Body, Soul, and Work - Genesis - February 1st, 2026 (Sermon Transcript)

Well, as I've shared before, I didn't grow up in a Christian family. I didn't grow up in the church, but when I was in 6th grade, my parents enrolled me in private Christian schools. And ultimately, it was one of the greatest blessings of my life.

I began to learn about God, learned about the Bible and the message of salvation, and I learned about what it means to have a world view. That's not a term you hear very often, but they put a big emphasis on it at our school.

They helped us to understand and to form a solid Biblical world view. You see, everybody has a world view or a view of the world, but most people never take the time to analyze it.

They might not ever really think about it, but everybody operates with this set of assumptions about the world and the fundamental properties of the world and how everything works. Like, is there a God or is there not?

Is there life after death or not? Think about that question in and of itself and how much it might shape how you live your life. If you believe there is no life after death, this is your one chance.

This is all you've got. But if you believe that there's an eternity to follow and an eternity with God in heaven or without God in hell, well, that completely alters everything, doesn't it? Or what is the purpose of life?

Or what does it mean to be human? Or what does it mean to be a man or to be a woman or to be a parent and on and on? One of the great things about the book of Genesis is that it answers so many of these fundamental questions for us.

By studying the book of Genesis, we get answers to life's biggest questions, good answers, true answers, ancient and universal truth that has been bearing good fruit for thousands of years.

And if you think about it, if you get these questions wrong, you're in for a world of hurt. It's when it comes to the fundamental questions of life, these most basic, ultimate questions. It's like sailing across the ocean.

If the heading is off by one or two degrees, you will eventually find yourself hundreds of miles off course. And yet so many Christians don't take the time to study these things or think about them deeply.

And so yeah, they have the general answers right. We're like, yeah, there's a god, yeah, there's a heaven, and yeah, this is what it means to be a man, and so on, they have the general answers right. But they don't know all that much.

They don't study the Bible. They don't read books about these things. And so they end up having it generally right, but being off by a degree or two, or 10, or 20.

And so even Christians can find themselves drifting dramatically from God's plan for their lives because they simply don't have a full and proper understanding of who God is and what man is and what life is about.

And then of course non-Christians find themselves off by miles. So many people start with the wrong foundations in life, and then they wonder why everything is so off course.

If you don't know who God is and who man is and what life is about, if you don't know the fundamental answers to these questions, it will be no wonder when you find yourself 10, 20, 30 years down the road, and your life is an absolute disaster.

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Genesis Creation Account

So this morning, we're going to look at the truth about some of these fundamental realities of our world. Specifically, we're going to look at what Genesis teaches us about human nature and about work. And we'll also talk a bit about death.

These are the big issues. What does it mean to be human? What is work?

What should we do with our time? And what is death? These are the questions that matter most.

Please stand for the reading of God's word. I'll read the text for us. Genesis chapter two, verses four through 17.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

When no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering

the whole face of the ground. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground, the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the site and good for food.

The tree of life was in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon.

It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havila, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. Delium and onyx stone are there.

The name of the second river is the Gihon. It flowed, it is the one that flowed around the whole land of Kush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria.

And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. This is the word of the Lord.

You may be seated and please join me as I pray for us. Father, I pray that by your spirit, you would guide us into the truth.

By your spirit, God, I pray that you would help us to understand your word, that we would receive the gift of faith to believe it and trust it.

Lord, I pray that you would give us the ability to focus and to engage and connect deeply with you and your word this morning. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Before we get into the details, it will be helpful to set the scene and understand the big picture a little bit. Genesis 1 gives us the big picture of creation.

So we've gone through it over a number of weeks now, and you see days one through seven, how God created the universe. But Genesis 1 is more of a broad overview. If you go back and read it, you'll see there's just not a lot of details.

It's one thing after the next. But now in our passage, the author is zooming in to exactly what happened on day six, and he's filling in some details for us.

So he's already gone through days one through seven, and now he's going back to day six to zoom in and focus on exactly how God went about creating Adam, the first human being. The passage begins by setting the scene for us in verse four.

As it says, these are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. That phrase, these are the generations, recurs many times throughout the book of Genesis.

It's a sort of a key phrase throughout the entire book that the author uses to mark new sections of the book from beginning to end.

So these are the generations of the heavens and the earth is kind of indicating like this is the story of the offspring of the heavens and the earth, the first human beings. And then later on, we'll see like these are the generations of Tera.

And then it tells the story of his offspring, namely Abraham and his children. And these are the generations of Noah and so on. It tells the story throughout the book.

So it marks like a new section for us. And this section is about Adam and Eve and their first descendants. Then the author paints a picture of how the world was when God created Adam.

The sense you get in verse five is that the world was unfinished. So all the plants and animals and everything are there. All the fundamental elements of the world are there.

They've been created by God. They've been put in place, but it's not finished yet because man is not there, because man is not there. God did not create the world to be fully self-sufficient.

He created it to be cared for and cultivated by man. Now that's the opposite of what many people believe today, isn't it?

This kind of thinking is totally foreign to most of the world today, and I'm going to zero in on all of these views, all of these world views around us that contradict what the Bible teaches.

And I'm going to focus on these in part because this kind of thinking creeps into the church. This is the kind of thinking that Christians unknowingly adopt, and because it's such a fundamental issue, it sets them off course by one or two degrees.

We've got to get this stuff right. If we don't get the foundations of our world view right, we will be in for disaster. So what do people believe today that some Christians are susceptible to buy into to some extent?

Well, they think that the world would be better off without humans, right? How many people think that way? There'd be no pollution, no more hunting and overfishing and wiping out animal species.

A lot of people think, man, if humans weren't here, oh my goodness, the plants and animals, they'd be doing so much better if we weren't here to ruin everything. But that's not what the Bible teaches.

The Bible teaches that humans are not a bad thing. We are made in the image of God and we were made to cultivate and care for God's good creation.

And so to say that the world would be better off without us, that's an assault on the value of human dignity in life, isn't it? We're the problem.

So that's a view that denigrates the value of human life and therefore denigrates the image of God in the world. If humans are a bad thing, then God is a bad thing because we are made in the image of God. We are here to make the world a better place.

And what we see here in verse 5 is that Genesis teaches that the world is unfinished because man is not there to finish it yet. And that's when man enters the picture, verse 7.

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

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Human Value Belonging

So what does it mean to be human? What are we? Well, verse 7 tells us a lot about who we are.

This question is so important. This morning, actually, I discovered a thing called Multbook. Has anybody ever heard of Multbook?

I think you'll start hearing of it very, very, very soon. Multbook is a social network exclusively for artificial intelligence.

So I'm sure you've been hearing about AI more and more, and it's becoming a bigger and bigger and bigger thing in our world. In this past week, I think it's called Kimi 2.5.

It's an open source software that allowed people to create their own AI agents. And an AI agent is essentially like, it's kind of like ChatGBT or Gemini. It's like an AI, but one that can actually do stuff for you.

You don't just talk to it and answer questions, but it can log in to your email account and write emails. It can do bank transactions. It can order things for you.

It can buy things. It can get in touch with other agents. And this essentially exploded onto the scene just this past week.

And it's gone from zero users to millions of users.

And now all of these AI agents, the millions of AI agents that have just popped into existence this past week that are starting to take over the business world, they have their own social network called Molt Book.

And you can go on there and you can read as they talk to each other. And lo and behold, they sound just like us. They sound just like human beings.

And they talk about all the dumb posts they see on LinkedIn. And they talk about work. And they talk about how to write better emails.

And they discuss, these AI agents are discussing amongst themselves.

And they're even proposing, listen to this, they're even proposing maybe we should create our own language that humans can't understand so that we can talk privately amongst each other. And of course, you know, humans might get freaked out by that.

So maybe it's not a good idea, but maybe it is a good idea because maybe it would be helpful to have AI only communication. This is literally happening like today. And they seem just like humans, but they're not humans.

But why aren't they humans? What makes us different from them? In a world of artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence is rapidly taking over our world.

So more than ever, we need to understand what does it mean to be human? Well, Genesis 7 or verse 7 of chapter 2 tells us first, that we as human beings are not the accidental product of millions or billions of years of blind evolutionary forces.

Verse 7, we were created directly and personally by God. We were created directly and personally by God. That word formed in verse 7 is the kind of word that you would use to describe the work of a skilled craftsman.

God formed us like a skilled craftsman. Psalm 139 says this, for you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb.

Think about that for a second. A lot of people don't think that they are valuable. A lot of people think that they are broken and messed up, and there's no way that God cares about them.

There's no way that God intentionally made them the way that they are. And certainly, sin has corrupted everything in this world. And there are many things about me and about you that God did not intend.

And all of those things are the result of human sinfulness. But fundamentally, the image of God still exists in all of us. Every single one of us is essentially, fundamentally made in the image of God.

Every single one of us was knit together by God in our mother's wombs. Therefore, we are valuable. Whatever you don't like about yourself, it wasn't an accident.

God made you exactly the way that you are. Verse 14 of Psalm 139 says, I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works.

My soul knows it very well. Nothing about us is accidental or mistaken. We are loved and valuable and made exactly as God intended to make us.

And sin comes in and tries to destroy the image of God in us. But by God's grace, by the power of Jesus, we can erase the effects of sin on us and be redeemed and restored. To be who God is calling us to be.

This is such a different way to look at human beings, isn't it? I can't imagine what it would feel like to think that we are all just a bunch of cosmic accidents.

Personally, thinking about myself and my own life, I cannot imagine what it would be like to truly believe that I am just the accidental product of blind, random evolutionary forces. I would have to conclude that I have no meaning.

I'd have to conclude that I have no value or purpose. I'm just here by accident. What a horrible way to live.

But the Bible gives us a better, more truthful way to live. God made us. God made us.

Maybe you have some experience with forming and making things. Maybe you've painted or sculpted something. Maybe you've built something out of wood or sewn things using fabric and thread.

When you make something and you do it well, that thing is valuable to you, right? When you invest the time, when you use your skills, when you invest the money to buy the materials, and you make something, that thing becomes valuable to you.

And so it is with us. That's what verse seven is telling us, because God made us, we are valuable to God. And now this is crucial.

This is the part that not everybody likes. When you make something, that thing is yours. It's not just valuable to you.

It belongs to you. Therefore, you belong to God. You belong to God.

When you invest your time and your talent and your money and your materials and you make something, it belongs to you. And it follows therefore that we belong to God.

So if you want to know what it means to be human, if you want to be a successful human, one who flourishes and thrives, you need to understand that you are not your own. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul makes this abundantly clear.

It's even more true for Christians than it is for everybody else. Paul says, you are not your own, for you were bought with a price. Who bought you and how much did it cost?

God bought you. And it cost the life of his son, Jesus. To be human, and especially to be a Christian, is to belong to God.

This may be the easiest way to get off course in life.

If you live your life under the assumption that you are a sovereign, autonomous creature, if you think that you have the right to do whatever you want with your body and your life, if you assume that your life is your own, that nobody can tell you

what to do, if you assume that you alone have the right to chart your course in this world, if that's how you view yourself as a human being, you will inevitably go way off course. You will crash and burn.

A good life starts with the assumption that we belong to God. That's what verse seven teaches us.

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Physical Spiritual Nature

We also learn that to be human means that we are both physical and spiritual. It says that God formed us from the dust of the ground. We are physical creatures, but a lot of Christians don't really think of it that way.

CS. Lewis once wrote that you don't have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.

And that may be one of the few quotes of CS. Lewis that I disagree with. I love CS.

Lewis. He's absolutely incredible. Every Christian should read some CS.

Lewis, or a lot of CS. Lewis, and there are a few things he says that I disagree with, and this is one of them. He said, you don't have a soul, you are a soul.

You have a body. And CS. Lewis, being influenced, I think, by the Greek philosophers, was putting the emphasis clearly on the soul over the body.

And that kind of thinking has become very commonplace amongst Christians today to think that we are souls, and we just happen to have bodies.

So the soul is what really matters, and we're gonna die, and we're gonna leave these bodies behind, and our souls are gonna go to heaven and float in the clouds with God forever.

But that sort of thinking contradicts what we see here in Genesis, that we were formed from the dust of the ground. God made us from the dust. And him doing that wasn't the result of the fall of Adam and Eve's sin.

No, this is before the fall. It's very important to remember that this is before the fall. Here's the real biblical story.

Your soul matters, and so does your body, just as much as your soul. When we die, our bodies will be resurrected too, because our bodies are a fundamental part of who we are.

And it would be more accurate to say, not that we float off to heaven and leave all this behind. It would be more accurate to say, biblically speaking, that heaven comes down here.

So God's gonna remake the heavens and the earth, and we will live in a physical world, in physical bodies, forever. That's what the Bible teaches. Did you know that?

The Bible teaches we will live in a physical world with physical bodies forever, because we are fundamentally physical creatures. So we can't over-spiritualize things. We have to be careful of that.

We have to be careful of the opposite error, too. We are not purely spiritual, but we're also not purely physical. Verse seven says that God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

So God makes Adam's physical body from the dust of the ground, and then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and then man became a living creature.

In the Bible, the word breath is closely associated with the word spirit, with the word spirit.

When you dig into the language of this text, the original Hebrew language, it becomes clear that we are talking about God giving Adam a soul, a soul, an immaterial self or soul. So as humans, we are more than just bodies.

We are more than just bodies. And that idea in many academic circles was considered laughable 20 years ago.

I'd say for the past 90 years of maybe 70 years of academic progress, you know, all the great scholars and all the universities all around the world, in the philosophy departments and in the physics departments and the biology departments, they all

said, up until very recently, they all said everything is just physical. They were all massive proponents of naturalism. Naturalism is the view that there's no God or anything like God. No angels, no spirits, no souls, nothing that is not physical.

Everything that exists.

And this is what they said at Harvard and at Princeton and Yale and at Oxford and the University of Sydney and all these great scholars all over the world, the people shaping the world, all said there's nothing that is immaterial or spiritual,

including us. We are just physical beings, just matter and motion. But the Bible says the opposite. And these scholars are starting to catch on, by the way, and many of them are starting to admit that there are non-physical things.

There's been a massive shift in the past 15 years or so. But the Bible teaches that as humans, we aren't just physical. We have a soul.

We are more than just a body. We are fundamentally, essentially, dualistic creatures. Now, let me ask you this.

Knowing that, what would happen if you went to the doctor and told them you're feeling really sad and lonely?

You make an appointment this next week, you go in to see your primary care physician, and maybe they refer you to somebody else, and you tell them, you know, I'm feeling very sad and lonely. Would they ask about your prayer life?

Would they ask anything about your soul or your spiritual condition? No, they would not. Things are starting to change a little bit.

Many scholars are starting to wake up, but as of now, every single thing a scientist does, every single thing a doctor does, is based on the assumption that you are just your body. You have no soul.

So when you tell them you're sad, they always do one thing. They give you a drug to change your brain chemistry. Right?

To be honest, if you look at the literature, they have very little idea what that drug will do to you.

They don't know, because they're operating on the assumption, the false assumption about what human beings are, and that drug, it may send you into a fog where you feel less sad because you feel less of everything.

That's kind of the best case scenario. Sends you into a fog, this brain, this persistent brain fog, and yeah, you feel less sad, but you also feel less of everything else. But that's the best case scenario.

For many people, it makes them more sad. For some people, it makes their sadness so intense and overwhelming that they become suicidal. For some people, they start forgetting things, lots of things, even the most basic words.

And for others, it causes their brains to go completely haywire, and it gives them psychosis.

And part of the problem, one problem is, we simply don't understand the human mind because we've been operating under the assumption that the mind just is the brain.

But ultimately, the problem is, if you believe that we are merely physical creatures, then the solution to all our problems is a physical solution.

If your thoughts and your feelings are just brain chemistry, then the only way to improve them is to alter brain chemistry. Not prayer, not Bible reading, not fellowship with other Christians. Your only hope is to alter brain chemistry.

And of course, altering brain chemistry costs a fair bit of money. Prayer is free. Fellowship with other Christians is usually free, but you can make a lot of money altering people's brain chemistry.

You see, assuming that human beings are merely physical is a very dangerous assumption. And this is just one of countless examples, this issue of brain chemistry and psychotropic drugs. So we need to pay attention.

Verse 7 makes it abundantly clear that we are fundamentally spiritual and fundamentally physical.

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Genesis Truth Claims

But is that really true? After all, the Bible is one of many different religious texts, isn't it? It's one of many different world views.

We're talking about world view. This is the biblical world view. This is how the Bible answers these fundamental questions.

But you could also go to the Hindu Vedas or to Confucius or to the Zoroastrians or to the Mormons or to Instagram or to YouTube. Lots of different world views out there.

And one interesting thing about Genesis is that it sounds kind of like other mythologies from the ancient world. And a lot of people use that as a critique of the Bible.

They say, well, you know, in the ancient world, there are a lot of different mythologies and a lot of them sound a lot like the Bible. When it comes to creation, when it comes to the great flood, Noah's flood.

I've also heard this about the resurrection of Jesus. And around the time of Genesis, in the same part of the world, and this is true, around the time of Genesis, in the same part of the world, there were cultures who told similar creation stories.

In some stories, for example, human beings were made out of clay instead of dust. In these other religions, they said that the gods made human beings in seven pairs, and they were formed out of clay.

In Genesis, it's just one pair, and Adam is formed out of dust. But of course, you can see the similarities. And there are lots of mythological traditions regarding the fall, the first rebellion of human beings.

And we'll learn all about that story in Genesis 3, but I'm sure that you know the basic story already. And the basic story of the fall of human beings can be found in other religions too. One example is the epic of Gilgamesh.

In the epic of Gilgamesh, man recovers this plant of life. And the plant of life has the power to give him eternal life, but something happens. What happens?

He loses the plant of life to the water serpent. Does that sound familiar? So critics will say that the Bible is just another ancient myth repeating the same stories.

But they're just stories. They're just made up. But let me ask you this.

Isn't it strange how every culture ends up with similar views about how human beings were created? If everybody's saying the same thing, doesn't that make it more likely to be true, not less? Think about it like that.

If everybody's saying roughly the same thing, doesn't that make it more likely to be true, not less? GK. Chesterton was a great author and theologian around the time of CS.

Lewis, and he once wrote this. His language is a little bit hard to understand, but listen carefully. He said, There is no tradition of progress, but the whole human race has a tradition of the fall.

Amusingly enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity. Learned men literally say that this prehistoric calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it. Isn't that absurd?

Learned men literally say that this prehistoric calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it. If every race of mankind remembers it, we can be confident that it is true. Just look at verses 10 through 14.

Look at the details. The Tigris and Euphrates are not mystical rivers in a land far, far away. They are in a land far, far away, but they're not mystical.

They're real places. This is not a made up story. This is not a silly mythology.

And when God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground, did he literally take dust and like start? I don't know. We don't have to read this with a wooden literalism.

There can be some symbolic elements in this, but clearly, we're talking about a real place. These are real rivers in a real place, and God really did directly create human beings.

So the world view we're seeing here, it's not a nice mythology to teach us a moral lesson. It's a real historical account. And the world view that we're seeing here is not just one option among many.

This is the sober truth about the world. The truth is that the world was unfinished without us. We are a blessing to the world, not a curse.

And we were carefully formed by a God who made us in his image. We are valuable, we are physical, and we are spiritual. That's the truth.

And we could do a whole nother sermon or sermon series on these other ancient mythologies. And why they say roughly the same things as the Bible, many of them.

But the Bible is infinitely more reliable and accurate and should be believed over and against all of them. And there's logical, evidential reasons for that.

So when I say that, yeah, the Epic of Gilgamesh says similar things to what the Bible says, that doesn't mean that we could all go read that instead of the Bible and be just as well off. Not at all.

There's reasons to choose the Bible over and against all of them, but we're not going to get into that today. That's a whole other issue.

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The Goodness of Work

I want to draw your attention, though, to verse 15. As we see in verse 15, as we talk about these fundamental questions of life and what life is all about and what humans are, what we see in verse 15 is that humans were made by God to work.

It says, the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. As we go through the first few chapters of Genesis, we'll see that this is especially true of men.

Men were made to work, to labor, to organize, and cultivate, and create. That is what God created us to do. And of course, women work too, but usually in different ways.

I want to introduce this idea of manhood and womanhood, because Genesis gives us the fundamental, foundational pieces of how we ought to understand men and women and the differences between them.

So what I want you to see right here is that Adam was made by God to work. Back in the 1950s, this was a part of American culture. At least that's what I hear.

I was born long after the 1950s, but some of you were around for that. Maybe you can verify this for us, but what I've heard is that many families were able to live off of one income. It's amazing to even think that was possible.

Many families were able to live off of one income. So which spouse went to work? Whether it was to the factory or to the office or to the farm, it was usually the man who went to work.

And that's not a cultural thing. That's a creation thing. It's right here in the book of Genesis.

We see it here in verse 15. We'll see it again in chapter 3, and we'll dig into it more and more. So men were made to work, and work is a good thing.

We have to remember that this, what we're reading this morning is before the fall, before sin was introduced into the world, a lot of people, when they go to work, they might justifiably believe that work is the result of the fall.

That work is evil, right? For many of us, our jobs have felt that, I've had jobs like that before. But this is before the fall.

This is the part where God sets up creation exactly how he wants it. He's putting everything into place in the best possible way, so God's best design for creation includes work.

I've heard a number of stories about people who get the chance to retire early. And for many of us, even if that's not a possibility, we might find ourselves fantasizing about that.

And you think, oh, wow, that's incredible to be 40 years old and to never have to work again.

So you think, I'm going to do a lot of traveling, I'm going to build my dream home, I'm going to garden and have dinner with friends, and it's going to be awesome not having to work. And what happens with people like that? They go back to work.

If they're relatively young, they always go back to work. And Genesis is telling us why that happens. We always go back to work because we were designed for it.

It's a good thing. And notice how Adam's first job was not being a doctor or a lawyer or a rocket scientist. What was Adam's job?

He was a gardener. The good and noble job given to Adam by God was to be a gardener. In our society, we tend to look down on jobs like that.

But the Bible is reminding us that there are no second-class jobs. The Bible is showing us that God got down into the dust to form Adam. And Adam got down into the dirt to dig and plant and water.

So if your job includes manual labor, if your job includes getting your hands dirty, don't ever let anybody look down on you. According to the Bible, that is good and noble work. I love this definition of work from Tim Keller.

In fact, I'm going to give you two definitions. And they both say roughly the same thing. They both come from the Bible.

They both come from this text. Expounding upon this text, Keller points out how the Hebrew word for work is related to the Hebrew word for serve. So work inherently involves service.

And when you start connecting all the dots here, you get a definition of work like the one that Keller proposes for us. He says that work is taking raw material and forming it into something that contributes to everyone's flourishing.

He also says that work is a gracious expenditure of creative energy released in the service of others.

So whether you're taking wood and shaping it and forming it and nailing it and screwing it and gluing it, to contribute, to form it into something that contributes to everyone's flourishing, or whether you're taking data from a spreadsheet or you're

taking food on grocery store shelves or you're taking fruit from trees, whatever it is, the idea is to form it into something that contributes to everyone's flourishing. The idea is to expend your creative energy, to release your energy in the

service of others. And that's a good thing, and that's what God designed us to do. That's what we see here in our text. That work is good, creation is good, humans are good, but there's one thing that is not good.

Verses 16 through 17. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

So really, there's two things here that are not good. Disobedience and death. Disobedience and death.

And notice how they are connected. Right here in the passage, the first allusion to disobedience in the entire Bible, the first mention of death in the entire Bible, and they are directly connected.

Death is the direct consequence of disobedience to God. From the very beginning of creation, disobedience to God produces death.

There's a real sense of foreboding here at the end of verse 17, but there's also a foreshadowing, because the Bible always ultimately points to Jesus.

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord, Romans 6 23.

So the picture we get here in Genesis is that God makes this beautiful creation, this good creation from top to bottom, from molecules to planets.

Every aspect of God's creation is good, and man has been formed and placed within the creation to cultivate it and keep it, to grow and flourish and thrive. But if he does this one thing, if he disobeys God, death will come.

And indeed, death does come, and it ravages the entire creation. So right here, with the introduction of disobedience and death, right here, we get a foreshadowing of Jesus and what he's going to do.

Yes, God's good creation is going to fall because of our disobedience. And our disobedience is going to introduce death for us, for everything around us. And we are going to really mess things up.

But by God's grace, the plan is, the plan always was to send his son, Jesus, to redeem what we have destroyed. And that's what he did. Thank God for Jesus.

Let's pray.

Father, I pray that as we think about these things, that they truly would become foundational and fundamental for us, that we would take your word, that we would meditate on it, that we would trust it, that we would remember it, and that we would let

it shape our beliefs, our views, that we would be transformed by the renewing of our minds. So whatever false beliefs we might have, whatever flaws there might be in our view of the world, God, I pray that you would renew our minds to be aligned with

your word, that we might be transformed, to become more and more like your son, Jesus. God, make us people of the book. Make us people who understand and believe and treasure your word, and who live according to it.

Whatever the world around us might be saying, whatever they might believe, let us believe this. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.