In 1884 Sir Frederick Treves discovered the Elephant Man in a vacant green grocer’s shop opposite the London Hospital. He described him as ‘the most disgusting specimen of humanity’ he had every seen. He had an ‘enormous and mis-shapen head’. A mass of bone projected from both his brow and his upper jaw, giving him a somewhat elephantine appearance, while spongy and evil-smelling skin, which looked like fungus or brown cauliflower, hung in bags from the back of his head, his back, chest and right arm. His legs were deformed, his feet were bulbous, and he had hip disease. His face was expressionless and his speech spluttering and almost unintelligible. His left arm and hand were, by contrast, as shapely and delicate as a woman’s.
To add to his suffering he was treated like an animal, and hawked round the countryside from fair to fair and (though without police permission) exhibited to the curious for twopence a look. Treves wrote: ‘He was shunned like a leper, housed like a wild beast, and got his only view of the world from a peephole in a showman’s cart.’ He received less sympathy or kindness than a dog, and, terrified of staring eyes, he would creep into some dark corner to hide.
But Treves discovered he was a human being, John Merrick by name, aged 21, highly intelligent with an acute sensibility and a romantic imagination. And when he was abandoned by the showman, Treves arranged for him to be accommodated and cared for in a room at the back of the London Hospital, where, three and a half years later, he died in his sleep.
When the first woman visited Merrick, gave him a smile and a greeting, and shook him by the hand, he broke down into uncontrollable sobbing. But from that day his transformation began. He received many notable visitors including Queen Alexandra, then Princess of Wales, and was enthralled by his visits to the pantomime and the countryside. Treves discovered him to be ‘gentle, affectionate and lovable, free from any trace of cynicism or resentment, without an unkind word for anyone.
‘Gradually he changed,’ wrote Treves, ‘From a hunted thing into a man’. But actually he had always been a man. It was Treves’ remarkable reverence for human life which enabled John Merrick to lift up his poor mis-shapen head and gain some human self-respect, as a man made in the image of God.
You may already know that story of the Elephant Man and have seen the moving film based upon it. It highlights the importance of the truths we studied at the end of Genesis 1, when we saw that we are made in the image of God. We suggested that image consists of a variety of unique human qualities: that we are rational, moral, social, creative, and spiritual beings. Those qualities have all been marred by sin – but just as John Merrick’s physical deformity did not stop him from being a human being made in God’s image, so deformities in other areas do not stop us from still being human beings made in God’s image. And understanding what we are as human beings and what gives meaning and value to our lives is very important indeed – both for us as individuals, and for us as a society.
So the Bible does not stop at Genesis 1 in its account of humanity. No sooner have the seven days of creation reached their triumphant climax in the unending seventh day of God’s rest (chapter 2:1-3) than the Bible goes back over creation again from a different perspective. Instead of the wide panorama of the heavens and the earth in all their vast array in chapter one, we now watch man in a garden in the east with two trees in the middle of it in chapter 2.
But first let us consider this seventh day.
1. The seventh day (2:1-3)
Notice again that ‘very good’ of chapter 1:31, and then the delighted satisfaction of the seventh day in chapter 2 vv1-3.
This is what creation culminated in. It is what creation was heading for. Notice there was no evening and no morning. This seventh day has not ended. We are still in it. Creation is still heading for rest, as a picture of the culmination and fulfillment of the purposes of God. The new testament picks up this idea and tells us that ‘there remains a sabbath-rest for the people of God’ (Hebrews 4:9). If you are one of those people, then that is what you are here on earth for: to be a creature of the seventh day; to share in God’s delight at the fulfillment of His purposes in creation as everything and everyone find their rightful place in acknowledging Him as Lord.
We are going to move on from those first three verses to the second heading, which is:
2. The Man
- man from a slightly different perspective. Remember the highly patterned creation story of Genesis 1, with its sudden break at 1.26 with the arrival of man? We now have a second account of the creation of man, from verses 4 to 7 of chapter 2. It's quite distinct. There's no seven days (see verse 4). The order is now man (v. 7), plants (v. 9), animals (v. 19). The male comes first (v. 7), then the female (v. 22).
There are various ways these two accounts can be explained. Some have suggested two different source documents have been combined at this point. (It is known as Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis; it is very far from a watertight theory.)
Others have attempted a reconciliation with what geology and archaeology tell us, and this is possible. Let me share a brief speculation. It is only a speculation, but it may be helpful.
The Adam of chapter 2, verse 7, is an agriculturalist. He is going to till a garden (v. 15). Cain is going tobuild a city (ch. 4 v. 17), and within a few generations Cain’s descendants are forging bronze and iron (ch. 4 v. 22). That would make this Adam of Genesis 2 Neolithic man, according to archaeology, which reveals a sudden shift, after hundreds of thousands of years of hunting cavemen, to an agricultural, city-building culture some time after the last Ice Age, around 8000 BC. But the man and the woman of Genesis 1 may represent man from 1 million BC. Archaeology tells us they were cavemen.
So the wasteland after the last Ice Age, where rich alluvial deposits were frequently flooded, could be what verse 5 of chapter 2 is talking to us about. And then Adam is created (v. 7) out of what God has already created: Neolithic, agriculturalist man out of pre-Adamic cave man. And it is suggested that pre-Adamic men – those created in chapter 1 - continued to exist. It was they whom Cain feared might kill him. Do you remember that puzzle in chapter 4: 14? Who is it that Cain is frightened may kill him? And did he perhaps find his wife from among this pre-Adamic race, who were all to perish in the Flood, leaving only Adamic man, Neolithic man of chapter 2, to survive in the persons of Noah’s family?
Well, there is nothing wrong with that sort of speculation. But it is speculation, and, if we become too absorbed in it, we are going to miss the point of the chapter. If you are a creationist, I will not argue with you, because that is not the point here. The juxtaposition of these two accounts of the creation of man helps us to see what is significant and what is not significant. In other words, as I have already suggested, if the seven days and the order of events in chapter 1 were meant to be so important, would they be stood on their head in chapter 2? Just as the telescoping of enormous stretches of geological time into seven days reveals God's purpose in creation to focus on man, so these two complementary accounts throw two spotlights on to exactly the same object: man, humanity. We learn here what it is to be human and what place humankind has in God's purposes.
So let's notice from chapter 2 what we can learn about humanity.
First the purposelessness of creation without humanity, before man is there as God's vice-regent to rule and control (v. 4). Notice the change of order to indicate the change of focus - from 'the heavens and the earth' at the beginning of the verse to ‘the earth and the heavens’at the end. And then, we see in verses 5 and 6, a world not initially hospitable. (That word 'watered' could as easily mean 'flooded'.
And then in verses 7 and 8: the purpose of the garden is to provide a context for the man. It is as if, having been created to exercise dominion over God's world in chapter 1, humanity is then withdrawn from the wider world and placed in a garden, and in that garden his God-given task began. Verse 15: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it." His job was to rule and to subdue the earth, but humanity didn't achieve that at a stroke. The extraordinary domination which human beings have achieved over our environment has come step by step and stage by stage. We don't know what further conquests we may yet make. But it began when Adam tilled the garden, and God brought him the animals to name (vv 19,20).
Notice that work was not a part of the curse that results from the Fall in the next chapter. Work is the very essence of what it meant to be in the image of God. And we, of course, have learnt in our age that to be without work is, in fact, a much greater curse. The desolation of the wet wastelands depicted in verses 5 and 6 is partly because ‘there was no man to work the ground’(v. 5). In fact, ‘to work the ground’ is one definition of what it means to have dominion. The earth needed the man for fruitfulness, just as the man needed the earth for his work, for both to fulfil God's purposes for them. Our domination is not an accident. It is God's ordained will. God set humankind as His image in the earth – to do His will here.
We have no need for the guilt of the environmentalists. The breathtaking beauty of the rain forest and the untamed wilderness isn't actually more beautiful than the well-tended garden or well-tilled farmland. The earth was meant to have man's attentions. It wasn't just meant to be an untamed wilderness, it was meant to be made fruitful. There is that old story about a vicar and an elderly gardener talking and the vicar saying, rather pompously, "Isn't it wonderful how God makes the plants grow in the garden?" At which the gardener mutters, "You should have seen the garden when He had it to Himself!" That is exactly the point. It is our role to bring out the beauty of creation, to make it more beautiful. We should not think of untouched nature as the really beautiful thing and feel guilty about any human interference. To be as God is to the earth - that means work for us, which has all sorts of implications for your and my daily work.
So let's consider that further by looking at the garden in verses 8 to 15.
3. The Garden
Verse 9: ‘Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant 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.’ The garden met man's aesthetic needs: ‘trees pleasing to the eye’. It met his physical needs: ‘good for food’. And there his spiritual needs were to be met also. ‘In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (we'll return to those in a moment). Moreover, verses 10 to14 tell us of a world waiting outside the garden, with its mineral resources and all the opportunities for exploration and discovery and cultural development that that implies (v. 15).
When we view our daily work in the light of that, we need to remember the purpose for which God had done His work in creation (1: 31): ‘. . . it was very good’. God created the universe to be good in His eyes, and it perfectly fulfilled that purpose.
Now there is no separation here between economic good and moral good, no grounds for separating God's providential care of His creation and His desire to have His creation in a right relationship with Himself. The goodness was all to do with creatures and the creation in a right relationship to the Creator. And that is why the fall has such awful consequences. This is a very important theological point. When you and I move out of the role that God has given us, all the relationships go wrong: our relationship with each other has gone wrong, our relationship with God has gone wrong, our relationship with the world has gone wrong. For God has so designated it that we have a right role to play between Him and the world, and if we won't play that role, then the world itself is damaged by being out of kilter with God.
All God's activity is directed to achieve that goal of goodness, and therefore all our activity should have that same wholeness and integrity about it. What I do with my life here on this earth matters very much indeed. It matters that God should be able to look at the work of my hands and pronounce it very good, just as He looked at the work of His own hands and saw that all He had made was very good. And that's what verse 15 of chapter 2 means for you and me.
I've got to that midlife stage (or probably past it!) where I have observed a number of close friends make changes in their careers in their 40's. Just as when you're hill-walking you suddenly see the summit point and you think, "That's where I'm going to get to at the end of this walk," so in life you come to a point when you see the end and think, "That's where I'm going to be when I'm sixty-five." So you ask yourself the question, "Is it where I want to be? When I get there, am I going to look back on the forty years of my working life and be proud of it?" Or, more importantly, "When I look back, is God going to say, 'Very good'?" That is what He put you and me on this earth for, so that He could pronounce that verdict on your life and mine. And if the career and the work you're in at the moment does not lead you to think that will be the case, I would counsel you very strongly to think very hard about changing it, because you will never know the blessing of the hand of God upon you in your working life unless you're clear that you're doing what He meant you to do and that His verdict on it is, "Excellent! That is just what I put you here to do. Well done!". Because that is what He wants to say to you and to me and that's why He's put us here on this earth. I find that a challenge to me and I've seen in the lives of many of my contemporaries that crucial moment, and I've deeply respected some of them who've made major career changes as they saw the summit and said, "That isn't where I want to get to at the end of my working life."
That God should pronounce it good, the work of my hands; there is a spiritual audit to be done on our work, both of what is it achieving and on how we are doing it. I hope you've done that spiritual audit. What am I achieving? How am I conducting myself in the achieving of it? Does God pronounce it good? Because, if He doesn't, why am I doing it?
It is true of our child-rearing - what does God think of it? It is true of our careers - what do they add to the sum of human happiness? Does God say, "That's a very good thing to be doing."? If you're unemployed, do you see your life in this perspective? The fact that you don't have salaried employment at this moment may be way out of your control, but that does not mean that God may not look at your life and say, "Very good. It's what I want you to be doing." Perhaps you're a single parent struggling to raise children alone. Exactly the same spiritual audit needs to be run over these things.
It's not the approval of other people. It's not what our parents, our friends, our wives, our husbands think of what we're doing. It's not winning our children's respect and it's not human rewards. It's not salary, status, security. It's God's verdict that we seek because it is God's work we do (ch. 2 v 15). It's His gift to us, not our achievement and He has told us what its purpose is.
4. The Trees
Now let's consider the trees. Verse 9: ‘Out of the ground the Lord made to grow every tree that is pleasant 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.’ Then verses 16 and 17: ‘The Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”’
Notice that in the very middle of the garden is not, as you might have expected, a cosy little cottage that God had prepared for Adam and Eve to live in, but instead, two trees, each named after the destiny to which it would lead. The fruit isn't magical, but sacramental. The Bible has no room for blind forces, only for acts of God. So the fruit of one of the trees carries a word from God which confronts man with God's will. The fruit doesn't have special properties within it. It has a prohibition attached to it, which makes it the alternative to discipleship, the opportunity for obedience or disobedience. That's what matters about this tree. That's why is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It represents the opportunity for Adam and Eve either to obey God or to disobey Him.
And here, in verse 16, we see the garden as the place where God communicates with humanity. Here, for the first time, we hear God's voice speaking to human beings. The relationship hinted at in chapter. 1 v 26, “Let us make man in (or as) our image", has come to fruition in verse 16 of the next chapter. But it also makes clear on what basis that relationship can exist. For God and man to relate to each other, God must be God and man must be man, God must be the Creator and man must be the creature. It cannot be the reverse. "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” By eating of that particular tree, man is laying claim to decide for himself what is good and what is evil.
You and I, by and large, are not tempted to try to replace God in ruling the universe. There are those who might be so tempted, but I think the majority of us do not want to run the universe. But all of us want to decide what is right and what is wrong for ourselves. We would all like to decide for ourselves what the rules are. In fact, we all do, every day of our lives. We keep taking that prerogative away from God and saying, "I will decide for myself what's right and what's wrong." We eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And that is what Adam is doing when he takes that fruit.
This tree was there in the middle of the garden at the outset. It was not added later. It is the way things are. The Creator God has a will for us that we should obey Him. That will of God is at the very centre of creation, and from it human moral values derive. We don't invent them for ourselves. They are given from the start. And in one sense, we have no freedom outside this will of God. There is no freedom outside verses 16 and 17.
Let me tell you of a favourite Gary Larson cartoon. It consists of two goldfish in a goldfish bowl and on the carpet the desiccated skeleton of a third fish. One goldfish is saying to the other, "I guess he made it, it's been over a week since he went over the wall." For a profound theological comment, you turn to a Gary Larsen cartoon! One of my curates put it like this: "A goldfish's freedom to be a goldfish depends on its respect for the appropriate context for its life." It takes a preacher to make it sound as good as that! If you and I cannot accept that we are created beings who have a Creator, we cease to be free. It is not freedom to reject that truth, it is the opposite.
You and I are free within a context, and that context is a certain attitude to the will of God. "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die." That was the only prohibition there was. Adam had not been told that he shouldn't hit Eve (once she was credated), or bully the animals. He'd just been given one test on which his obedience or disobedience would hinge. You see, God was not going to be in the garden with Adam. We see from chapter 3 that He used to visit Adam from time to time, but most of the time all Adam had to go on was a bare word of God: "You are free to eat . . but you must not eat . .", a word that expressed God's will for him.
Faith is living by God's word, trusting and obeying it. And God's word tells us that, although we have all eaten of this first tree and defied God's will in our lives, He has also provided a way back to the second tree, the tree of life. The last chapter of the Bible contains a blessing on those who wash their robes that they may have the right to the tree of life (Revelation 22:14). Those robes are washed in the blood of the Lamb, the blood shed for us by Jesus. His death paid the penalty for our disobedience and allows us to go back to the tree of life and eat of it.
5. Our Place in God’s World (18-25)
There is a lot in the last verses of chapter two: some of the most beautiful verses in the Bible and some of the most important, verses 18 to 25 of chapter 2.
First, verse 18, ‘And the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper as his partner.”’ Now, verse 26 of chapter 1. There we saw that sexuality and being in God's image are the two fundamental factors of humanity, of being human. God's image required both genders. Now here, companionship is stressed. Humanity is gregarious. Human life is meant to be corporate. That is true of all human life. It's true particularly of redeemed human life. You may be aware that the commonest word for a Christian in the New Testament is the word 'saint'. It comes 62 times in the New Testament, 61 of them in the plural. The 62nd time is Philippians 4:21 where it says, ‘Greet every saint’. It is the only time in the New Testament that the word 'saint' is used in the singular. The Christian life is corporate. Not all will marry, but all of us are called to get to know other Christians better, get to know them and love them and care for them.
Human life is corporate. "It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper, as his partner."
Now what follows in vv 19-20 is the beginnings of scientific endeavour, the naming and classifying of creation. ‘So, out of the ground, the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle and to the birds of the air and to every animal of the field. But for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. And so (v.21), the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And he slept. And He took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man He made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, 'This, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called woman, for out of man this one was taken.’
More a reunion than a union, a coming back together again of what God had separated. Homosexual marriage can never be what God intended, because it's not the one-flesh union of a man and a woman there in verse 24: ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh.’ Marriage is ordained by God from the outset and there is much that can be learnt of it just from this verse alone.
It is to be public before it is to be consummated. The man ‘leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh’. The leaving comes before the cleaving. Those of us who are parents of children of marriageable age need to learn that lesson so strongly. How many marriages have we all seen torn apart by parental love that will not let a child go! I am so grateful that, after my marriage if ever my wife and I disagreed in front of my parents, my parents invariably took my wife's side and always have done. It's very healthy. The fact that they had actually always taken anybody else's side against me for the previous thirty years in neither here nor there! But I am so grateful for that. Right from the outset, it was clear. They were not committed evangelical Christians, but they took a very godly attitude to our marriage. And how many marriages we see pulled apart by a love that won't let a child go!
Marriage is not for everybody and it doesn't mean that if you are single and you don't know married love you are missing out on a spiritual benefit. As we know, the Bible uses marriage as one of the best pictures here on earth of heaven: Israel is called God's bride. It is adultery for Israel to go off after other gods. When Jesus said about his contemporaries that they were ‘an adulterous generation’, He didn't mean that there was a lot of sexual promiscuity going on. He meant that they were a generation that had turned away from God in their hearts. It's a standard picture, picked up by Paul who quotes this verse in Ephesians 5.
But remember this: marriage is just for time. It is something just for this earth. It will not be there in heaven. Jesus made it very clear: "In heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage." Why is that? Because marriage is a little picture for us of what heaven will be like. It's not that heaven is like marriage. If we took marriage into heaven, it would spoil heaven. Heaven is far more wonderful than the best love we ever know on earth, married or unmarried. Marriage at its very best is one of God's little visual aids for us.
And so we end with a pointer to heaven in these verses that we've been looking at, one of the clearest little glimpses that we get, but only one and only a limited one at that. And the way there is going to be via the cross. Not via nudism. Look at verse 25: ‘The man and his wife were naked and were not ashamed.’ We know that what will follow chapter 3 will mean that we can never get back to that situation again. We cannot tear our clothes off and stand naked in front of one another and think that that is a way back into God's grace. Now we go via the cross, via forgiveness. The guilt that will follow chapter 3 is a right and proper thing.
These chapters keep thrusting us on into the New Testament, they keep pointing us on to Calvary, to the incarnation, to the crucifixion, to the resurrection. That will follow more from Genesis 3 as we go ‘In Search of the Crusher’.