Columbiana County Jail 01/09/2026
Columbiana County Jail • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 5 viewsNotes
Transcript
Genesis 2:1-6
Genesis 2:1-6
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
Now that we are finished with Chapter one in Genesis, We are now starting our journey in chapter two. The first verse of this chapter begins with the term “thus”. This reflects back to the content of the prior passage, so this verse summarizes all of chapter one. It is a statement of conclusion, God completed His work of creation. The heaven and the earth and every aspect of God’s great creation was finished.
Chapter and verse divisions were not part of the original Bible text, so these words are meant to be read in a natural flow from those at the end of chapter one. In Genesis 1:31, God declared all He had made as “very good”.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
He accomplished exactly what He set out to do, and He was satisfied with the results. In this moment, nothing existed in creation which was bad, or corrupt, or out of sync with the plan and purpose of God. The heavens and earth were vast, teeming with life, and they were exactly as God intended them to be.
The change does not happen until later during the fall of man and human sin. That is when the ideal state that God created is changed.
2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
As the previous verse has already confirmed, God completed His work of creation on the sixth day. The week was not over , however. The seventh day mattered to God and became the most important day of them all. Why? Having completed His work, God rested. This is a point where the pattern of chapter one is stopped. On each of the previous six days of creation, God did specific work and saw that it was good. On the seventh day, God did no work.
What does it mean for God to rest? When you read this passage, that question had to enter your mind. What do you think it meant? What does it mean to rest from working, for One with the power to create worlds out of nothing with just His command? Honestly, it is difficult to know, but the passage is clear that it was significant to God. Whether for practical, symbolic, or other purposes, we are meant to see this as a meaningful choice on the part of the Creator. This day of rest will become known as the Sabbath, a central point of God’s Law and essential to Israel’s worship of Him. But even now, before sin enters the world, before the Law exists, this day of rest is already meaningful to the Creator.
3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
The previous verse describes God accomplishing His work of creation in six days. After this, on the seventh day, God rested from work. Here, we read that God does two things. God blessed the seventh day and He made the seventh day holy.
This brings us to an interesting question to address. What does it mean to bless a day? If we go back to chapter one, when God blessed something, it was tied to the fertility of His creation, to reproduction, and populating the earth. When we look at this blessing of the seventh day, this becomes less clear. One thing we do know about the future , under the Law, God would bless Israel for observing the seventh day rest. God would demonstrate His ability to provide for His people even when they sat out a day of work each week.
God also makes the seventh day holy or “set apart” from the other six days. Even before sin entered into the world, God intended from the very beginning for the seventh day to be a special day dedicated to rest. It is the pattern God set for the world beginning in this verse.
4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,
Now we get into some interesting points. Chapter one described God’s process of creation in six separate days. the first few verses of chapter two complete that sequence with a seventh day, where God takes a deliberate rest from His work. Having concluded the account of the creation week, Genesis now turns back to provide more information about the creation of human beings, where they lived, and God’s instruction to them.
This verse serves as an introduction to the story of Adam and Eve and those who would follow. It is written in the poetic structure of a chiasm. So now we have an interesting question to go over. What is a chiasm? A chiasm is a word -pyramid in which phrases parallel each other on the way “up” and “down”. Another way to think of this is as a mirror, centered on some specific point. The idea - pattern in a chiasm is structured as A-B-C-B-A, but can include many more points around the central theme. I brought this point up at the end of chapter one, when I was explaining you were going to see a specific writing style that was done in Hebrew. This is the style I was referring to. This form of writing is very common throughout Genesis.
So this verse begins with “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” And it reverses direction : “in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,”.
This pattern can be found in Genesis in single verses, in multi-verse sections, and even over the course of multiple chapters.
5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
Setting the stage for the arrival of man, two things are missing at this point in the creation story: rain and someone to work the ground. This verse describes a world in which no shrubs or small plants of the field had yet sprung up. The Hebrew word for plants God created during the prior days, as in Genesis 1:11, is de’se, which is a very general term.
11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
Here, in verse 5, the terms used are siah and e’seb, which are more specific. This passage, then, is describing the lack of cultivated crops grown for humans to eat.
God caused all kinds of plants to grow on the land on the third day of creation, and we will see in verse 8 that God will plant trees in Eden with fruit good for food. This verse is pointing forward to man’s future work and purpose on the earth, to plant crops and work the ground, to bring order to the earth by tending what god had made.
6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
The previous verse described the earth as lacking cultivated crops. At that point, there was no one to work the ground and no rain. So now we have another interesting question, how did the garden get its water with no rain?
This verse tells us how the garden got its water with no rain; mists or streams came up from the ground. The impression is of underground streams, the so-called “fresh water ocean”, which would saturate the land, perhaps on a cyclical basis. This fits the description of upcoming verses of the rivers that water the garden of eden and the region around it. It also fits with the farming practices of the Mesopotamian region that relied on cyclical flooding to sustain crops.
As we already discovered in chapter one, God had prepared a world in which humans could grow and gather food before He even made man. Likewise, He made a world in which humans were needed to care for all He had made and help to bring order to it.
