Book of Genesis - Ch. 2, Vs. 15-25 (05/07/2000)

Park Meadows Church

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Roger, do you have John 13, 3 open? Would you read it to us, please?

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As Brother David was giving us that wonderful message this morning, and he read that,

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I saw something for the first time. Something that I knew, but I'd never seen it connected with that verse.

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Go now to Ephesians 1 and 4. I don't think

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David would mind me adding a little bit. David, read

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Ephesians 1 and 4. Alright, we know that that was not a choice as we think a choice.

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We've just always been with Him. When David read John 13, 3 this morning, and Jesus knew that He had come from the

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Father and was going back to the Father, the thought come to me, so have we.

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We have come from the Father and we're going back to the Father, just as Jesus did.

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Then he was talking about the Passover and the eating of the lamb.

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And another thought come to me, David. They were instructed to eat all of it, or if they didn't, to burn all that was left.

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And I asked myself, why? And this is what myself said.

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That the next morning after they were gone, if there had been any food left, the lamb left, others would have eaten it.

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And salvation is for His people only, and not for anyone else.

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And this is why they had to eat it all or burn it all so there would be nothing left for others to pick up.

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Does that make any sense to you? Salvation is just for His people.

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Passover is just for His people. None left over for anybody else.

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Now, I left you last week with an assignment. What three things is it that the evolutionists cannot account for?

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Who thought of at least one? Who thought of none?

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All right. The three things that come to my mind was that they cannot account for human speech.

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Neither can they account for human conscience or for human individuality.

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The second part of the assignment was a typical day in the life of Adam in the garden. I'm sure all of you answered that one.

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Who wants to read their essay? Who doesn't want to read their essay?

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What two words? Well, you were supposed to look at that too, but also just outline a typical day of Adam.

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All right, give us the two words, dress and keep. Well, take care of it.

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And then exactly, exactly ten words was in one of the places in the Bible. And it was in Malachi 3 .14.

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And it said, You have said it was vain to serve God. And what prophet has said is that you have kept

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His ordinances. Isn't it enough to see that those exact same two words are used again and again?

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If you had had the resources to trace it further back, you would have discovered that both words, dress and keep, come from a word meaning to worship.

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So in both the assignments for Adam, his dressing and his keeping of the garden was worship of God.

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I found that to be rather interesting. Well, he was placed over all of the creation.

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But in all of my research, I've never come to a satisfactory answer in my own mind of just what he meant by the word keep, other than worship.

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But it had something else with it, and that I cannot answer. I was in hopes when

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I got the answer back from you all today about the typical day in the life of Adam, I would find out what it meant.

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But since no one is volunteering, did anybody spend any time thinking about it?

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All right. Greg? All right.

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David? Oh, that's why you put up your hand.

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Well, let me add to that then for next week. Did Adam have to sleep?

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Now, let's come to our lesson. The 15th verse of the second chapter.

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And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

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And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou may freely eat.

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But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it.

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For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Very simple statement.

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Made one time, made to Adam. Not to Adam and Eve, but to Adam. It was not easy to misunderstand what had been said.

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So he knew exactly that there was a tree that he could not touch.

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Well, it doesn't say not touch, but he could not eat the fruit of it. Didn't say he couldn't look at it.

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He just could not eat it. Now, Adam was in a state of innocence.

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He was completely free. Freedom demands a choice, so he had to have a choice or he would never have been free.

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This is the choice. The reason for the tree, part of it, was to give Adam a choice.

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What is it that God loves more than sacrifice? Obedience.

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That's what this tree is going to teach, is obedience. Most important lesson.

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David mentioned it again this morning. Always study what the word does not say along with what it says.

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The Lord tells Adam to not eat of this tree. What he does not tell him is, but you are going to eat of the tree.

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God had decreed that the human race would fall and the way it would fall, but he did not tell

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Adam. So Adam had no idea that the human race was going to turn out to be sinful.

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He had no idea of doing anything except what the Lord wanted him to do.

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So why did Adam eat of the tree? Because he wanted to.

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Just that simple. That one simple answer will help you understand all the rest of the

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Bible. He did it because he wanted to do it. So do we.

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We do not know what we're going to do in the next five minutes. We think we know based on past experience, but we don't know.

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God has a revealed will and an unrevealed will, Russell. The revealed will is the one for which we are to be in obedience.

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The unrevealed will, we have nothing to do with. So commit that one simple little answer to memory.

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It applies to your entire life. We do that which we want to do without ever knowing that what we're doing is already decreed by God.

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Pharaoh did what he wanted to, not knowing that he was fulfilling the will of God. Any questions?

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Verse 18. And the Lord said, It is not good that the man should be alone.

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I will make him a helpmeet, one who helps for him.

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And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, every fowl of the air, and brought them unto

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Adam to see what he would call them. And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name of it.

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I found it strange that the scripture says that it is not good for man to dwell alone.

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I will make him a helper. And then immediately, Fred, he brings all of the animals to him to name.

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There seems to be no connection. Looks like that just after he said,

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I'll make him a helpmate, that he would have gone ahead and made it. But he didn't. He brought all of the animals past Adam for him to name them.

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So there must have been a reason. First of all, how many days do you suppose this took for Adam to name all of the animals?

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Now we're not talking about every animal inside of every species. We're talking about every animal of every species.

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Is he still at it? In an instant. How could that be?

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That's not what he told us happened. He said he brought them and they all passed by. And he named them as they passed by.

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Well, I understand he can do anything and could do anything he wanted to do. He didn't have to do anything he did.

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But there is a logical pattern to what he did. Now, since we can't answer that one,

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Russell, how did he know what to call each one? He named them.

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No, now, you can't cop out with saying everything is because God wanted it.

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That's true. What language?

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So he named it by its shape. And what else?

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And by what noise it made. So basically he named it by the shape, by the sound it made, certainly not by what he remembered.

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I heard someone say one day he named the elephant because he said it looks more like an elephant than anything.

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He actually named it Aniba. I don't know.

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In fact, I imagine if we took a poll, there wouldn't be over three or four things that were there.

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Well, my point in all of this is, first, he said I'm going to make him a helper, and he didn't.

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He brought all of the animals. How do you suppose the animals come by? By twos.

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Male and female. Why was that? To show him what?

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How did he know they were not? I hate classes that got an answer to everything.

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Well, game and twos are all right, but there was no attraction between Adam and the animals. None whatsoever.

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What's this extracurricular stuff? Well, I am too.

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All right, he gave names to all of the cattle, to the fowler there, to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was found no helper.

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And the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam. Are there any medical doctors in the audience?

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Are there any retired nurses in the audience?

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B, tell us what is meant by the term deep sleep. What did that smart aleck say?

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Number five? Okay. In surgery, the anesthetist is the most important person in there, because they kill you and then hold you just above death.

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That's what deep sleep is. He put Adam into that deep sleep. Now, since we're playing the game

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God could have, he could have done it without putting him to sleep. Why did he not make

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Eve from dirt like he did Adam? I don't know if we're...

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I don't know if we're learning anything, but we're sure having fun, ain't we? Why? That's exactly right.

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There was an attraction as soon as he saw her. There had never been an attraction in any of the animals.

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If he had made her from dirt, then she would have been a separate identity and there would have never been any attraction.

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There had to be an attraction between these two. We'll get to more of that in a moment.

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Well, we'll get to it right now. Therefore...

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Oh, where did I leave off? And the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept, and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh thereof.

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Now, for the first 80 years of my life, I thought man had one less rib than a woman, but that's not true.

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And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man made he a woman and brought her unto man.

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Now, a rib is symbolic of what he did. He took bone. Russell, in fact,

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God did the first cloning. From Adam he produced a woman.

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Out of the sight of Adam came the human race. Out of the sight of the ark came the home.

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Out of the sight of Jesus our Lord came eternal life. All out of the sight.

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And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.

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She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

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Ishman. Was Eve a descendant of Adam?

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Now, you've had all kinds of answers. She wasn't. Are you sure?

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The only way you define it. Descendant. You descended from. What did...

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No, just Adam and Eve. Was Eve a descendant of Adam?

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Well, we need to work on your definition. Oh, she was a descendant of Adam.

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What? Just like Adam was. But she was a descendant of Adam.

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She did not stand alone in her creation. Adam was made out of dirt.

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Woman was made from bone. Why did God not make the woman?

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I've already asked that. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh.

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And they were both naked. Now, this is naked, not naked. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

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And God called them... What? What? He called them

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Adam. He did not call them the Adamses. He called them

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Adam. One. The man and the wife make up one.

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Before woman was removed from Adam... Now, I want you to listen very close and not misunderstand.

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Adam had all of the properties of both male and female. Although he didn't look like a woman.

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But he had all of the properties of both. The woman has that...

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Talking about now. Now, the woman has that for which a man seeks. Love. Motherly instinct.

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Care for children. The ability to manage a household. Everything that a woman is good at.

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Man, on the other hand, has all that the woman desires. Protection.

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Provider for the family. Leadership of the home. Spiritual head of the household and so forth.

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Everything that the man is held responsible for. What is the oldest institution on earth?

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What? Family. Now, we're going to open chapter three, and I know we won't get very far.

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But we must get started in it. And this is the one that's going to take some deep concentration on your part.

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Now, the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the

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Lord God had made. It's very unfortunate on some circumstances that we live in the

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West. The eastern part of the world seems to have a better understanding than our translations.

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We have here one of the most difficult as well as the most important narratives of the whole book of God.

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This third chapter. The last chapter ended with a short but striking account of the perfection of the first human beings.

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And this one opens with an account of their transgression, degradation, and ruin.

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That man is in a fallen state. The history of the world with that of the life of miseries of every human being establishes on any successful contradiction.

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But how and by what agency was this brought about? A great mystery.

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And I ask each one of you, have you ever been satisfied on this part of the subject?

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Though you're convinced that it is a fact, have you ever really been satisfied or have you just accepted it as what it says and go on?

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Who and what was this? In what way did he or it seduce the first happy pair?

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These are questions yet remain unanswered. The whole account is either a simple narrative of facts or it is an allegory.

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If it is a historical event, its literal meaning should be sought out.

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That's what we're going to do. If it is an allegory, no attempt should be made to explain it.

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I take it as a event in history. I believe it to be an account of something that actually happened.

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Therefore, I'm going to take it upon myself to seek the true meaning of it.

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I cannot stand here and give you all of my research, so you will get a part of it.

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But if anybody would like to have a full copy, I'll be glad to make one. We start now with notes on the serpent in the garden.

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First of all, we have to go to language. Brother Rogers, that's a difficult task, as you just pointed out.

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But as you study the languages of the world, you begin to see that they all trace back to either one of the languages of Hebrew or Arabic.

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I have found that in the Hebrew, where I could not find a root,

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I could usually find it in Arabic. And vice versa. If it's not in the

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Arabic, then you can usually find it in Hebrew. So I think

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I could be safe in saying that the language that was first used was either

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Arabic or Hebrew. And I lean toward the Hebrew. It had to be given by God.

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Man did not come equipped speaking a language. It had all of the facilities to do it, and God saw that it was developed.

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Now, the base word for serpent in the

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Bible is nokash. N -A -C -H -A -S -H

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And it signifies this.

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It means to view attentively, to acquire knowledge or experience by attentive observation.

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Nokash. And through study of the scripture,

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I have learned that this word seems to be the most general meaning in the

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Bible. It's used throughout the Bible, and it actually is used in the wrong way in lots of places.

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Because they make it mean something other than in one particular verse.

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The original word is by the Septuagint translated a serpent. Nokash.

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Not because that was the fixed determination of the meaning of it, but because it was the best that occurred to the translators.

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And they do not seem to have given themselves much trouble to understand the meaning of the original.

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For they have rendered the word as variously as our translators have done.

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Talking about the Septuagint. In the

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Septuagint, we find nearly the same translation as we have in this part of Genesis.

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The New Testament writers, who seldom, unfortunately, quoted the

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Old Testament from the Septuagint translation, and often did not change even a word in their quotation, they copied the first version using this word.

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So, from the Septuagint, we find in some places, such as this.

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In Genesis 3 .1, it's translated serpent. In Genesis 1 .21,

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the same Hebrew word is translated whale. In Ezekiel 29 .3,

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it is translated crocodile. In Jeremiah 51 .34,

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it's translated dragon. In Job 26 .13,

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it's translated a whale, or a hippo, or a seahorse. Now, all of these different translations are from the same word.

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So, we can expect not much light, indeed, from any of the ancient versions, which are handed down to us from the

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Septuagint. And, by the way, the Septuagint was a corrupted text, even in the beginning.

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In all of this uncertainty, it's natural for anyone that's serious in their inquiry to look someplace else for information.

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They go to the Arabic, they go to the Hebrew roots. Very nearly, we find a word similar to that in the text, and it casts quite a bit of light upon it, and it's called

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C -H -A -N -A -S, Chanas, or Cahanas.

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This word signifies he departed, drew off, lay, hid, seduced, slunk away.

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From this root word comes Achanas, Cahanas, Cahanasay, and Canus, which all signify an ape, or any other creature of that genus.

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It's very remarkable, also, that from this very same root comes Cahanas, the devil.

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I found it rather interesting that the devil and the ape have the same root word in their meaning.

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Now, the Nakosh was more subtle, more wise, cunning, prudent, than any of the beasts of the field.

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That whatever this Nakosh was, he stood erect, and he stood at the head of the inferior animals for wisdom and for reasoning.

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He did walk erect, because that was necessarily implied when his punishment was upon thy belly.

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It actually says, upon all fours thou shalt go. That he was endued with the gift of speech, where conversation is here related between he and the woman.

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That he was also endued with the gift of reasoning, where we find him reasoning and disputing with Eve.

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That these things were common to this creature, the woman no doubt having often seen him walk erect and talk and reason, and therefore she testifies, no kind of surprise when he accosts her in the language related to the text.

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Indeed, from the manner in which this is introduced, it appears to only be a part of the conversation.

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Had this creature never been known to speak before his addressing the woman at this time and on this subject, it could not have failed to excite her surprise and to have filled her with caution, though from the purity and innocence of her nature she might have been incapable of being affected with fear.

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And I'll grant you that, that might have been the reason. Now, I say all of this to say that none of these can ever be spoken of the serpent of any species.

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None of them ever did or ever will walk erect. The tales we've heard of two -footed and four -footed serpents are justly exploded by every judicious naturalist and are utterly unworthy of credit.

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Remember, he named the animals according to their shape, their activity, or the sound they made.

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All of these things considered, we are obliged to seek for information someplace else.

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The word serpent means serpo, come from serpo, and it means to hiss.

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It doesn't mean to talk. It means to hiss. That's what the snake did, and I think that's the reason he named it what he did.

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The subtlety and cunning, endlessly various pranks. How many of you have ever been to a zoo and observed an orangutan?

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It is my belief, and I put that in quotation marks because it's just my belief, but I have a right to my belief as all of the other theologians.

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They're guessing after they've done research, but my belief is that this animal was a forerunner of the present -day orangutan.

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If you'll stand or sit and watch them over a period of time, they seem to be very intelligent, but they, in their natural state, will not walk erect.

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Now, man can make them walk erect, but it takes a lot of patience and training.

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In one place, I found that a survey was made of monkeys in general, and over 90 % of them hated women.

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Now, I don't know if that has any connection at all or not. They were told that they would eat from the dust, which the orangutan does.

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Although he has all of the capability of inspecting the food, he'll rub it on his coat mostly just to see what it is or to get the dust off of it.

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And that brings us down to the first verse of Chapter 3, and we're going to stop there.

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So, I want you to think about this animal. I used to think of it as a snake all of the time, but I have decided that it was not.

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If you disagree, that's fine. All right, we'll start with verse 1 of Chapter 3 next time.

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Are there any questions, statements, arguments?

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Well, I cannot believe that God would make a certain animal and make them like this just as one.

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I think it was a species. I'll tell you, I'll share with you what I really think it was, if you won't ever tell anybody.

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All my life of education, I've always heard and read and studied about the caveman.

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How many are familiar with the caveman? Well, never having seen one, but seeing all of the pictures of how he evolved from some little something and finally walked erect and finally become man, which is not true.

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I think that this animal was the forerunner of the caveman.

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It answers all of the questions, and it was not a man at all.

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It was an animal. And I believe if we had been there at the time, we would have thought nothing about the difference between the animal and Adam and Eve.

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But that's just my thoughts. Anything else, then let's stand and go home.