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We begin to read this evening in the book of Genesis, chapter two and verse 4. Genesis chapter two and verse 4. These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven. And no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground, but there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 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 the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became four heads. The name of the first is Pishon, that is it which compasses the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. There is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon. The same is it that compasses the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel. That is it which goeth in front of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. And the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. And the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone. I will make an help meat for him. And out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto the man to see what he would call them. And whatsoever the man called every living creature, that was the name thereof. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for man, there was not found an help, meat for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man made he a woman and brought her unto the man. The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. May God, our Creator, explain his own words to his son. Thus far, we have given ourselves what you might call a bird's eye view of the first creation story. We found it was concerned in the first place with the stages of God's creative activity. The great acts of creation, strictly so called. Not the centuries of development and maintenance, but those few successive creative acts that occurred, each of them within a day of twenty four hours, as far as we know. Not within days that were necessarily days of one week, but days that were marked by certain creative words of God. Creative words of God that themselves may well have been followed on each occasion by centuries or billions of years of development and maintenance. But then again, a series of creative acts that came to their end on the sixth day. So that that sixth day was followed by another, a seventh, which has lasted to this very present moment. For God's creative activity ended then. Quite clearly, his maintenance and his development of all that he had created has gone on and still goes on, and accounts for the vast variety of things that we see around us now. Then we noticed that those days of creation took God's creative process further and further along, introducing at each stage things that were more complex, so that the series of creative acts come at last to a climax, and that climax, the creation of man. We saw what a wonderful concept that is, that man is the, is created to be the climax, the chief of all the ways of God in this world, and was made in the image of God to be God's viceroy. To be and to do and to act and to think on his lower level, the kind of things that God is and does and thinks at his higher level. Therefore, man was given to have dominion over God's great creation and to develop it, to subdue the earth and fill it and make something of it for God. But then we found that Genesis one is not only concerned with God's creative activity, but also dilates upon God's methods of organization. And therefore, in chapter one of Genesis, we find God labeling sundry parts of his creation with labels that call our attention to the reasons why he has organized our universe the way he has. We found that the common reason behind God's organization is that man should learn to live in utter glad dependence upon God. Therefore, we found it was important that we should put both these ideas together. Man was made to have dominion, to be king of the earth, to be its overlord and ruler and administrator. But at the very same time, man could only be king of the earth and have dominion so long as he himself acknowledged that his dominion was a derived dominion, and he himself content to live in humble, glad, filial dependence upon God. If we may anticipate the message of Genesis for a moment, and anticipate what, uh, Dr. Chapman is so keen to come to. Genesis will tell us how it was that Earth came to its present chaos. It was because man who was made dependent on God and put in a world so organized that it would emphasize at every turn his dependence upon God, that man chose to grasp at independence of God and And came came to to a point where he was no longer content to accept God's judgments and God's decisions, and take his norms and standards and commands from God, but insisted on knowing good and evil for himself that he might make his own decisions independent of God. And in the very moment of grasping at his independence of God, he lost, quite logically lost, a great deal of his dominion. Till we see man at this present moment, not only having lost a lot of his dominion in the world external to him, but lost a good deal of the dominion of the world that's internal to him and can no longer very often govern even his own passions. Genesis, let's anticipate a bit further. Not only tells us of man's folly at grasping independence and the fall that followed thereupon. Genesis preaches us the gospel. And if you ask what is the particular gospel message that Genesis puts before us as no other book of scripture puts before us, then that message is not so much the message of redemption by blood and sacrifice, though that is hinted at in Genesis. That is a message of salvation that is left to books like Exodus and Leviticus to spell out in detail. Great method of salvation as it is preached to us in the book of Genesis par excellence is justification by faith. And if one ponders that a moment, one will see how that that method of salvation is admirably and exactly suited to man's need, as Genesis disposes that need. If man's ruin has come by his grasping at independence, man's salvation will come as he learns in true repentance to come back and be utterly dependent upon God. Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness, says the New Testament, and further explains what it means to believe God. Taking Abraham for its example, its bit of case law, it points out how God left Abraham till Abraham was physically quite incompetent and unable, and had the sense to see that his body was as good as dead, and Sarah was as good as dead. If ever they were to have a son, it would be God who did it all. And Abraham learned to despair of himself, to cast away all trust in himself, and trust only in God. The God that raises the dead and counts the things that are not as though they were. So from the very first chapter of Genesis, we get lines of thought that will tell us not merely of what man was originally intended to be, not merely how he failed, but also how he is in process of being redeemed, and one day in Christ shall reach the goal that God originally planned for him. And now we move on to the second creation story. As you see from the charts here, there are no less than three creation stories in Genesis. They lie side by side. They do not contradict each other, in spite of what school texts tend to say. They are there to complement each other and to put creation in its different contexts that we might see it from different points of view. So this second creation story that we are now to study will tell us not merely about the creation of man, and focus our attention on him rather than upon sun, moon, stars, whales, and elephants. But it will carry on with the story to the fall of man and what it involved for Adam and for Eve and for the whole human race, and then it will carry on the story further still to give us a glimpse of the effect of the fall upon the succeeding generations and man's first attempts at civilization. And when that story is done, chapter five will come back once more to the story of creation and put it in another and different context. Now, let me first of all, uh, therefore demonstrate to you that chapters two, three, and four of Genesis all do in fact stand together as one deliberately, uh, arranged section of the book. They carry one very noticeable and simple main thought. And that is to be found in the simple repetition at strategic points in these chapters of the word ground. I wonder, would you take your Bibles in hand and follow me through the text? It will have the added advantage of helping you keep awake. Genesis chapter two, verse five tells us there was not a man to till the ground. In verse, um, six, that there went up a mist and watered, irrigated, or perhaps flooded the whole face of the ground. Then it tells us that God formed man out of the dust of the ground. And then verse nine, uh that out of the ground he made sundry trees to grow. And verse nineteen, and out of the ground the Lord formed every beast of the field. Now cast your eye over to chapter three, if you will, and look, uh, first in verse seventeen towards the end. Cursed is the ground for thy sake. In toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. In verse nineteen. in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Verse twenty three: therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken. Then again into chapter four, to watch the same theme recur. Verse two: Cain was a tiller of the ground, and in process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. Verse ten: and God said to Cain after he had murdered his brother, what hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now cursed art thou from the ground, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength. Verse fourteen, Cain says, Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the ground. And I'm sure you must, uh, uh, be thinking that that is a very elementary and simple observation to make. Why shouldn't the word ground occur very many times in these chapters? But then would you notice also that not only does the word recur, but it recurs at the center and peak of interest in all those three chapters. Without any doubt, the most important part of chapter two is the creation of man. How was he created? And from what start? And what is he anyway? Says chapter two, man was made of the dust of the ground. The idea of ground lies, I say, at the very center and peak of chapter two. Chapter three is notable for the fall of man and the consequent curse that God was obliged to pronounce. And right there, in that most solemn of all passages, while God is pronouncing his curse on the fall, we read, cursed is the ground for thy sake. And subsequently, man was sent out of the garden to till the ground and live by the sweat of his brow till he returned to the ground, for from the ground he was made, and to the ground he returned. So in chapter 3 too, this notion of ground lies at the very heart of the chapter's most important passage. In chapter three uh, then chapter four, we meet Cain's rebellion against God and the punishment that God had to inflict upon Cain for his deliberate and persistent rebellion. And what was that punishment? Well, he was driven out from the face of the ground. For casted art thou from the ground, said God to to Cain. And Cain, who had the sense to see how grave was the punishment inflicted upon him, said, my punishment is greater than I can bear, for thou hast cast me out from the face of the ground. And if at this moment it doesn't appear to us how such a thing should be very grave, let us just observe that this idea of the ground and man's relation to the ground stands at the heart of chapter four, just as it stands at the heart of three and at the heart of chapter two. What it all signifies, we shall later discover. It is going to talk to us of the reason for man's existence. It is going to begin to answer the question, why was man made? And talking to us first about the original man, it shall raise in our minds the question, but what am I meant to be doing? What is the point of human existence? Why do we live? And it will tell the sad story how man's rebellion took him eventually head on clashing against the very reason for his existence. And it will tell us what God did with man when man turned round and defied God over the very reason for which God has made him. And it will let us into the secret of a lot of the frustration that nestles at the heart of otherwise excellent civilizations. But before we come to study that in detail, we shall need to notice another theme lying particularly in chapters one and two— uh, sorry, two and three. And that is, in these chapters, God describes to us and defines for us what life is. We shall read in these chapters the sorry state of affairs, that when man sinned, he brought upon himself death. But of course, if you would understand what death is, you must first have some concept of what life is. Say, what is life? What is it? You should know you're alive. What is life? What is man, anyway? So Genesis takes us to the very beginning, and he says, the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground. Man, from one point of view, is so much stuff. Which doesn't flatter his ego very much, but there it is. And the chemists assure us it is so. I forget now, with the inflation, the price has gone up. In my young day, it used to be one and three and five and eight, I think, the chemicals that compose a human body. I should imagine they might be, oh goodness no, thirty quid now, I suspect, with inflation, but uh, even so, it isn't a lot, is it? We are so much. And the good astronomers tell us that the chemistry of the universe is more or less, uh, uniform. We're made of the same stuff as the ground, moon, stars, or anything else. And such a lowly origin may well help us eventually to see the grandeur that God designed for creatures that were made of clay. For man is of the earth, earthy. As we have borne the image of the earthy, oh, praise God, one of these days we shall rise in God's universe, and we shall bear the image of the heavenly. But man isn't just so much stuff. He is so much stuff, but not just so much stuff. For God took this man that he had formed out of the dust of the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. Now, if we would know what Genesis means by that, we do well to take the New Testament's commentary upon it. I know no better. It is to be found in one Corinthians chapter fifteen, where Paul observes, uh, what this verse says, that man became a living soul. And Paul shows us what that that verse means by contrasting the first man with the second. He says the first man became a living soul, but the last man a life-giving spirit. In other words, Genesis is not telling us that man had a soul as well as a body. Genesis is telling us about one kind of man, the kind of man the first man was, while one Corinthians will tell us that the second man, the last man, the Lord from heaven, is a somewhat different kind of human being. The first man, a living soul. The last man, the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. You see, we as human beings, we are alive. We're not just so much dead stuff. We are animate. Unlike the old benches and the floor and the rocks, they are inorganic, inanimate. We are animate, alive. If you ask a biologist to define what life is, he will say, well, things are alive when they can reproduce themselves. That's precisely what man is. He has life, he can reproduce his own kind. He can pass life on. He can't create it. Because man is a channel of life, he is not a source of life. The first man was made a living soul. He's alive, he's animate. He can reproduce. He can't create life. Now that last man, the last Adam, the second man, are human still, somewhat different kind of human being. He was and is a life-giving spirit. He can create life. Our contact and dealing with him puts us in contact with a kind of human being infinitely superior to anything we could have been by ourselves. But that's, uh, anticipating. Man is so much stuff, but then he's animate stuff. He's alive. But then, is that all life is? Goodness me. In that sense, yeast is alive, isn't it? What? It can reproduce. No, God goes on to explain. The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed, and out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. Oh, how lovely. That God should plant a garden to put man in, and why a garden? Because God wanted man to live, really to live. Not just to be a bit of yeast that could multiply, but to have life. You say, what do you mean by life? Well, it has all sorts of dimensions, doesn't it? First of all, says God, we'll have trees good to look at. And then we'll have trees good for food. Yes, man's physical life will need to be provided for. I wonder, I wonder if you've noticed the order that inspired Holy Writ puts them in, those trees, I mean. Not first trees good for food and then trees good to look at, but trees good to look at first and then trees good for food. That's God's order of priorities. I hope you keep to them. A curious thing how sometimes Puritanism has reversed them, hasn't it? And exalted the importance of s- of the stomach far beyond the importance of the brain. Good Christian folks think that eating your food is a very good thing. They're not quite so sure about art. But God's very sure about art. He invented it. And he made trees in that garden good to look at. Oh, I love God for that. God's no utility God. He's alive, he's animate. He can reproduce. He can't create life. Now that last man, the last Adam, the second man, ah, human still, somewhat different kind of human being, but he was and is a life-giving spirit. He can create life. And our contact and dealing with him puts us in contact with a kind of human being infinitely superior to anything we could have been by ourselves. But that's, uh, anticipating. Man is so much stuff, but then he's animate stuff. He's alive. But then, is that all life is? Goodness me. In that sense, yeast is alive, isn't it? What, it can reproduce. No, God goes on to explain. The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed, and out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. Oh, how lovely. That God should plant a garden to put man in, and why a garden? Because God wanted man to live, really to live. Not just to be a bit of yeast that could multiply, but to have life. You say, what do you mean by life? Well, it has all sorts of dimensions, doesn't it? First of all, says God, we'll have trees good to look at, and then we'll have trees good for food. Yes, man's physical life will need to be provided for. I wonder, I wonder if you'd noticed the order that inspired Holy writ puts them in, those trees, I mean. Not first trees good for food and then trees good to look at, but trees good to look at first and then trees good for food. That's God's order of priorities, I hope you keep to them. A curious thing how sometimes puritanism has reversed them, hasn't it? And exalted the importance of st- of the stomach far beyond the importance of the brain. Good Christian folks think that eating your food is a very good thing. They're not quite so sure about art. But God's very sure about art. He invented it. And he made trees in that garden good to look at. Oh, I love God for that. God's no utility God, you know, is he what? He could have made us a, a colorless world full of concrete like men do nowadays. Just bare old concrete, not God. I suppose we could live without color, without beautiful things to look at, but I imagine we should be more often than not quite bonkers and very difficult to get on with. So God, who wants us to live, ministered to our aesthetic life, our mental sound health, by giving us tulips and daffodils and forget-me-nots, so that when we come in all steamed up from work and the potatoes are, uh, uh, are boiled over and the thing is in a mess, we can say, well, cut it out and go and sit in the garden and have a look at the tulips and let them calm us down. That's how beautiful it is, you know. Yeah, and when a husband for his sins wants to placate his wife and come, well, he can give a nice bunch of red tulips or roses, honey, what, oh, yeah. And how many an invalid has found the first step back to want to live? Not by the injections the old medics gave him, important as they are, but by the lovely color of a bunch of flowers that somebody went and put on his locker. Who lovely God is, isn't he? He made trees good to look at. To cope with our aesthetic sense. Oh, I shall be told off if I'm not careful, so I shall have to add this. Yeah, you will be careful as a Christian what you spend on those things, won't you? God has given us all things richly to enjoy. Yeah, enjoy them with a very good conscience. But do remember you're living in a fallen world, and get your priorities right. And there are men wanting to be redeemed. And that means that we shan't always have the time as much as we would like to enjoy the nice things. Our blessed Lord, ah, he came from the regions of glory, was prepared for a time to give up the sight of lovely things beyond description. Tread the smelly old streets of Jerusalem. And smell the wood of the cross. That we might be saved. He's back in the glories of heaven now, isn't he? Nothing wrong with glory, you know. But he expects those of us that owe our redemption to him to have a certain proportion in life as to what we spend on the nice things. Yes, spend some on it, enjoy it. Christ had time for what the living. Just get our proportions right, shall we? Trees good to look at, good for food. And then there was the tree of life, which was in the middle of the garden. And if you ask me whether I think it was a real tree or a symbolic tree, I personally hold the opinion, and it would take too long to prove why I hold it, um, that it was a real tree. For man does not have in himself physical, mark the adjective, physical immortality. And for man to go on living physically demanded that he should have access to that tree of life and constantly take of that tree. When man sinned, God drove him out of the garden for this specific purpose, so that he should no longer put out his hand and take of the tree of life and thus live forever. Being denied that tree and the trace elements that it had, whatever they were, man began gradually, gradually, gradually to decline, and the old aging process set in. It's still a mystery, isn't it, what that makes people age? The Bible's answer is that they don't have access to the tree of life, not yet. Ah, one day we shall. On each side of the river of that heavenly city is there the tree of life. Its leaves are for the healing of the nations. But not only had man a physical and an aesthetic dimension, note next, and we are going up the scale, aren't we? Man has another dimension to his life as originally created, the dimension of adventure. Oh, I wish I could just capture how Adam and Eve felt in the garden, you know. Why, Tuesday was a greater surprise than Monday, wasn't it? And when you got to Thursday and you thought you'd seen the block, then you came across four rivers. Oh, oh, I wonder where they go. Out past the limits of the garden, out and out and out, and I wonder what lies beyond there. Oh, the fascination of it. You see, God is not only lovely, but he's never a bore. He's always got some new things for you. Always another horizon. And for these early couple, the four rivers going out hither and thither, and where did they take you as their waters flowed on, inviting you to geographical exploration? And then when you went down one of them eventually, as man did in the succeeding ages that followed, you came across gold. Wonder what you could do with that, they said. And the women soon found out you could make it ornaments, and the men found out that, well, you could, yeah, you could do things with it, and and then there was bedellium and onyx and all the excitement of the invitation to explore. I'm genuinely sorry. I'm very, very grateful to those whose job is one long, monotonous, same thing day after day, aren't you? Those soulless conveyor belts in the motor car factories. Oh, how much healthier folks would be if in their daily job there was new interest and room for initiative. We should have a lot less neurotics, shouldn't we? And perhaps more peace. Oh, my dear Christian folk, I hope you haven't lost your sense of wonder and exploration. Do you see a young man getting interested in astronomy? Then don't say, for God's sake, don't say, huh, why study the stars? Well, what would you study? Would you do sit at home and twizzle your fingers? Who would say, what good will it do? Uh, you won't get much of a job. I nearly said naughty words. Why must you always think of things in the pounds, shillings, and pence you get from it? It's not living. Living is having an interest for its own sake. That's why God put a universe around us, to capture our imagination and to develop our initiative and our potential and our gifts, so that we might live. There's some folks, they're only three quarters alive, aren't they? They've got all sorts of gifts, but they've never tried using them. Some of them could embroider if they like, but no. Or they could carve. Or they could cook, but no. They've lost the interest. Only sort of half alive up. And then there was another dimension of life, far higher, infinitely far higher than any we've mentioned so far. We're told that the Lord God said to these couple whom he put in the garden to develop, of all the trees of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it. For in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely Surely die. die. Spell out life at its highest, and that life is a relationship with Almighty God, a relationship marked out by moral condition. Every true relationship has to have its conditions and limits, doesn't it? A relationship that is not defined, that has no limits, isn't a relationship. A woman that's anybody's wife isn't anybody's wife. And life? Oh, how wonderful that man should be made in the image of God so that he can sustain a relationship with God. But how will you mark out the relationship? What kind of a life will it be? Well, the old caterpillar is related to the creator of sense, isn't he? Oh, but a very humble relationship. The creator made it, and the creator sustains it, but that's, uh, not even that much does the caterpillar know. You know, caterpillars don't even know they are caterpillars. Man is in a relationship with God that is a moral relationship. That mean, you say? It means a relationship where God declares himself creator and Lord by laying down a command, which man is expected to reply to by loving obedience and trust. It's a relationship. A relationship at the level of one's morality and behavior and choice and moral judgment, where God says, thou shalt not eat of it. And if man asks, but why can't I eat of it? God says, because I say so. Man has to decide what he's going to do with this prohibition, and therefore with his relationship with God. Now see a wonderful thing. I'm not quite sure whether I can explain it to you. So if on what I'm now about to say, I seem to be talking heresy, I don't think I am, but consult your elders and get it sorted out, and if you have the time, come and ask me, because if what, if you think I'm saying heresy, I'm not. But it's a little bit difficult to explain. In order that man might have this relationship with God, God had to give man the ability to sin. Can I repeat that last phrase? God gave man the ability to sin. Oh, I hasten to add, God didn't give him permission to sin. In fact, God very straightly forbade the man to sin. But God gave him the ability to sin, didn't he? For you notice that when Adam was faced with that prohibition, Adam was able to disobey it, and did alas disobey it. He was able to. God hadn't made man like God has made caterpillars, of course he did. God could have made us, could he not, like he has made many creatures, simply to go by instinct. They have no choice what they do. They just do it by the mechanism that, uh, keeps them going inside. They don't even know they're doing it. They have no choice in the matter. A bumblebee that gets on your arm doesn't sit there pondering, now, shall I sting this man? Would that be a Christian thing to do? Would my creator have me sting him? No, of course he doesn't. Just act blindly, by blind kind of, uh, reactions. And God could have made us like bumblebees, couldn't he? No choice. And we should have all been the most well behaved. There wouldn't have been much significance in it. One thing it would have cut out, and that would be love in its highest and truest sense. It would have made impossible this high relationship with God at a moral level. What the Bible means by loving God. For you see, you can't have love in that sense, can you, unless people have a choice. Why, if some clever old scientist were to produce a, a, a computer with arms and legs and shiny bells for eyes, and uh, uh, so programmed it that it would come into the room and say, hello my darling, and come up and put its arms around you and kiss you, ooh, you'd kick it in the teeth, wouldn't you, like, don't be so daft, don't. But you know that there is no choice. Wasn't even a compliment to you. They had no choice. It was just programmed to do it, and it couldn't say no if it wanted to, unless the fuse went wrong or something. God could have made us like that. But in his magnificent kindness, he didn't. He made us something bigger. And that meant giving us the ability to say no to God. What a tremendous gift. I nearly said, what a dangerous gift. God gave us the ability to say no to God. In order that when we said yes to God, it should mean something. That it should be a response of willing, deliberate trust, expression of our admiration of God himself. Thank God that he dared give it you. The ability to say no. Oh, but friend, mark, mark what a gift it is. At another level, a human parent has often, uh, deliberated with himself, hasn't he? Here's a uh six-year-old. He's seen boys out in the street with a beautiful jackknife, and it's got a knife here and a knife there and a corkscrew there and a saw there, and the six-year-old wants one. Well, now what shall the parent do? Of course, if he's going to grow up to be a man, he'll have to learn how to use these things, but that's a bit of a dangerous gift to give a 6-year-old, isn't it, one? No telling what he'll do with himself and with the furniture. And to give a creature the ability to say no to God. I don't know whether it's appropriate to remark it, but, uh, I feel I want to say what tremendous courage in God. That he might give us the very highest fellowship of love of God. Oh yes, he straightly forbade man to say no, forbade him to eat of that tree, and warned him of its consequences. We have never any permission to sin. And if we sin, we must take the blame for the consequences and the guilt of it. You say, do you think that tree was a real tree? I don't see why not. You see, it didn't need to be any particularly special tree, did it? In order to set up this relationship, it could have been any old tree you like. There just had to be one prohibition. You say yes, but there you are. That that's like God, you see. Spoil the lot. When you think he's given me, he's given you some lovely gift, then he adds some snide kind of prohibition and makes life difficult. No, sir. God put that prohibition there so that man might learn freedom Freedom. and And exercise. exercise freedom. You never know what freedom is till you meet a prohibition, do you? If I come into your house and you say, well, you're very welcome here, like they do in Ireland, you know, when you come in at the front door, and alas, they don't in England, but they do in Ireland, and you say, you're very welcome here. I say, thank you very much. And now you may do as you like, make yourself at home. They don't know what I do at home. They mustn't. Make yourself at home. Uh, I say, really? Yes, there's anything you mustn't do. But what a pity. Now I have no choice much, have I? Can't do anything wrong if I want to. Can't express my personality, can't, you know, I, there's nothing I mustn't do. God is bigger than that. He said, yes, there's one thing we mustn't do. And therefore let man sense his freedom of choice. And what came of that? And the sad results that have flown from it, we know too dismally, we know it. Ah, yes, my good friend, but before you get to the enis- end of Genesis, you'll be told what glorious things have and still will flow on this marvelous concept of life that God has designed for human beings. Ah, there will come a story in this chapter that reads like this, of a servant who came to a girl and said, my master is exceedingly rich, and he wants him, he's given him all. Would you like to be the bride of my master's son. Free choice. Don't have to be. Oh, this is the thing that shall fill heaven with consummate delight at the marriage supper of the Lamb that will start and go on for all eternity. Are men and women freely saying yes to God's son. Not because they have to, but because they want to. The story of life isn't quite finished, but it'll be finished in a minute or two, because there follows a passage now where some other expert will have to help you. Life had a dimension Godward, upwards, if you like. It had a dimension sideways. And it is not good to be alone, says God, not for me to dispute him. He made an help meet for him. That's life's completion. Have mercy on them, won't you? To whom God has not given that gift. And think twice before you make them the butt of your jokes. But when God came to make a help meat for Adam, he brought all the animals, and Adam named them. There was not found among them a help meat for Adam. Interesting, isn't it? The first man was not a somewhat improved animal. No, sir, he wasn't. An animal that was just a little bit of improved might have delighted to have a lion for his wife, or an ape, for all I know, but Genesis roundly declares that in all the animal world, there was not an affinity in any of them with the first man. Mark it, we're required to believe it. And then Adam did a wonderful thing. He named these animals. I can't tell you what language he used, but it is a marvelous thing. He named them. Unless God gave him a language already invented and complete, then have we here evidence of a tremendous mental capacity. Inventing language was one of the most brilliant things that man ever did. Animals communicate with nods and grunts and whatnots, and none of them, as far as we know, has a language system developed like humans have. It was somebody's genius that hit upon the system of using an arbitrary sound to represent a thing or person. I mean arbitrary. For instance, if you, if you come to Ireland and you'll see a thing growing in the ground with branches and green leaves, uh, we call it a tree, tree. We make the noise tree, tree. But if you go across to the French, they not in have- not having our advantages, they say arbre. That's another different noise, isn't it? And if you go to the Greeks, they say dendron. And if you go to the Hebrews, they say H. There's no rhyme or reason in it. They are just arbitrary sounds, but therein is their genius. Somebody hit upon the thing of, of making arbitrary sounds to represent things. And thus language was words. What a marvelous bit of life words are. The living death it is not to be able to speak or to hear words. And you notice where this is, uh, where this matter of language is introduced, don't you? First introduced where Adam is presented with his wife Eve. Why, yes. Because if ever there was a place where you need words, suitable words, really to act like human beings and live, it's in human relationships, is it not? Well, an old lion, when he thinks his lioness is jolly pretty, well, he has ways of expressing it and nibbles her ear and pats her on the back and whatnot, but his vocabulary is distinctly limited. There's not much he can say to make the heart glad, is there what? But words! How marvelous things words are. We who are Christians should never be found saying of this holy book, it's only words. What do you mean it's only words? Only words? What would you have from God? Tins of cocoa or something? Words! The highest expression of fellowship and And life. life. As Adam found his language and a wife to talk to, so there is a second man who has a bride, and to come and win her. He calls himself the Word, the Word of God. Life. Life. As God designed it. My good friend, are you alive? At every level? Alive and enjoying the beauty and aesthetics of creation. I'm alive, enjoying its fascination and exploration and its challenge and its interest. Alive in your relationships with your fellow men and women. Alive to the fascination of the word. Man's creative literature. Alive supremely to God, as he has expressed himself not only in creation, but in the Word, Jesus Christ our Lord, and in these inspired words. Alive, really enjoined God.