Genesis #05 Ch. 2:4-3:6 — Chuck Missler

Genesis 2:4–3:6 and the Purpose of the Study

This is the fifth study in the book of Genesis conducted by Chuck Missler. The subject of this tape, Genesis chapter 2, verse 4, through chapter 3, verse 6.

While we're in the book of Genesis, it's also very clear, it's especially clear to those in the room that are spiritually enlightened, that this fellowship means a lot of prayer. So we don't pass an offering plate here on Monday nights, but it's not without cost, because I do covet your prayers for the study.

Those of you that think about it during the week, those of you that are being blessed by the study, praise the Lord for it. Those of you that aren't, praise the Lord for it, okay? I mean, petition him to help us on Monday nights, because we are seriously, I'm very flippant style perhaps, but we're very seriously, we are in a supernatural exercise, this is not a course in apologetics.

We'll touch upon some interesting things, because that's our nature to do so. But it's not, our intention here is to stimulate you to do your own homework. And so we tend to go in a kind of a loose style.

But our intention also is to invoke the real teacher of this program, which is the Holy Spirit. So let's do that right now. Father, we just do claim the promise that you've given us, and just ask you to send your Holy Spirit to open our hearts and our understanding and our eyes that we might behold wondrous things out of thy law, that we might behold Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.

That's the beginning and the end of it, the Lord Jesus Christ. But I would like to start tonight, I'd like to remind you of Luke 24. We looked at Luke 24 the first time we started the study. Let's turn to Luke 24 now, just as we get warmed up and into this.

Luke 24 is the famous story of the Emmaus Road. It's the first act of our Lord Jesus Christ after his resurrection. It's an Old Testament Bible study, where he in effect, for practical purposes, was incognito with his disciples, traveling seven miles to the road to Emmaus, joins these two gentlemen who were there puzzled and depressed and frightened because of the events three days before.

Our Lord, in his resurrection situation, accompanies them, and instead of dramatizing his presence by some kind of overt act, he rather leads them in an Old Testament Bible study. And I think there's just so much, I think there's just much here.

As he joins himself to these disciples, he asks them why they're so sad, they tell him that, gee, where were you three days ago, don't you understand what's happened, how all these things transpired. And he rebuked them subtly and says, didn't you realize that that's exactly what the Scripture, didn't you know that the Messiah, the Christ, is to suffer these things and to enter into his glory.

And then verse 27 of Luke 24 says, and beginning at Moses and all the prophets, that means he was quite an exhaustive study, on the seven-mile journey, he recounted for them Moses and all the prophets, and he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

That's a very, very exciting thing. And then as we skim down to verse, well, I should explain that there's also a change of scene, because when they get to Emmaus, he fellowships with them at mealtime, and then splits, joins the rest of the disciples that evening.

And there again he confronts them, and verse 46 says, and thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day. Again, we see this third day, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that tonight also.

Okay, so the point I'm really trying to make is that the Lord Jesus Christ himself not only vindicated Moses as the author, but pointed out that all the prophets speak of him, of Jesus Christ. He says that many places, I just picked this example.

And he says, search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, they are they which testify of me. So our purpose is to focus on, yes, Genesis, but Genesis as a book of prophecy. So we're going to gradually wean ourselves from the six, you know, was the world created in six days kind of thing.

And we're going to tonight, and probably when we get to the Noah's flood thing, we'll talk a little more about the evolutionary hypothesis. But we're going to really not try, it'll be my attempt not to focus on those issues, but rather to focus as a book of prophecy.

Evolutionary Claims and the Fossil Record

I started, you know, someone gave me, getting back at this, we're in chapter two, we're going to get into the creation of man. Someone gave me, time or time before last, this little poster. And I think I shared it with you when I got it, but it's so appropriate I'll mention it tonight.

It's really an artist's rendering of a sequence of men going from one side to the other. And the first man is a Heidelberg man. And then the subtitle under here, it says, it's built from a jawbone that was conceded by many to be quite human.

Then the Nebraska man scientifically built up from one tooth and later found to be the tooth of an extinct pig. And I'm going to come back to some of these. It's really quite interesting. And the Nebraska man was not only an absurd extension of ideas from a trivial amount of data.

You know, Mark Twain mentioned that. He was so fascinated by this field of science because you can come to such wholesale conclusions with such economic evidence. It takes very little evidence to come to sweeping conclusions.

But this, of course, was not only rather bizarre, but the tooth around which they built the whole idea of the Nebraska man was later found out to be a tooth of an extinct pig. And as the papers at the time picked up, it was the first time that a pig made a monkey out of a man.

But anyway, the Piltdown man, the jawbone turned out to belong to a modern ape. The Peking man, all the evidence has disappeared, and that's a whole story. The Neanderthal man, in 1958 at the International Congress of Zoology, Dr. A .J. Ekov said that his examination of the famous Neanderthal skeleton found in France over 50 years ago is that of an old man who suffered from arthritis.

And then there's a Cro-Magnon man, and it just mentions that this is one of the earliest and best established fossils that is at least equal in physique and brain capacity to modern man. So what's the difference?

What it doesn't mention, by the way, is the Cro-Magnon man, applying the concepts of phrenology or craniology or whatever you call it, probably had an intellect and superior strength to modern man as we think of him.

So if, in fact, he was representative for a bear, there's been a decline. But modern man, this genius thinks that we came from a monkey. That's modern man. And then, of course, Romans 1 .22, professing themselves to be wise, they became as fools.

My first instinct, and I gathered a lot of notes in this direction, which I'm going to spare you the details of, but I will just highlight so you get the flavor of what we could do. There was the Heidelberg man, of course, which was created entirely out of just the findings of a jaw, which later investigations proved was human.

The Nebraska man, which was 1922, Henry Osborne. The whole thing is built up from the single tooth, which I mentioned. The Piltown man, sometimes called the Dawn man, 1912. Charles Dawson, another guy, found a jaw bone, which later turned out to be that of a modern ape.

But here's the point. They discovered upon examination that it had been treated with iron salts to make it look old. And the subsequent treatment also revealed file marks where they modified the thing to become a fraud.

The point I'm going to make when I get through here, well, let me go on, then I'll come back. In 1921, the so-called Peking man, all the evidence of that's gone. And that also is a whole complex story in which there's not only misguided intent or prejudice or presumption.

There's actually the active fabrication of a fraud, an attempt to gain fame and notoriety by fraudulently creating evidence. The Neanderthal man we mentioned. The Cro-Magnon man we mentioned. There's also the Java man, which is one of the first things.

Du Bois found this in 1891. He's one of the earliest examples of this sort of thing. Found a skull cap. And also about 50 feet away, a femur, a thigh bone. And he also found some other things that he didn't disclose then.

He concealed some evidence of some other teeth, which later, in fact, they in fact disproved the hypothesis that he was trying to sell. First of all, there's no linking of this thigh bone with the skull cap he found.

They're 50 feet apart in the dig. And there's no reason necessarily to link them. But anyway, in 1922, some 30 years later, he revealed some other things he had found at that same dig. And the significance of that was very obvious because it tended to destroy his whole hypothesis.

And the teeth of the thing was also that he found that were involved in this. Turned out to be that of an orangutan. And he himself, before he died, admitted that this was probably the fragments of a large gibbon.

Or it's a form of simian or ape. Well, the point is, those of you, it occurred to me, rather than go into all of this and spend a lot of time, those of you that are into this and would like to dig into it, there are several books in paperback in most of the Christian bookstores.

One's called The Ape Men, Fact or Fallacy. The other one, very widely quoted, very scholarly work. In fact, in that sense, maybe even a little tedious, is Gish's book called Evolution Colon. The Fossils Say No.

And the main impact of these books isn't just to go through all these examples. The thing that you'll discover if you take the trouble, those of you interested in this, go ahead and dig those books out and read them.

What you need to realize is none of the traditional paleontological examples that you may remember from your high school textbooks have been validated. Most of them have been totally debunked. They made a lot of press when they were discovered some 10, 20, 50 years later when somebody discovered something that proved them as frauds.

The press didn't really play it up. It's nothing secret. It's been published. But it hasn't gotten the visibility. In fact, most people today, if you mention these, assume that they're examples. And this continues to get promoted by National Geographic or Life magazine summaries and things.

The point is, not only are they not scientifically valid, in most cases they are the result of an overt attempt to deceive. And that's what makes these books interesting. If you're into that, you might find it fun to get into.

It's my intention not to spend any more time on it in our review of Genesis because, first of all, it's a specialized interest. There's plenty of books around. You can chase that down. Secondly, it particularly hit me tonight as I saw the group gather and I enjoyed the ministry of song.

It occurred to me that all of this material, as well as a lot of the other stuff I've drugged in here in the last few weeks, may be intriguing in their side trips. They don't really get at where people are hurting.

That's what God would have us do. That's what Genesis is really all about, the predicament of man. And it ain't the predicament of monkeys posing as man. It's the predicament of you and I where we're at today, not who might have preceded Adam in the minds of some monkey men.

So I'm going to try and shift gears a little bit to get to what really is the guts of what this is really all about. And so with that, let's jump into God's Word. We're in Genesis 2, and I'll pick up Genesis 2.

The Toledoth Structure and the Meaning of “Day”

As we pointed out last time, the first three verses, for sure, really belong as part of Chapter 1. But the seventh day is hallowed after the sixth, and that brings us down to verse 4. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

We're a generation of the Toledoth. There are ten of them in the book of Genesis. Most of the others are clearly genealogies. From time to time, whether it's Adam or Noah or whatever, there will actually be a genealogy.

And if you're outlining the book of Genesis, and I have a tendency not to emphasize that. Most of you that are into it can do it yourself if you like. But there are several different ways to outline it.

But one of the ways to outline the book is by genealogies. And if you do that, this is the first one. These are the generations, or the genealogy, if you will, of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

So in a sense, the structure of the text to this point is as the form, in a sense, of a genealogy. It's also a very structured, metrical thing, and therefore many of these scholars refer to the passage up to this point as the so-called creation hymn.

In a lyrical style, it has summarized the foregoing. We're now going to go back and examine some things specifically. And that's why you have this sort of closing verse. These, which up until now, are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, and the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

And the word day here is the word yom. It's one of those cases where the word yom means general period. The day they were created. You mean they were created one day? No, they were created in seven. When the word yom is used with a number, it's a specific period of 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night in terms of the Hebrew idiom of the day.

And that's exactly what God intended in chapter 1. That's exactly what Moses reconfirmed in Exodus and should put that issue to silence. Maybe it won't be comfortable, because you can't figure out how the stalactites and all that go.

We'll talk more about that when we get to Noah. But that is what God intended, clearly in the language. For us to recognize God's creative act as occurring in six days with him resting on the seventh.

That's another thing I'm going to leave for those of you that are interested. You can find all kinds of scholastic scientific works which argue for what's called the young earth. There's an incredible amount of scientific data which argues eloquently for an earth no longer than 10 ,000 years.

And that's a shock to many people who have been conditioned by a preschool or even college in some cases or I should say a geological orientation to our cosmology. And that's one view, a view that's getting increasingly under criticism in view of modern discoveries.

So enough of that, we'll get back to the text. Verse 5, Now we're going to get into in detail that which had already occurred. But he's going to go back and talk about in detail the creation of Adam. When did Adam occur?

In the sixth day. It sounds like, you know, if you're looking at this chronologically, you talk about six days, seventh day is holy, you figure in the eighth day. Not really, we've changed subjects. We've gone from the overview.

We're now going to go look at Adam specifically, Mr. and Mrs. Adam and see what transpired. And we'll also try to outgrow this view that all this trouble started when he had a Mrs. Adam, but that ain't so, you'll see.

Okay. We also should note here something that will be of great interest to us when we get to Genesis 6 and 7. There wasn't such a thing as rain. There's no evidence of rain on the earth, biblically speaking, until Noah shows up.

So we want to remember that as we look at the predicament of Noah trying to convince his friends about his project that was going on in his driveway. But that's later. Okay, verse 7. 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. Now we could spend hours just talking about that. The whole New Testament amplifies that. But the long and the short of it is that it just means exactly what it says. I might mention that the word Adam, the word for man, is a summary of Adamah, which is the word for earth or dust.

That's what he's named after. We're also going to discover, earlier it said in Genesis 1, male and female created he them. So Eve is created. Now we're going to unfold, what's going to unfold here is the detailed summary of how she is, how they are created.

Eden, the Two Trees, and the Rivers

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 and the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden and thence it was parted and became four heads. The name of the first is Paishon, that is, it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah where there is gold.

The gold of that land is good. There is bedillium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon and the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Hittical which incidentally is, we know it by its Persian name, which is the Tigers.

And that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria and the fourth river is the Euphrates. Now, before we go on, the books are full of details about this. Trying to figure out where was Eden. And, believe it or not, you can find scholastic arguments that try to promote it as being in Europe, Armenia, Saudi Arabia.

The abundant evidence would argue that it's roughly in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Valley. That area in Mesopotamia which is known as the Fertile Crescent. And the trouble with it is is that if you look at 2 Peter 3 .6 he comments on the flood.

It will be a very important passage to us when we get to Genesis 6 but it might be worthwhile to look at it right now. 2 Peter 3 .6. Remember verse 4 is a very important verse for you. The passage of verses 3 and 4 because verse 4 ties the disbelief in the second coming of Christ to evolution.

We're all familiar with 2 Peter 3. 3. Knowing this first, that there come in the last days scoffers walking after their own lusts and saying, where is the promise of his coming? Meaning, these scoffers, these doubters are going to say, where did you get this idea?

Jesus Christ is literally going to come back to the planet Earth. These people that will scoff at that idea will argue, Peter says, for since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.

Which is a way of saying that it's an argument towards uniformism. Uniformitarianism or whatever you call it. In other words, the idea that things won't change. It's a continuum view of cosmology. The concept of God intervening at the end of human history ties to the idea of God intervening in the first place.

And verse 5 goes on to, and we talked about this, but verse 5 goes on, for this they willingly are ignorant of that by the word of God the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of the water and in the water by which the world that then was being overflowed with water perished.

Now this is the cataclysm theory of history. Science has had a tendency to disavow the concept of cataclysms. Writers like Immanuel Velikovsky and others, strictly from scientific and historical evidence, have argued that we are the victim, that planet Earth has been the subject of all kinds of catastrophes.

That's all of its polar poles, its direction of rotation, and its orbit and the rest. And there's evidence of this. If you want any evidence yourself, take a telescope and look at the moon. There's all kinds of evidence that's been subject to catastrophes of various kinds.

So has the planet Earth, and that's basically Velikovsky's argument. But what Peter's saying here is, the world that then was being overflowed with water perished. Now the point is, the world after Genesis 6 and 7 is a different world.

The days of Peleg, the continents were divided, and so forth. We're going to get into all of that. But since that's yet future in Genesis, I'm sort of looking ahead and I want to reflect back. I would argue to you that it's a waste of time to try to figure out where Eden is by the placement of these rivers.

Because those rivers are in different places now. There was a major upheaval, major disruption of the planet Earth, the poles are probably reversed, the direction of rotation is probably reversed according to Steinhauer, Patton, and Hatch, and or Velikovsky, depending on what your theory is, and so forth.

So there's just a lot of upheavals that occur between here and where we're headed. So trying to look back and figure out where Eden is is a waste of time. Now that leaves me with a problem. It's not a big problem, but I'll show you.

I'm very flipped when I've got a strong opinion about something. Let me be just as candid with you when I've got a major problem. I've got a couple in the book of Genesis. This is one of them, the genealogy of Cain is another.

Later on we're going to discover there's a genealogy of Cain's family. And what bothers me about that is they all die in the flood, right? They and all their descendants, right? And I have a theory that this may all disprove.

I think everything, whatsoever things were written before time were written for our learning. So for some reason the Holy Spirit had to give us the genealogy of Cain. I don't know what it is. For some reason the Holy Spirit has given us the trouble of laying out these rivers and some peculiar geological information here that has defied scholarship to identify clearly.

And from a spiritual point of view I have no concept of what value it might be. So it's no big problem in one sense, unless you're just a curious student. And thus I invite you, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit hopefully, get in some insight as to what you said, I have none.

There's a number of places in scripture that challenge my very peculiar extreme view that everything here is for a spiritual purpose. By the time we're through the book of Genesis, if you've been with us, and you hang in there that long, you're going to discover all kinds of places where the Holy Spirit has just hidden treasures for us.

And you will emerge from that experience, I believe, with a profound respect for every subtlety and detail. The thing is, by the time I get you into some of those, you will have forgotten about this passage in Genesis 2 to nail me with.

So, but gee Chuck, if that's true, what's Habbalah got to do in Pishon? I have no idea. So if any of you discover over the summer, by sitting on the beach, digging in this and you get some insight, I'd be very fascinated to hear your hypotheses as to why the Holy Spirit might have put all this in here.

There is a couple of subtleties. It's interesting that in each river, the writer attempts to identify the river, except the river Euphrates. From the context that's in the Hebrew, the implication is clearly there that the writer assumes that the reader knows where the river Euphrates is in contrast to these others.

So most scholars feel that the river Euphrates isn't exactly where it was then, but probably in that region of the world, that river was named by the descendants of Noah in a correlative sense. So you can run with that one if you like.

I'm not sure where it will all lead you, but I will use that as an excuse to skip quickly to verse 15. And the Lord God took the man, put him into the garden of Eden, to till it and to keep it. And the Lord 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. Now we're all familiar, most primitive understanding of the Scripture, as some exposure to the famous tree. Sometimes you visualize a literal, usually you visualize a literal tree with literal fruit on it, and if you pluck one of those fruits, you've broken the rule.

Now whether this tree was that kind of a tree, or whether it was something else conceptual, is really irrelevant. I could fascinate you with some tangents that are probably wrong, so I'll skip it. The point is, God wanted us to understand that this is a literal tree.

The first observation I would like to make before, while this is all fresh in your mind, is where's Eve? Where's Eve? She's not on the scene yet. Girls, make note of that, okay? Guys, note that you had this burden before Eve came on the scene.

So I'll leave you to think about what all that means, and we'll move on a little bit. And I'm going to assume for a moment that we're... Oh, by the way, one other note that I wanted to share with you before we plunge into this whole Adam-Eve tree thing, is verse 10.

There's a hint in Hebrew grammar. It's one of these subtleties I think is exciting. In verse 10 it says, A river went out of Eden to water the garden. The tense there is past tense. Okay? When we get to verse... in fact, 11 through 14, the verses are in the present tense.

And what's implied, certainly not proven, but implied in the text, is that Adam, who probably was the original writer, and I won't get into that whole argument, but at the time this was written, Eden was in past tense, was already removed.

What's hinted in the grammar is the absence of Eden at the time this was written. And yet it was present tense, i .e. prior to Noah. Isn't that interesting? I think that's interesting. If you're a believer, that's exciting.

If you're kind of skeptical, then don't worry about it. It's just one of Missler's nonsensical things. I'll come back to the tree. I've got some things I want to share with you about the tree. But before we do that, let's try to get more of all of this in view.

Adam’s Command, the Creation of Eve, and Marriage

Okay, so Adam has the commandment not to eat of this tree. Adam was given full liberty. He had this paradise, this garden, in Eden. He's given dominion over it. He's to run things, manage it. He can do anything he likes, except one thing.

He's given one little rule, which by its own definition is the knowledge of evil. Everything up till now is good. God created the world. We know from testimony of five of the six days that that was good.

In fact, we have a summary thing. It was all very good, right? Everything is terrific. But there's no evil. Visible, aware, what have you. There's no pain. Even God puts on a deep anesthesia for his blood transfusion thing.

There's no pain. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil becomes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil experientially by simply its existence. Breaking the rule introduces evil. So we get very philosophical about the tree of good and evil if we like, but it's one of those things by definition.

Now, let's move to verse 18. The Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a help fit for him. This guy, the helpmate, helpmate is a corruption in the 16th century in terms of that as a concept.

He's making a helper, assistant, comforter, friend, partner, whatever, fit for him. Verse 19. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them to...

Now, he's not saying he created them. It's a recap statement to put in context what God is doing. A lot of people really quibble about verse 19. But in the context, it's clear what the teacher is telling us.

Every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them. And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all the cattle, to the fowl of the air, to every beast of the field.

But, in other words, we're taking inventory. That's what we're doing. Taking inventory. There was not found a help fit for Adam. The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam. And he slept. You know, it's interesting in the New Testament.

I'm getting ahead of the story, but it just comes to me now. So, let's just stick it in here and you can see where I'm headed. In the New Testament, do you ever see an expression of a Christian dying?

What's the euphemism? What's the linguistic phrase we use in the New Testament? Sleep. Was Adam saved? At this point? Setting aside other issues? Sure. So, Adam slept. He went into a deep sleep. And what happens in that deep sleep?

God took one of his ribs, as the translation would have it, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, He made he a woman, and then brought her to the man.

We take for granted that by then the sleep is over and he's awake, and he's now presented with his work of art. Okay? And Adam 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.

Up until now the word for man had been, you know, the word Adam is used for man. The word ish is also the word for man, and ishah is the Hebrew for woman. And it's interesting, I had an inventory, I forgot to bring it, of I think 17 languages, which has the word man and woman, the same kind of thing in English, it's man and woman, woman is derived from the word man.

In German, in Sanskrit, in you name it, same kind of thing occur. In the Hebrew it's also ish and ishah. There's always, not always the only construct, but there's a construction in which the man and woman, the phenomenon we have in the English occurs in the other languages too.

Anyway, now, a couple of things. First of all, this is the first recorded case of deep anesthesia, and blood transfusion in the scripture. We have the idiom here of the rib, and that's the common conception.

The word in the Hebrew is sele, or something like that. It really can be translated, in fact it occurs 40 times in the scripture, and it's translated all kinds of ways. To mean side, it's a word that means wing of a building, it's a word that means panel, like a side panel of some kind.

Now it's not unreasonable in the context to visualize it as a rib, but it isn't necessarily what the Hebrew, it's something we infer from the Hebrew. No big deal, but just in case you girls have been being ribbed all the time.

No, it's going to get worse, don't you think? By the way, another one of these things that you hear, that isn't, it's interesting, is that, it's suggested by some writers, that God took woman, not from his feet, that he was to trample her, not from his head that she was to lord it over him, but from his side, in fact, from under his arm that he might protect her, or that part that's closest to his heart.

Isn't that pretty? I don't know if it's scriptural, but it's pretty. This is going to get a little more complicated, so in order to make it efficient, let me try to map our approach to this fairly carefully.

We're not talking about, big pardon? Should be no pain, he was put into a deep, well, that's a good point, but he was certainly put into a deep anesthesia, okay? There's another reason I think he was put into a deep anesthesia, and a fall hasn't occurred yet.

Okay, but let me go a little further, and then we'll double back on this. Let me talk a little bit, but let's go a little bit further. Let me finish chapter two, so no matter how much I get distracted, I will have finished chapter two.

Verse 24 is quoted three times in the New Testament. Adam has just said, this is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, and 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.

Now, some people, some scholars, feel this was Adam still speaking prophetically. It's a little awkward, because there weren't any fathers and mothers yet, to the best of our knowledge. Others feel that Moses, or the Holy Spirit, or what have you, put this in as an explanatory comment.

What's interesting is, is that it's quoted by Jesus Christ. It's quoted in the New Testament on three different occasions. And verse 25 says, and they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.

That's setting the stage for chapter three. And chapter three is the most important chapter in many respects. I could make the case that chapter three is the most important chapter in the Bible. You could probably put together a comprehensive, competent theology entirely from chapter three.

Very, very important chapter. And part of my problem is some of the things I want to share about chapter two requires really an overview of chapter three. So I'm stumbling a little bit to figure out how we're going to really get at this.

But let me just present you. We're going to get into it in more detail, but I'm going to take for granted you know the story, how Eve is approached by the serpent, Satan in the form of a serpent, and she's deceived by him, violates God's law, and Adam joins her in that predicament, and we have the whole, what's called the fall of man in chapter three.