Episode Transcript
All right.
If you'd take God's precious Word
and turn the book of Genesis, please.
The book of Genesis.
See, we're missing...
Lesson 5.
Missing Natalie this morning.
Genesis 1.
So last week we talked about the different stages of creation.
Remember, we start off with illumination.
If I'm a chalk here, there it is.
Illumination.
That was light, because all life has to have light to live.
That is the basis of life is light.
So that was the first thing God made.
After illumination, then we had vegetation.
Remember? That was a living creature that has a body,
but doesn't have a soul.
It's a one-part living being.
And then we move from vegetation to what?
Can anyone remember the next one?
Huh?
You can? We'll say it.
Animation. There we go.
Animation. That was the moving creature that has life.
How many parts does the animals...
How many parts do the animals have?
No. Are they a one-part creature like the vegetation?
They have a body?
What do animals have that the vegetables don't have?
Soul. Thank you, Chris. Good job.
The soul is the mind, the emotion, and the will.
And so animals, like my chickens this morning,
they are the moving creature that has life.
They love... I've got this two prairie tea bushes
in my backyard. They grow naturally here in Texas.
And they love eating those prairie tea bushes.
The bushes stand there and just take it.
They're alive, but they're not moving creatures that have life.
The chickens move wherever they want and eat what they want.
They have a mind and a motion and a will.
You go picking one up, and they're going to tell you
all about how they don't want to be picked up.
All about that.
So they're animated creatures.
This morning we're going to get into the last part of creation.
And before we do, let's go ahead and close this out now.
In verse 24, Genesis 1.24,
when God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature
after his kind cattle and creeping thing
and beasts of the earth after his kind.
And it was so. We also looked at that last week.
Everything is made after his kind.
We looked at the fact that there were monkeys.
They say we came from monkeys.
When I grew up, there was always a missing link.
I tell you, the missing link has never been found.
And they said it took millions and billions of years
to evolve from a monkey to a man.
And we still have the monkeys.
We still have men.
And we don't have the things in between.
And if it took all those millions and billions of years
to be all kinds of, well, first of all,
the creatures would still be around
because they were always supposed to be an improvement
on the last model.
And we'd have all kinds of fossil records, which we don't.
But anyway, we'll go ahead and move on.
We'll begin with that.
And so look here now in verse 25.
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind
and cattle after their kind
and everything that creeped upon the earth after his kind.
And God saw that it was what? Good.
Everything God does is good.
Everything God made was good.
And now if you'll look, so we begin to close this out.
Verse 26, and God said,
let us make man in our image after our likeness.
Now, if you'll notice, the word God is singular.
The pronoun for God, our, is what?
Plural.
So you learn grammar here too, isn't that nice?
So God is singular.
God said, not gods, God said,
let us make man after our image.
Remember, we told you that there is one God,
but he exists in how many persons?
Three persons, but one God.
Okay?
Not three gods, but three persons and one God.
And God is going to make man in his image.
Now, God is going to make something different
than the animals, different than the vegetables.
Man is going to be made in the image of God.
And that's going to entail quite a bit
as we'll see here in just a moment.
But look here and he says,
in our image after our likeness, okay,
he will be made like God in this sense
as God is three persons that make up one God.
Man is going to be three parts
that make up one person, okay?
We're going to be, he's going to be made in God's image.
He's going to be made in God's likeness.
Look back in your text and let them,
that is, let the men that we make
have dominion over the fish of the sea
and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle
and over all the earth
and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So who's going to have dominion over all the earth
and everything that's made?
Man is.
Thank you.
Man has dominion.
Why?
He's made in the image of God.
God has dominion because he's God.
He has dominion over everything.
Everything came from God.
And so God has given man dominion over the earth, okay?
So man is going to exercise on earth
the authority of God in heaven.
Make sense?
Man is going to exercise on earth
the authority of God in heaven.
And so when you look at man,
when the animals looked at man,
man was going to be a visible representation
of the invisible heavenly God,
a visible earthly representation
of the invisible heavenly God.
Make sense?
All right.
So this was man.
Man was going to rule the earth
in the name and authority of God.
When you saw man,
you would see the image or representation of God.
Man would not be God,
but he would be the representative of God.
A lot of times we have
the important dignitaries that come here.
They are not the president or the prime minister
or the king or queen from the nation they left
or that they belong to.
But they are a physical representation.
And if you have a business
or if there is like in Brother Shepherd's case,
he's a sheriff's deputy, he's not the sheriff,
but he wears the sheriff's uniform.
He has the sheriff's badge.
The sheriff is handed down to him his own authority.
So when he were to pull up in front of your house,
if you happen to work in that particular,
live in that particular county,
and the car pulls up in front of the house,
it's going to say,
it's not going to say Brother Shepherd on the side.
It's not going to say Andy.
It's going to say Sheriff on the side of that car.
Because even though they never see the sheriff,
he is the physical representation
and bears the authority of the man that they never see.
He can arrest.
He can do whatever based on that sheriff's authority.
Now, if he were to go outside that sheriff's authority
and go up to a house
and instead of serving an arrest warrant or a search warrant,
let's say he goes up to the house and he walks in
and he says to Annamarie, fix me a sandwich.
And he tells Brother Eddie, turn off the rangers.
I want to watch Willa Fortune.
Now, he may be doing that in the name of the sheriff,
but he's not doing that in the authority of the sheriff.
He may be bearing the sheriff's image with the uniform,
but he is marring that image and perverting that image
and perverting the role the sheriff gave him.
And it won't take long and the proper authority
is going to kick him out of that house, isn't it?
You see?
No, I'm not making you a sandwich.
And no, you're not watching Willa Fortune at my house
and you kick him out is what's going to end up happening.
And so God has given man,
is going to create men in his image after his likeness.
He's going to give man authority over all the earth.
Verse 27.
So God created man in his own image.
In the image of God created he him.
Male and female created he them.
So a woman is a woman.
She is part of mankind.
She is the female version of mankind.
And man is the male version of mankind.
And God, as he made angels in two different categories,
cherubim and seraphim,
he made men in two different genders, male and female.
Okay?
And in verse 28,
and God blessed them and God said unto them,
be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it.
That means have control over it
and have dominion over the fish of the sea
and over the fowl of the air
and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.
And so you have two genders, not three, not many,
not LBGTQ plus, two genders.
It's so simple.
Now if Brother Shepherd is wearing that sheriff's uniform
and then his uniform
depicts his role for that sheriff's department.
Okay?
Now let's say that someone is given a
Macalester's T-shirt.
My son Abel used to work at Macalester's.
And let's say they have a Macalester's T-shirt
that they issue the employees.
And that Macalester's shirt shows that they work
at Macalester's,
whether in the kitchen, the front of the house,
the back of the house, whatever.
That shirt shows their role.
I have a uniform at work that I wear at the courthouse.
That shows my role.
Let's say that being given my role at the courthouse,
I were to go, and mine says U.S. Marshal's Service,
let's say I were to go to Rockwall County
and I were to start trying to arrest drunk drivers
and things like that with my uniform.
That's not going to work.
It's not my role.
It's not, I have no authority in my capacity to do that.
On the other hand, if Brother Shepherd were to come
in his sheriff's uniform to my courthouse,
he couldn't carry his gun inside.
That's not, he can't exercise any authority.
That's not his role.
Now, if Brother Shepherd were to come to the courthouse
and he were to say, I demand my rights
and I should be able to do whatever I want
and he were to try to get out of his role,
he could be in trouble for that.
If I were to go over there to Rockwall County
and try to do his role, I could get in trouble for that.
Because we were hired and we were both sworn in
to do a particular function for the authorities over us.
And when God puts a human soul in a female body,
he just equipped that soul with their uniform.
This is your role in life.
You're going to nurse babies.
You're going to help man.
You're going to take the feminine role.
He tells the man, this is your role in life.
I give her wide hips to have babies.
I give her breasts to nurse children.
I give you broad shoulders to chop wood,
a muscular chest to defend and protect and provide.
And I make you think differently.
And if you've been married any length of time,
you know men and women think differently.
We'd be crazy to deny that.
And so man's going to be in the leadership role.
Woman's going to be in the helper role.
And they both have different functions.
And when a person is born in that body,
it's like me being in my uniform, looking at the uniform
and saying, I'm going to pretend,
I'm going to identify as a sheriff's deputy in Rockwall County.
I'm going to identify as a Macalester's employee.
And let me tell you, you wouldn't want me making your sandwich.
Okay?
You wouldn't want it.
I'd make a mess out of it.
So when people say, I'm not a female, I'm not a male,
I'm something different than the uniform that God has given me,
they're actually rebelling against the role their creator put them in.
That's all it is.
It's rebellion.
And I don't pretend.
Did you know that England, I think it was or heard on the news last week,
the UK is considering making laws to imprison people
who do not refer to someone after the pronoun of their choice.
I'm not going to pretend.
They're just going to put me in prison or fight me or something.
I'm not going to call that fella back there.
She, he's too burly to be a woman.
All right.
I'm not going to call a woman a he.
And so this is just reality and the Bible makes so much sense.
It's so logical and it brings us back to truth.
And so let's look here now in verse 29.
And God said to the man, behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed,
which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree in the witch is the fruit
of a tree yielding seed to you.
It shall be for meat.
Now meat in the Old Testament, I'm sorry, in the King James, it means food.
Today, we would think of meat as flesh, but like a cow, pig, whatever that we eat.
But in the King James language, archaic English, it's food.
Verse 30, into every beast of the air, into every fowl of the air,
into everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life,
I have given every green herb for meat and it was so.
And so verse 31, and God saw everything that he had made and behold,
it was very good in the evening, the morning, or the sixth day.
All right, so now God has closed out the sixth day.
He has created man and we're about to get into the specifications of man's creation,
but everything's done.
It was very good.
If you look there in verse 31, it was very good.
Everything he made, the evening, the morning of the sixth day.
So God finished his creation in six days.
Chapter 2.
And chapter 2 is a recapitulation or recap of chapter 1.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the hosts of them,
and on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made,
and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
All right, so we see here what rest is.
This is important.
God finished his work.
He was done with his work on the sixth day.
On the seventh day he rested from his work.
Now we've already learned that God is all-powerful, all-knowledge, omnipresent.
He's everywhere at the same time.
God doesn't get tired.
There's nothing he can't do.
He's omnipotent.
And so we see him resting on the seventh day and concluding all of the work,
meaning on the seventh day he officially stops and no more work is done on the seventh day.
And so God resting on the seventh day doesn't mean that God went,
whoo, boy, after all that I'm beat.
I've got to get some rest.
And I start, you know, doing this right here.
That's not what it means.
Something that is, an object that is at rest will remain at rest until a force acts upon it.
Right? That's physics.
Okay?
And so if I have this eraser, and I won't lay it on the table for the sake of those watching online,
and I rest this eraser here, the eraser is now resting on my hand.
It will continue to rest there until another force acts upon that eraser,
like the force of my hand here acting on it or knocking it off or whatever,
and then it will move.
Until then, it remains at rest.
It's an object at rest.
That's the type of rest we're looking at here,
resting in the sense that no more work is done.
No more movement is done.
No more creative work activity is taking place.
Why?
Because in those six days, God's work was finished.
This is very important.
We understand this now.
To rest doesn't mean to struggle to do something.
It doesn't mean to, oh, I'm going to try to rest.
No.
To rest in the Bible means to recognize that the work is finished.
Right?
If I am, I built a chicken coop last year,
and I did a lot of work on that coop.
I spent several days on it.
And then finally, when the very last thing was done, what did I do?
I stopped.
I don't get up every day and go working on that coop anymore,
because it's finished.
It's complete.
And when something's complete, you stop.
And so in the same way, God completed his creative work,
and on the seventh day, he rested, meaning he didn't get refreshed,
but he ceased his work because it was finished.
All right?
Now with that in mind, that's going to mean something
when we move further in this class.
Okay?
Let's look here now in verse 2.
And on the seventh day, God ended his work.
So ending work or quitting work and resting under the same thing,
you see?
Stop working means you're resting.
God ended his work, which he had made,
and he rested on the seventh day from all his work, which he had made.
And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it.
It means he made it special.
When you see the word sanctify in the Bible,
it means to make something special, to set it apart from every other day,
because in it, he had rested from all his work, which God created and made.
All right?
Now let's move on to verse 7, and we'll get to the creation of man.
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.
All right?
So what God did, he makes man from the dust of the ground.
Every other creation that God made, he just says, let this happen and it happens.
He did say, let us make man, but he did something special with man.
He formed the first man from the dust of the ground.
You know, what I saw were made out of is dirt.
You stick us back in dirt, and we turn back into dirt, right?
You put somebody in the ground and just give them time.
They'll turn right back to dirt again.
We're just made out of dirt.
Our body is.
And so God formed man of the dust of the ground,
but look what God did.
And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.
All right?
And so now, God breathed.
If you'll turn to, I think it's 2 Timothy, chapter 3.
I'll tell you real quick.
Yep, 2 Timothy, chapter 3.
Hang on.
Here we go.
2 Timothy, chapter 3.
That's in the New Testament.
You're there, Jonathan.
Good for you.
Jonathan, you're my hero.
He is fast.
Yes, he does.
He's got a good mama.
2 Timothy, chapter 3.
And look with me now in verse 16.
This is a Scripture we read when we first started this class,
the very first lesson we took.
All Scripture is given by, say it with me, inspiration of God.
And it's probable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction, and righteousness.
We learned that all Scripture is given by inspiration,
and when we talked about inspiration,
we learned that inspiration meant from the breath of God.
That God spoke and man wrote.
That all Scripture is from the mouth of God, from the horse's mouth as we'd say,
and man, special men called prophets, wrote down what God said, what God told them to write.
Spiration speaks of breathing.
Oh man, this is good stuff.
There are three ways to breathe.
The most recognized way, if you put the prefix RE, RE means what?
To do over and over again, right?
Wind and then rewind, right?
Breathe and then re-breathe.
So we have respiration.
See? Means you breathe.
That felt so good, I'm going to do it again.
We just keep breathing.
Respiration.
So every one of us practice respiration 24-7.
We continue to breathe in and out and in and out.
Then, this is one part, it's called expiration.
That's when you breathe out and you don't breathe back in again if you don't respirate.
When I was a boy, my grandmother worked at the hospital and when someone would pass away,
they would say, well, Mr. so-and-so expired last night.
You ever heard that used before?
Jonathan, have you heard it?
For someone dying, expired?
Yeah.
Right.
And I remember as a little boy, I'd hear her say, Mr. so-and-so expired last night.
And I kept thinking, well, I guess they have an expiration date like a gallon of milk, you know?
I remember trying to figure that out.
But that's not what he's talking about.
What she was talking about is the breath went out.
That breath of life went out of Mr. Jones and never came back in again.
But here is the other way, not respiration, not expiration, but the exact opposite of expiration.
It's inspiration.
It means to breathe in, too.
All scripture is given by inspiration.
All scripture, if you have the Bible like this, it's God breathed.
It has God's life.
The Bible says the Word of God is alive and powerful.
And so this is the breath of God.
It has the life of God.
And when man lives and he reads it and he believes the message of this book, he lives as well by this word.
Now, when God breathed the scriptures, we have inspired words in a book.
Let me give you something to think about this morning.
It is a thing that may change your outlook on life forever.
God never meant for us to have a Bible.
We were never supposed to have a Bible.
We were not supposed to have an inspired book.
We were created to be inspired people.
Does that make sense?
We were not supposed to have, you know what we do today?
We take the inspired words of God.
Tell me if I'm wrong now.
We catch ourselves thinking thoughts we shouldn't think.
We catch ourselves doing things we shouldn't do.
We catch ourselves being tempted to do things we know are wrong.
And then we take the Bible, we take what God says, and we try correcting our mind.
We try guiding our behavior with a book on the outside of us to give us rules to go by.
How to think, live, act in this world by an inspired book on the outside of us.
And our mind is constantly going the opposite direction a lot of times.
God never created man to have an inspired book.
He created his inspired words to be inside his heart, in his mind.
Remember, God created man in his image and gave him authority over the earth.
Man was made to think like God thinks.
To know the good that God knows.
And to live and walk with the word of God inside him.
An inspired creature.
We say the word of God is without error, and it is.
Man was created to be without error.
We were created to be perfect people without any fault, without any bad thoughts in our mind.
We can all agree when that man last week shot and killed,
he shot 60-something people, killed 20-something, I think.
Something's wrong in the human heart.
And it's getting worse and worse and worse.
And the Bible said it would continue to get worse and worse and worse.
Everything God says is coming to pass.
God made the human heart to be like he made everything else.
God saw that it was good.
And when God made man, man was good.
His heart was good.
His mind was good.
God never, it never says that God breathed into the nostrils of the animals or the creeping things or the fish or the birds or anything else.
The breath of life, it says, but God made man in his own image, gave him that authority and he breathed in him.
Man's nostrils are the breath of life and man became a living soul.
Man was inspired.
All scripture was given by inspiration.
And now here God breathed into Adam.
The man was given by inspiration of God.
Amazing.
Let's look here now.
Chapter 2 of Genesis, back there again.
Verse 7, Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.
Now here's what happens.
God is a spirit.
Jesus said in the New Testament that God is a spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
We learned about God being a spirit in one of our previous lessons.
Plants have a body.
Animals are the moving creatures that have life.
They have a body and a soul.
God creates man in his own image.
God breathes his spirit, his breath into man.
Man now has something the plants and animals don't have.
Man has a spirit.
As God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
God is three persons that make up one God.
Man is three parts that make up one person.
It's very obvious to you today that I have a body.
Look, here it is.
That's the proof of one part of me.
It's also very obvious to you today that I have a soul.
I have a mind.
I have emotions.
I have a will.
My mind thinks and has been communicating with you.
I get emotional about what I teach.
I have a will because I chose to come here this morning and I didn't have to.
But there's a third part of me and a third part of you.
Because everything I just said about me can go for you as well.
There's a third part of me that the animals don't have and that is a spirit.
My spiritual nature is just as real as my bodily nature or my mental nature.
Just as real.
How do you know you have a spirit?
Look at you right now.
What are you doing this morning?
You're sitting in a church in a classroom learning about a God you can't see.
But inevitably it's real because of the creation around us and because we're here.
Look across the entire world this morning.
Those who do not accept God's word.
The Chinese teach atheism in their public schools.
It is against the law in China to be under 18 and accept a religious belief.
It's against the law.
Nevertheless, China embraces Buddhism.
They say there's no God which Buddhists don't believe in God.
But can we deny that Buddhism is a religion?
Of course not.
It's a way of coping with afterlife and solving the problems and the obvious issues of life
and the answer of how come things are wrong in life and somehow they've got to be fixed.
Well through this reincarnation and all this stuff eventually it's all going to get worked
out and it's not.
It's getting worse.
But that's religion.
You go to a jungle where they've never seen a white man and they're around around with
a bone through their nose and one claws on and spears in their hand.
You know what you're going to find in that jungle?
Religion.
They're going to have some kind of belief about something and they're going to be dancing
around to it.
You look at the native Indians here before we got here.
They got their little feathers in their hand and their dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, all that
stuff.
Do you know what that is?
It's religion.
They've got their gods that they worship, the son that they worship and all these other
spirits they worship.
It's their religion.
Why?
Because man has something animals don't have.
You ever seen an animal worship?
Not anywhere in this world where you see a group of animals having any kind of spiritual
activity whatsoever.
They don't have that capacity because God did not give them a spirit.
Just like the vegetation has no capacity to think and to move and to feel and to love.
That's not something God gave to them but he imparted all three of these things to us.
Man is incurably religious because man was created to know and act with and for his Creator
here on earth.
It's a beautiful thing.
He gave us a spirit so we could know him, have the knowledge of spiritual things.
I used to go to church out in the country many years ago and I drove through the country
and I passed a dairy up.
In never any Sunday when I passed the dairy up did those cows ever have prayer made.
They were just out chewing their cud, sitting underneath the tree, walking around just like
every other day.
Those were the most non-religious cows I'd ever seen.
But they're all that way.
Here we are.
This is why aren't we here?
People meet and say some people don't go to church and I say that's right.
Again, the Buddhists aren't in church this morning.
The other religions in India, they're not in church this morning.
Some atheists here in the United States, they're not in church this morning.
We understand that.
Some people who call themselves Christians are in church this morning.
Every one of them.
That's how atheism got here.
Atheism is its own religion.
In Christianity, God created us.
Atheism says we created God.
You see the difference?
We created God and we created ourselves.
We evolved.
Fish swam up on the shore and somehow one day one of them didn't suffocate for lack of
oxygen from the water in his gills.
Somehow they developed legs.
All this unbelievable stuff.
Why aren't they doing that today?
How come we don't see a well?
How come when a well washes up today and people start shoving it back and trying to be humane
to it?
What if they say how come the evolutionists aren't out there saying stop?
He's trying to evolve.
Because deep down inside we know it's all a bunch of bunk.
But it's a religion they made up to try to cope with the answers of life once again.
Man's incurably religious.
Let's look now.
And then we'll close here in just a moment.
Verse 8, the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden and there he put the man whom he had
formed.
He planted a garden in Eden, a part of the earth, a particular place in the earth at
that time.
And he put the man there.
God has the authority to put the man wherever he wanted to and he put the man in that garden.
He made him.
Verse 9, and out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to
the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil.
Here we go.
So this garden has everything a man could ever want.
He had given the animals and the people the vegetation to eat.
There was no mention of animals being eaten at this time.
No mention whatsoever.
I don't think man was originally created to eat animals, even though we do today, and
it's okay according to the Bible.
But at the time that wasn't God's original idea.
And so he puts two trees in the middle of the garden.
He says the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil.
So in the middle of the garden, there's a tree of life.
You eat from this tree, you live forever.
You pass from it. There's a tree of knowledge of good and evil.
I'm going to spend a little time here.
Every thing God made, He saw that it was what? Good.
So when man was created and put on earth, everything man knew was what? Good.
This tree would allow man to know not only the good that God created, but to also know
the earth and everything that was created in an evil way.
Man only knew good, the good that God designed, the good that God intended for man.
He only knew everything in a good way.
He couldn't imagine it in an evil way.
But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would allow him to not only know good,
not only imagine good things, but also know and imagine and experience evil things on
earth.
That's the two choices Adam had.
God willing, we'll take back up with this story next Sunday and see what happened.
Because obviously, not everything is good today.
Alright.
Lord willing, we'll see you next week.
