Show Notes
Genesis 2:9
Pastor Stephen Lauer
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] O Lord our God, what joy it brings our hearts to hear the Psalms description of your blessed presence into which you already by faith and in union with your Son, welcome us.
[00:00:20] There is that river of delights. There are blessings forevermore, and you, our Father, have blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus your Son.
[00:00:39] O Lord our God, open our hearts, enlarge them that we may see and believe and receive more of your blessings to us in Christ Jesus. Jesus, O Lord our God, help us as we commune with you by faith and in your word.
[00:00:59] Help us to taste and see that you are good.
[00:01:05] And O Lord, help us to leave your presence having met with you, knowing that you are our God and that you will be our God forever. In Jesus name we ask.
[00:01:19] Amen.
[00:01:21] We're going to read God's Word now from Genesis chapter two.
[00:01:25] Genesis Chapter two.
[00:01:29] We're going to begin reading in verse four.
[00:01:34] Genesis two Beginning in verse four hear God's Word.
[00:01:39] These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground and amidst was going up from the land, and was watering the whole face of the ground.
[00:02:07] Then the Lord God formed the man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
[00:02:22] The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed, and out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.
[00:02:41] The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden.
[00:02:54] There it divided and became four rivers.
[00:02:58] The name of the first is the Pishon it is the one that flowed around the whole land of Habilah.
[00:03:04] Where there is gold, the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and onyx stone are there.
[00:03:12] The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush.
[00:03:19] The name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria and the fourth river is the Euphrates.
[00:03:29] The the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it and the Lord God commanded the man, saying, you may surely 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.
[00:03:51] Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone.
[00:03:56] I will make him a helper fit for him.
[00:03:59] Now, out of the ground, the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.
[00:04:08] Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
[00:04:13] The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.
[00:04:23] But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him.
[00:04:28] So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
[00:04:41] And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
[00:04:50] Then the man said, this is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.
[00:05:04] Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
[00:05:13] The man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
[00:05:16] Please be seated.
[00:05:33] What did Adam lose when the Lord God tossed Adam out of the garden because he'd eaten from the tree that he was forbidden to eat from? When the Lord God tossed Adam out of the garden, what did Adam lose?
[00:05:52] God put Adam in the garden. He gave the garden for him to be a home, to work in it as God had worked, causing the garden to grow. Adam was to follow his example, working and keeping the garden to live there.
[00:06:10] And he gave them all manner of delights.
[00:06:13] It's this picture of a paradise, right?
[00:06:17] All of the trees were beautiful to look at. And they bore fruit that was pleasing, delicious, delightful.
[00:06:26] A garden dripping with pleasure. A paradise.
[00:06:31] And he told them one thing. No, you can eat from all the trees except the one.
[00:06:36] The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Evil. Don't eat from that, because if you eat from that, you will die.
[00:06:44] He ate from it. We know the story. And God sends him out of the garden, and he puts an angel there and a flaming sword there to guard the way so that Adam can't go back into the garden.
[00:06:57] What did Adam lose when he was cast out of the garden? Now he's cast out of the garden because he sinned, because he rebelled against God. Because he ate from the tree that he wasn't supposed to eat from.
[00:07:12] And in his sin he fell.
[00:07:16] He lost his innocency. He became naked and ashamed. He lost his righteousness that God had made him in. God made Adam, and he said he was good.
[00:07:27] The Bible says that God made man upright, righteous, good, holy, even.
[00:07:34] Adam lost all of those things when he ate from the tree. But when God sent him out of the garden and didn't let him come back in, what did Adam lose?
[00:07:49] Did he lose the Garden of Eden? Well, surely he lost the Garden of Eden.
[00:07:56] He lost the delights of the Garden of Eden. He lost the ease of the Garden of Eden, chapter 2, verse 9. Out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.
[00:08:15] Adam lost the wonderful garden, full of delights and pleasures that God had made for him.
[00:08:22] Yeah, God left Adam in the garden to tend it, keep it.
[00:08:26] But it was a garden God had already caused to grow.
[00:08:30] It already had bumper crops full of fruit everywhere for Adam to eat.
[00:08:35] Yes, he had to work, but his work was with relative ease compared to after the fall.
[00:08:45] Chapter 3, verse 23. Therefore, the Lord God sent him out of the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.
[00:08:55] Now he has to work and work hard. Yeah, he had to work before, but now he has to work hard. The curse says that now you're going to have to work and earn your bread and eat your bread by the sweat of your brow. Implying that before he had ease, he lost the ease.
[00:09:15] Now work would be hard, cursed even.
[00:09:20] He lost the delights and privileges of the garden.
[00:09:24] He lost the delight of his wife, the delight that God had made his wife to be for him. That song, that poem he sings. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. The joy of Adam over his bride, and no doubt Eve over her husband.
[00:09:46] Adam lost the purity and the delights that God had given them in that pure, holy marriage, untouched by sin that was left behind in the garden.
[00:10:00] We could probably go on and ponder more.
[00:10:05] He lost life. Now that's a result of sin.
[00:10:09] But. But there was life in the garden. It was in the garden. It was there that God had taken him from the ground, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, formed all of the creatures and the birds, given them all life in the garden. Given Eve, the mother of all the living life in the garden.
[00:10:32] He seems to have left that too behind. For when God sends him out, he curses him.
[00:10:40] You're going to work hard by the sweat of your brow till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
[00:10:51] God had given physical life and all of its delights and pleasures in their purest, most wonderful form.
[00:10:59] And he lost them.
[00:11:03] Yeah, Adam lost the, the delights and ease of the Garden of Eden.
[00:11:13] But Adam doesn't just lose.
[00:11:16] For Adam, Adam's name has a meaning.
[00:11:22] It isn't just his name.
[00:11:24] It's a word that means man.
[00:11:29] It's a word that means man. And not just male, like a male human being, man.
[00:11:36] The word Adam means man in the way that the English word man can mean mankind.
[00:11:47] When you hear the word, when you read this story, you are meant to hear the word mankind. Every time you hear the word, the man or Adam, this story is written about mankind formed, placed in a garden, mankind given a bride, and delights and privileges and pleasures.
[00:12:19] Mankind being exiled from the garden.
[00:12:26] Now, if you're a duck or a camel or a javelina, this story isn't about you.
[00:12:36] But if you're a person, a little boy or a little girl, or a grown up man or a woman, this story is meant to draw mankind in.
[00:12:49] Mankind ate from the tree.
[00:12:52] Mankind was exiled from the garden.
[00:12:57] After all, mankind was taken from the dust.
[00:13:02] And now mankind will return to the dust.
[00:13:08] Now that's some terrible stuff to lose, isn't it?
[00:13:12] Or maybe it's the most wonderful things you could think of to lose. What a terrible loss.
[00:13:19] But if this story isn't just about one man, if it's about Adam representing mankind, a picture of mankind, yes, he was a real man.
[00:13:33] But if this story is about what mankind lost when he was exiled from the garden, then surely there's more to this story than just the delights of paradise, than just the fruits of the garden, even the most wonderful fruit of the garden for Adam, his wife Eve.
[00:13:57] There's a biblical principle drawn from Adam and his name and then expanded and applied in the last Adam that the New Testament tells us.
[00:14:11] The first Adam, mankind represented all mankind.
[00:14:17] The last Adam represented a new mankind.
[00:14:25] What mankind lost in the first Adam, the new humanity, the new creation. Mankind regains in the last Adam, the lord Jesus Christ.
[00:14:40] First Corinthians 15:22 says it this way.
[00:14:44] For as in Adam all die, as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.
[00:14:59] Whatever was lost in the first Adam is regained in the second Adam.
[00:15:10] What did mankind lose then, when Adam was exiled from the garden?
[00:15:20] Can you go and find Eden?
[00:15:26] Can Eden be regained?
[00:15:30] It's gone.
[00:15:31] It was wiped away, destroyed in the flood.
[00:15:36] That Eden is most certainly gone.
[00:15:41] And we have no reason to think, no evidence that it's coming back.
[00:15:45] If Christ wanted to restore you to Eden, if that was all that Adam lost, truly, really tragically lost, if Christ wanted to restore you to Eden, he would have come, paid for your sins on the cross, risen from the dead, come out of the tomb and planted another Eden.
[00:16:08] But he didn't.
[00:16:12] As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive.
[00:16:18] What the last Adam lost, the first Adam restores, regains.
[00:16:28] If you asked Adam outside the Garden, he would have told you that what he wanted most of all was not to be back in the Garden.
[00:16:42] As wonderful as Eden was, with all of its pleasures and delights, the only real, true paradise that man has experienced here on earth.
[00:16:55] Adam would tell you there's something better than that.
[00:17:00] The thing that mattered the most, that I lost when I ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
[00:17:09] That's something even better.
[00:17:13] You see, what Adam lost was a thing he didn't yet have.
[00:17:20] Genesis 3:22.
[00:17:23] Then the Lord God said, behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.
[00:17:30] He ate from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil.
[00:17:33] Now he's become like one of us, knowing good and evil.
[00:17:37] This now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of Life and eat and live forever.
[00:17:49] Now, so that he will not stretch out his hand and take and eat from the tree of Life which God had planted in the middle of the garden.
[00:17:58] God sends him out of the garden.
[00:18:01] Therefore, the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.
[00:18:12] What Adam lost, what mankind lost, that we really want restored in Christ, was connected to the garden. It was pictured in the garden, pictured in a tree that if you ate from it, you would live forever.
[00:18:39] Adam hadn't eaten from that tree.
[00:18:44] What Adam lost was something he didn't yet have.
[00:18:51] God offered it to him. God pictured it for him, but he didn't yet have it.
[00:19:04] In the garden we meet a man. From the dust, dead earth.
[00:19:13] God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living being.
[00:19:22] We read of a river that flowed from the middle of the garden that gave life to the whole garden as it were spiraling through the garden, as it went down and out from the garden.
[00:19:37] And then it branched out into four directions. What a river. We don't have rivers like that today.
[00:19:45] Rivers are formed by little rivers and streams Flowing into bigger rivers. This river got bigger as it went out from the garden, giving life to the whole garden and all its trees and to the whole world beyond.
[00:20:04] And what a garden full of trees. Fruitful, delightful trees. Trees that gave pleasure and sustained Adam's physical life.
[00:20:19] A garden full of life, brimming with life, teeming with abundant, delightful life.
[00:20:31] Everything in the Garden of Eden testified to fullness of life.
[00:20:38] It was the most beautiful picture I haven't seen with our eyes. We've only heard about it with our ears.
[00:20:46] It was a picture of abundant life.
[00:20:51] It was a picture of the delights of eternal life.
[00:20:58] Life beyond physical life. Life that wasn't sustained by earthly trees or earthly rivers.
[00:21:08] Life that required a tree of life.
[00:21:13] Life that was fuller, higher, richer, with more delights than Adam could dream of. In the Garden of Eden, even as Adam looked into his own heart and there pondered the image of God in which he was made.
[00:21:33] Adam had a witness to life beyond the garden.
[00:21:40] The garden spoke in every respect to eternal life.
[00:21:48] Because the garden was the one place where God would come and meet with Adam.
[00:21:58] You see, the garden had to be such a picture of rich, abundant life.
[00:22:05] Because where God is, is in every respect, eternal life, every blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Paul writes about, all of it is connected with the eternal life of God himself.
[00:22:26] So when God would come down from time to time to walk in the cool of the day of the garden with Adam, the garden had to be a picture of that.
[00:22:39] So Adam would know where God is. His eternal dwelling is full of life and all its pleasures far, far beyond what I experience here on the best of days in the garden.
[00:22:57] So God gave man a taste, a taste of eternal life, a taste of his presence.
[00:23:02] And in the tree of Life, God offered Adam that higher life, more permanent life, unchanging, no fall, heavenly.
[00:23:20] He was inviting Adam into his home.
[00:23:27] That's what mankind lost when Adam was sent from the garden. And the way to the Tree of Life, the way to eternal life, was barred by the flaming sword.
[00:23:43] But what the first Adam lost, what we lost, the last Adam regained.
[00:23:54] You see, this is what Jesus came and earned for you.
[00:23:58] In his righteousness, in his holiness, in his perfection, in his dying and shedding of his blood, in his rising from the dead, Jesus earned heaven for you.
[00:24:15] Adam lived in the picture of heaven, but he lost the reality and the way to the reality. Jesus has opened that way up again for you.
[00:24:28] That's what Genesis is about.
[00:24:38] The Old Testament reads Genesis this way. That's the way way it understands the dynamic.
[00:24:44] The saints in the Old Testament are not longing for Eden.
[00:24:49] They're longing for what Eden pictured. The delights of heaven in the presence of God.
[00:24:57] You read the story in the book of Exodus. God brings his people out of Egypt, out of slavery and darkness and death, through the Red Sea ordeal.
[00:25:09] He brings them to Mount Sinai. And what does he do? He makes a covenant with them. He says, you're my treasured people.
[00:25:17] I've chosen you out of the peoples, the nations of the earth, to be my holy people, to be my treasured possession.
[00:25:26] And then he binds himself to them in covenant. And he says, I will be your God, and you will be my people.
[00:25:33] And when they sin because they worship the golden calf, God says, I'm going to destroy you. And Moses stands up and he pleads.
[00:25:42] He pleads on behalf of God's people. He pleads his own life as a picture of Christ. He says, lord, blot me out of the book of life, but spare those people whom you promised to save.
[00:25:59] And God takes his mediation.
[00:26:02] He forgives the people. He says, okay, I'm not going to destroy them. But then he says this. A few chapters later, in chapter 33, he says, you take this people up to Canaan, the promised land.
[00:26:15] I'll send my angel before you. He's going to drive out the nations. You'll have the land flowing with milk and honey. There you'll have the picture of heaven.
[00:26:25] Remember what Moses says?
[00:26:28] No.
[00:26:29] If you will not go up with us, if your presence will not be with us, if we cannot have you, O God, then we don't want Canaan.
[00:26:41] What we want is you.
[00:26:44] For you to be with us and us to be with you. That's the heart of the covenant.
[00:26:49] That is what the Old Testament saints longed for.
[00:26:53] That is what they looked forward to, receiving in fullness the reality when Jesus the Messiah would come.
[00:27:01] And you read the Psalms. You sing the Psalms like we just sung Psalm 16. And this is what they talk about.
[00:27:08] Psalm 23.
[00:27:11] You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You invite me into your home, O God. And you feed me and you host me.
[00:27:22] And I will live in the house of God forever.
[00:27:27] It's God's home into which the psalmist longs to be brought.
[00:27:35] Psalm 36, 8, 9.
[00:27:39] In God's house is a river of delights that flows forth from his throne.
[00:27:45] There God's people are satisfied.
[00:27:50] That's what we long for that day when we will be with him forever.
[00:27:58] And what we Sang in Psalm 16, my heritage and Portion is the Lord.
[00:28:05] He.
[00:28:06] He is the inheritance of God's people.
[00:28:11] And at his right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's what the Old Testament saw. The Messiah bringing us into God's home, his house in heaven, his eternal dwelling, which cannot be touched or changed, full of delights.
[00:28:33] And the whole chapter of Hebrews 11 is driving at this, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.
[00:28:45] It says that the Old Testament saints look forward to a city, not one on earth, but a heavenly city, whose builder and maker is God.
[00:28:55] Not a home or a country here on earth, but a heavenly one.
[00:29:01] Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God.
[00:29:06] The covenant relationship is drawing us into God's heavenly presence.
[00:29:13] You see, this was Jesus goal. This is what he came to regain, the way to the presence of God. His eternal dwelling place, his throne room.
[00:29:27] And that's what you find at the end of the Book of Revelation.
[00:29:31] The dwelling place of God is with men.
[00:29:34] And men are once again able to dwell in God's presence, but this time permanently, forever.
[00:29:44] And there's that river of delights, the river that gives life. And there's the tree of life. What those things pictured in the beginning Jesus has come to bring us into for eternity.
[00:29:59] Jesus didn't come to give you a garden paradise here on earth.
[00:30:03] He says, I'm going to my Father's house, where there are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
[00:30:16] And when I come again, I will receive you to myself, that where I am you may also be.
[00:30:26] And where did Jesus go?
[00:30:29] He ascended on high to heaven.
[00:30:33] The writer of Hebrews tells us that what Jesus cleansed with his blood was not an earthly tabernacle, but the heavenly one.
[00:30:42] And that's where he's entered. That's where he sits and reigns. And that's the kingdom that he came to bring us into.
[00:30:50] Matthew 24.
[00:30:54] He says to the sheep who are on his right, come, you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom that was prepared from you, from the foundation of the world.
[00:31:08] That spiritual heaven that God made when he created the heavens and the earth, that third heaven into which Paul got a glimpse of that heaven was prepared for the people of God from the very beginning, and Adam lost it. And Jesus, who now in our nature as the God man, sits in heaven, he has regained it. And if you are united to Jesus Christ by faith, this is yours today.
[00:31:40] It's a heavenly treasure that cannot be touched.
[00:31:44] Moth and rust cannot destroy it. Thieves cannot break in and steal it.
[00:31:50] It's safe, it's secure, it cannot be touched. It's yours. And one day Jesus is coming again to bring you into that heavenly paradise.
[00:32:04] That's your hope, dear believer. Let's pray.
[00:32:11] Almighty God and Father in Heaven.
[00:32:17] Our minds struggle to comprehend the wonders and delights of the Garden of Eden.
[00:32:27] All we have known all our lives is a world in which there is curse, where plants shrivel and die, where animals die, where our loved ones are buried in the tomb.
[00:32:43] Even the little delights, even the best of food and of delights in relationships here on earth, we know, cannot compare to the joys that Adam experienced with his wife in that blessed garden.
[00:33:02] But, O Lord our God, you tell us that there is something greater, something bigger, something so vast that our minds can't comprehend it.
[00:33:15] Eye has not seen, nor his ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what you, O God, have prepared for us.
[00:33:24] But oh, how we thank you that Jesus had secured this blessed arena for us and that he is preparing a place for us to enter into.
[00:33:37] Lord our God, we ask that you would strengthen our faith that our focus each day might always be on the Lord Jesus, on His work for us, which is complete and sufficient, that he has paid for all our sins, that he has reversed what the fall of Adam did for us so that we are now in him restored to right relationship with you, and that he is working to sanctify and change us, to prepare us and make us fit soul and body, that we might be holy and enter into your presence again. O Lord God, help us to see that what Jesus has done and is doing is enough, and that we can trust in him, so that then we might move beyond our worries and fears regarding our salvation and we might learn to live in the joy of the Lord Jesus, that we might rejoice at all times in him, not only in the thought of his coming and of future pleasures, but that we might rejoice already even now, knowing that we have died with him to sin, that we are risen from with him, that we are indeed even seated with him in the heavenly places through our union with Him, O Lord our God, fill our hearts and our minds with this vision of the truth, the reality of Jesus our Savior, and of what he is doing and has done.
[00:35:07] In Jesus name we ask, Amen.
