Parasha Bereshit 5784
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Me
Me
Well, this week we start our Torah Cycle all over again, and we begin back at the beginning with Parasha Bereshit, Genesis 1:1-6:8. Genesis (or Bereshit as the sefer is known in Hebrew) covers a lot of ground in the narrative of the development of mankind and especially B’nei Israel. Genesis 1 begins with the narrative of HaShem speaking all things into creation through the first six days of creation. Genesis 2 better details the account of the creation of Adam and Chavah and their purpose to watch over and cultivate Gan Eden. Genesis 3 describes the serpent’s temptation of Adam and Chavah, the first sin, the shame and loss of innocence that goes with sin and the curse that goes with it.
In chapter 4 we read about Cain and Abel bringing their offerings to the Lord and because of Cain’s jealousy he kills his brother Abel, the first murder. With chapter three and four we see how rapidly the infection of sin can multiply as we go from eating the fruit to brother murdering brother. Chapter 5 relays the generations from Adam to Noach and the length of each generation’s life. The tail-end of Parasha Bereshit is the first eight verses of Genesis 6, which shows us yet again how rapidly the infection of sin can destroy our lives as we move from Adam and Chavah eating of the fruit, to Cain murdering his own brother, to Adonai looking down on mankind and determining that the wickedness of humankind was so great and the evil inclination so horrible that he regretted form man from dust and decides to wipe out all with the exception of Noah and his family.
As most of you are well aware by now, I spent a lot of years working in restaurants. And while I’ve worked in almost every sort of concept you could imagine, I have also worked in some of the best high end restaurants as well. And one of the best things about working in a higher end restaurant is having legitimate executive chefs and sous chefs on staff in house. These guys are awesome to talk to, to learn from, and just to work with…
But, one of the things they are best at is creativity in the kitchen… Most chefs are very hands on in developing the restaurants menus, and most restaurants have a standard menu available regularly. But, in higher end restaurants you also have daily specials hand crafted by the chefs, and they are usually really awesome and ridiculously beautiful dishes.
But, with each of the chefs I’ve worked under there is typically one standardized rule when it comes to the chef’s special, there are no changes or substitutions. Each and every chef’s special dish is specifically designed with the precise pairing and flavor profile relationship of every single item on that plate. And they are viewed as being a masterpiece, a work of art, and the chef is always very protective of their work. If you order the special and don’t like it they can handle that, they recognized not everything they do is everyone’s cup of tea… But, if you change something about the dish and complain about it then they loose their cool because it isn’t the dish they created.
So, generally speaking, the chef will not allow for changes or substitutions to the nightly special because it would be an alteration to his vision of the dish, an alteration to the way he designed it. Every night I would go over features of the evening with each and every table. I’d describe to each guest the market price on menu items that fluctuated with the market, I’d describe the soup du jour, the dessert features, and the chef special each shift. And when the guest would ask me about the special and if we could make any changes I’d have to continually repeat that the dish is served as the chef designed and that we cannot make any changes or substitutions. And if they would argue, which sometimes happens, I would have to remind them that the chef’s special was hand crafted for a very specific flavor profile and presentation and that is why we made no changes to the dish. The chef perceived it is a finished item and that it was perfect as created, and there were plenty of other items on the regular menu and we could make changes and alterations to any of them.
We
We
We’ve probably all experienced issues like this before? Where you know something is exactly the way it should be, yet someone else wants to change it or contort it?
Maybe our car is always parked in a very specific spot for a very specific reason and our new neighbor wants to give us a hard time about it’s location…
Perhaps we have worked on a project at work tirelessly and it is complete and virtually perfect… Yet our boss wants us to change one small part that we feel would completely effect the entire finished project…
Maybe we have worked on an art piece for months and months and have it finished and are beyond thrilled with the outcome lining up so perfectly with oour vision, then someone comes by and makes a suggestion or complaint about one small piece that would change the entire vision of the work…
We can alway put ourselves in these shoes in one way or another, maybe it’s not an artistic kind of an ordeal… But we’ve all been in the boat where we were beyond excited about an outcome on something we had worked so hard on only to have someone else come in and completely mess up the entire outcome…
God
God
Today we’re going to focus on a very specific aspect of Parasha Bereshit. As we do, there’s a very important reality to the narrative in Bereshit that we must grasp and take to heart and it is very much like what we see with a chef’s dinner special…
Principle: We are created in the image and likeness of G-d, and the enemy wants nothing more than to ruin G-d’s creation.
(repeat)
Let’s dig into the Bible together…
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness! Let them rule over the fish of the sea, over the flying creatures of the sky, over the livestock, over the whole earth, and over every crawling creature that crawls on the land.”
God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.
God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the land, and conquer it. Rule over the fish of the sea, the flying creatures of the sky, and over every animal that crawls on the land.”
Then God said, “I have just given you every green plant yielding seed that is on the surface of the whole land, and every tree, which has the fruit of a tree yielding seed. They are to be food for you.
Also for every wild animal, every flying creature of the sky and every creature that crawls on the land which has life, every green plant is to be food.” And it happened so.
So God saw everything that He made, and behold it was very good. So there was evening and there was morning—the sixth day.
On the sixth day of creation Adonai created Adam, mankind. Genesis 1 says mankind was created in Adonai’s image and likeness.
God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.
Immediately after creating Adam and Chavah and breathing the Nish’mat Chayim, Adonai blesses them and gives them their very precise calling and purpose, to be fruitful and multiply—to fill the earth with generations upon generations of those created in the image and likeness of HaShem. He also called mankind to rule over and conquer the things of this world and to rule over the rest of creation.
There were really only a handful of things that mankind had to keep in mind, and they were to be fruitful and multiply, to rule over the rest of creation, and that we can eat of every plant yielding seed with exception of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
So God saw everything that He made, and behold it was very good. So there was evening and there was morning—the sixth day.
There’s a couple of very important and key ideas to take to heart here… First and foremost, God formed Adam (mankind) from the Adamah (dust of the earth) in His image and likeness. He then breathed His Breath of Life into our lungs. The very next thing HaShem did after creating mankind and breathing the Nish’mat Chayim into our lungs was to bless mankind. Lastly, after He blessed that which He created in His image and likeness He then looked at all His creation, including mankind, and declared His creation was very good. Not just good, but very good.
Let that sink in… He did not look at His creation, mankind, which He created in His image and likeness and declared they’re ok… They’ll do… They’ll be tolerable… He didn’t say, “Meh, I think I can work with this…” No, He declared mankind very good!
וַיַּרְא אֶלֹהִים אֶת–כָּל–אַשֶׁר עָשָׂה וְהִנֵּה–טוֹב מְאֹד
Vayareh Elohim et-kal-asher asah v’hineh-tov me’od.
So God saw everything that He made, and behold it was very good.
(Genesis 1:31a)
Much like the chefs I worked for over the years who worked very hard to make sure their dinner specials were perfect, spot on and the best possible flavor profile imaginable. They made no exceptions when it came to their special dishes, there were no changes or substitutions allowed or needed… The same is true with God’s creation of mankind… He created us in His image and likeness, Adam and Chavah were works of art… They were perfect, there was no fault, no failure, no sin, no disappointment, no problems… That is, until the enemy came into the picture…
Principle: We are created in the image and likeness of G-d, and the enemy wants nothing more than to ruin G-d’s creation.
(Parasha Bereshit)
But the serpent was shrewder than any animal of the field that Adonai Elohim made. So it said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from all the trees of the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “Of the fruit of the trees, we may eat.
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat of it and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”
The serpent said to the woman, “You most assuredly won’t die!
For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Now the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a thing of lust for the eyes, and that the tree was desirable for imparting wisdom. So she took of its fruit and she ate. She also gave to her husband who was with her and he ate.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made for themselves loin-coverings.
Remember, the enemy wanted to be like God, in fact he thought he could sit on the thrown of God. He was already exactly what God had created him to be and served as an angel of the Lord. He had a very important role already in the kingdom of God, but was never satisfied. And the enemy is the father of lies… Imagine being hasatan and getting kicked out of heaven because you thought you could become God Himself… Then you hear that God is created the universe and in it He is going to created mankind who will be created in His image and likeness, or better put, mankind would be given exactly what you thought you wanted.
He got angry and, in my words, basically said if he can’t have the image and likeness of God then no one can…
In psychology, this is what would be called projection. Psychology today defines projection as: Projection is the process of displacing one’s feelings onto a different person, animal, or object. The term is most commonly used to describe defensive projection—attributing one’s own unacceptable urges to another. For example, if someone continuously bullies and ridicules a peer about his insecurities, the bully might be projecting his own struggle with self-esteem onto the other person. The concept emerged from Sigmund Freud’s work on defense mechanisms...
So the serpent comes into the picture in order to project the enemies self-esteem issues onto God’s prized creation.
And notice the way the serpent words things… “Did God really say you can’t eat of any tree?”
Well, of course He didn’t… Chavah says, “He specifically said not to eat from the one specific tree, lest we die.”
Then the serpent says:
The serpent said to the woman, “You most assuredly won’t die!
For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The enemy wasn’t saying that Adam and Chavah wouldn’t die, he was trying to convince them that they wouldn’t drop dead immediately and that God’s real reason for them not eating of the tree isn’t so they don’t die, but rather because He knows that they would become like God if they do eat from it.
Well, there’s the enemy’s biggest lie… Mankind was created in the image and likeness of Adonai, we can’t become anymore like God than the way we were already created. And the enemy was well aware of this fact… But he was projecting his own issues on God’s prized creation.
And because of this Adam and Chavah gave into the temptation and ate of the fruit thinking they could become more like God. But the reality is we were already created in perfection, created in the image and likeness of HaShem, and we can’t become more like God than we were first created.
The enemy wants us to believe his lies more than we believe the truth of the Word of God. But God created mankind in His image and likeness, He blessed His creation, and then He called His creation Tov Me’od (very good). And because of the lies of the enemy we rejected what God called us to be, we rejected who God created us as, we chose the lies of the enemy over the truth of God’s blessing.
But, despite all of this, God still loves us, He still cherishes His creation. So much so that He sent Yeshua to redeem our sins, to restore us from the lies of the enemy, to make us new, to renew His image and likeness in our lives, to restore His N’shmat Chayim through His Ruach HaKodesh.
I believe this is a tremendous part of what we see when Yeshua is immersed by Yochanan HaMatbil and those at the shores of the Jordan hear the Baht Kol speak over Yeshua, which we read in Matthew 3:17 and Mark 1:11…
Then Yeshua came from the Galilee to John, to be immersed by him in the Jordan.
But John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I need to be immersed by You, and You are coming to me?”
But Yeshua responded, “Let it happen now, for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” So John yielded to Him.
After being immersed, Yeshua rose up out of the water; and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Ruach Elohim descending like a dove and coming upon Him.
And behold, a voice from the heavens said, “This is My Son, whom I love; with Him I am well pleased!”
If you pay close attention you’ll notice that Yeshua’s immersion narrative in a lot of ways replicates the creation account. Notice in creation you have the Baht Kol speaking creation into existence, we see the Ruach Elohim hovering over the depths of the seas, we see the mankind—created in the image and likeness of God—and in the immersion account we see Yeshua of whom Colossians 1 says:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
In the creation account we see God bless mankind and declare His creation Tov Me’od, and in the immersion account says:
And behold, a voice from the heavens said, “This is My Son, whom I love; with Him I am well pleased!”
Yeshua, the visible image of the invisible God, came to offer His own life for our sins, for our failures, for our belief in the enemy’s lies over the Truth of Adonai’s Word. He offered His life in order to restore mankind in the image and likeness of our Creator. The Lord sees our failures, or as Paul says in Romans 3:23
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Yeshua, the firstborn of all creation was born of a woman, born into a fallen world, ministered in Spirit and Truth for 3.5 years, and then offered His life on the Cross, resurrected from the dead, and ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father and made atonement in the Holy of Holies in heaven so we can be restored in the image and likeness in which we were first created.
Principle: We are created in the image and likeness of G-d, and the enemy wants nothing more than to ruin G-d’s creation.
Immediately after the fall of Adam and Chavah they recognize their shame and that they are naked, they hear God coming to meet with them in the Garden and they hide themselves and their shame from Him. The omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Adonai comes strolling through the Garden, man is hiding, and what is it God says as He approaches?
He called out, “Where are you?” Does anyone for even a moment believe God didn’t know where they were? This is a much deeper question being posed to mankind… Sin has now entered us and we cannot reside in the Presence of God because of our sin… God is not asking Adam where he went as though He somehow lost track of him… He’s asking Adam where are you, as in where is your heart? What happened to you? I gave you life and my own breath within you, I gave you the Garden to rule over, I created you in My image and likeness, and that wasn’t enough?
And where did mankind find themselves because of our freewill choice to sin? Outside the Garden, outside the will of God, outside the Presence of God… No longer able to intimately interact with Him. And through Messiah Yeshua, the firstborn of all creation, we are being restored. Through the Blood of Messiah our sins are washed clean and forgiven. And one day, when we are in the Olam Habah, we will be reunited in His Presence again as we were originally created to be. And between now and then we are able to have His Presence through His Ruach reside within us.
And as the redeemed, we must be even more cautious of the enemy’s temptation, of the enemy’s distraction, of the enemy’s projection… Because, just as Adam and Chavah had a specific calling, so do we… To make disciples of all nations!!! To bring the restoration of Messiah Yeshua to all creation!!!
You
You
(Call worship team up and unmute)
You have been created in the image and likeness of Adonai. And through Messiah Yeshua you can be fully restored in His image and likeness.
What lies of the enemy are you choosing to hold on to, choosing the believe?
What areas of your life are you allowing the enemy to rob you of the fullness of the blessing HaShem has spoken over you?
What mistakes have you made that you’ve allowed the enemy to hold over your head and convince you that you’re not Tov Me’od, that God couldn’t possibly call you good, that God couldn’t possibly love you after what you’ve done?
Are you trusting the lies of the enemy over the Truth of God’s Word? Are you choosing to die a little day by day rather than to find freedom and life everlasting in forgiveness Yeshua?
You are a child of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. You have been created in His image and likeness and are breathing His Nish’mat Chayim… And He has bought your freedom, your forgiveness, your salvation with the Blood of the Lamb to restore you in the truth of what He has created you to be and the good life He has spoken over you.
We
We
Psalm 139:14 says
I praise You, for I am awesomely, wonderfully made! Wonderful are Your works— and my soul knows that very well.
Or as it is worded in other translations, “I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made...”
We are in the lineage of Adam and Chavah, and as such, we are in fact awesomely and wonderfully made! We are made in the image and likeness of God, we are made to praise and worship our Creator. We are made to encounter the God of all creation in a tangible and personal way. We are made to experience His goodness and His love because He has made us, breathed His Nish’mat Chayim in our lungs, He has spoken His blessing over us and declared His creation Tov Me’od.
And even though we have failed time and time again… Even though our sins have created a bigger and bigger chasm between us and our heavenly Father, He has prepared a way for our redemption and restoration in Messiah Yeshua, the firstborn of all creation.
Principle: We are created in the image and likeness of G-d, and the enemy wants nothing more than to ruin G-d’s creation.
In a moment we are going to spend some time in worship, I want to encourage you today to recognize the lies of the enemy that have bled their way into your life and to toss them off. Do not believe his projecting his self-image issues on you… Do not believe that what God created you for or to be isn’t good enough. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, we are made in the imaged and likeness of Adonai, and through the Blood of Messiah we are redeemed and restored in the image and likeness in which we were first created!
As we worship let us focus our hearts on the identity in which we were created, for which we’ve been redeemed in Messiah Yeshua. Let us throw of the lies of the enemy, the curses others have spoken over us, the false identities we have accepted. Let us reject the lies of the enemy. Let us turn our hearts to the God of all creation, the God who has redeemed us, and let us accept ourselves as He sees us—awesomely and wonderfully made.
Genesis 1:31 (TLV)
So God saw everything that He made, and behold it was very good.
May the Lord of all creation comfort each of us and may our eyes truly be opened to the truth of His love and compassion for us. May we see ourselves, redeemed in Messiah Yeshua, as God has declared us, Tov Me’od.