Man’s Creation

You see, God said, “The problem with Lucifer was he was too glorious, he was too beautiful, he was too powerful, he was too wise. So we will start at the opposite end. We’ll just take some dust. Just dust. Mix it with a little water, make some clay and mold it into a body.” And there it was, the body, formed by God. A more beautiful piece of sculpture or statuary or whatever you want to call it than even anything that Michelangelo ever produced. A perfect body. But it was just clay. And then it says, “The LORD breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Hebrew is a very vivid language. The sound of the words is related to the thing that they describe. And where it says, “He breathed” in Hebrew it says viyepach [phonetic]. Phonetically the “P” sound is called a plosive, it’s an explosion. And then there’s the [chett], which no ordinary English person can say, and that’s a long, breathed-out sound. An outgoing, long drawn-out sound. [ephoch] and that contains such a sense of dynamic. God didn’t just breathe languidly into that body of clay. He breathed Himself into it. He imparted Himself. Through that breath God came in. And that piece of clay was marvelously transformed, miraculously transformed into a living human body, into a living human person, with all the faculties that you and I enjoy. There came out of clay through the inbreathed breath of God a man became a living soul.

That’s our origin. That’s where we came from. We’re not insignificant. We’re very humble in our origin, but we have a divine destiny. We were formed and molded by the hand of God. We were inbreathed by the Spirit of God, the breath of God. You know I believe that because of that we have an eternal destiny. That light in us cannot die. It’s the light of God and it’s a very solemn thought for all of us because we will never cease to exist. We only have two alternatives; we can exist in the presence of God, or we can exist in eternal banishment from the presence of God. But one or other of those, each one of us here tonight is going to experience. There is no such thing as extinction of a human soul. It’s eternal. For better or for worse.

So that’s how we came into being. We are divine workmanship. We’ve mistreated it, we’ve failed to appreciate it, we’ve squandered God’s riches in unrighteous living, in foolish enjoyments and sinful pleasures, but we’re still in the likeness of God. I observed that in the covenant that God made with Noah after the flood, He said, “Every man, every person that kills a human being will answer for it with his life, because man was created in the image of God.” You see murder is not just killing a person. It’s destroying the image of God in a human being. And that’s why the abandoning of the death penalty is one of the many steps backward that this nation and other nations have taken. And one day God is going to require that the nations answer for what they’ve done.

Now there was nothing that was not good until man discovered he had no mate. That was the first thing that God said is not good for man that he should be alone. Everything God had created was good up to that point. So woman has a special place. Without woman a man is not what he should be. We read in Genesis 2:20,

“Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. [I prefer to say a helper to complete him. I believe that’s what a wife does to a man is complete him. Certainly it’s true in my experience.] and the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made [but the Hebrew says “He built”] into a woman, and He brought her to the man.”

How many of you men would agree that women are a mystery? And how could anybody build a rib into a woman? There’s no explanation given. A lot of things are explained, but at this point the Bible is silent. We just have to bow before the inscrutable wisdom of God. And so the LORD brought the woman to the man,

“And Adam said:
‘This is now bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,’”

In Hebrew man is ish and woman is ishah. So there’s a direct relationship between the two words.

“Because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

So that is the original creation of the human race. And you see we are divine workmanship. Very humble material, but divine workmanship. And if we don’t realize that we’ll never find the fulfillment that we need in life. If we do not realize how inexpessibly valuable we are, if we have a low sense of our own value, we can never become what God intends us to become. So it is very important for all of us and each of us to come faced with this fact.

Now the image of God in us has been defiled and desecrated but it is still there. And that’s why God said “If you murder a man you will pay for it with your life because the image of God is in that man.” And when we abort babies we are aborting the image of God. I don’t want to get into that subject. Enough has been said on that I am sure.

So Adam and Eve were created for one supreme purpose—to have fellowship with God. And the record makes it clear that God came each evening into the garden—it says in the wind of the day, when the cool breeze sprung up in the evening, then God came to have fellowship with Adam and Eve. But, you know about the serpent and this is something I want to speak about more fully later. But God gave Adam a job. The job was to be the keeper of the garden. He was there to keep the garden, to protect it, to watch over it and he failed to do so. You see the first failing of the human race was in a man. The first one actually recorded was in the woman, but the man was delinquent in his duty. He failed to be where he should have been. You see that’s the problem of our contemporary culture. It’s delinquent males. It’s men who have abdicated from their responsibility. Almost inevitably women have moved in to fill up the vacuum, but it’s never God’s plan. God has one plan and it works.

So, let’s read the temptation that was confronted Eve. But you have to remember that it was Adam’s fault that Eve was there without his protection and the serpent got into the garden, because Adam should have been protecting the garden. And it says in Genesis chapter 3,

“Now the serpent was more cunning that any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, ‘Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?’”

He didn’t immediately deny the word of God. He questioned it. But when Eve entertained his question she was defeated. And the moment we permit ourselves to question the word of God we’re on the way to defeat.