special revelation, now remember we switch now; verses 9-14, through verse 15 we had general revelation, that is the garden has been made. Now God is going to talk to man and he says here’s some operating instructions. The one thing you guys can do, be My guest, have all the trees, but just this one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now there’s been a debate in history about what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is. There’s not one that’s singled out; I can tell you this, that there is a prevailing thrust in Jewish tradition that argues that the tree of knowledge of good and evil wasn’t a tree but it was a vine that had a grape-like fruit on it and I can’t evaluate that because the Word of God doesn’t tell me anything, I just know that that tradition exists; whether it comes from roots back before Moses I don’t know.

But we can tell you why the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; let’s look at this expression “knowledge of good and evil.” Every once in a while somebody will write a book when they need some money and they’ll say the secret of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and they’ll come up with this thing, it’s a sex symbol and what happened is that sex was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Well, you don’t have to be a genius to read Genesis 1 that the man and the woman were supposed to procreate; now I don’t know how else you’re going to procreate without having sex. So sex can’t be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; just the whole tenor of the narrative, it’s just a way far out kind of interpretation. There’s got to be another way and there is. All one need do is spend $15.00 at the nearest book store for a concordance and look up every place in the Old Testament where “knowledge of good and evil” happens and it will tell you right quick what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil means; that that title is.

I’ll give you a fast summary of what knowledge of good and evil is if you looked it up; you can test me on it, get a concordance and do your own thing. In Deuteronomy 1:39 it is used for an infant before the age of accountability and the passages goes before an infant is accountable he does not know good and evil. Now what that must mean is he can’t exercise his conscience, he’s not really functioning in a mature spiritual way. Another passage is 2 Samuel 19:35 and this is used for senility, an 80 year old person… now it’s not age because you can be a very old person and be extremely sharp and alert but senility; in 2 Samuel 19:35 a man there is 80 years old and he’s saying I’m failing, I can’t see, I can’t hear, and I can’t discern between good and evil, and reading the context he used to be able to do it, so there it’s connected with senility or the inability of having a functioning mind that can pick up the signals of the conscience. In 1 Kings 3:9 it is used for the requirements of Solomon says. Solomon says oh Lord, You have made me king of this people and I must have the ability to discern between good and evil. So there’s it equated, again, with discernment.

But we have one verse we want you to turn to in the New Testament, Hebrews 5:14, and this to me shows you the flavor of the whole expression better than any other passage I’ve seen. It says, in that passage that deals with Christian maturity, “Strong meat belongs to them that are of full age, even to those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” Read that last part of verse 14 again, “those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil.” Now notice this, whatever this ability is it is gained only by experience; you’re not born with it. Adam and Eve were not born with this; Adam and Even had to acquire a knowledge of good and evil. Now that wasn’t bad, the tree is just called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” meaning that the knowledge of good and evil will be conveyed to this couple by the tree.

Now the question is how, and it could have been two ways; one if they stayed on positive volition they would acquire a knowledge of good and evil in the sense that they would exercise their conscience in obedience to the command of God. God said don’t eat: Yes Sir, I won’t eat. And every time they’d walk by the tree, ah, it’s such an attractive tree, well God said no, so Yes Sir, we will not eat and walk on. And this would happen day after day after day after day after day after day after day and what would begin to happen? Their conscience would be exercised positively… positively, they would obey their conscience, they would obey the Scriptures, and this would become a habit, a habit of righteousness, and they would have passed their probationary test. Now that’s one way the tree could have functioned. We all know the tree didn’t function that way; the tree functioned in a backup negative way; they violated and yeah, then they really got a knowledge of good and evil. Now they’ve got a knowledge of good and evil with all kinds of good and evil; they got a knowledge by personal experience of violating it, going into evil and washing around, so to speak, having their nose rubbed in it, and that’s how they got their knowledge of good and evil.

So the tree was there for a test; the tree was connected with death. It said “in the day that you eat of there you will surely die,” it’s an imperfect tense in the Hebrew plus the infinitive absolute, and this infinitive absolute, it used to be thought that it kind of repeated the action but recent studies in grammar shows the infinite absolute enforces the mood of the main verb; that is, if the mood of the main verb is one of permission, like for example in Genesis 2, earlier here it says, “and you may surely eat,” the mood is a permissive mood to the verb, you tack on the stem of the verb in the infinitive absolute, what it does it says you will really be able to eat freely, it’s a good translation in the King James, but when it comes to a command the mood is the imperative mood and the mood is strengthened by the infinite absolute and it says you’d better not because the day you eat thereof you’re really going to die, completely, physically and spiritually you will die.

And that is the thing that has given rise in theology to two famous expressions which we will study further as we examine the fall. Today we will not examine the fall but we will introduce these expressions and show you what the threat was. In theology in ages past the expressions were always coined in Latin terms and the reason for this was that it was kind of an international language and the Italians and the French and the Germans could all get together and understand this, and you had theological precision in your documents. So the first statement that you see up here is the statement of what man was in innocence: posse non peccare at morior [sp?], meaning able not to sin and die. Now notice carefully, it sounds awkward when it’s translated because it originally occurs in Latin, but watch the statement, “able not to sin and die,” that means they could have died and they could have sinned, but they were able not to. They had the ability not to. Now, after this, when you have the fall theologians add this term in front of posse, non: non posse non peccare at morior [sp?] meaning not able any longer not to sin and die, this is an expression of total depravity. No matter what man does after the fall, he can try to be good, he can try to do this, he can try to do that, he can’t do anything else but… [tape abruptly ends]