In this sermon, Chuck Mistler continues his study of the book of Genesis, focusing on Genesis chapter 2, verse 4, through chapter 3, verse 6. He emphasizes the importance of prayer in their fellowship and requests the audience's prayers for the study. Mistler then delves into the detailed summary of how Adam and Eve were created, describing the garden of Eden and the trees within it. He also briefly mentions a personal testimony of healing in his own marriage. Finally, Mistler shifts gears to address the predicament of mankind and the purpose of the book of Genesis in addressing human suffering.

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, and 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? At any point, 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. And 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, 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 cry, it'll be my attempt not to focus on those issues, but rather to focus as a book of prophecy. 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. 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 the 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 the 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 a modern man, and 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 his 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 that 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. He 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. But also, 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. 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, 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... 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. 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. 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 is 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, that is, which are 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 twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night in terms of the Hebrew idiom of the day. And that's exactly what God intended in chapter one. 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 and 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 we've talked about six days, seven days 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, Noah 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. 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 Pishon, 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 Hittikal 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 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 now, 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. 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 that 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. 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. We tend to, science has attended, 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 as planet Earth has been the subject of all kinds of catastrophes. That's all at its polar, its poles, its direction of rotation, and its orbit, and the rest. And there's evidence of this. 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 in it, whatsoever things were written before time were written for our learning. So there's 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 to let, 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, by the time I get you into gee, Chuck, if that's true, what's Havilah got to do in Pishah? 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 hypothesis 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. Okay? 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 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, we're, oh, by the way, one other thing I wanted, another note that I wanted to share with you before we get plunged 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 14, 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, now we'll get to 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. Okay, so Adam has the commandment not to eat of this tree. Adam was given full liberty, to have 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. You know, 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 just, it's one of those things by definition. Now, anyway, let's move to verse 18. Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a help fit for him. This guy helped me, help made is a corruption in the 16th century in terms of that as a concept. We're looking, he's looking, making a help, 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. 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, is the translation of habit, and closed up the flesh instead thereof, and the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, 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. Okay? 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. All right? No big deal, but just in case you girls have been ribbing, being ribbed all the time. No, it's going to get worse, don't you think? Um, by the way, another, one of these things that you hear that isn't, it's, 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. Um, 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, beg your pardon? Should be no pain, he was put in a deep, well, that's a good point, but he's certainly put into a deep anesthesia, okay? There's another reason I think he's put in a deep anesthesia, and, well, a fall hasn't occurred yet. Okay, uh, but let me, let me, let me go a little further, and then we'll, we'll double back on this. Um, let me, um, let me talk a little bit, let's go a little bit further, and, well, let me just, 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. We now have, 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 that 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 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. Let me just, let's just go at a little hint and then we'll come back to this. Turn with me to Romans 5, 14. Paul is arguing, verse 14, he makes reference to death. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses. Romans 5, 14. Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come. Okay? And from here on, he talks about one man, Jesus Christ, and how he undone, undoes the offense of one man. He makes this whole case. And we often think of Jesus Christ as the second Adam, whereas by one man sin entered in, by, you know, one man. It was, this was taken care of. And the word one man occurs one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, something like ten or eleven times here in this passage. And it's not my intent to get into Paul's whole argument, except, because that would take all evening itself, except to point out one specific thing. Speaking of Adam at the end of verse 14, Adam is a figure, a model, a type, a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ. Now, we know that Jesus Christ, of him who was to come, who was to come, who is Paul talking about here? Jesus Christ. Good. And in many respects, and that's exactly what Paul deals with here in Romans, is how Jesus Christ was a fulfillment or a completion of the problem that Adam created, so to speak. Okay? What's often overlooked is the other way around. And the question I'd like you to think about is how was Adam a type of Christ? We know how Christ was a fulfillment of Adam. Terrific. The whole New Testament speaks of that in many places. But how was Adam a type of Christ? I'm going to suggest to you, first of all, that Christ, we know the church is the bride of Christ. Where did Adam get his bride? From his side. And you can go to, where is it, John 19 or wherever and see the wound in Christ's side and the blood and water flowing and start to tie this together. It's going to get more, this may sound way out, but it's going to get more and make more and more sense as we go through. The wife was created from his side. And in fact, we'll hold Ephesians 5 until we're through chapter 3. No, I think what I'm going to do is let's jump into chapter 3 and then come back. That's easier. I like to keep it sort of chronological, but I think it's going to be too complicated if I do. Let's jump into chapter 3. Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, half God said ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden. Now, first of all, we have a real problem with this. A lot of us have because you sort of see some kind of snake wrapped around a tree. You've all seen the little drawings, you know, chatting with Eve. Our problem is we have no idea what a serpent is. We know what a serpent was after it was cursed. God went to great lengths to curse the ground, to curse the creation. And we think of ourselves as redeemed by the blood of Christ. And it's when we're through Isaiah and through the book of Revelation we know that the great exclamation of Isaiah or the Apostle John was, Behold, I see a new heavens and a new earth. There's far more being redeemed than you and I. The whole creation groans and travails until now, Paul tells us. So we tend to impute on these images our concepts from an ecology that's in a situation that's totally different. And we'll deal with some of that when we get to the flood. But at this point you just might make the mental note that what is the serpent here might be something far more elegant, far more complex, far more glorious than this slithering thing we think of as a serpent. There's something else that many people, you can find the scholars speculate about, is there seems to be no comment about the fact that, hey, the serpent's carrying on a conversation with Eve. And so either that was common then, possibility, or it was unique for the situation and we just don't have the record of Eve, you know, saying who is this really, or whatever, you know. Or we're dealing with an unfallen creature who has the ability to read thoughts or there's other forms of communication going on here. So you can pick your model. They're probably all wrong, but any one of them is convenient enough to get through this part of it. Bear in mind, Adam and Eve at this point had not fallen yet. Luke in the genealogy refers to Adam as a son of God. We know from Psalm 104, verse 2, which we all looked at together, that God is clothed, His righteousness is clothed with what? Light. Throughout the Scripture, our righteousness is always described as a garment. Jesus Christ is described as being clothed in light. Remember Matthew 17, the Transfiguration, verse 2, describes Him clothed in what? Light. Matthew 17, 2, for those of you who want to get into the Transfiguration thing. He's having a staff meeting with Moses and Elijah, and you can get that whole thing from the Revelation chapter 11 tape. And all through the Scripture, we have the concept of being clothed with light as being righteousness. Was Adam righteous? At this point, he was, wasn't he? Was Eve righteous? Sure. Interesting thing. When Eve had fallen, but Adam hadn't, could Adam have communion with Eve? Interesting problem that occurs. We'll come to that. The first thing Satan does, and it's always his first step, always his first step. He saith unto the woman, Yea, half God said, you might underline that in your Bible. Half God said. Does God really mean that? I mean, creating the world in six days. You mean you've got, you mean the shed blood of a carpenter that was crucified on a Roman cross two thousand years ago is the basis of salvation to everyone? Before and since? Come on, get serious. You know, that's, what's the first step? The planting of doubt. Clouding, subtly at first, overtly later, the authority of God's Word. If you are a Bible believer, that's the first step. The first step Satan has to do is wean you from that. Somehow get you off that kick. Create a doubt. Well, Moses didn't really write Genesis, it was these five different scribes. J, E, P, you've all heard it. Or there wasn't one Isaiah. You know, Isaiah didn't write Isaiah, there were two of them. The Deutero-Isaiah didn't read John 12 where it quotes from Isaiah 1 and Isaiah 2 and says, hey, that same Isaiah had said, John, if you're a student of the Gospel of John, you have no problem with two Isaiahs because he destroys the idea. If you believe in Jesus Christ, you have no problem with who wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy because Christ quotes from all of them and attributes them to Moses. And so on. So you can spend a lot of, we can just save a lot of time if you accept God and His Word. Our righteousness, Isaiah tells us, are like what? Filthy rags. That's the plight, that's the euphemism. If you want to know what the Hebrew really says, you can get the Isaiah tape. Used menstrual cloths is actually the term that Isaiah uses. But the Scripture deals in extreme contrast in terms of God's righteousness and ours. Bear in mind here, Eve is in an unfallen state. We have no concept of what facilities accompanied her position at that time. So I'm not sure it's fruitful to dwell on, gee, how can serpents talk? Because I'm not sure these are anything more than idioms that we can relate to, or idioms that are as close to the reality that we can relate to. In any case, there we are. And obviously, Satan is in the serpent. We don't have to speculate on that. It is described in Revelation 12, and we'll go there later anyway for other reasons, that that old serpent, Satan, the devil, you know, John tells us with explicitness in 12th chapter of Revelation, verses 5 and 6, whatever. So we know that this is Satan, and we can do great things, a few things better than to study this carefully and notice how he goes about it. The first thing he does, but recognize another predicament. To whom did the commandment about the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, come to? Adam. It's the possibility that Eve heard about it from whom? Adam. So she's one step removed, right? It doesn't necessarily say, we have no evidence to indicate that she got it direct, right? She got it from Adam. That's the chain of command, right? So she learned from Adam, hey, I can do anything I want, but we're not supposed to touch that tree. Now, the first thing Satan does, and it's always his first step, always his first step. He saith unto the woman, yea, half God said, you might underline that in your Bible, half God said. Does God really mean that? I mean, creating the world in six days. You mean the shed blood of a carpenter that was crucified on a Roman cross 2,000 years ago is the basis of salvation to everyone before and since? Come on, get serious. You know, that's, what's the first step? The planting of doubt. Clouding, subtly at first, overtly later, the authority of God's word. If you are a Bible believer, that's the first step. The first step Satan has to do is wean you from that, somehow get you off that kick, create a doubt. Well, Moses didn't really write Genesis, it was these five different scribes, J, E, P, you've all heard it. Or there wasn't one Isaiah, you know, Isaiah didn't write Isaiah, there were two of them, the Deutero-Isaiah. Didn't read John 12, where it quotes from Isaiah 1 and Isaiah 2 and says, hey, that same Isaiah had said, John, if you're a student of the gospel of John, you have no problem with two Isaiahs because he destroys the idea. If you believe in Jesus Christ, you have no problem with who wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, because Christ quotes from all of them and attributes them to Moses. And so on. So you can spend a lot of, we can just save a lot of time if you accept God at his word. As I said when we started the course, if you don't have any problem with Genesis 1-1, you'll have no trouble with the rest of it. In the beginning, God created heaven and the earth. Period. And you can take a carriage return and then you can decide about the gap theory or this, that, the other thing, it'll all come out right if you get across that first bridge. Okay. Anyway, Satan creates doubt in the mind of the woman. Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden. And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of any garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. Had he said anything about touching it? It's interesting how we add to our apparent burdens. You've got a basic commandment of God to love one another and the ink is not dry before the Pharisees will come in and amplify that with 12,000 amendments. Okay. And we have sort of, you know, the entrance, if you will. This isn't really legal. It's not something else. We'll come to that later. But it's interesting that the described burden of Eve isn't what the restriction was that God laid on them. Now, verse 4, at this point, the dialogue has taken place. She didn't resist Satan. She got into this whole thing. It starts subtly. It's a seduction. It starts with a flirtation, a courtship, and follows through. Exactly what's going on here. But at this point, Satan is the serpent, says unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die. Now, there is the overt, manifest contradiction of what God had said. At this point, the true colors show up. We're not talking about a subtlety, you know, a little doctrinal tangent. We're talking about a head-on confrontation. And in this, you could get into a whole study of the cults. And the cults used in this terminology implying a religious group that calls themselves Christian. If they don't call themselves Christian, there's no problem. That's a whole different kind of a problem, not the kind you generally will face. The ones that trip you up are the ones that call themselves Christian, but aren't in the biblical sense and Christ's own definitional sense. What do all of the cults do? They deny the deity of Jesus Christ. And they take some slight tangent and carry it onward. If you're navigating and you've got a one degree error for an hour, it won't make much difference aboard a ship. In a couple of days, you'll be a lot off course. And so you start with a little tangent. That's exactly what it is, a little bit. But in the early stages, hey, there's a subtle deception going on. As you really get into it and you look at the gospel of Christ as presented by certain kinds of cults, most of them, you'll discover sooner or later you can find the head-on confrontation with the gospel of Christ is that he died for us and that his shed blood is the only thing that will avail for the sinner. That's the guts of it. The Bible carries that theme from beginning to end. And to deny it is simply to be non-biblical or anti-Christian. Somebody wants to be that and puts that on his banner or on the stationery, terrific. That's his choice. It's clear what he's doing. But the deceptions that purport to be Christian or following Christ that deny the whole mission that he was on is satanic. Anyway, but let's go on. Now notice what else he does. Verse 5, For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, or gods. Bear in mind the word Elohim is in the plural. Knowing good and evil. Now, it's very interesting how many groups make as their aspiration the idea of becoming gods. Those of you who have been involved with the groups know who I'm referring to. Those of you who aren't, don't worry about it. But I don't really want to get into a whole doctrinal thing. There's plenty of more competent people than I developing those aspects of this. Let's just move on. Now notice verse 6. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, nourishing situation, right, that it was pleasant to the eyes, attractive, beautiful, a tree to be desired, to make one wise. There's three qualities, right? Can you find fault with any one of those? It's good for food. Hey, it's nourishing. Mother says it's good for you. Terrific. That it was pleasant to the eyes, beautiful. It's beautiful. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Beautiful piece of music. National Anthem for the Common Market. All men are brothers. Terrific. Well, now if you read John 8. A tree to be desired, to make one wise. Anything wrong with wisdom? Solomon sought wisdom and was blessed for asking for it. Hey, this is good stuff. It's going to make me wise. Right? Rationalization. Can't find fault with any one of those three things. What was the only thing wrong? Being disobedient. Perfectly rationalized. You know, Porsches are good quality cars. You know, drive fast. You can make a long list of great things. I'm not knocking Porsches, but it's not the God you should be worshipping. For some of us, it's a Porsche. For others of us, it might be a promotion. Others of us, it might be a... A Mercedes-Benz, fine. Yeah, great, thank you. Those of you that don't read, I do drive a 450 SL. And the day that I start taking that seriously is the day that that could stand between me and fellowship with the Lord. And the day that that happens is the day that I shouldn't have a Mercedes-Benz. Or whatever. The issue is its impact on your relationship with God. I drive a Mercedes-Benz to prove that a Christian can drive a Mercedes-Benz. It also is owned by a company, so it's not important anyway. So I'm not being very self-sacrificing by dismissing the idea, because it happens to be... You know, I can rationalize. It's not a big thing. How do you make it look interesting? The day that that becomes an issue with me... Now incidentally, I'm not going to share with you the kinds of things that are a serious place of my stumbling. They're there. Mercedes happens not to be it. But there's plenty of others, so you can kid me about that if you like. And if you knew me well and kept probing, you'd find those places where... Where my coveting those things are a hindrance to my spiritual growth, my spiritual relationship with the Lord, my fellowship with Him. And that's what's got to be examined daily, moment to moment. And so the rationalization that takes place... I could give you an elaborate rationalization of it. It's the cheapest car I've owned. I've driven it for four years and it's worth more now than I paid for it. So I have a negative cost of ownership. Terrific. It's got nothing to do with whether I ought to have one or not. Because whether I ought to have one or not has to do entirely with my spiritual relationship with the Lord. And if it interferes, I shouldn't have it. And that's exactly what I want you to be conscious of. The absolutely ironclad rationalization Eve had here. We're taking this route. Good for food. It was very, very beautiful. And it benefited her. She's going to make her wise. And did make her wise. Worldly wise. But it was the great... Well, let me corral that one. It certainly was the fall. The big act. I can't resist saying the big apple, but that's probably a bad thing. Any New Yorkers here, they won't forget. So she took of the fruit thereof and did eat. And that's the big thing. And gave also unto her husband with her. And he did eat. Now, it doesn't make it quite clear when Adam showed up. One of the things that's worth thinking about is the possibility that Eve was alone at first. And Satan knew the weaknesses. And the weakness here was through Eve. And the approach to Eve was when she wasn't covered by her husband. And Paul suggests that same kind of modeling in his letters. That's the whole concept of the role of the husband covering the wife. Or for widows and what have you to be covered by the church. The notion that there is a protection, a spiritual covering that's important. And it was the absence of that that may have been the first difficulty. But now we get to her husband with her and he did eat. And this is one of the most interesting aspects of Adam in my mind. Turn with me to 1 Timothy 2. 1 Timothy 2. And you girls may wince at this because you may recall this is one of those passages where Paul, advising Timothy, argues for the woman to learn in silence but in subjection to the masculine authority within the church. In verse 12 he says, I will not permit a woman to teach or usurp authority over the man but to be in silence. Now this does not argue against women teachers but Paul is arguing for the sense of order in the church to look to the man for authority and as the position of authority. But he goes on to support, I don't manage to get into the burden of Paul's argument tonight but I'm intrigued with some of the support he musters in defense of his argument here. He points out that for Adam was first formed then Eve. He's arguing that God's order is for the man to be first. Inaccountability, we're going to see. His argument points out that Eve was deceived, Adam was not. Edom was snowed by the serpent, totally conned and blew it. Adam was not. Adam knew exactly what he was doing. If on the way home tonight you're getting a big old trip and you know about the fall, recognize up front that Adam had the greater accountability, greater responsibility. But we're going to just show you how far it went. Because he goes on to say, verse 14, Adam was not deceived but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Woman's sin, you can't take away from that, she did, she was, she fell. The point he says here is that he wasn't. Adam was not. Now, there's one other fact that he mentions here, verse 15. Notwithstanding, she shall be saved and childbearing if they continue in faith and love and holiness with sobriety. Now, okay, let me at this point, let's put ourselves in the garden. And Eve is there and she's been conned by this serpent. And she's violated the one law that was laid down. She partook of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam comes along. Now, if you or I were Adam, the situation would be very, very simple. We would look down our self-righteous nose and say, oh, are you in trouble? Right? Boy, are you going to get it. You ate from the tree? You are in deep yogurt, kid. Or something of that effect. And you could carry the thing. Adam was not lost. Adam had not fallen. Adam was clean. She blew it, he hadn't. Right? Was she lost? What was her destiny? Death. Adam may not have fully apprehended what that meant. They didn't die for what, 900 years or so. Whatever, I forget the exact. Before the flood, it's extended longevity. The blanket of the earth, the water, the physical longevity was extended. For reasons we'll cover when we get to Genesis 6. But that isn't really what God's talking about anyway. Spiritual death is what we're talking about. Okay? There's a second and first death thing that we can develop later. But the point is, Eve was in trouble. Adam was not. He was clean. And all he had to do was stand back and let nature take its course. And Eve was in deep trouble. Is that what Adam did? The interesting possibility, and I say it that way because this is just a viewpoint. Alright? It's not necessarily something I'll assist on. It's something I'll leave to you to think about. Is Adam, understanding her predicament, loved Eve so much that he joined her in her predicament? Now, I'm going to presume, for the sake of my model, for the sake of the type that he had foreknowledge. Because by joining Eve, they had children. And it was from the offspring, the seed of the woman, that redemption was going to come. If Adam had not given himself to Eve, if you will, for Eve, we never would have had the seed of the woman, which is one of the highest titles of Jesus Christ. We're going to discover in chapter 3 of Genesis, and we get to verse 15, there's a declaration of war, the likes of which the universe had never seen or ever would see again. And the warrior in that war carries the title, the seed of the woman. Adam isn't even mentioned in the passage. A title of none other than Jesus Christ. Climax, it's the forecast of the virgin birth, and it takes its climax in Revelation 12, where that woman brings forth a man-child. What woman? Israel. In the sense that she started with Eve. The genealogy that was to bring forth the Deliverer. All of this would have been null and void, impossible, wouldn't have happened had Adam not allowed himself to be made sin. For her. For her. He was saved already. He had no problem. No. She was the one in trouble. She got conned by this idea. This approach. This doctrine. But he loved Eve so much, that he gave himself for her. Because by so doing, provided for her redemption. That's wild. Now, let's turn to Ephesians 5. Let's pick it up. Verse 22. You've all seen this. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as unto the Lord. That's a trip, isn't it? That's tough. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, and he is the Savior of the body. Therefore, as the church is subject to Christ, so let wives be to their own husbands in everything. Now, girls, as he starts pushing that one, you just have him read one verse more. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it. Now, we all know that Christ gave himself for the church. That's the idea I'd like to sort of let you digest, is the idea that Adam gave himself for Eve. Or let me put it this way. To the extent that he did, he was a type of Christ. Greater love hath no man. I'm going to argue that there's no greater love for a woman than Adam had for Eve. Would you have done that for your wife? That's a tough question. Girls, don't make your husband answer that. Allow them to live from this day forward in pursuit of that position before the Father. Let them live from this moment forward moving toward that kind of a position before the Father to do for the wife what Christ did for the church. Now, Paul goes on here and describes what he's doing. And just about the time, well, let's just take it so I don't deprive you of the value here. Gave himself for it, that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of the water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it might be holy and without blemish. That is perfect. By whose righteousness? By Christ's righteousness, not by our own. He ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Interesting, isn't it? He that loveth his wife loveth himself. That's exactly what God ordained when he created Eve. That's exactly the first proclamation of Adam when he's confronted with Eve. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth it and cherishes it even as the Lord of the church. For we are members of his body and of his flesh and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother and be joined unto his wife and the two shall be one flesh. One point that I was going to bring up when we got to Genesis 2.24. It isn't just a concept of cleaving. It's a concept of leaving. There's two ideas there. And a lot of people have only done half of it. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother. When we get to Genesis 12, we're going to find the most important case of that, perhaps. Abraham. Who doesn't do it. The fact that he doesn't do it is sort of masked because Abraham is God's friend from Genesis 18 on. That's blotted out of the record, but you can find it if you dig. He doesn't really do it. He blows it. We'll get to that in Genesis 12. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother. There's probably some men in here who haven't left their father or their mother. In order to cleave to his wife, the two shall be one. I don't mean physically leave, necessarily. But it's a different accountability before the father. Leave his father's mother and be joined to his wife. The two shall be one flesh. Now just about the time you think you're understanding what Paul's getting at. You're reading through this letter in Ephesians. And right about now you're saying, fine, fine. He's teaching us all about husband and wife relationships. And just about the time you come to that conclusion, you get hit with verse 32. This is a great mystery. Because I speak concerning Christ and the church. And the idea I want you to grapple with is the idea of the supernatural implications of marriage. We think of marriage biologically as a mechanism for procreation. We think of the marriage as a sociological thing, as the basic element of a family being the basic element of a community being the basic element of a nation. We look at America and we know that we're weak because the family's weak. We look at divorce and all those. We look at it sociologically and come to some very obvious conclusions that we're in deep trouble as a nation because our families are. So we can look at the marriage sociologically. We look at marriage psychologically. The need for companionship and dependence and support for one another. And you could probably make a list of the different ways you can view marriage as God ordained, the supernatural basis for marriage. God chose the marriage of Adam and Eve to be far more than a way to have Cain and Abel and what have you. He chose Adam and Eve to become the model for the redemption of the universe. Because Adam and Eve become the model for what's going to be the greatest union in the universe of Christ and the body of Christ, the church. And so as we attend to Adam and Eve, there's far more going on here than the fact that two young people in a garden blew it a long time ago and we're somehow reaping the benefits. It's much more complicated than that. Did God know about that in advance? Sure. And he's conducting this for a very specific reason. While we're in Ephesians, we'll pick it up in chapter 2. We all know verses 8 and 9 of chapter 2 because they're so often quoted among evangelicals. Let's go a verse earlier. Verse 6, he says, Why? Why did God go through this? Why did God put Adam in the garden when he knew he was going to blow it? Why did he give him Eve when he knew that Eve was going to fumble, cause him to stumble? Why? Why? Why? He obviously knew in advance that he, God, would have to become flesh, dwell among us, even the death of the cross. Why? Verse 7 tells you that in the ages to come, we don't know what ages he's talking about. These billions of years from now? Are these in other galaxies, in other planets? Could be. Other dimensionalities? Totally different hyperspace? Could be. What's all this about? That in the ages to come, he might show the exceeding riches of his grace. How does God demonstrate infinite grace? Infinite power? Infinite a lot of things we can sort of perhaps roughly imagine, at least in some sense. How do you manifest infinite grace or infinite love? This is the way. What God has done from Genesis to Revelation. Jesus. God's demonstration of love. Not just for you and I. I mean, yes, his love for us, but the demonstration isn't just for you and I to be saved. Terrific. But through that whole demonstration, he can demonstrate for ages yet undisclosed his riches and his grace and his kindness through Christ Jesus. Now, I'm going to suggest to you as a possibility that Adam was a type of Christ. That Adam foreshadowed this whole thing in a sense. He fell, he gave himself for Eve, he loved her that much. That's how much Christ loved you. My wife taught me a lesson some years ago and the firefighters can give you the whole thing on a tape if you like. Seriously, no, I'm serious. I wasn't being flippant there. We've been married 23 years and I was busy teaching Bible studies and all kinds of things and our marriage almost broke up. And God did a very, very fantastic thing in our marriage. Our marriage really started three or four years ago in a very special, special way. And she can tell it best but be prepared to cry when you hear her. But she also, she took Ephesians 5 and she said that as long as she was to, she's tried submission and all that and that didn't work. I was really obnoxious. I think Harry Truman said it, there's nothing worse than a guy that drinks is a guy that doesn't. There's nothing worse than living with a guy like me for a lot of reasons. So she tried that and that was no answer. But she did something else. She said that God, her, and I and that my conduct was God's problem, not hers. And her job was to not only just submit to me, she says, gee, if she's supposed to relate to me the way Christ is related to the church. Colossians and Ephesians emphasize that Christ is to be preeminent in all things. So she started putting me in that position. And boy did God deal with me fast. It's like in 24 hours it started. And that whole story is on a, in fact it's actually a set of six tapes but the first tape is the testimony from the scripture, those things that God did miraculously in our life and in our marriage to heal our marriage and most exciting, most erotic, most incredible experience that in our 23 marriages the last four or five, seems like yesterday, just neat. So for what it's worth I'll plug that. You can fire a fire, just get Nancy Missler's tape number one but it works. The events in Genesis 3 work in today's thing. But I would like you to, I think what we'll do next time is we'll pick up roughly where we are but I want to leave you with some ideas. Let me get a couple more minutes and then you can develop this here. I would like you to, between now and next Monday night, take, really digest Genesis chapter 3 but I'd like you to reflect on two trees. Two trees. Both of them were planted in the garden. The one we just read about was planted in Eden. There's another one that John talks about in chapter 9 verse 41. Both trees bring to you knowledge of good and evil. Both trees are good for food. Now that's the way they're similar. Here are the contrasts of the two trees. One of them was planted by God. That's the one we just read about. The other one was planted by a man in Matthew 27 verse 35. One was pleasant to the eyes, a tree to be desired to make one wise. The other tree had no beauty that we should desire it. One tree was forbidden for us to eat. The other tree was one that we are commanded to eat. One tree, Satan enticed us to eat when we shouldn't have. The other tree, Satan will attempt to prevent you from eating of if you try. One tree brought sin and death. The other one brings you life and salvation. One of them resulted in man being turned out of the garden, out of the paradise. The other one is the means by which man reenters paradise. Now, the whole idea, incidentally, of the cross of Calvary being described as a tree occurs in Acts chapter 5 verse 30 and in 1 Peter 2 verse 24. Both of those places speak of Jesus Christ being hung on a tree. Now I always, when I came across those passages, always assumed that was just a euphemism for the cross. I no longer believe that. I believe that that idiom was chosen by the Holy Spirit for us to link the tree that Jesus Christ was hung on in his crucifixion with the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. The concept of a curse of man is linked in Acts 3 verse 17. We'll see shortly. Also, we're going to discover later in Genesis when we get to Joseph. Remember the dreams? Remember Joseph when he went to prison and he had the baker and the wine steward? And we have the elements of the bread and the wine introduced as elements of salvation? Oh, we didn't know that. It's one of a hundred and some odd ways that Joseph is a type of Christ. Esther chapter 2 verse 23. There's a hanging on a tree. But more importantly, Galatians 3 verse 13 is my authority where Paul says, Cursed is anyone that hangs on a tree. It's a Levitical concept. That's exactly why Christ was crucified on a tree. The official form of capital punishment was stoning in Israel. Why was Christ crucified? Because the Romans invented it as a symbol. Bearing on his brow, of course, the thorns, which we're going to see introduced as the symbol of the curse. Every time you come across a thorn or a thistle, it's put there by God to remind you that man is under the curse, the curse of sin. Those of you that are close to the ground know what a thorn or a thistle is. Some of you, like me, probably the only thorns and thistles you run into are people. It's going a little beyond our time, but we are in some pretty exciting areas. We're going to, next time, dig in a little more deeply into Genesis chapter 3. I'm going to suggest to you that the issue in Genesis 3 is a declaration of war. One of the pivotal verses in the entire scripture is Genesis 3 verse 15, where God declares the war and He declares war on Adam. He provides a promise of victory. He ordains and announces the virgin birth, which is not just a sign it had to be that way because of a curse. We'll cover that again next time. Adam, by the way, isn't mentioned at all in that. Eve is. She will be the path for redemption. How interesting it is that Adam committed himself making redemption possible, but the means of redemption is the seed of the woman. We'll talk a little bit about the other seed. There's two seeds. It's a war. There's two parties to a war. The seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, who is a person. And there's a battle. Climax is in Revelation 12. I'll leave you with one other thing. At the end, we know that, of course, they're cast out of the garden. Why? Most of us have this model of the cherubim being there to keep Adam from entering the garden. And I personally don't believe that's what they're there for. An ordinary angel would have sufficed. An ordinary angel slaughtered 185,000 Syrians one evening after dinner. I don't think that it would have taken cherubim. Why are there cherubim guarding the way to the tree of life? And that's a question we'll answer next time. That's terrible. So let's close with a word of prayer and look forward to regathering next time to further explore Genesis chapter 3. Father, we just praise you and thank you that we are able to partake of these great promises and commitments you've made to yourself. Father, we just thank you that the last Adam has given himself for his bride. And we just thank you, Father, that we have an opportunity to be that bride. That we are in that number that are destined to be co-heirs and to co-reign with him. And Father, we just praise you that these things aren't some afterthought as a repair of a damaged possession, but rather a plan that you have launched from before the foundation of the earth. That before we were formed, you know all our members, all our parts. That there's no detail, nothing about us that you did not know and knew way back then. And Father, we thank you that we are in your kingdom and that each one of us are here tonight by a divine appointment with you. We thank you, Father, that you have provided so great a redemption, that you've gone so far as to reach us and call us into your kingdom. We thank you, Father, for this very evening, for touching our hearts, showing us these things. To increase our appetite for these things, to increase our hunger for more knowledge of you. That you would increase our impatience to know more of the wonders that you have wrought on our behalf. We just ask you, Father, in this coming week, as we find time to open your word and to study these things, that you just might lead each and every one of us to what you have done for us individually. That you might help us to more fully understand the mystical relationship that you have put us into in our marriages. And that you would heal them as well as ourselves. And we just pray, Father, that in all these things, all our words and our thoughts, our commitments, will be pleasing in thy sight of our bridegroom in whose name we pray. Amen.