Genesis 2, The 7th day & Creation Part Deux
Sermon • Submitted
0 ratings
· 8 viewsNotes
Transcript
Headlines
Prayer
All right so tonight we get back into our
journey of the book of beginnings, Genesis. ( In Hebrew Beresheet.)
Thus far we have looked at the creation week, Day 1 through Day 6. From the very beginning of the creation of the Heavens and the Earth on Day 1, to the separation of the waters on Day 2, to Day 3 the separation of dry land from the water and the beginnings of plant life. Then on 4th day the establishment of the lights in the heavens, the sun moon and stars, and then on the 5th day, the creation of fish and birds, and finally on day 6 the creation of land animals and insects and the creation of Mankind.
Tonight we finish the first week with the establishment of the Sabbath Day, The day God rested from has creative work.
We are going to take a deep dive into the Sabbath. We will look at the question, why was the Sabbath established, who was it for, what did Jesus say about it and why don’t we at Calvary Sunrise observe the Sabbath and should we?
Finally we will look at additional detail in the re-telling of the creation story and later learn more about the creation of man and the creation of woman and the establishment of marriage.
Let’s stand;
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts.
2 By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.
3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.
5 Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.
6 But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.
7 Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
8 The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.
9 Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing 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.
10 Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers.
11 The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
12 The gold of that land is good; the bdellium and the onyx stone are there.
13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush.
14 The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.
16 The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;
17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
19 Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
20 The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.
21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.
22 The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
23 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.”
24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
So here, some have suggested that the first 3 verses belong to Gen 1. So we are told the act of creation has been completed. One of the peculiar things we notice in these first 3 verses is that there is no evening (erev) and no morning (boqer) mentioned. Certainly there was an evening and morning but we believe that the erev and boqer mean more than just evening and morning .
Each creation day we are going from obscurity or chaos into order or darkness into light. In a like manner when we come into a relationship with Christ we also go from darkness into the light.
17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
Notice here in 2-3;
Genesis 2:2–3 (NASB95)
2 By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.
3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
As we consider verse 2 notice God completed His work. According to the 1st law of thermodynamics - the conservation of matter and energy, neither matter or energy can be created or destroyed. It is only transferred from one state to another. So when God says it is completed, it is. He is the only One who can create. At some point in the future He will create a new heavens and Earth.
Back to verse 2 notice what it does not say, it does not say that God was resting. God was not tired. No, it says He rested, meaning a pause, a ceasing from labor. The actual Hebrew word here is Shabboth.
Notice also; He finished His creation work only to begin His work of Redemption. The bible has only a few passages regarding creation, Gen 1 , Ps 8, but the entirety of the rest of the bible is all about redemption. From Gen 3 to Revelation.
So when we think about the Sabbath we should first think of the 10 Commandments;
8 “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9 “Six days you shall labor and do all your work,
10 but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you.
11 “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.
Wow, that pretty clear. So why don’t we observe the 7th day?
But first when was the Sabbath established? We first see it in Ex 16; with the gathering of the Manna;
23 then he said to them, “This is what the Lord meant: Tomorrow is a sabbath observance, a holy sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over put aside to be kept until morning.”
24 So they put it aside until morning, as Moses had ordered, and it did not become foul nor was there any worm in it.
25 Moses said, “Eat it today, for today is a sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field.
26 “Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, the sabbath, there will be none.”
So it seems certainly this was something they had been observing even before the giving of the law.
Notice also, God takes the Sabbath very seriously; the penalty for breaking the Sabbath was Death.
Exodus 31:14 (NASB95)
14 ‘Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people.
Also, remember the reason for the 70 year Babylonian captivity was that they did not keep Sabbath of the land. So the concept of the Sabbath is not one to take lightly.
Someone might say, we do observe it, except that now we observe Sunday, the first day of the week in commemoration of the Resurrection. That is not true either as there are a list of things one cannot do in observance of the Sabbath; don’t let anyone tell you they observe the Sabbath.
So why don’t we?
Exodus 31:12–17 (NASB95)
12 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying,
13 “But as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, ‘You shall surely observe My sabbaths; for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.
14 ‘Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people.
15 ‘For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall surely be put to death.
16 ‘So the sons of Israel shall observe the sabbath, to celebrate the sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant.’
17 “It is a sign between Me and the sons of Israel forever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor, and was refreshed.”
First clearly this is a sign for Israel. This Sabbath observance separated the Jews from all other nations.
When we look at Jesus’ attitude about the Sabbath we get a real picture of the intention.
First of Jesus was not against the law;
Matthew 5:17 (NASB95)
17 “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.
That includes the Sabbath. However Jesus made a distinction between the ceremonial law and the moral law.
Jesus made a remarkable statement when He said;
27 Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.
We remember Jesus always seeming to heal on the Sabbath day. This really irritated the Pharisee's and the Religious Jews. They cared more about the ceremony than the people. (BTW - this is what religion always does.) There are many recorded examples of this.
9 Departing from there, He went into their synagogue.
10 And a man was there whose hand was withered. And they questioned Jesus, asking, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”—so that they might accuse Him.
11 And He said to them, “What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out?
12 “How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”
13 Then He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand!” He stretched it out, and it was restored to normal, like the other.
14 But the Pharisees went out and conspired against Him, as to how they might destroy Him.
Probably the greatest example of the heart of Jesus about the needs of people over ceremonial law;
Matthew 12:1–8 (NASB95)
1 At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat.
2 But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.”
3 But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions,
4 how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone?
5 “Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent?
6 “But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here.
7 “But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.
8 “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
Our Lord Jesus, the Creator, is announcing Himself to the Religious Leaders as Lord of the Sabbath. Wow!!
Paul had some interesting things to say as well in regard to Sabbath observance;
Colossians 2:16–17 (NASB95)
16 Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day—
17 things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.
Finally In Acts when they gave out the rules for Gentile believers;
28 “For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials:
29 that you abstain from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication; if you keep yourselves free from such things, you will do well. Farewell.”
No mention of the Sabbath is given. The point is as Christians every day is alike. So whatever day we choose to meet together we do it with all our heart. Whether Sat or Sunday or Wed..
So there you have a brief synopses of the Sabbath..
We continue;
4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.
5 Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.
6 But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.
So Ch 2 is just a retelling of the Creation with some additional details.
Notice verse 5 up until the flood it had not rained. There was a mist that watered the Earth. We talked about the “Canopy Theory” previously. Suffice to say things were very different. It is interesting to consider that all we know about the Earth is after the Flood Gen 6.
Peter writes;
2 Peter 3:5–7 (NASB95)
5 For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water,
6 through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.
7 But by His word the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
So what was there at the beginning is no longer there. This is important as we look at the next verses.
Now in verses 7-17 we get more detail;
Genesis 2:7–17 (NASB95)
7 Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
8 The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.
Article: Israel and the land of Eden - Some postulate that Israel is where Eden was..
9 Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing 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.
10 Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers.
11 The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
12 The gold of that land is good; the bdellium and the onyx stone are there.
It would be great to know where this is but as mentioned the Earth is different now than at the beginning!
13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush.
14 The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
Conclude Here.. Prayer
15 Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.
16 The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;
17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
So again we see God forming (yatsar) Adam from the dust. Which is what we are.
Almost 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Only about 0.85% is composed of another five elements: potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. All 11 are necessary for life. The remaining elements are trace elements, of which more than a dozen are thought on the basis of good evidence to be necessary for life.[1] All of the mass of the trace elements put together (less than 10 grams for a human body) do not add up to the body mass of magnesium, the least common of the 11 non-trace elements.
Not surprisingly all these elements are found in the Earths crust. Dust we are and to dust we will return.
But notice Life only comes by the breath of God.
In verse 9 we get the first mention of the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil. We will save that topic for chapter 3.