Chuck Smith discusses the creation of man, emphasizing that humans are made in the image of God, which includes the capacity for love and self-determination. He explains that God created man to have dominion over the earth and to bring pleasure to Him, highlighting the spiritual nature of humanity. Smith also reflects on the physical body as a temporary tent, contrasting it with the eternal spiritual body that awaits believers. He encourages listeners to consider whether their lives are truly bringing pleasure to God, as fulfillment comes from living for Him. The sermon concludes with a reminder of God's goodness in creation and the purpose of human existence.

Oh, let the Son of God enfold you With His Spirit and His love Let Him fill your heart and satisfy your soul Oh, let Him have the things that mold you And His Spirit like a dove Will descend upon your life And make you whole Then God said, Let us make man in our image According to our likeness. Notice the plural pronouns, us, our. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in His own image. In the image of God, He created him. Male and female, He created them. Then God blessed them and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, See, I have given you every herb that yields seed, which is on the face of all the earth, every tree whose fruit yields seed. To you it shall be for food. Also to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food. And it was so. Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. And so we find now the creation of man in order that he might rule over the earth, in order that that might be his sphere of rule, his domain, that he might have dominion over the earth. Interestingly enough, in the beginning, as a vegetarian, eating the vegetables and the fruit, which grew in such abundance in that pre-flood period, the antediluvian period, God created man in His image and after His likeness, no doubt referring to the spiritual aspects of God's nature. No man has seen God at any time. We don't know what God looks like. We think of God often in a human form. God did take on a human form in Jesus Christ. He came in the likeness of sinful flesh. But God never revealed Himself in a form to man because God never wanted man to create any likeness of Him in any kind of a form. Now, God is described often in human terms. Because God sees, we assume that God has eyes. And so we say the eye of the Lord is upon the righteous. Because God can hear, we say His ear is open to their cry. The hand of the Lord stretched out over the land. And so we think of God in physical type of terms of hands and feet and eyes and ears. A nose as God can smell. The incense is a sweet savor unto the Lord. And yet, God never revealed Himself in a human form apart from Jesus Christ because He did not want man making any kind of a likeness or an image of God. So being made in the image of God, in the likeness of God or being made like God, we were made with the capacity to love because God's chief emotional characteristic is love. God is love. So He created us with the capacity to love. God's chief governmental attribute is that of self-determination. So God made us self-determinate beings. Given to us is the capacity of choice. God is a spirit. So He made man a spiritual being because we were made like God. And basically, I am a spirit. I live in a body. I possess a consciousness. But the body isn't the real me. The body is only a tent in which I'm living for a while. I'm going to move one day into a house. It's not going to look like this tent. Now, because this old tent is going to pieces, I do my best to keep it looking as well as I can, and I care how I look now. But in that new body, hey, it's going to be perfect. A lot of flaws with this body. Inherited flaws. You see, we're the product of the genes and the combination of genes and how they came together and all, and here I am, you know, the product of my ancestry. But then, you know, my old body's been beat up a ways as I've been going along too. Not only do I have certain inherent flaws, but I've acquired a lot of flaws too. Tents falling apart. That's all right. One day I'm going to move into a house. My spirit, you see, I'll still be me. I'm going to move out of this body. The body isn't me. The body's going to go back to the dust. And how it goes back really doesn't matter to me. Once I move out, that's all she wrote, man, and I don't care what happens to it. Because I'm going to have already moved into my new body. Now, the new one I have is permanent. We have a building of God. It's not made with hands. It's eternal in the heavens. So my spirit, I'm basically spirit, live now in this body. But God being a spirit made me a spirit. But then he gave me a tent in which to live. This body. Created in the image of God, in the likeness of God, in order that I might know God and have fellowship with God. The purpose of my existence is to bring pleasure to God. In Revelation 4.11, as the elders respond to the worship of the cherubim around the throne of God, they say, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor because you've created everything and for your pleasure they are and were created. So I was created for God's pleasure and the purpose of my being here is to bring pleasure to God. Now, the question is, is your life bringing pleasure to God? And in the degree that your life is bringing pleasure to God, you are living a satisfying, fulfilling life. And the same token in the degree in which you're living for yourself, you're living an empty, frustrating life. Life can only be meaningful and fulfilling when you are living to please God because that's why you're here. God saw everything that he had made. Indeed, it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Now, chapter two is a recapitulation. We've gone through quickly and we've had a brief summary of the six days of creating as God prepared the earth for man's living upon it and then created man and placed him upon it. Now we're going to come back and we're going to fill in some details, especially that of the creation of man. These are not conflicting accounts. It is the typical Hebrew method of teaching. Jesus followed it. He would lay out a principle and then he would come back and amplify the principle. Look at the Sermon on the Mount. The principle, take heed to yourself that you do not your righteousness before men to be seen of men, for I say you have your reward. And then he goes on and he lays out then how to pray, how to fast, and how to give to God. Lays the principle, amplifies it. The principle, accept your righteousness, exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you're not going to enter into the kingdom of heaven. And then the rest of the chapter five of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's Gospel, he is illustrating then in five illustrations of how the Pharisees were living and how God intended man to live in relationship to the law. So here you give the overall. Now we come back and we look at some details. Thus the heavens and the earth and all of the host of them were finished. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had done. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. Not that he was tired, but he had completed the work of creation. And so he had ceased his creative acts. Now having created it, energized it, set it in operation. The laws of thermodynamics and entropy now take over. Setting the sun out there to give its light and energy and heat to the earth. The sun in giving off the light and the heat and the energy is dissipating 1,200,000 tons of its mass every second, gradually wearing down. And so we see the gradual decay, the loss by movement, friction loss. And we see the universe is a giant clock that had once been wound up but is gradually winding down. Now we don't have to worry about that. For when it gets down to a certain place, God's going to just wipe it out and he's going to create a new heavens and a new earth. And he can go on doing this to infinity. And the next heaven and earth that he creates will not know anything of sin and rebellion, which is going to be a great place to live. So God finished his creative acts and now everything is set in motion. The trees have the capacity of reproducing. The creeping things, the insects, all the life forms are marvelously designed to all reproduce. So they can perpetuate themselves. Now as man has played with his environment and as the environment has been damaged through various catastrophes, some of the species that God has created have become extinct. Some of them are in danger now of becoming extinct. But basically, in the beginning, God had created all of the varieties, the capacities of reproduction, and now he watches the universe as it perpetuates itself according to his design and plan. Now this is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth, before there was any herb of the field had grown, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth and there was no man to till the ground. But a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground 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 being. So he speaks now of the creation of man himself. Forming man out of the dust of the ground. It is interesting that the same 17 elements that you find in the dirt outside are the same 17 elements that make up our bodies. Now there are questions about the resurrection. How are the dead raised? With what body do they come, Paul said, some will ask. And there are some people that are so attached to these bodies that they don't like the thought of losing them and hoping some way that this body itself is going to be resurrected. This body is going to be changed. Metamorphosis. Change of body. Personally, I wouldn't want to spend eternity in this body to tell you the truth. I'll be very happy to have a new building of God not made with hands eternal in the heavens. I look forward to that. But the idea of this body somehow being resurrected does create a lot of problems that the skeptics have brought up in past generations. Because this body does go back to the dust. In reality, if your body is just buried in the ground, it becomes fertilizer. As it goes back to dust, the chemicals become nutrients that feed the roots. And so some of the chemicals that made up the bodies buried in the West during the days of the Wild West, you know, as the bodies decomposed and went back to the chemicals in the soil, as the roots of the grass went down, they began to feed on these same chemicals that once made up One-Eyed Jake. And the cows grazing ate the grass and assimilated the chemicals that were once the body and in the body of One-Eyed Jake. And the cows were milked and those chemicals were passed on in the milk and were nutrients in the body of the guy that drank it, became then a part of his body. And when he got shot, he was buried and the process went on. So these same chemicals have been the part of many bodies. In the resurrection, which body will they belong to? If you've had a transplanted heart, who gets it? We know that when this body is dissolved out of the dust, God said, I created you to the dust you're going to return. Dust thou art to dust return. Talking of the body, not talking of the spirit of man. But the spirit of man moves into the new body, the building of God, not made with hands. That's eternal in the heavens. So the Lord God planted a garden. I love that, planted a garden eastward in Eden. And there he put man whom he had formed. Now, to try to find the Garden of Eden, we're given some clues here. Out of the ground, the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight, good for food. The tree of life also was in the midst of the garden, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The river went out of Eden to water the garden. And there it parted, became four riverheads. The name of the first is the Pishon. It was the one that encompasses the whole land of Havelah where there is gold. The gold of the land is good. Bedillium, onyx stone are there. The name of the second is Gihom, the one that encompasses the whole land of Cush. Now, at this point, probably all of the landmass was still just in one landmass. This was before the flood, which did cause there to become tremendous geographical changes as the water were changed, as the seabeds inundated the land, and the land under the weight of the water sunk, and new mountain ranges were thrust upwards. And a fascinating book on the changes of the earth's structure and on the thrust, the gigantic thrust that have taken place on the surface of the earth during the last 10,000 years. I would highly recommend the book, Earth in Upheaval by Immanuel Velikovsky. Fascinating book, as he deals with some of the tremendous geographical, geological, and catastrophe changes that have transpired on this planet earth. And the evidences of them all over the world, especially down in the Andes of some of the more recent thrust. Fascinating reading. So, to try to find the Garden of Eden would be futile, because the whole structure has been so dramatically changed that it would be impossible to locate the Garden of Eden. So, we read of it, we read of the rivers and so forth that came out of it, and of those areas, but even the Euphrates River, but things have so changed that there is no way of actually saying, well, this is where the Garden of Eden actually existed. We'll return with more details on the subject of creation in our next lesson, as we continue our verse-by-verse study of Genesis. And we do hope you'll make plans to join us. But right now, I'd like to remind you that if you missed any part of today's message, or perhaps you'd like to order a copy for that special friend or loved one, you can do so by simply contacting one of our customer service representatives, and they'd be more than happy to assist you with the ordering details. And we'll have all the contact information in just a moment. Now, as we close out today's program, I'd like to draw your attention to a very special resource that we refer to as the Old and New Testament Study Guide. It's specifically designed for anyone desiring to become a better student of God's Word. Simply place these study guides next to your Bible, and as you follow along, you'll discover key words that define Hebrew and Greek words commonly found in the Bible, along with biblical maps, charts, and diagrams to help visualize the text. You'll also find study questions for each book of the Bible, along with excerpts of Calvary Chapel distinctives. This verse-by-verse overview of both the Old and New Testaments will help us all to study the Bible more efficiently and effectively, and is a valuable set of resources for any study library. Order yours today by simply calling toll-free 1-800-272-WORD, and one of our operators will be more than happy to assist you with the details. Our office hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, Monday through Friday. Once again, that number is 1-800-272-WORD. And for those of you who still prefer to write, you can use our mailing address, which is The Word for Today, P.O. Box 8000, Costa Mesa, California, 92628. And be sure to include the call letters of this station with your correspondence. And now, on behalf of The Word for Today, we'd like to thank all of you who share in supporting this ministry with your prayers and financial support. And be sure to join us again next time, as Pastor Chuck Smith continues his verse-by-verse venture through the book of Genesis. That's right here, on the next edition of The Word for Today. Now, once again, here's Pastor Chuck Smith. May the Lord bless you and cause you to grow in grace and in knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. May you increase in your understanding and knowledge of Him. May you be freed from that power of darkness, the corruption that is in the world through lust. May you grow up in Him in all things, being strengthened. May you increase, day by day, in His richness, in His love, in His grace, in His Word. In Jesus' name. Every year, Pastor Chuck gives his prophecy update to prepare Christians to be ready to give an answer for anyone who wants to know what the Bible has to say about the future. So it is with great excitement that The Word for Today presents to you this year's Maranatha VI Conference entitled, The Forming Confederacy. Join Pastor Chuck Smith, Mark Hitchcock, Don Stewart, Doug Hamp, and Arieh Eldad, the former senior commander of the Israeli Defense Force, as they help us to comprehend and unravel scriptures pertaining to the imminent forming confederacy coming against the nation of Israel. I encourage you, as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, to become informed about what the Bible says about the signs of the times and prophecy being fulfilled right before our very eyes. For more information on how you can order the Maranatha VI Prophecy Conference on DVD with a bonus MP3, call The Word for Today at 800-272-9673 or visit us online at thewordfortoday.org. This program has been sponsored by The Word for Today in Costa Mesa, California.